10 ms·

Windows 10 pushed me to Linux. I spent the last few years slowly but surely weening myself off a dependence on Microsoft tools (at home anyway). I switched my

by malbs 11y ago

Windows 10 pushed me to Linux. I spent the last few years slowly but surely weening myself off a dependence on Microsoft tools (at home anyway). I switched my dev environment from VS/C# to Python/Komodo. Email from Outlook to Gmail/Thunderbird. Stopped using IE a decade ago or more. The idea behind it was to make sure I wasn't really bound to a particular platform. The last few times I tried Linux, I'd either end up with Windows withdrawals, or some game/app I forgot about that I still used, or the kids would complain (or wife) and would end up back on Windows. This time, I've kept another machine running Windows on it, but my primary machine I installed Mint 17.2 on it, and no dual booting. Things I'm missing - Can't play Witcher 3 (but apparently a native version is coming soon), and I'll probably miss out on SW: Battlefront. However a bunch of other games I play have native Linux ports, in particular Kerbal Space Program. I went a little nuts and buy a brand new gtx 980ti that might not get stretched as much as it could by switching platforms. Things I'm enjoying - The font rendering seems nicer? Maybe it's imagined though. Komodo IDE runs way better under Linux than Windows, I have no idea why. I like the fact that my time investment in learning Python is paying off because a lot of the support tools/background tasks are written in Python. Especially good is now being able to see open source/dev projects that in the past I would skip over looking at because hey - no native Windows port. It's been a couple of weeks since I switched now, and no regrets yet. Thanks Windows 10.

WalterGR 11y ago
What didn't you like about Windows 10?
- malbs 11y ago
  Same thing I really didn't like about Windows 8. Ads on my desktop, in an operating system I paid money for. In particular Toyota car ads in the music app. I did like the UI improvements, the notifications system etc, that switching between new/old apps didn't feel jarring anymore. I think the kicker was the github project calle dunfuck windows 10 or whatever it was, where you ran a bunch of batch scripts to remove/kill off the monitoring services, and I just didn't want to have to worry about that. Also the fact that on my other machines, the nagging to upgrade to windows 10 is constant, I had to go find/remove some random windows update patch from June/July to get rid of gwx.exe. edit: lastly, the licensing terms of the operating system itself, IANAL, and I couldn't tell what rights I had to the o/s in the future.
  - AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
    To be fair, the music app isn't the operating system, just something that comes with it. You are not forced to use it - and you didn't pay for it so it being ad supported is practically normal. Did you pay for Windows 10?
    - tdicola 11y ago
      I didn't pay for my Linux install and it has zero ad-supported junkware.
      - Ntrails 11y ago
        Wasn't there a big bru-ha-ha when one of the big linux gui distros added amazon crapware by default?
        glogla 11y ago
        There was. It was just one distribution of many (Ubuntu), just one version of it in fact (Unity Ubuntu, Xubuntu or Kubuntu or whatever is Gnome Ubuntu called didn't include it) and it was not only possible (unlike in Windows 8 and 10) but also rather easy to remove.
        bmn_ 11y ago
        There was, and as a result a lot of people shitcanned that distro, and said incident left an indelible black mark on the vendor's reputation.
    - malbs 11y ago
      No, the Windows 10 upgrade was "Free", but I was talking specifically about Windows 8 with regards to ads in the O/S. The music app comes with the O/S, and is the default registered music player, for all intents are purposes, it's part of the O/S, and it's ability to inject ads into the start screen (as well as the Games widget, and Store widget doing the same thing) are just more of that.
megablast 11y ago
Vista pushed me to Mac OS. And then I went from .Net/Visual Studio to Objective-C/Xcode and making apps instead of websites. So much happier now. (but that was in the days of IE6)
smacktoward 11y ago
For me it was Windows XP. What did it for me back then was the introduction of product activation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation). Having as my primary workstation a computer that Microsoft could remotely disable at any time for any reason wasn't a very appealing prospect. Linux was much rougher on the desktop then, but it was good enough and has only gotten better. I still have a Windows partition, but I only ever use it for playing games, and with Steam's Linux support improving I find myself using it less and less even in that limited capacity. For a company that used to understand that its success depended on developer mindshare, Microsoft has done a really remarkable job over the last 15 years turning Windows into a platform that seems laser-focused on the goal of making developers want to use almost anything else.
- Zardoz84 11y ago
  C and C++ dev on Windows is a pain on the ass. On my GNU/Linux, I can use pkgconfig to get the lib dependences, and cmake could grab the deps very well. On Windows, I end doing ugly things to get the dependencies working...
  - flohofwoe 11y ago
    I only had that experience with projects that use autoconf for build configuration, usually these are tied very closely to UNIX-like platforms. Most libs that use cmake to setup the build files can be integrated well on Windows (most likely because the author choose cmake exactly for this reason to be easily usable across platforms). But that's more of a problem of Linux isolationism than Windows' fault (basically the modern version of the bad old days when everyone was on Windows and all you got to build a project from source was a bunch of Visual Studio project files).
    - phs2501 11y ago
      But even with cmake there's no standard place for third-party libraries to be installed on Windows. There's no /usr/lib and /usr/include analogue. So if I'm writing software that uses a third-party library I either have to bundle it into my source tree or hope there's an installer for it, burn the default installation location into the build system, and hope the user compiling my code has not overridden the default location. (I know some installers like Qt will make a system environment variable to say where their libraries are, but that's not particularly nice if everything did that.) In my case I needed libapr, and as far as I can tell there is no installer for it, so I wound up just saying "drop a compiled copy of libapr into this location in the source tree" into the build instructions since I did not want to redistribute it with my source. So yes, I dearly wish for something like a working pkgconfig on Windows.
MikaHakki32 11y ago
>> I switched my dev environment from VS/C# to Python/Komodo. I could have followed that statement if it was ... to IntelliJ/Java.
geophile 11y ago
I am the family IT guy. Years ago (Windows 2000 era, very young kids) I got tired of maintaining Windows and declared that I would no longer support it. We've been all Linux and Mac since then. For a while, we were Linux only.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  I will double down on your anecdata, since that is my story as well.
et1337 11y ago
Linux pretty much solved the "where are all my apps" problem. If we can just figure out the "why doesn't my graphics card work" problem, we'll be set.
- Qwertious 11y ago
  What graphics card are you using, and what distro? To state the obvious, if you're using Nvidia then you'll want to install the proprietary driver, whereas with AMD you'll want to keep the open-source driver as default, because Catalyst isn't that stable.
  - et1337 11y ago
    I use both AMD and Nvidia on Ubuntu. For both GPUs, every OS upgrade is a toss-up as to whether things will work or not.
- empiricus 11y ago
  Some issues I had last month with ubuntu linux: 1. When I plug my UHD monitor, linux tries to use 4k@60hz, but my video board does not support this, so no video signal. 2. tried to use latest intel video drivers, so I had to upgrade first ubuntu 3. after upgrade no more GUI, only text mode 4. solved the GUI issue, no luck with the wrong resolution/refresh rate. 5. using xrandr command line I can set 4k@30hz. 6. using black magic I can set 4k@50kz. 7. a couple of days ago the mouse cursor had disappeared (mouse still working). Random advices from the internet did not work, had to reboot 8. cannot set mouse speed from the system settings, I have to do it from the command line with some visual parsing of xinput commands. This is all I remember now :)
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    Reminds me of when I used to use Windows. I'm just glad I don't have any of these problems with Linux. Seems like no matter what OS you use, there's always some hardware configuration that the OS has problems with.
- 7952 11y ago
Rusky 11y ago
My solution to this problem is to run Windows in a VM, with a graphics card passed through to it. That way I can run (and test!) games and other apps I still need every once in a while without dual booting. I use qemu/kvm, with OVMF for the firmware to get around some VGA problems, and pass a discrete card to the guest while using the integrated intel graphics for the host. It requires CPU and motherboard support, but those aren't too uncommon on newer hardware.
- malbs 11y ago
  I didn't realise you can use direct hardware access in a VM! (Other than HDD) That'd be pretty good
  - glogla 11y ago
    You can, but only on AMD GPUs. Nvidia GPUs have this disable unless you buy very expensive "cloud" model.
    - otis_inf 11y ago
      Yeah I ran into that wall 2 weeks ago. I tried to switch to Linux for the host and run my Windows 8 VMs in VMWare on Mint. After fighting with the nvidia drivers at install for a bit I got it working but VMWare using dual monitors is super slow on nvidia (780 here) in mint: the windows in the guest VM were drawn as if it was done by a single core on half the speed, instead of on the GPU. Single monitor, no problem. Had to roll back to windows for the host to make the VMs work nicely. A bummer, considering moving away from Windows takes that first step and I now have to stick around for longer. Perhaps next year...
    - dale-cooper 11y ago
      Not true, you can work around this. I'm running a 970 gtx in a vm. See https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768
  - JoachimS 11y ago
    Didn't know you could do it either. And the security aware (paranoid) part of me screams loudly when reading this. ;-)
sytelus 11y ago
Biggest hurdle I found moving to other OSes were bunch of NTFS formatted external hard drives with TBs of my data. How do you use them from *nix/Mac? On Mac NTFS were readonly unless you install 3rd party stuff but even then there were several problems sharing on network. Reformatting dozen hard drives to new file system was just too much work.
- malbs 11y ago
  Last year I bought a Synology NAS w/ 12 TB (9tb usable) and copied most of my data to it. So data wasn't a problem. Bonus now is I can use NFS!
- erik14th 11y ago
  On Linux I use NTFS-3G[0]. Never had a problem. [0]http://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/ http://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/
- Zardoz84 11y ago
  NTFS on GNU/Linux was rw without any issue from years ago. I have a big partition with my user data on a NTFS partition that I shared across Windows 8.1 and Kubuntu 15.04 without any issue. The only problem that I could have is that if I unplug the computer on Windows, I need to reboot on Windows to mark it-self as safe, so Linux can mount it again without any warning message.
cm2187 11y ago
What is the closest equivalent of visual studio+c# in the linux world? I.e. A high level language that can be used for a breadth of applications (web site, desktop app, console, etc) and a very rich IDE which helps a lot in term of auto-complete/debugging/discoverability? To me the IDE is at least as important as the language.
- malbs 11y ago
  At the time I started thinking about making that change, I don't think I had a good answer. I started using Python, and Python Tools for Visual Studio, and thought, this is fucked, because I love this tool, and it's tying me to Windows still, so I consciously made the decision to switch out my dev tool to Komodo. I don't love it. It's got nothing on PTVS, but it runs on Linux really well. For a decent dev tool under Linux - what about MonoDevelop? VSCode looks ok, but I haven't tried the Linux version, but apparently you can do C# development in it. I'm not really up to speed with C# dev these days, last job I had which required C# was 2009, and since then I really haven't done much serious development in it (It's 95% Delphi professionally, and Python for my own stuff) Edit: I wanted to re-iterate, I absolutely love Python Tools for Visual Studio. Those guys have created (what I have found to be) the highest quality python development tool I have experienced. The downside is it requires Visual Studio. If they can take what they have added to VS, and re-produce that in VSCode.... Wow, I would be very happy.
  - vetinari 11y ago
    For python, try Pycharm. There's also community edition, which may or may not be enough for you. Another step up is Intellij Idea, which supports everything that all the other language-specific products together.
  - lbruder 11y ago
    For a nice Delphi alternative, try Lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/). Like Delphi 7, but with more features. Documentation could be better though.
- danieldk 11y ago
Filthy_casual 11y ago
Same here. I decided to stop playing video games cold turkey and what I did was grab an Arch Linux iso and follow the beginner's guide. Much more decent.
grimman 11y ago
I think the only actual Windows app I still really need is Total Commander. I know there's lots of commander apps available for just about any platform, but I've used Total Commander for... 15 years? I know it inside and out; even a small change at this point would be jarring. :(
- _ZeD_ 11y ago
  well, I don't use it, but it's marked "platinum" on wine[0] so you may not miss it [0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=31360 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
- jasonjayr 11y ago
  Windows commander (As it was called back then) was the first piece of shareware I've ever registered, back in the 16-bit Windows 3.1 days, which is just as long as I've been using it as well :) Impressively, it is still under active development. "Double Commander" is a very complete open source re-implementation in QT, and they are targeting all 3 major platforms with it. There are a few quirks that will be noticeable for anyone that's nimble with Total Commander, but the keybindings and even the menus are just about the same, and if that's what's keeping you on Windows -- the benefit of the linux ecosystem will greatly outweigh those small nuisances.
- deno 11y ago
  I don’t use either personally, however Krusader seems like a pretty good alternative. http://www.krusader.org/ http://www.krusader.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krusader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krusader
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
NoGravitas 11y ago
The font rendering on Linux is so much nicer than on Windows, especially on web fonts. I use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy how bad the font rendering can be sometimes (and yes, I have used the cleartype tweaking tool, thanks).
- ue_ 11y ago
  The font management (installing and enabling) isn't so nice. I don't know how it is on Windows, but on GNU/Linux it even comes down to editing dotfiles containing snippets of XML in your home directory to enable or disable certain fonts or rendering methods. Gentoo partially solves this by having eselect fontconfig.
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    All I had to do was extract the font files into ~/.fonts/.
  - NoGravitas 11y ago
    Installing and enabling fonts is pretty much just dropping them into a directory fontconfig knows about. Now as far as disabling certain (installed) fonts or switching rendering methods, specifying particular rendering methods for particular fonts, or specifying replacements for fonts you don't have installed or don't want to use -- those things do require editing XML dotfiles. But as far as I know, they can't be done at all on Windows (at the user or system-wide level; I think applications can do them for themselves).
- pmelendez 11y ago
  > The font rendering on Linux is so much nicer than on Windows, especially on web fonts I actually like the other way around. I don't like the font rendering on Linux... not even in Firefox.
pdkl95 11y ago
> The font rendering seems nicer? While I agree that it is better than the font rendering in Windows[1], I suggest that the font rendering is "different", and opinions will vary considerably about which is better. You may be interested to know that there are patches to the font handling libraries (fontconfig, freetype, cairo) that used to be known as "infinality"[3], but are now maintained by bohoomil[4]. With these patches, you can actually select (with environment variables) various rendering options, including emulation of ClearType and several other rendering styles, including a customizable FIR filter and detailed control of the hinting. Warning: Messing with fontconfig is far more complicated than it looks. Use these patches at your own risk! That said, I do like the results[5]. [1] The modern ClearType rendering, not the pixel-snapping, over-hinted[2] stuff used previously [2] http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h... [3] http://www.infinality.net/blog/ http://www.infinality.net/blog/ [4] https://github.com/bohoomil/fontconfig-ultimate https://github.com/bohoomil/fontconfig-ultimate [5] http://i.imgur.com/wMWmNKt.png http://i.imgur.com/wMWmNKt.png
vassy 11y ago
Windows pushed me to Linux, and Linux pushed me to OSX.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  I use to think OS X "just worked" until I tried it my self. I'm not going to waste my time writing about the horror story that is OS X, but this HN thread is a pretty good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10010395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10010395 I don't see how people can use that and tout it as superior to anything, even Linux. I can understand the use of a macbook, but I'll never understand why people use OS X.
gawa 11y ago
SW Battlefront can run on linux, thanks to Wine. [1] Wine can be a pain to use, if you're not comfortable enough with linux. But know that it's possible. I had the game running fine, only with some minor annoyances (like a very long loading time). But it was years ago, you might find a more recent version of Wine which runs the game smoothly, almost out of the box. I just wanted to encourage you. Keep learning linux, keep toying with Wine, and you'll be able to play this game (and others) ;) [1] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4785&iTestingId=61427 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... Edit : I realized you were probably referring to the newest SW Battlefront... My bad. Well, it still applies somewhat : Wine will be able, eventually, someday, to run this upcoming SW Battlefront.
- coldpie 11y ago
  If you'll allow me a moment of self-advertising, my company sells a version of Wine called CrossOver. It has a user-friendly wrapper, so you have less fiddling to do with files and command lines. We contribute all of our improvements back to the Wine project and are the largest force driving Wine's development (check out the email addresses in the Git log). Working on Wine is my full-time job. Even if you don't end up using it, purchasing our product directly helps improve Wine :)
  - binthere 11y ago
    Question: Doesn't Wine take away some of the performance as opposed to play the game natively on Windows?
    - coldpie 11y ago
      Yes, for many games, but not for all. Older games tend to run at full speed, more modern and cutting edge titles tend to run at a 20-50% framerate reduction. Even some modern games run at full speed. It really depends on the game.
andresmanz 11y ago
> Things I'm missing - Can't play Witcher 3 (but apparently a native version is coming soon), and I'll probably miss out on SW: Battlefront. That's the one single reason why I keep Windows 8.1 on my HD. Over the last 3 years I've used Windows for maybe 13-14 hours in total. Fortunately, more and more games come out on Linux, too. And some games run pretty good in Wine. Fallout 3, for example, runs faster on Linux (with higher settings) than it does on Windows. Even though I updated everything, disabled pretty much anything that could run in the background and don't have much installed. I can't even imagine how Windows can still be the preferred OS for gaming nowadays. Using Windows is a pain in the butt, and so is playing games on it. The whole OS by default wastes precious resources those games could use, and it gets worse with every new version. On Linux I'm the only person who tells the OS how and when to waste the resources.
iammyIP 11y ago
Windows 7 thankfully pushed me to linux, when i bought a 'student edition' from digital river to upgrade from xp for 39 euro. As it turned out, this win7 key i got from digital river only could be authenticicated, when the iso had been installed over a pre-existing xp-installation. I never installed xp again, so now i have a win7 leftover for some games that pops up a screen every 30 min, which tells me that the system is not sure wether it's genuine or not. I can leave that window open and it doesnt steal focus. But how stupid is that to sell such a version anyway. First i need to install xp, and then i need to install win7 over it. Why? That was when i realised i need to get out of this. Somehow i heard Linux Mint would be easy for people that are sick of windows. Installed like a breeze. I had to move out. Like if you don't live with your parents anymore. Windows = Dad. Macos = Mom. Don't misunderstand - both are nice, and so i am nice to people that use these systems, while nonetheless probing sometimes wether they don't have any desire to live on their own a bit more. Most of them somehow appreciate my tales of freedom, but at the same time feel they can't deal with their life without Mom washing their clothes and Dad telling them when they should be home. Often this goes hand in hand with a severe adobe or visual studio addiction - they make the most perservant drugs - and are often a necessity for survival, which is a shame. I reserve a warm place in my heart for those people and think well of them. But that aside - now i had my own shitty apartment and needed to do everything for myself. First it was hard and i needed Wine. I totally wrecked it two times. But freedom. No more eula accept clicking without having read it was enough for me to continue. I now can change the scrollbar gfx of the whole system by editing a dead simple png file. Nobody cares. I can install, backup, delete and setup anything like i want, without permission from anybody. I also don't get shouted at every imaginable occasion that 'Hey, you! Did you know you are using Linux(tm)(r)(c) <accept> <ok>' - instead, the system is able to shut up about itself and to get out of the way as much as i want it to get. That is so much beyond priceless - and this translates into a quality of life that is only comparable with having your own garden near the house you've built yourself while tasting your own brewed beer with best friends in the sunshine of a late summer afternoon. And everything linux is searchable on the internet, which runs on it. I keep in mind to also care about the people that made this possible, in humankinds brightest collaborative effort so far. They all shall be remembered, their names encarved in granite, and i acknowledge their immense contribution to humankind. Kudos to them that made this possible, including all other free operating systems contributors, from all the GNU, BSD, Plan9, riscOS, templeOS and others. So, from 2011 to now, i experienced about 5 distros, and currently have settled on manjaro with xfce. The next time i might try real archlinux as a main system maybe? The hardware support is amazing actually. I plug stuff in, it instantly gets recognised and usable without any further ado. I had an Ipad for a short time, i wanted to wipe it to factory settings and upload some pdfs to read - how foolish of me. First it needed a superspecial cable. Then, this Ipad could not be acessed as a simple usb storage device. Wtf. Who built this and why? Finally after the factory reset it did not boot anymore and demanded i connect it with a windows or mac that had itunes installed. Haha. No. But it also makes me sad that such electronic things exist which demand such utter nonsense from me that i won't fulfil for them. I have, to make this clear, no bad feelings for anybody that earns money to live by working for microsoft - may they live well. Then i am sometimes remembered by force of what a wierd microsoft business corporate world system this 'windows' is oozing out of every corner, when i _have_ to use it for work in special situations, and it feels totally backwards to use it. It's like entering a room where tv is on and the people in it all obsessively want a deeply involved discussion with me about the running show. Well, thats my story with this..

by malbs 11y ago

WalterGR 11y ago

What didn't you like about Windows 10?

malbs 11y ago
Same thing I really didn't like about Windows 8. Ads on my desktop, in an operating system I paid money for. In particular Toyota car ads in the music app. I did like the UI improvements, the notifications system etc, that switching between new/old apps didn't feel jarring anymore. I think the kicker was the github project calle dunfuck windows 10 or whatever it was, where you ran a bunch of batch scripts to remove/kill off the monitoring services, and I just didn't want to have to worry about that. Also the fact that on my other machines, the nagging to upgrade to windows 10 is constant, I had to go find/remove some random windows update patch from June/July to get rid of gwx.exe. edit: lastly, the licensing terms of the operating system itself, IANAL, and I couldn't tell what rights I had to the o/s in the future.
- AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
  To be fair, the music app isn't the operating system, just something that comes with it. You are not forced to use it - and you didn't pay for it so it being ad supported is practically normal. Did you pay for Windows 10?
  - tdicola 11y ago
    I didn't pay for my Linux install and it has zero ad-supported junkware.
    - Ntrails 11y ago
      Wasn't there a big bru-ha-ha when one of the big linux gui distros added amazon crapware by default?
      - glogla 11y ago
        There was. It was just one distribution of many (Ubuntu), just one version of it in fact (Unity Ubuntu, Xubuntu or Kubuntu or whatever is Gnome Ubuntu called didn't include it) and it was not only possible (unlike in Windows 8 and 10) but also rather easy to remove.
      - bmn_ 11y ago
        There was, and as a result a lot of people shitcanned that distro, and said incident left an indelible black mark on the vendor's reputation.
  - malbs 11y ago
    No, the Windows 10 upgrade was "Free", but I was talking specifically about Windows 8 with regards to ads in the O/S. The music app comes with the O/S, and is the default registered music player, for all intents are purposes, it's part of the O/S, and it's ability to inject ads into the start screen (as well as the Games widget, and Store widget doing the same thing) are just more of that.

megablast 11y ago

Vista pushed me to Mac OS. And then I went from .Net/Visual Studio to Objective-C/Xcode and making apps instead of websites. So much happier now. (but that was in the days of IE6)

smacktoward 11y ago

For me it was Windows XP. What did it for me back then was the introduction of product activation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation). Having as my primary workstation a computer that Microsoft could remotely disable at any time for any reason wasn't a very appealing prospect. Linux was much rougher on the desktop then, but it was good enough and has only gotten better. I still have a Windows partition, but I only ever use it for playing games, and with Steam's Linux support improving I find myself using it less and less even in that limited capacity. For a company that used to understand that its success depended on developer mindshare, Microsoft has done a really remarkable job over the last 15 years turning Windows into a platform that seems laser-focused on the goal of making developers want to use almost anything else.

Zardoz84 11y ago
C and C++ dev on Windows is a pain on the ass. On my GNU/Linux, I can use pkgconfig to get the lib dependences, and cmake could grab the deps very well. On Windows, I end doing ugly things to get the dependencies working...
- flohofwoe 11y ago
  I only had that experience with projects that use autoconf for build configuration, usually these are tied very closely to UNIX-like platforms. Most libs that use cmake to setup the build files can be integrated well on Windows (most likely because the author choose cmake exactly for this reason to be easily usable across platforms). But that's more of a problem of Linux isolationism than Windows' fault (basically the modern version of the bad old days when everyone was on Windows and all you got to build a project from source was a bunch of Visual Studio project files).
  - phs2501 11y ago
    But even with cmake there's no standard place for third-party libraries to be installed on Windows. There's no /usr/lib and /usr/include analogue. So if I'm writing software that uses a third-party library I either have to bundle it into my source tree or hope there's an installer for it, burn the default installation location into the build system, and hope the user compiling my code has not overridden the default location. (I know some installers like Qt will make a system environment variable to say where their libraries are, but that's not particularly nice if everything did that.) In my case I needed libapr, and as far as I can tell there is no installer for it, so I wound up just saying "drop a compiled copy of libapr into this location in the source tree" into the build instructions since I did not want to redistribute it with my source. So yes, I dearly wish for something like a working pkgconfig on Windows.

MikaHakki32 11y ago

>> I switched my dev environment from VS/C# to Python/Komodo. I could have followed that statement if it was ... to IntelliJ/Java.

geophile 11y ago

I am the family IT guy. Years ago (Windows 2000 era, very young kids) I got tired of maintaining Windows and declared that I would no longer support it. We've been all Linux and Mac since then. For a while, we were Linux only.

Roboprog 11y ago
I will double down on your anecdata, since that is my story as well.

et1337 11y ago

Linux pretty much solved the "where are all my apps" problem. If we can just figure out the "why doesn't my graphics card work" problem, we'll be set.

Qwertious 11y ago
What graphics card are you using, and what distro? To state the obvious, if you're using Nvidia then you'll want to install the proprietary driver, whereas with AMD you'll want to keep the open-source driver as default, because Catalyst isn't that stable.
- et1337 11y ago
  I use both AMD and Nvidia on Ubuntu. For both GPUs, every OS upgrade is a toss-up as to whether things will work or not.
empiricus 11y ago
Some issues I had last month with ubuntu linux: 1. When I plug my UHD monitor, linux tries to use 4k@60hz, but my video board does not support this, so no video signal. 2. tried to use latest intel video drivers, so I had to upgrade first ubuntu 3. after upgrade no more GUI, only text mode 4. solved the GUI issue, no luck with the wrong resolution/refresh rate. 5. using xrandr command line I can set 4k@30hz. 6. using black magic I can set 4k@50kz. 7. a couple of days ago the mouse cursor had disappeared (mouse still working). Random advices from the internet did not work, had to reboot 8. cannot set mouse speed from the system settings, I have to do it from the command line with some visual parsing of xinput commands. This is all I remember now :)
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  Reminds me of when I used to use Windows. I'm just glad I don't have any of these problems with Linux. Seems like no matter what OS you use, there's always some hardware configuration that the OS has problems with.
7952 11y ago

Rusky 11y ago

My solution to this problem is to run Windows in a VM, with a graphics card passed through to it. That way I can run (and test!) games and other apps I still need every once in a while without dual booting. I use qemu/kvm, with OVMF for the firmware to get around some VGA problems, and pass a discrete card to the guest while using the integrated intel graphics for the host. It requires CPU and motherboard support, but those aren't too uncommon on newer hardware.

malbs 11y ago
I didn't realise you can use direct hardware access in a VM! (Other than HDD) That'd be pretty good
- glogla 11y ago
  You can, but only on AMD GPUs. Nvidia GPUs have this disable unless you buy very expensive "cloud" model.
  - otis_inf 11y ago
    Yeah I ran into that wall 2 weeks ago. I tried to switch to Linux for the host and run my Windows 8 VMs in VMWare on Mint. After fighting with the nvidia drivers at install for a bit I got it working but VMWare using dual monitors is super slow on nvidia (780 here) in mint: the windows in the guest VM were drawn as if it was done by a single core on half the speed, instead of on the GPU. Single monitor, no problem. Had to roll back to windows for the host to make the VMs work nicely. A bummer, considering moving away from Windows takes that first step and I now have to stick around for longer. Perhaps next year...
  - dale-cooper 11y ago
    Not true, you can work around this. I'm running a 970 gtx in a vm. See https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768
- JoachimS 11y ago
  Didn't know you could do it either. And the security aware (paranoid) part of me screams loudly when reading this. ;-)

sytelus 11y ago

Biggest hurdle I found moving to other OSes were bunch of NTFS formatted external hard drives with TBs of my data. How do you use them from *nix/Mac? On Mac NTFS were readonly unless you install 3rd party stuff but even then there were several problems sharing on network. Reformatting dozen hard drives to new file system was just too much work.

malbs 11y ago
Last year I bought a Synology NAS w/ 12 TB (9tb usable) and copied most of my data to it. So data wasn't a problem. Bonus now is I can use NFS!
erik14th 11y ago
On Linux I use NTFS-3G[0]. Never had a problem. [0]http://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/ http://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/
Zardoz84 11y ago
NTFS on GNU/Linux was rw without any issue from years ago. I have a big partition with my user data on a NTFS partition that I shared across Windows 8.1 and Kubuntu 15.04 without any issue. The only problem that I could have is that if I unplug the computer on Windows, I need to reboot on Windows to mark it-self as safe, so Linux can mount it again without any warning message.

cm2187 11y ago

What is the closest equivalent of visual studio+c# in the linux world? I.e. A high level language that can be used for a breadth of applications (web site, desktop app, console, etc) and a very rich IDE which helps a lot in term of auto-complete/debugging/discoverability? To me the IDE is at least as important as the language.

malbs 11y ago
At the time I started thinking about making that change, I don't think I had a good answer. I started using Python, and Python Tools for Visual Studio, and thought, this is fucked, because I love this tool, and it's tying me to Windows still, so I consciously made the decision to switch out my dev tool to Komodo. I don't love it. It's got nothing on PTVS, but it runs on Linux really well. For a decent dev tool under Linux - what about MonoDevelop? VSCode looks ok, but I haven't tried the Linux version, but apparently you can do C# development in it. I'm not really up to speed with C# dev these days, last job I had which required C# was 2009, and since then I really haven't done much serious development in it (It's 95% Delphi professionally, and Python for my own stuff) Edit: I wanted to re-iterate, I absolutely love Python Tools for Visual Studio. Those guys have created (what I have found to be) the highest quality python development tool I have experienced. The downside is it requires Visual Studio. If they can take what they have added to VS, and re-produce that in VSCode.... Wow, I would be very happy.
- vetinari 11y ago
  For python, try Pycharm. There's also community edition, which may or may not be enough for you. Another step up is Intellij Idea, which supports everything that all the other language-specific products together.
- lbruder 11y ago
  For a nice Delphi alternative, try Lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/). Like Delphi 7, but with more features. Documentation could be better though.
danieldk 11y ago

Filthy_casual 11y ago

Same here. I decided to stop playing video games cold turkey and what I did was grab an Arch Linux iso and follow the beginner's guide. Much more decent.

grimman 11y ago

I think the only actual Windows app I still really need is Total Commander. I know there's lots of commander apps available for just about any platform, but I've used Total Commander for... 15 years? I know it inside and out; even a small change at this point would be jarring. :(

_ZeD_ 11y ago
well, I don't use it, but it's marked "platinum" on wine[0] so you may not miss it [0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=31360 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
jasonjayr 11y ago
Windows commander (As it was called back then) was the first piece of shareware I've ever registered, back in the 16-bit Windows 3.1 days, which is just as long as I've been using it as well :) Impressively, it is still under active development. "Double Commander" is a very complete open source re-implementation in QT, and they are targeting all 3 major platforms with it. There are a few quirks that will be noticeable for anyone that's nimble with Total Commander, but the keybindings and even the menus are just about the same, and if that's what's keeping you on Windows -- the benefit of the linux ecosystem will greatly outweigh those small nuisances.
deno 11y ago
I don’t use either personally, however Krusader seems like a pretty good alternative. http://www.krusader.org/ http://www.krusader.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krusader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krusader

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

NoGravitas 11y ago

The font rendering on Linux is so much nicer than on Windows, especially on web fonts. I use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy how bad the font rendering can be sometimes (and yes, I have used the cleartype tweaking tool, thanks).

ue_ 11y ago
The font management (installing and enabling) isn't so nice. I don't know how it is on Windows, but on GNU/Linux it even comes down to editing dotfiles containing snippets of XML in your home directory to enable or disable certain fonts or rendering methods. Gentoo partially solves this by having eselect fontconfig.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  All I had to do was extract the font files into ~/.fonts/.
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  Installing and enabling fonts is pretty much just dropping them into a directory fontconfig knows about. Now as far as disabling certain (installed) fonts or switching rendering methods, specifying particular rendering methods for particular fonts, or specifying replacements for fonts you don't have installed or don't want to use -- those things do require editing XML dotfiles. But as far as I know, they can't be done at all on Windows (at the user or system-wide level; I think applications can do them for themselves).
pmelendez 11y ago
> The font rendering on Linux is so much nicer than on Windows, especially on web fonts I actually like the other way around. I don't like the font rendering on Linux... not even in Firefox.

pdkl95 11y ago

> The font rendering seems nicer? While I agree that it is better than the font rendering in Windows[1], I suggest that the font rendering is "different", and opinions will vary considerably about which is better. You may be interested to know that there are patches to the font handling libraries (fontconfig, freetype, cairo) that used to be known as "infinality"[3], but are now maintained by bohoomil[4]. With these patches, you can actually select (with environment variables) various rendering options, including emulation of ClearType and several other rendering styles, including a customizable FIR filter and detailed control of the hinting. Warning: Messing with fontconfig is far more complicated than it looks. Use these patches at your own risk! That said, I do like the results[5]. [1] The modern ClearType rendering, not the pixel-snapping, over-hinted[2] stuff used previously [2] http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h... [3] http://www.infinality.net/blog/ http://www.infinality.net/blog/ [4] https://github.com/bohoomil/fontconfig-ultimate https://github.com/bohoomil/fontconfig-ultimate [5] http://i.imgur.com/wMWmNKt.png http://i.imgur.com/wMWmNKt.png

vassy 11y ago

Windows pushed me to Linux, and Linux pushed me to OSX.

zxcvcxz 11y ago
I use to think OS X "just worked" until I tried it my self. I'm not going to waste my time writing about the horror story that is OS X, but this HN thread is a pretty good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10010395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10010395 I don't see how people can use that and tout it as superior to anything, even Linux. I can understand the use of a macbook, but I'll never understand why people use OS X.

gawa 11y ago

SW Battlefront can run on linux, thanks to Wine. [1] Wine can be a pain to use, if you're not comfortable enough with linux. But know that it's possible. I had the game running fine, only with some minor annoyances (like a very long loading time). But it was years ago, you might find a more recent version of Wine which runs the game smoothly, almost out of the box. I just wanted to encourage you. Keep learning linux, keep toying with Wine, and you'll be able to play this game (and others) ;) [1] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4785&iTestingId=61427 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... Edit : I realized you were probably referring to the newest SW Battlefront... My bad. Well, it still applies somewhat : Wine will be able, eventually, someday, to run this upcoming SW Battlefront.

coldpie 11y ago
If you'll allow me a moment of self-advertising, my company sells a version of Wine called CrossOver. It has a user-friendly wrapper, so you have less fiddling to do with files and command lines. We contribute all of our improvements back to the Wine project and are the largest force driving Wine's development (check out the email addresses in the Git log). Working on Wine is my full-time job. Even if you don't end up using it, purchasing our product directly helps improve Wine :)
- binthere 11y ago
  Question: Doesn't Wine take away some of the performance as opposed to play the game natively on Windows?
  - coldpie 11y ago
    Yes, for many games, but not for all. Older games tend to run at full speed, more modern and cutting edge titles tend to run at a 20-50% framerate reduction. Even some modern games run at full speed. It really depends on the game.

andresmanz 11y ago

> Things I'm missing - Can't play Witcher 3 (but apparently a native version is coming soon), and I'll probably miss out on SW: Battlefront. That's the one single reason why I keep Windows 8.1 on my HD. Over the last 3 years I've used Windows for maybe 13-14 hours in total. Fortunately, more and more games come out on Linux, too. And some games run pretty good in Wine. Fallout 3, for example, runs faster on Linux (with higher settings) than it does on Windows. Even though I updated everything, disabled pretty much anything that could run in the background and don't have much installed. I can't even imagine how Windows can still be the preferred OS for gaming nowadays. Using Windows is a pain in the butt, and so is playing games on it. The whole OS by default wastes precious resources those games could use, and it gets worse with every new version. On Linux I'm the only person who tells the OS how and when to waste the resources.

iammyIP 11y ago

Windows 7 thankfully pushed me to linux, when i bought a 'student edition' from digital river to upgrade from xp for 39 euro. As it turned out, this win7 key i got from digital river only could be authenticicated, when the iso had been installed over a pre-existing xp-installation. I never installed xp again, so now i have a win7 leftover for some games that pops up a screen every 30 min, which tells me that the system is not sure wether it's genuine or not. I can leave that window open and it doesnt steal focus. But how stupid is that to sell such a version anyway. First i need to install xp, and then i need to install win7 over it. Why? That was when i realised i need to get out of this. Somehow i heard Linux Mint would be easy for people that are sick of windows. Installed like a breeze. I had to move out. Like if you don't live with your parents anymore. Windows = Dad. Macos = Mom. Don't misunderstand - both are nice, and so i am nice to people that use these systems, while nonetheless probing sometimes wether they don't have any desire to live on their own a bit more. Most of them somehow appreciate my tales of freedom, but at the same time feel they can't deal with their life without Mom washing their clothes and Dad telling them when they should be home. Often this goes hand in hand with a severe adobe or visual studio addiction - they make the most perservant drugs - and are often a necessity for survival, which is a shame. I reserve a warm place in my heart for those people and think well of them. But that aside - now i had my own shitty apartment and needed to do everything for myself. First it was hard and i needed Wine. I totally wrecked it two times. But freedom. No more eula accept clicking without having read it was enough for me to continue. I now can change the scrollbar gfx of the whole system by editing a dead simple png file. Nobody cares. I can install, backup, delete and setup anything like i want, without permission from anybody. I also don't get shouted at every imaginable occasion that 'Hey, you! Did you know you are using Linux(tm)(r)(c) <accept> <ok>' - instead, the system is able to shut up about itself and to get out of the way as much as i want it to get. That is so much beyond priceless - and this translates into a quality of life that is only comparable with having your own garden near the house you've built yourself while tasting your own brewed beer with best friends in the sunshine of a late summer afternoon. And everything linux is searchable on the internet, which runs on it. I keep in mind to also care about the people that made this possible, in humankinds brightest collaborative effort so far. They all shall be remembered, their names encarved in granite, and i acknowledge their immense contribution to humankind. Kudos to them that made this possible, including all other free operating systems contributors, from all the GNU, BSD, Plan9, riscOS, templeOS and others. So, from 2011 to now, i experienced about 5 distros, and currently have settled on manjaro with xfce. The next time i might try real archlinux as a main system maybe? The hardware support is amazing actually. I plug stuff in, it instantly gets recognised and usable without any further ado. I had an Ipad for a short time, i wanted to wipe it to factory settings and upload some pdfs to read - how foolish of me. First it needed a superspecial cable. Then, this Ipad could not be acessed as a simple usb storage device. Wtf. Who built this and why? Finally after the factory reset it did not boot anymore and demanded i connect it with a windows or mac that had itunes installed. Haha. No. But it also makes me sad that such electronic things exist which demand such utter nonsense from me that i won't fulfil for them. I have, to make this clear, no bad feelings for anybody that earns money to live by working for microsoft - may they live well. Then i am sometimes remembered by force of what a wierd microsoft business corporate world system this 'windows' is oozing out of every corner, when i _have_ to use it for work in special situations, and it feels totally backwards to use it. It's like entering a room where tv is on and the people in it all obsessively want a deeply involved discussion with me about the running show. Well, thats my story with this..