9 ms·

Yes exactly. About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it

by skohan 6y ago

Yes exactly. About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to. By contrast, whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates. The OS suggests things to me I have no interest in. When I want to use Microsoft software, I have to log into accounts for some reason, which often means a round trip through email to reset the password. Once Windows even changed firmware settings without asking me which broke things in Linux. The best things about Linux are not what it does, but what it doesn't do. I want this for my phone as well.

hazaskull 6y ago
Counter example. I switched from Linux to Windows because I find its desktop-experience to be superior. In my mind software and hardware is evolving at a rate that makes it impractical to support the notion that I could usefully modify it myself so it mostly comes down to trust. Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers? Looking at being able to access old data and run old programs I feel MS have been doing a great job. Now if they come up with a way for me to make sure that my data is in some standardized format AND protected in such a way that I could reasonably expect nobody (not even MS) to read it (but still be able to offload it elsewhere) I’d be entirely happy.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers? Do you? I don't. Microsoft is exclusively profit-oriented, they'll sell all your information in a heartbeat if they believe to have a legal way to do it and that it won't kill them in the next 5 years. A group of open source maintainers (the more radical the better) will not. They will (usually) not polish the product as well, and they might be difficult to deal with if you found an issue (but you _can_ talk to them, unlike Microsoft). I definitely trust open source people more, because they do their thing for ideological reasons and based on principles, not to maximize engagement and ad-spend and their yearly bonus.
  - inquirerGeneral 6y ago
    Your concerns are the same that I had up until about 3 years ago when Microsoft and Google changed everything because at least at Google they do not care about your actual data because they can aggregate and anonymize it and a level that nobody else in the entire world can. This is why it's way more dangerous to give data to even open source apps that are encrypted and secure because if they ever do change your privacy policy and you don't pay attention to it, they could say they start selling your data and you continue to agree to it.
    - salawat 6y ago
      The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this one. The fact they pitch their skills at anonymizing and aggregating data doesn't change the fact you can't trust Google to not utilize data exfiltration techniques in the first place. Your argument about open source license changes applies just as much, if not moreso to Google as well. Have you really thought through that all the way?
    - bigbob2 6y ago
      That's why I like using a system which gives me control over which updates I want to receive. I'm not forced to take updates on an operating system which can also change the privacy policy on me and has done so in the past.
- rodelrod 6y ago
  Literally the only significant amount of data I've ever lost in my life, either on a personal or professional context, were: 1. half a decade of emails dropped by Microsoft from my old Hotmail account with no reason or warning; 2. all my highlights on a 3000-page book series lost due to a iOS update breaking compatibility with the app I was using for it.
- inquirerGeneral 6y ago
  Good post. Google has actually went even further in making it transparent where they show every bit of data they have on you. You can delete it all review it all have it auto delete, they don't need any of it
gambiting 6y ago
I literally and honestly feel like the only difference here is that vast majority of linux distributions don't have auto updates enabled and windows does. I'm literally afraid of running apt-get upgrade in Ubuntu because always, inevitably, things change and move about , which I hate with passion.
- happymellon 6y ago
  This is literally the opposite to me. Running apt update/upgrade never breaks anything except a long time ago when I ran out of disk space during an update. This could have been handled better, but it isn't a usual scenario for me.
- franga2000 6y ago
  The problem isn't automatic updates, it's the philosophy behind those updates. On Ubuntu (last time I used it some 5 years ago), an update fixed bugs in software and that's it. Occasionally you'd get a new feature here and there, but rarely in the shell and existing features always stayed in their places. On Windows 10, updates ship breaking changes basically every time and there is no regard for consistency. Whether the updates are manual or automatic is an implementation detail - eventually, you'll update either way. The big difference is between a rolling release with no promise of compatibility and a versioned release with LTS.
  - SCHiM 6y ago
    Strange, my experience is also the exact opposite. I really wonder why that is? I'm running about 10 windows 10 machines, various builds, auto updates enabled. Some in a domain, some in a workgroup. The last time an update bricked a system, or even broke a feature, must be over a year ago. Now on Ubuntu, I have the same experience as some other posters. I'm reasonably confident that I can update if I do it semi regularly. But the number of times I've experienced breakage that lead to hours of bugfixing during $DAYJOB, is way too high. Now everything is in its own tightly controller docker, no more random breakage (unless docker breaks, or a key expires...). A debian 9 apt upgrade actually managed to render my install inoperable once. But that might be semi-unfair as it had to do with graphics drivers. Are you running windows systems on semi-recent hardware? Or is it all decades old thinkpad laptops with shitty thirdparty drivers?
mr_mitm 6y ago
I totally get your point regarding Windows, but does Android do this, too? The only thing mine does is auto-update apps, and only because I told it to. I didn't have to turn on auto updating. OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically.
- plater 6y ago
  But it spies on you. And transmits data about you to Google. And has pre-installed apps you cannot fully uninstall. And it changes your privacy settings without you knowing when new features are added.
  - inquirerGeneral 6y ago
    Google spying on you is the least of your worries, they are the most transparent of all the big tech companies if you ever manage to dig into your Google profile these days. If anything Google is so far ahead they are advocating more privacy and less data being sent if you choose, because they don't sell it directly to people like a local grocery store with its own app or Amazon does. Federated learning AI is basically making it where Google can continue to have all the benefits of massive data mining without any personal information ever having to leak out
    - gbrown 6y ago
      Not to be glib but... Stockholm syndrome much?
- krageon 6y ago
  > OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically. The parts involved with spying on you will update regardless of what you want or say. Unless of course you're not using the play store (or any other google services).
- Tarsul 6y ago
  my android phone has a nagging "security update" popup that I cannot delete. I don't update so it stays with my phone all the time (it takes a huge amount in the pause screen), i have to deny the updates each time i restart my phone (which doesn't happen often). Nonetheless, it's true I can still use my phone (and the appstore)... huh, now that I take a closer look at this annoying update it appears to be from samsung not from google.
incrudible 6y ago
> About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to. My experience with Linux on the Desktop is that it wants to install updates. It doesn't force me to install updates, which I appreciate. However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff. This has never happened to me with Windows. I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.
- ip34162 6y ago
  I never had a problem with LTS versions of Ubuntu MATE. If you want modern-looking LTS, try KDE Neon. https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/
  - neogodless 6y ago
    I had Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a Dell Inspiron 3137. I ran apt-get update and it crashed and would not boot. I was preparing to lend the laptop out to family so I had to put Windows back on it. It happens. Your personal experience is not everyone's experience.
    - stewartm 6y ago
      I would be intrigued to know what happened with this one. Across well over a decade of using Apt on Debian, Ubuntu & Mint, the amount of times I have seen Apt crash, is never. By contrast I have seen Apt tasks fail leaving packages partially installed. If relevant, it may seem a trivial, semantic difference, but I think it is a little more important than that. Following the typical Microsoft paradigm of 'just reboot and hope for the best' will rarely result in the desired outcome, and in the case of something like grub could well end up with a system that will not boot. For me a key difference in this case, is I have never encountered an unbootable Linux system (outside of hardware issues), that I could not fix with some basic tools. I can't say the same of Microsoft products (Personally, I don't consider a fresh install a fix :) ).
das4119 6y ago
Summed up in the following: Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now. Its time to dim your screen. We don't care if you're reading a recipe while you cook. No we won't put a widget to allow this temporarily. We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later. Its time for feature X to not work or not exist anywhere. We don't care that it worked in the old version. We don't like it.
- qayxc 6y ago
  So in other words you haven't found and used the "Settings" app yet?
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    The thing mentioned in this bit? > We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.
  - hulitu 6y ago
    The settings app is useless. Even win 3.0 had better settings than settings app in win 10.
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      You haven't used it in a while. Microsoft is slowly re-implementing or dropping all of the Windows 3.x/9x era Control Panel settings. A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago is very unfair as it's continuously improving and evolving.
      - wutbrodo 6y ago
        > A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago How do you know his/her opinion is based on year-old usage?
zaat 6y ago
This is simply not true, unfortunately. I run a Fedora system for more than ten years, and during this period updates shoved into my system tons of unwanted stuff. I still prefer the system to the alternatives, but let me tell you, there is simply no way I would install flatpak into my system, and if it wasn't for the terrible log spam it filled my log with, I probably wouldn't even know it arrived. But it would still be calling home and look for new packages that I will never want to use. Maybe, even probably, no one have any nefarious motives behind the latest changes, but someone decided that if I want to upgrade my system now I have to start using systemd-resolve, and while I can and probably will alter it so it won't bother me, I wouldn't be installing it on my own. Also, Firefox is the king of unwanted changes with little to no warnings, and while technically it isn't Linux, one day an innocent yum or dnf update install just killed my customized setup, flagged all my beloved addons as unsupported, and left them in disabled state.
grifball 6y ago
>My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to. >whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates Yeah, it is really nice to have a consistent interface. But there is a flip side. Sometimes, people have to change in light of new security problems, and these sometimes need to be done quickly. The most obnoxious of these updates are interface changes (both UI and API). I think Windows does this too much and maybe for non-security related issues. The only real example I can think of is how OpenSSL uses envelope functions because ppl would abuse the primitives [Source: Alexandra Boldyreva, Christopher Patton, Thomas Shrimpton: Hedging Public-Key Encryption in the Real World].
andrepd 6y ago
You have summed my feelings about it excellently. The other day I installed an app in Linux that logs my activities, such as documents opened and programs used, and indexes it into a searchable database ("I can't remember that pdf I was reading last weekend, let me get it"). The most jarring feeling about that was... that for once I wasn't not thinking how privacy invasive all that data collection was! I'm used to seeing programs and websites attempting to collect all sorts of nefarious data and trying my best to stop that collection (including not using the product at all). I was stunned how useful it was once I realised it was all local and serving my interests, not those of its manufacturer.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  > The other day I installed an app in Linux that logs my activities May I inquire about the name of this app? Is it desktop-environment specific?
- feteru 6y ago
  What app is that? It sounds very useful. Definitely a refreshing feeling compared to the use of a million cloud services.

by skohan 6y ago

hazaskull 6y ago

Counter example. I switched from Linux to Windows because I find its desktop-experience to be superior. In my mind software and hardware is evolving at a rate that makes it impractical to support the notion that I could usefully modify it myself so it mostly comes down to trust. Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers? Looking at being able to access old data and run old programs I feel MS have been doing a great job. Now if they come up with a way for me to make sure that my data is in some standardized format AND protected in such a way that I could reasonably expect nobody (not even MS) to read it (but still be able to offload it elsewhere) I’d be entirely happy.

luckylion 6y ago
> Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers? Do you? I don't. Microsoft is exclusively profit-oriented, they'll sell all your information in a heartbeat if they believe to have a legal way to do it and that it won't kill them in the next 5 years. A group of open source maintainers (the more radical the better) will not. They will (usually) not polish the product as well, and they might be difficult to deal with if you found an issue (but you _can_ talk to them, unlike Microsoft). I definitely trust open source people more, because they do their thing for ideological reasons and based on principles, not to maximize engagement and ad-spend and their yearly bonus.
- inquirerGeneral 6y ago
  Your concerns are the same that I had up until about 3 years ago when Microsoft and Google changed everything because at least at Google they do not care about your actual data because they can aggregate and anonymize it and a level that nobody else in the entire world can. This is why it's way more dangerous to give data to even open source apps that are encrypted and secure because if they ever do change your privacy policy and you don't pay attention to it, they could say they start selling your data and you continue to agree to it.
  - salawat 6y ago
    The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this one. The fact they pitch their skills at anonymizing and aggregating data doesn't change the fact you can't trust Google to not utilize data exfiltration techniques in the first place. Your argument about open source license changes applies just as much, if not moreso to Google as well. Have you really thought through that all the way?
  - bigbob2 6y ago
    That's why I like using a system which gives me control over which updates I want to receive. I'm not forced to take updates on an operating system which can also change the privacy policy on me and has done so in the past.
rodelrod 6y ago
Literally the only significant amount of data I've ever lost in my life, either on a personal or professional context, were: 1. half a decade of emails dropped by Microsoft from my old Hotmail account with no reason or warning; 2. all my highlights on a 3000-page book series lost due to a iOS update breaking compatibility with the app I was using for it.
inquirerGeneral 6y ago
Good post. Google has actually went even further in making it transparent where they show every bit of data they have on you. You can delete it all review it all have it auto delete, they don't need any of it

gambiting 6y ago

I literally and honestly feel like the only difference here is that vast majority of linux distributions don't have auto updates enabled and windows does. I'm literally afraid of running apt-get upgrade in Ubuntu because always, inevitably, things change and move about , which I hate with passion.

happymellon 6y ago
This is literally the opposite to me. Running apt update/upgrade never breaks anything except a long time ago when I ran out of disk space during an update. This could have been handled better, but it isn't a usual scenario for me.
franga2000 6y ago
The problem isn't automatic updates, it's the philosophy behind those updates. On Ubuntu (last time I used it some 5 years ago), an update fixed bugs in software and that's it. Occasionally you'd get a new feature here and there, but rarely in the shell and existing features always stayed in their places. On Windows 10, updates ship breaking changes basically every time and there is no regard for consistency. Whether the updates are manual or automatic is an implementation detail - eventually, you'll update either way. The big difference is between a rolling release with no promise of compatibility and a versioned release with LTS.
- SCHiM 6y ago
  Strange, my experience is also the exact opposite. I really wonder why that is? I'm running about 10 windows 10 machines, various builds, auto updates enabled. Some in a domain, some in a workgroup. The last time an update bricked a system, or even broke a feature, must be over a year ago. Now on Ubuntu, I have the same experience as some other posters. I'm reasonably confident that I can update if I do it semi regularly. But the number of times I've experienced breakage that lead to hours of bugfixing during $DAYJOB, is way too high. Now everything is in its own tightly controller docker, no more random breakage (unless docker breaks, or a key expires...). A debian 9 apt upgrade actually managed to render my install inoperable once. But that might be semi-unfair as it had to do with graphics drivers. Are you running windows systems on semi-recent hardware? Or is it all decades old thinkpad laptops with shitty thirdparty drivers?

mr_mitm 6y ago

I totally get your point regarding Windows, but does Android do this, too? The only thing mine does is auto-update apps, and only because I told it to. I didn't have to turn on auto updating. OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically.

plater 6y ago
But it spies on you. And transmits data about you to Google. And has pre-installed apps you cannot fully uninstall. And it changes your privacy settings without you knowing when new features are added.
- inquirerGeneral 6y ago
  Google spying on you is the least of your worries, they are the most transparent of all the big tech companies if you ever manage to dig into your Google profile these days. If anything Google is so far ahead they are advocating more privacy and less data being sent if you choose, because they don't sell it directly to people like a local grocery store with its own app or Amazon does. Federated learning AI is basically making it where Google can continue to have all the benefits of massive data mining without any personal information ever having to leak out
  - gbrown 6y ago
    Not to be glib but... Stockholm syndrome much?
krageon 6y ago
> OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically. The parts involved with spying on you will update regardless of what you want or say. Unless of course you're not using the play store (or any other google services).
Tarsul 6y ago
my android phone has a nagging "security update" popup that I cannot delete. I don't update so it stays with my phone all the time (it takes a huge amount in the pause screen), i have to deny the updates each time i restart my phone (which doesn't happen often). Nonetheless, it's true I can still use my phone (and the appstore)... huh, now that I take a closer look at this annoying update it appears to be from samsung not from google.

incrudible 6y ago

> About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to. My experience with Linux on the Desktop is that it wants to install updates. It doesn't force me to install updates, which I appreciate. However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff. This has never happened to me with Windows. I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.

ip34162 6y ago
I never had a problem with LTS versions of Ubuntu MATE. If you want modern-looking LTS, try KDE Neon. https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/
- neogodless 6y ago
  I had Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a Dell Inspiron 3137. I ran apt-get update and it crashed and would not boot. I was preparing to lend the laptop out to family so I had to put Windows back on it. It happens. Your personal experience is not everyone's experience.
  - stewartm 6y ago
    I would be intrigued to know what happened with this one. Across well over a decade of using Apt on Debian, Ubuntu & Mint, the amount of times I have seen Apt crash, is never. By contrast I have seen Apt tasks fail leaving packages partially installed. If relevant, it may seem a trivial, semantic difference, but I think it is a little more important than that. Following the typical Microsoft paradigm of 'just reboot and hope for the best' will rarely result in the desired outcome, and in the case of something like grub could well end up with a system that will not boot. For me a key difference in this case, is I have never encountered an unbootable Linux system (outside of hardware issues), that I could not fix with some basic tools. I can't say the same of Microsoft products (Personally, I don't consider a fresh install a fix :) ).

das4119 6y ago

Summed up in the following: Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now. Its time to dim your screen. We don't care if you're reading a recipe while you cook. No we won't put a widget to allow this temporarily. We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later. Its time for feature X to not work or not exist anywhere. We don't care that it worked in the old version. We don't like it.

qayxc 6y ago
So in other words you haven't found and used the "Settings" app yet?
- StavrosK 6y ago
  The thing mentioned in this bit? > We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.
- hulitu 6y ago
  The settings app is useless. Even win 3.0 had better settings than settings app in win 10.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    You haven't used it in a while. Microsoft is slowly re-implementing or dropping all of the Windows 3.x/9x era Control Panel settings. A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago is very unfair as it's continuously improving and evolving.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      > A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago How do you know his/her opinion is based on year-old usage?

zaat 6y ago

This is simply not true, unfortunately. I run a Fedora system for more than ten years, and during this period updates shoved into my system tons of unwanted stuff. I still prefer the system to the alternatives, but let me tell you, there is simply no way I would install flatpak into my system, and if it wasn't for the terrible log spam it filled my log with, I probably wouldn't even know it arrived. But it would still be calling home and look for new packages that I will never want to use. Maybe, even probably, no one have any nefarious motives behind the latest changes, but someone decided that if I want to upgrade my system now I have to start using systemd-resolve, and while I can and probably will alter it so it won't bother me, I wouldn't be installing it on my own. Also, Firefox is the king of unwanted changes with little to no warnings, and while technically it isn't Linux, one day an innocent yum or dnf update install just killed my customized setup, flagged all my beloved addons as unsupported, and left them in disabled state.

grifball 6y ago

>My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to. >whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates Yeah, it is really nice to have a consistent interface. But there is a flip side. Sometimes, people have to change in light of new security problems, and these sometimes need to be done quickly. The most obnoxious of these updates are interface changes (both UI and API). I think Windows does this too much and maybe for non-security related issues. The only real example I can think of is how OpenSSL uses envelope functions because ppl would abuse the primitives [Source: Alexandra Boldyreva, Christopher Patton, Thomas Shrimpton: Hedging Public-Key Encryption in the Real World].

andrepd 6y ago

You have summed my feelings about it excellently. The other day I installed an app in Linux that logs my activities, such as documents opened and programs used, and indexes it into a searchable database ("I can't remember that pdf I was reading last weekend, let me get it"). The most jarring feeling about that was... that for once I wasn't not thinking how privacy invasive all that data collection was! I'm used to seeing programs and websites attempting to collect all sorts of nefarious data and trying my best to stop that collection (including not using the product at all). I was stunned how useful it was once I realised it was all local and serving my interests, not those of its manufacturer.

MayeulC 6y ago
> The other day I installed an app in Linux that logs my activities May I inquire about the name of this app? Is it desktop-environment specific?
feteru 6y ago
What app is that? It sounds very useful. Definitely a refreshing feeling compared to the use of a million cloud services.