6 ms·

In that list, nothing strikes me as a killer feature that I would leave either Linux or Windows for. I've actually gone from Windows (about 10 years) -> Ubuntu

by hd4 7y ago

In that list, nothing strikes me as a killer feature that I would leave either Linux or Windows for. I've actually gone from Windows (about 10 years) -> Ubuntu (6 years) -> Clear Linux (a few months if that) -> Windows 10 in the last week or so because I realized that I value convenience and performance over whatever else is on offer from Linux, even though there are a few good tools I immediately missed from Linux (grep firstly, but at some point I'm going to setup WSL anyway). There's nothing compelling enough to even bring me back to Linux any time soon, why would I bother with FreeBSD? I develop software, and just want to get things done and the OS to stay out of my way. Windows 10 LTSC does that amazingly well. Sorry if I sound like a shill, I'm really not, I just grew tired of fighting silly little fights to get Ubuntu/x-distro to do what I want.

papermachete 7y ago
What workloads offer better performance in windows 10 than linux?
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  Web browsers are 20% faster for example. OpenGL/Vulkan performance (the gap is closer than before but still exist) But the biggest gap is openCL.
  - mushufasa 7y ago
    can you elaborate on CUDA? My understanding is that the NVIDIA drivers are a hassle to setup on linux, but once you do, the performance is just as good. Are you saying the performance is still worse if you can properly configure the cards? I am considering a rig from System76 whose selling point is that their Pop!_OS fixes the driver config issues.
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      Actually my statement was baseless. After a few googling, I can't find any evidence. Still, this hold for openCL.
    - hpcjoe 7y ago
      I'm not sure where you developed that understanding. NVidia drivers and CUDA are trivial to set up on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS/RHEL). If you use a different distro, you might have a little more work to do, but even that is running a single script that you pull down from NVidia. Some distros maintain packages with 3-6 month update cycle (Ubuntu), so you don't even need to bypass the normal management paradigm. This is sometimes a problem for corporate controlled systems, where you are not allowed to install packages/drivers/etc. For me, I've been running NVidia cards on Linux on desktop and laptop systems since 2006. If you can't use the command line, Linux systems will generally be somewhat more work than windows systems, but not by much. To keep this in context of FBSD, I've used FBSD11 and 12 for a number of things, including development build targets, potential hypervisor based systems. FBSD is an opinionated system. When you run into an FBSD opinion (say, where include directories and libraries sit), and this doesn't mesh well with a configuration/build system, using FBSD winds up being a fairly frustrating experience. The positives about FBSD from my experience are, fundamentally, the bootloader is much better than grub/grub2, from a UX perspective. I know that's a low bar, but really, grub is terrible. The negatives, and I am sure this will result in downvotes, but I am being open on this here, are some members of the community with a chip on their shoulders. You can see that here in the comments about "hey we can do X, and linux can't." I've confronted many of those (often but not always, incorrect) biases during my second to last job, from people who ought to know better. It was tiring having to deal with that crap. FBSD has some interesting tech with it. (Puts on management hat) The hard reality is that unless this tech is so massively compelling, that companies can cast the remaining negatives as being less important to their individual value analysis, I don't expect FBSD to gain or even maintain market share. (Takes off management hat) I've made the same points about SmartOS/Illumos. It doesn't matter how much you like something, if you can't show that it is compellingly better to a large swath of people/companies, chances are you just won't see wide spread adoption/replacement. Moreover, a companies job is to make money for its owners. I've worked at companies that had some aspect of their engineering and management team blind to this. They thought that their job was to provide a home/advocacy base for their platform, rather than turn that platform into the absolute best version of itself. This wasn't FBSD, but the trajectory of this organization was sadly predictable. They had some great tech. But it was wrapped up in a culture that could not adapt. Similar to the FBSD people I indicated, they had a fairly massive chip on their shoulders, which prevented them from taking their real and valuable tech, and making it wide spread. That was a shame. So now, we have Windows and Linux, with the latter completely dominating clouds/containers and ML/AI, and only MSFT still pushing Windows at Azure. I don't see FBSD doing much more than being an appliance OS over the long haul.
  - papermachete 7y ago
    That's interesting, I can't find any benchmarks showing windows browsers being faster.
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      I can't remember the original source.. Still: 10% faster according to phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows10-linux-browsers&num=6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows1... (clear Linux is still the fastest, as always, but is unlike all other distributions)
- hd4 7y ago
  The term 'workload' is itself slightly loaded as it implies something constant like a server maintaining performance over a given period. I did mention my use-case is developing software, so I'm not exactly pushing this to its limits, however programs seem to work a lot faster which I know sounds anecdotal. I found a benchmark which did influence the switch back to Win10. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=icelake-clear-windows&num=6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=icelake-... >if simply counting the number of first-place finishes, Windows 10 performed the best with coming in front 50% of the time to Clear Linux at 36% and Ubuntu 19.10 at 13%.
  - papermachete 7y ago
    To me, my optimised compilation of liquorix on f2fs beats windows on my laptop outright. I lose bandwidth but gain lower latency. Even moving around windows explorer and searching by name is embarrassingly sluggish on my windows 10 install. Can't afford ms telemetry service and windows "defender" taking up half my resources whenever they please, either.
    - hd4 7y ago
      It's trivial to remove telemetry these days.
      - hd4 7y ago
        I seem to be getting a lot of downvotes for that comment for some reason, not sure why but there are several programs that can disable telemetry, this is probably the best-known one. https://wpd.app/ https://wpd.app/
        edgyquant 7y ago
        Removing telemetry completely isn't supported by MS
        papermachete 7y ago
        I also recommend W10 Privacy and Blackbird. Definitely turn off windows defender and all spectre/meltdown mitigations (inSpectre). They don't do anything either way.
josteink 7y ago
> In that list, nothing strikes me as a killer feature that I would leave either Linux or Windows for. I would guess it’s mostly about keeping existing users, instead of leaking them to Linux. > I've actually gone from Windows (about 10 years) -> Ubuntu (6 years) -> Clear Linux (a few months if that) -> Windows 10 in the last week For me the whole point of Linux (or BSD) is not performance or lack of “bloat”, as much as being able to build and customize everything into working for me, into fitting my workflow. I can’t have that on Windows or OSX. But everyone’s different: what works for me may not work for you, and that’s 100% ok. You use whatever helps you get the job done.
_tkzm 7y ago
"I develop software, and just want to get things done" - exactly why i am a continuous windows user since win95(ie. ever). linux and (free)bsd always interested me but they were always impractical and eventually only a time wasters.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  As a counter-point, I am much more productive on Linux than on Windows, and I don't need to deal with a new OS every 4 years with forced upgrades. I believe Windows 7 is going out of support soon, even though many people still run it as ... it does what they want, and they don't need to upgrade. Meanwhile, my Linux/BSD environment only changes on one condition: when I want it to. While some internals change (i.e. systemd), much of the UI is very consistent. This is a massive time-saver for me, because I don't want to deal with learning Windows 10 or whatever new Microsoft comes out with.

by hd4 7y ago

papermachete 7y ago

What workloads offer better performance in windows 10 than linux?

The_rationalist 7y ago
Web browsers are 20% faster for example. OpenGL/Vulkan performance (the gap is closer than before but still exist) But the biggest gap is openCL.
- mushufasa 7y ago
  can you elaborate on CUDA? My understanding is that the NVIDIA drivers are a hassle to setup on linux, but once you do, the performance is just as good. Are you saying the performance is still worse if you can properly configure the cards? I am considering a rig from System76 whose selling point is that their Pop!_OS fixes the driver config issues.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    Actually my statement was baseless. After a few googling, I can't find any evidence. Still, this hold for openCL.
  - hpcjoe 7y ago
    I'm not sure where you developed that understanding. NVidia drivers and CUDA are trivial to set up on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS/RHEL). If you use a different distro, you might have a little more work to do, but even that is running a single script that you pull down from NVidia. Some distros maintain packages with 3-6 month update cycle (Ubuntu), so you don't even need to bypass the normal management paradigm. This is sometimes a problem for corporate controlled systems, where you are not allowed to install packages/drivers/etc. For me, I've been running NVidia cards on Linux on desktop and laptop systems since 2006. If you can't use the command line, Linux systems will generally be somewhat more work than windows systems, but not by much. To keep this in context of FBSD, I've used FBSD11 and 12 for a number of things, including development build targets, potential hypervisor based systems. FBSD is an opinionated system. When you run into an FBSD opinion (say, where include directories and libraries sit), and this doesn't mesh well with a configuration/build system, using FBSD winds up being a fairly frustrating experience. The positives about FBSD from my experience are, fundamentally, the bootloader is much better than grub/grub2, from a UX perspective. I know that's a low bar, but really, grub is terrible. The negatives, and I am sure this will result in downvotes, but I am being open on this here, are some members of the community with a chip on their shoulders. You can see that here in the comments about "hey we can do X, and linux can't." I've confronted many of those (often but not always, incorrect) biases during my second to last job, from people who ought to know better. It was tiring having to deal with that crap. FBSD has some interesting tech with it. (Puts on management hat) The hard reality is that unless this tech is so massively compelling, that companies can cast the remaining negatives as being less important to their individual value analysis, I don't expect FBSD to gain or even maintain market share. (Takes off management hat) I've made the same points about SmartOS/Illumos. It doesn't matter how much you like something, if you can't show that it is compellingly better to a large swath of people/companies, chances are you just won't see wide spread adoption/replacement. Moreover, a companies job is to make money for its owners. I've worked at companies that had some aspect of their engineering and management team blind to this. They thought that their job was to provide a home/advocacy base for their platform, rather than turn that platform into the absolute best version of itself. This wasn't FBSD, but the trajectory of this organization was sadly predictable. They had some great tech. But it was wrapped up in a culture that could not adapt. Similar to the FBSD people I indicated, they had a fairly massive chip on their shoulders, which prevented them from taking their real and valuable tech, and making it wide spread. That was a shame. So now, we have Windows and Linux, with the latter completely dominating clouds/containers and ML/AI, and only MSFT still pushing Windows at Azure. I don't see FBSD doing much more than being an appliance OS over the long haul.
- papermachete 7y ago
  That's interesting, I can't find any benchmarks showing windows browsers being faster.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    I can't remember the original source.. Still: 10% faster according to phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows10-linux-browsers&num=6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows1... (clear Linux is still the fastest, as always, but is unlike all other distributions)
hd4 7y ago
The term 'workload' is itself slightly loaded as it implies something constant like a server maintaining performance over a given period. I did mention my use-case is developing software, so I'm not exactly pushing this to its limits, however programs seem to work a lot faster which I know sounds anecdotal. I found a benchmark which did influence the switch back to Win10. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=icelake-clear-windows&num=6 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=icelake-... >if simply counting the number of first-place finishes, Windows 10 performed the best with coming in front 50% of the time to Clear Linux at 36% and Ubuntu 19.10 at 13%.
- papermachete 7y ago
  To me, my optimised compilation of liquorix on f2fs beats windows on my laptop outright. I lose bandwidth but gain lower latency. Even moving around windows explorer and searching by name is embarrassingly sluggish on my windows 10 install. Can't afford ms telemetry service and windows "defender" taking up half my resources whenever they please, either.
  - hd4 7y ago
    It's trivial to remove telemetry these days.
    - hd4 7y ago
      I seem to be getting a lot of downvotes for that comment for some reason, not sure why but there are several programs that can disable telemetry, this is probably the best-known one. https://wpd.app/ https://wpd.app/
      - edgyquant 7y ago
        Removing telemetry completely isn't supported by MS
      - papermachete 7y ago
        I also recommend W10 Privacy and Blackbird. Definitely turn off windows defender and all spectre/meltdown mitigations (inSpectre). They don't do anything either way.

josteink 7y ago

> In that list, nothing strikes me as a killer feature that I would leave either Linux or Windows for. I would guess it’s mostly about keeping existing users, instead of leaking them to Linux. > I've actually gone from Windows (about 10 years) -> Ubuntu (6 years) -> Clear Linux (a few months if that) -> Windows 10 in the last week For me the whole point of Linux (or BSD) is not performance or lack of “bloat”, as much as being able to build and customize everything into working for me, into fitting my workflow. I can’t have that on Windows or OSX. But everyone’s different: what works for me may not work for you, and that’s 100% ok. You use whatever helps you get the job done.

_tkzm 7y ago

"I develop software, and just want to get things done" - exactly why i am a continuous windows user since win95(ie. ever). linux and (free)bsd always interested me but they were always impractical and eventually only a time wasters.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
As a counter-point, I am much more productive on Linux than on Windows, and I don't need to deal with a new OS every 4 years with forced upgrades. I believe Windows 7 is going out of support soon, even though many people still run it as ... it does what they want, and they don't need to upgrade. Meanwhile, my Linux/BSD environment only changes on one condition: when I want it to. While some internals change (i.e. systemd), much of the UI is very consistent. This is a massive time-saver for me, because I don't want to deal with learning Windows 10 or whatever new Microsoft comes out with.