10 ms·

That gives me four years for the tools that lock me to Windows to decide to port to literally any other OS.

by InitialLastName 5y ago

willis936 5y ago
I'm not old and I have lived to see this sentiment come and go at least twice before. We're still on Windows.
- Lorkki 5y ago
  On the other hand, some of it sticks. For one thing, gaming on Linux has improved by leaps and bounds approximately since the announcement of Windows 10.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    Gaming on Linux gave up on trying to build native ports and Valve put some real effort into making their Windows compatibility layer that sits on Linux good.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Then why wait? Programs like Photoshop and Ableton Live work just fine through WINE. I have a hard time imagining what kind of software you can't replace on modern Linux...
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    Even LabView runs natively on Linux now, so my reason for the last fifteen years may draw to a close soon. Microsoft decided to put Office in the cloud, so don't need Windows for that anymore... VMware is also quite good if WINE isn't good enough for some reason. There's some rare expensive equipment that doesn't have Linux support (I'm talking $100k mechanical testing equipment and CNC machines) but those only need one computer each. Of course those probably won't support Windows 11 either, they barely supported Windows 10.
  - serf 5y ago
    while these can be made to work .. Fusion360/SolidWorks/CATIA/Siemens NX are notoriously hard to make work, and when they do the fixes usually only last a single patch; and these softwares (aside from SolidWorks) are all always-connected and auto-updating. and unfortunately a lot of that software is simply career-making. It's simply an arms-race that can't be won from the consumer perspective without applying adequate pressure to the companies to try and facilitate a legitimate release. it's hard to run any kind of business software to run any kind of business when it's in the back of your mind whether or not Autodesk has pushed an update to break everything by the time you need to use the software and have actual clients and money waiting for the work. I'd drop all my windows machines in a heart beat if those companies would consider the GNU/Linux market, but i'm not really holding my breath -- they make a ton of money on their captive audience.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      These are my problem. Situations where "maybe the export is a little wrong because an update mucked with the optimal Wine configuration" don't fly when I'm about to bet the business (or a less extreme version, drop multiple yearly salaries) on a production run of some hardware.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      You're not necessarily wrong, but the vast majority of recent WINE developments have been going into making it a much more stable experience. The past decade of WINE development has pretty much been about throwing the kitchen sink at your program and praying that it works, but companies like Valve have made some pretty wild overhauls to the system that allow for both leaner and more predictable prefixes. It's still not perfect (and as you've suggested, will likely never be), but the gap is definitely closing. We've gotten to the point where people are confident shipping Linux consoles because the Windows compatibility layer is just that good. Game studios are able to support Linux-based platforms without targeting a build for the OS in the first place. As the technology continues to be refined, I can definitely see some CAD and studio software developers experimenting with the tech. Much like you, I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. It's safe to assume that nobody cares about it, but it's also still too early to say for sure. In 5 years, WINE could well be a stable development platform for third-party developers who want to focus on a Windows build but also offer compatibility with other operating systems. Stranger things have happened.
  - DashAnimal 5y ago
    What about VSTs using iLok? Ive only shallowly looked at it in the past but haven't heard good things
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      VSTs using iLok barely work on Windows/MacOS, I'd imagine their chances of working on Linux to be fairly slim, courtesy of the fact that the DRM is often larger than the plugin itself. Some manufacturers like U-HE have taken it upon themselves to start releasing Linux builds of their VSTs (albeit without support) and they seem to work really well from what I've tried. So yeah, DRM is still an issue but the tides may be turning, especially now that the audio subsystem on Linux just got a massive rework.
  - tentacleuno 5y ago
    > Programs like Photoshop and Ableton Live work just fine through WINE. Could you expand on this, please? What was your experience working with Photoshop in WINE? What version / CC of Photoshop did you use? Did you use PlayOnLinux, which supports this IIRC?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Photoshop CS6 works pretty reliably on the majority of setups, I remember having an... ahem, perfectly legal copy installed without needing to use any install helpers whatsoever. WINE just downloaded all of the dependencies before launching the installer and it worked like a charm. According to WineHQ[0], the only features it seems to be missing is the updater that came with it. Creative Cloud seems to be a bit more hit-or-miss, but I genuinely don't know many people running CC these days. It might be worth doing your own research there. Ableton Live 10 works fine though, I played around with it for a while before switching to Bitwig (which has a native Linux build), and I really didn't have any complaints besides the CPU usage being marginally higher than native Windows. I haven't tried it recently either, so the situation may well have improved. EDIT: just reinstalled my copy of Live 11, it works out-of-the-box with WINE installed and no configuration. I can't go around making claims that it's perfect, but it's pretty damn close. You may as well see for yourself, all the software (WINE, Linux, etc) is free. [0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=25607&iTestingId=105510 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
      - xxpor 5y ago
        Does low latency audio work through WINE? I don't care about the specific tech used, as long as midi->hearing audio works well enough to actually play a piano.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Depends on what you consider low, Live reported that it was around 45ms of latency using the default settings on the DirectAudio driver, I didn't bother to install ASIO4ALL and try it that way though. You could also bring it down by reducing the buffer size, but I didn't really mess with that either. Native DAWs can hit 5-10ms of latency though, I'd bet with a minimal amount of tinkering you could get it to hover around 15ms through WINE.
  - ahnick 5y ago
    Fortnite
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- scruple 5y ago
  Thankfully we have options. I'm planning on moving my main desktop to Arch over my Christmas break from work. It's been a while since I ran Linux as my main desktop, my only complaints have been around gaming performance. I have a friend who plays the same games as I do and he's got everything working on his Arch install. That's really the only thing that holds me on Windows and if it's as smooth of a transition as I believe it currently is then I just have no reason to not give it another fair shake.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    I try to move to Linux desktop one or twice a year for the last, what, 20 years. I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it. The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on laptops. Again, I love Linux and have managed literally thousands of them since 1994.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      > Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. That's my experience with Windows as well though. On Dell xps on windows my external monitor goes blank sometimes and sleep randomly causes overheating and fast battery drain. On the other hand Linux handles it just fine. Win is not consistently better anymore.
      - rapind 5y ago
        I’ll add that m1 macs have been a shit show for external monitor support (ymmv but google it and you’ll find thousand page long support issues). It’s either rocket science to get monitors to work flawlessly or it’s the B team working on it. Probably the former given that it’s also a problem on Linux and windoze.
    - aquir 5y ago
      The same, I always try but go back to Windows because on desktop it's unusable due to silly issues like what you've mentioned
- roody15 5y ago
  I’m not. Linux been main driver for years … even for gaming now (although wine and proton have a big part here).
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Dozens of people switched :) At least I upgraded Windows 7 to Lubuntu
- cdumler 5y ago
  Realize the people who complain how hard it is are the people who are stuck. The people who don't made it out aren't complaining. Get out takes effort, but also it depends on how you approach it. If you look at trying to leave as in "how to run what I have now without Windows OS," you're going to have a bad time. Instead, I would suggest a few approaches that make a transition a lot easier: _Look at it as opportunity_ Other platforms have other ideas about how things should work. Instead of trying to replace Windows, take the time to realize that it's not the only way to solve problems. The Unix world has a pretty different idea about what's the way to work, which is often foreign until you realize there is a method to the madness. If you want opinionated and guided, MacOS is designed to have very strong "you won't have to worry about that" goal. Linux is the opposite and very flexible. So, you'll want to look at a lot of different distributions, as they all have particular goals in mind. _Reconsider your current software_ Look at your current software and see if you can find replacements that are cross platform. This can mean software that runs on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc). This can also mean switching to cloud/self-hosted software. The software I use I choose through the lens of "if I have to give up my current platform of choice, does this go with me?" _Sync your environment_ It can be daunting to jump ship to another OS if all your stuff is stuck on a different machine. I highly suggest SyncThing. It is a multi-platform, self-hosted synchronizer. Get a new machine (Linux, Mac) and sync your important files from your other machine. Now, you try out working on the new machine without loosing your work. Install some tools. Try getting stuff done. When you feel you've been held up for too long and need to get some stuff done again in Windows, all your stuff is magically sync'ed. Eventually, you'll find you're doing most of your work on the new machine, and you'll decide what to decommission from the old one. _VM/Wine/Proton_ Windows support under Mac and Linux has come a long way. Maybe you still need a very specific piece of software. That's fine, just plan on taking time to figure out if you can still get it to work on your new platform. About 12 years go I jumped from Windows to Mac and about 4 years ago I started working with Linux, as well. And, so can you. Today is your first day to start making changes.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > I'm not old and I have lived to see this sentiment come and go at least twice before. We're still on Windows. In that time we've seen Microsoft concede the mobile market to iOS and Android and the server market to Linux and Google Docs manage to take a major chunk out of MS Office. Microsoft is still extremely profitable, but it's not because of Windows anymore. Which is why they're now comfortable risking defection by screwing over the Windows customer more than ever. But that's what happens at the end, not the middle.
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    It feels like, to an extent, Microsoft was all but admitting they were giving away Windows for home users (how many of us are still on perpetually upgraded Win7 licenses?) and betting (the desktop software sector) on commercial licensing and Office. I notice a lot of OEM PCs, for example, come with an Office 365 trial install. I'm sure the OEM deal is "Windows is 30 cents cheaper if you include the trial." But if the OEM is already installing Ubuntu or whatever, they 1) no longer need to negotiate to shave pennies off the Windows license and 2) have an office suite pre-installed, potentially capturing a large number of the easy customers who'd click on the first thing available. How does Microsoft keep that sales channel open? I can't imagine them going the road of the shovelware antivirus vendors and outright paying OEMs for presence. But I could see them packaging up a cut down "Linux Subservices for Windows" product. This would be basically a blessed virtual machine package, which OEMs would be willing to include-- or maybe even pay a token sum for-- because, well, people still want to run their games and legacy software. More importantly, it's a way to get millions of people to install a MS-provided package on their desktops, which could include cross-promotional offers and telemetry. (Yes, there will be the inevitable shut-up packages from third parties, but they have those for Windows already).
- underscore_ku 5y ago
  i'm not. i've moved to Ubuntu linux
- bsder 5y ago
  Office365 being web/cloud based is a big difference this time. A normal office worker wouldn't have much difference whether their desktop is Windows, Linux, Chromebook, etc. Office workers follow breadcrumb trails through tech. As long as somebody gives them a document explaining how to follow the breadcrumbs, they don't care about anything else.
iso1631 5y ago
Saw people say the same with XP into Vista. The relationship people seem to have with windows is like someone trapped in an abusive relationship. On the other hand from what I read, XP - good Vista - Bad 7 - good 8 - bad 10 - good 11 - bad I don't have any experience in any of those so I'm not how true it is, but if it is, I guess hope that 12 will be out by EOL of 10?
- cedricd 5y ago
  I've run all of them over the years (progressively upgrading like a good computer user). It's not even subtle. The good / bad dynamic is drastic. And each 'bad' always brings to it a horrible UI change. Vista brought the window manager and those weird transparent windows and was generally ugly and buggy. Win 7 cleaned up the UI and made it flatter and simpler. 8 brought a full-screen start menu (!!). 10 went back to a 7-esque vibe (mostly). 11 is where we are.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    Can you name what made the "good" releases good? Because when I look at the list, I can name bad things for every single "good" release that I disliked. Much of what makes a "good" release though, isn't that MS fixes anything from the "bad" release they just reskin a later service pack from the "bad" release and try not to break to many things. If you skip the "bad" releases it makes the "good" ones bad. 2000->XP, forced online activation, if you moved from ME->XP they finally broke a lot of dos era apps. That isn't to say that XP is that far from 2000 which IMHO remains the best windows MS ever released (particularly after SP3). The only significant thing of value MS has added since XP, is 64-bit support, and that is questionable if you consider there was a 64-bit XP. vista->7, this one is harder, maybe the biggest ding is, that this is where they started to remove all the classic mode UI paradigms that were in place for 15+ years. So, while vista was such a mess that going from XP->7 was a shock, even on a PC 2x+ faster the UI still lags because much of the win32 graphics stack and sound system is now emulated on the processor rather than handed off to the graphics card driver. Win8->win 10, even more ad's, forced updates, can't permanently disable the virus scanner that eats 50%+ of the disk IOP rate, the list here is endless. In the case of 10-11, I don't think anyone would really have cared if they hadn't decided to screw with the start menu/task bar again. That is the one thing that raises the ire of windows users, yet they seem to always screw with it. I think secure boot/etc is less of an issue for people than it was 15 years ago (and IIRC someone already has a workaround).
canadaduane 5y ago
That has been my thinking as well. I officially migrated from my Windows PC and my MacBook Pro to Linux (Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop) this year. Both companies have been slowly showing signs that their values are drifting away from things I care about (ownership, control, privacy). I'm willing to budge a little to accommodate alternate viewpoints, but it's been clear that they've picked a direction and their tanks will just keep crushing each of the lines in the sand.
- scblock 5y ago
  I have Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop as well and if it wasn't a project laptop meant entirely for the purpose of being a project laptop and test bed for a few things I would chuck it out the window. In the reality of actually using the computer every single thing about my 5 year old MacBook Pro (the one everyone loves to hate) is better except maybe the keyboard, and that's not as cut and dry as the internet would pretend. Everything works except everything that doesn't work well. Fractional scaling is a mess, integer scaling is not much better. YouTube on Firefox can barely play 1080p videos. Scrolling is anything but smooth, and the system doesn't appear to be doing much drawing on the GPU at all. When connected to an external 4k monitor running at 1.5x scale (how I use it with Windows and macOS) the system gets really slow. Wayland is better performance wise, but at 1.5x scale (the best overall balance for the screen size and resolution) all electron based apps, which rely on xwayland, are blurry, and these days that's a lot of apps (including Slack, VS Code, and Zettlr which I run on all my systems). Kernel and driver support is mostly there except for the frequent regressions, so some features will in one version will break on the next kernel version, but it's fixed in the next next version, and that is not good enough. Power consumption on use is decent, but battery drain on sleep is atrocious even if you enable "deep sleep" which makes the machine take 5+ seconds to wake up. Meanwhile Gnome insists on hiding as many settings from you as possible, so to set up CalDav contact syncing, which is managed by Gnome, I had to install an additional email app I won't use because the Gnome account manager doesn't bother to expose a UI to manage the account directly. And if I screw up the settings in the mail client Geary, which otherwise works well and is what I use, I have to delete the account and start over because there's no UI I can find to view and edit the server settings. It's completely ridiculous. So the Pop!_OS team has built a really nice looking UI and a pretty good overall user experience (best I've had on Linux over the years), but it's all on top of a big pile of half working garbage. So it's simultaneously a really nice UI compared to my Windows 10 machine while being entirely frustrating to use.
ArnoVW 5y ago
After 30 years on Windows I switched this month to Linux, for pretty much the same reason. It's great. And it feels so fast. All my software exists natively on Linux (minecraft and game emulators for the kids, KNIME, Intellij, and Blender is a lot faster on Linux). No Word or PowerPoint, but there's Libre Office and it's good enough. Who'd have thought that 2021 would be the year of Linux on the desktop. Not because it has gradually improved (it has), but because the alternative has declined so much.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I've been saying something to that effect for years, actually. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150284 > As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, even I feel that soon Microsoft will have succeeded in making Windows so horrifically awful and user-hostile that the Linux Desktop will start to look good by comparison.
- franczesko 5y ago
  With Google Docs, Microsoft Office (maybe besides Excel) is pretty much redundant.
  - zibzab 5y ago
    Only if you never work with other people, who use office for whatever reason. Also, not everyone wants their files in the cloud. Although that's getting harder and harder with Office too.
    - jacob019 5y ago
      LibreOffice reads and writes MSOffice files just fine. I do it every day. Maybe there are some edge cases that affect someone, but it's never been an issue for me.
  - FourthProtocol 5y ago
    I will stick with MS Office. I can use it when disconnected from everything, and (note hyperbole, but the cynicism is real) I avoid the creepy feeling that Google is logging every mouse movement and keystoke I make for teh ads. In fact I welcome my evil Microsoft overlord any day before I use something from Google. I see MS as the lesser of two evils.
pdimitar 5y ago
Heh, exactly. I bought an amazing all-AMD laptop this summer and its 2TB SSD and 32GB RAM still lie on my desk right next to it. I'll get to opening it up and upgrading it and then will proceed to try and make it my main machine with Linux, including for light AAA gaming and main gaming machine for everything that's not AAA -- console emulators, MAME / arcade emulators, Steam Proton, you name it. (Well, for programming too of course but a 6c / 12t mobile CPU might not be good enough for a main dev machine. We'll see.) So yep, my sentiment is exactly like yours. I'll start slowly but seriously work towards ridding myself of Windows forever. It has been on a downward spiral for far too long to ignore anymore. Linux is not all sunshine and rainbows either but at this point I am willing to take the plunge and create my own Frankenstein monster of scripts and workarounds so that it can work perfectly for me. Plus, if more people start doing it, desktop Linux will eventually improve (lol; but who knows?).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

That gives me four years for the tools that lock me to Windows to decide to port to literally any other OS.

willis936 5y ago

I'm not old and I have lived to see this sentiment come and go at least twice before. We're still on Windows.

Lorkki 5y ago
On the other hand, some of it sticks. For one thing, gaming on Linux has improved by leaps and bounds approximately since the announcement of Windows 10.
- thrower123 5y ago
  Gaming on Linux gave up on trying to build native ports and Valve put some real effort into making their Windows compatibility layer that sits on Linux good.
smoldesu 5y ago
Then why wait? Programs like Photoshop and Ableton Live work just fine through WINE. I have a hard time imagining what kind of software you can't replace on modern Linux...
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Even LabView runs natively on Linux now, so my reason for the last fifteen years may draw to a close soon. Microsoft decided to put Office in the cloud, so don't need Windows for that anymore... VMware is also quite good if WINE isn't good enough for some reason. There's some rare expensive equipment that doesn't have Linux support (I'm talking $100k mechanical testing equipment and CNC machines) but those only need one computer each. Of course those probably won't support Windows 11 either, they barely supported Windows 10.
- serf 5y ago
  while these can be made to work .. Fusion360/SolidWorks/CATIA/Siemens NX are notoriously hard to make work, and when they do the fixes usually only last a single patch; and these softwares (aside from SolidWorks) are all always-connected and auto-updating. and unfortunately a lot of that software is simply career-making. It's simply an arms-race that can't be won from the consumer perspective without applying adequate pressure to the companies to try and facilitate a legitimate release. it's hard to run any kind of business software to run any kind of business when it's in the back of your mind whether or not Autodesk has pushed an update to break everything by the time you need to use the software and have actual clients and money waiting for the work. I'd drop all my windows machines in a heart beat if those companies would consider the GNU/Linux market, but i'm not really holding my breath -- they make a ton of money on their captive audience.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    These are my problem. Situations where "maybe the export is a little wrong because an update mucked with the optimal Wine configuration" don't fly when I'm about to bet the business (or a less extreme version, drop multiple yearly salaries) on a production run of some hardware.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    You're not necessarily wrong, but the vast majority of recent WINE developments have been going into making it a much more stable experience. The past decade of WINE development has pretty much been about throwing the kitchen sink at your program and praying that it works, but companies like Valve have made some pretty wild overhauls to the system that allow for both leaner and more predictable prefixes. It's still not perfect (and as you've suggested, will likely never be), but the gap is definitely closing. We've gotten to the point where people are confident shipping Linux consoles because the Windows compatibility layer is just that good. Game studios are able to support Linux-based platforms without targeting a build for the OS in the first place. As the technology continues to be refined, I can definitely see some CAD and studio software developers experimenting with the tech. Much like you, I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. It's safe to assume that nobody cares about it, but it's also still too early to say for sure. In 5 years, WINE could well be a stable development platform for third-party developers who want to focus on a Windows build but also offer compatibility with other operating systems. Stranger things have happened.
- DashAnimal 5y ago
  What about VSTs using iLok? Ive only shallowly looked at it in the past but haven't heard good things
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    VSTs using iLok barely work on Windows/MacOS, I'd imagine their chances of working on Linux to be fairly slim, courtesy of the fact that the DRM is often larger than the plugin itself. Some manufacturers like U-HE have taken it upon themselves to start releasing Linux builds of their VSTs (albeit without support) and they seem to work really well from what I've tried. So yeah, DRM is still an issue but the tides may be turning, especially now that the audio subsystem on Linux just got a massive rework.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > Programs like Photoshop and Ableton Live work just fine through WINE. Could you expand on this, please? What was your experience working with Photoshop in WINE? What version / CC of Photoshop did you use? Did you use PlayOnLinux, which supports this IIRC?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Photoshop CS6 works pretty reliably on the majority of setups, I remember having an... ahem, perfectly legal copy installed without needing to use any install helpers whatsoever. WINE just downloaded all of the dependencies before launching the installer and it worked like a charm. According to WineHQ[0], the only features it seems to be missing is the updater that came with it. Creative Cloud seems to be a bit more hit-or-miss, but I genuinely don't know many people running CC these days. It might be worth doing your own research there. Ableton Live 10 works fine though, I played around with it for a while before switching to Bitwig (which has a native Linux build), and I really didn't have any complaints besides the CPU usage being marginally higher than native Windows. I haven't tried it recently either, so the situation may well have improved. EDIT: just reinstalled my copy of Live 11, it works out-of-the-box with WINE installed and no configuration. I can't go around making claims that it's perfect, but it's pretty damn close. You may as well see for yourself, all the software (WINE, Linux, etc) is free. [0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=25607&iTestingId=105510 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
    - xxpor 5y ago
      Does low latency audio work through WINE? I don't care about the specific tech used, as long as midi->hearing audio works well enough to actually play a piano.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Depends on what you consider low, Live reported that it was around 45ms of latency using the default settings on the DirectAudio driver, I didn't bother to install ASIO4ALL and try it that way though. You could also bring it down by reducing the buffer size, but I didn't really mess with that either. Native DAWs can hit 5-10ms of latency though, I'd bet with a minimal amount of tinkering you could get it to hover around 15ms through WINE.
- ahnick 5y ago
  Fortnite
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
scruple 5y ago
Thankfully we have options. I'm planning on moving my main desktop to Arch over my Christmas break from work. It's been a while since I ran Linux as my main desktop, my only complaints have been around gaming performance. I have a friend who plays the same games as I do and he's got everything working on his Arch install. That's really the only thing that holds me on Windows and if it's as smooth of a transition as I believe it currently is then I just have no reason to not give it another fair shake.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  I try to move to Linux desktop one or twice a year for the last, what, 20 years. I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it. The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on laptops. Again, I love Linux and have managed literally thousands of them since 1994.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    > Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. That's my experience with Windows as well though. On Dell xps on windows my external monitor goes blank sometimes and sleep randomly causes overheating and fast battery drain. On the other hand Linux handles it just fine. Win is not consistently better anymore.
    - rapind 5y ago
      I’ll add that m1 macs have been a shit show for external monitor support (ymmv but google it and you’ll find thousand page long support issues). It’s either rocket science to get monitors to work flawlessly or it’s the B team working on it. Probably the former given that it’s also a problem on Linux and windoze.
  - aquir 5y ago
    The same, I always try but go back to Windows because on desktop it's unusable due to silly issues like what you've mentioned
roody15 5y ago
I’m not. Linux been main driver for years … even for gaming now (although wine and proton have a big part here).
matkoniecz 5y ago
Dozens of people switched :) At least I upgraded Windows 7 to Lubuntu
cdumler 5y ago
Realize the people who complain how hard it is are the people who are stuck. The people who don't made it out aren't complaining. Get out takes effort, but also it depends on how you approach it. If you look at trying to leave as in "how to run what I have now without Windows OS," you're going to have a bad time. Instead, I would suggest a few approaches that make a transition a lot easier: _Look at it as opportunity_ Other platforms have other ideas about how things should work. Instead of trying to replace Windows, take the time to realize that it's not the only way to solve problems. The Unix world has a pretty different idea about what's the way to work, which is often foreign until you realize there is a method to the madness. If you want opinionated and guided, MacOS is designed to have very strong "you won't have to worry about that" goal. Linux is the opposite and very flexible. So, you'll want to look at a lot of different distributions, as they all have particular goals in mind. _Reconsider your current software_ Look at your current software and see if you can find replacements that are cross platform. This can mean software that runs on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc). This can also mean switching to cloud/self-hosted software. The software I use I choose through the lens of "if I have to give up my current platform of choice, does this go with me?" _Sync your environment_ It can be daunting to jump ship to another OS if all your stuff is stuck on a different machine. I highly suggest SyncThing. It is a multi-platform, self-hosted synchronizer. Get a new machine (Linux, Mac) and sync your important files from your other machine. Now, you try out working on the new machine without loosing your work. Install some tools. Try getting stuff done. When you feel you've been held up for too long and need to get some stuff done again in Windows, all your stuff is magically sync'ed. Eventually, you'll find you're doing most of your work on the new machine, and you'll decide what to decommission from the old one. _VM/Wine/Proton_ Windows support under Mac and Linux has come a long way. Maybe you still need a very specific piece of software. That's fine, just plan on taking time to figure out if you can still get it to work on your new platform. About 12 years go I jumped from Windows to Mac and about 4 years ago I started working with Linux, as well. And, so can you. Today is your first day to start making changes.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> I'm not old and I have lived to see this sentiment come and go at least twice before. We're still on Windows. In that time we've seen Microsoft concede the mobile market to iOS and Android and the server market to Linux and Google Docs manage to take a major chunk out of MS Office. Microsoft is still extremely profitable, but it's not because of Windows anymore. Which is why they're now comfortable risking defection by screwing over the Windows customer more than ever. But that's what happens at the end, not the middle.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  It feels like, to an extent, Microsoft was all but admitting they were giving away Windows for home users (how many of us are still on perpetually upgraded Win7 licenses?) and betting (the desktop software sector) on commercial licensing and Office. I notice a lot of OEM PCs, for example, come with an Office 365 trial install. I'm sure the OEM deal is "Windows is 30 cents cheaper if you include the trial." But if the OEM is already installing Ubuntu or whatever, they 1) no longer need to negotiate to shave pennies off the Windows license and 2) have an office suite pre-installed, potentially capturing a large number of the easy customers who'd click on the first thing available. How does Microsoft keep that sales channel open? I can't imagine them going the road of the shovelware antivirus vendors and outright paying OEMs for presence. But I could see them packaging up a cut down "Linux Subservices for Windows" product. This would be basically a blessed virtual machine package, which OEMs would be willing to include-- or maybe even pay a token sum for-- because, well, people still want to run their games and legacy software. More importantly, it's a way to get millions of people to install a MS-provided package on their desktops, which could include cross-promotional offers and telemetry. (Yes, there will be the inevitable shut-up packages from third parties, but they have those for Windows already).
underscore_ku 5y ago
i'm not. i've moved to Ubuntu linux
bsder 5y ago
Office365 being web/cloud based is a big difference this time. A normal office worker wouldn't have much difference whether their desktop is Windows, Linux, Chromebook, etc. Office workers follow breadcrumb trails through tech. As long as somebody gives them a document explaining how to follow the breadcrumbs, they don't care about anything else.

iso1631 5y ago

Saw people say the same with XP into Vista. The relationship people seem to have with windows is like someone trapped in an abusive relationship. On the other hand from what I read, XP - good Vista - Bad 7 - good 8 - bad 10 - good 11 - bad I don't have any experience in any of those so I'm not how true it is, but if it is, I guess hope that 12 will be out by EOL of 10?

cedricd 5y ago
I've run all of them over the years (progressively upgrading like a good computer user). It's not even subtle. The good / bad dynamic is drastic. And each 'bad' always brings to it a horrible UI change. Vista brought the window manager and those weird transparent windows and was generally ugly and buggy. Win 7 cleaned up the UI and made it flatter and simpler. 8 brought a full-screen start menu (!!). 10 went back to a 7-esque vibe (mostly). 11 is where we are.
- StillBored 5y ago
  Can you name what made the "good" releases good? Because when I look at the list, I can name bad things for every single "good" release that I disliked. Much of what makes a "good" release though, isn't that MS fixes anything from the "bad" release they just reskin a later service pack from the "bad" release and try not to break to many things. If you skip the "bad" releases it makes the "good" ones bad. 2000->XP, forced online activation, if you moved from ME->XP they finally broke a lot of dos era apps. That isn't to say that XP is that far from 2000 which IMHO remains the best windows MS ever released (particularly after SP3). The only significant thing of value MS has added since XP, is 64-bit support, and that is questionable if you consider there was a 64-bit XP. vista->7, this one is harder, maybe the biggest ding is, that this is where they started to remove all the classic mode UI paradigms that were in place for 15+ years. So, while vista was such a mess that going from XP->7 was a shock, even on a PC 2x+ faster the UI still lags because much of the win32 graphics stack and sound system is now emulated on the processor rather than handed off to the graphics card driver. Win8->win 10, even more ad's, forced updates, can't permanently disable the virus scanner that eats 50%+ of the disk IOP rate, the list here is endless. In the case of 10-11, I don't think anyone would really have cared if they hadn't decided to screw with the start menu/task bar again. That is the one thing that raises the ire of windows users, yet they seem to always screw with it. I think secure boot/etc is less of an issue for people than it was 15 years ago (and IIRC someone already has a workaround).

canadaduane 5y ago

That has been my thinking as well. I officially migrated from my Windows PC and my MacBook Pro to Linux (Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop) this year. Both companies have been slowly showing signs that their values are drifting away from things I care about (ownership, control, privacy). I'm willing to budge a little to accommodate alternate viewpoints, but it's been clear that they've picked a direction and their tanks will just keep crushing each of the lines in the sand.

scblock 5y ago
I have Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop as well and if it wasn't a project laptop meant entirely for the purpose of being a project laptop and test bed for a few things I would chuck it out the window. In the reality of actually using the computer every single thing about my 5 year old MacBook Pro (the one everyone loves to hate) is better except maybe the keyboard, and that's not as cut and dry as the internet would pretend. Everything works except everything that doesn't work well. Fractional scaling is a mess, integer scaling is not much better. YouTube on Firefox can barely play 1080p videos. Scrolling is anything but smooth, and the system doesn't appear to be doing much drawing on the GPU at all. When connected to an external 4k monitor running at 1.5x scale (how I use it with Windows and macOS) the system gets really slow. Wayland is better performance wise, but at 1.5x scale (the best overall balance for the screen size and resolution) all electron based apps, which rely on xwayland, are blurry, and these days that's a lot of apps (including Slack, VS Code, and Zettlr which I run on all my systems). Kernel and driver support is mostly there except for the frequent regressions, so some features will in one version will break on the next kernel version, but it's fixed in the next next version, and that is not good enough. Power consumption on use is decent, but battery drain on sleep is atrocious even if you enable "deep sleep" which makes the machine take 5+ seconds to wake up. Meanwhile Gnome insists on hiding as many settings from you as possible, so to set up CalDav contact syncing, which is managed by Gnome, I had to install an additional email app I won't use because the Gnome account manager doesn't bother to expose a UI to manage the account directly. And if I screw up the settings in the mail client Geary, which otherwise works well and is what I use, I have to delete the account and start over because there's no UI I can find to view and edit the server settings. It's completely ridiculous. So the Pop!_OS team has built a really nice looking UI and a pretty good overall user experience (best I've had on Linux over the years), but it's all on top of a big pile of half working garbage. So it's simultaneously a really nice UI compared to my Windows 10 machine while being entirely frustrating to use.

ArnoVW 5y ago

After 30 years on Windows I switched this month to Linux, for pretty much the same reason. It's great. And it feels so fast. All my software exists natively on Linux (minecraft and game emulators for the kids, KNIME, Intellij, and Blender is a lot faster on Linux). No Word or PowerPoint, but there's Libre Office and it's good enough. Who'd have thought that 2021 would be the year of Linux on the desktop. Not because it has gradually improved (it has), but because the alternative has declined so much.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I've been saying something to that effect for years, actually. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150284 > As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, even I feel that soon Microsoft will have succeeded in making Windows so horrifically awful and user-hostile that the Linux Desktop will start to look good by comparison.
franczesko 5y ago
With Google Docs, Microsoft Office (maybe besides Excel) is pretty much redundant.
- zibzab 5y ago
  Only if you never work with other people, who use office for whatever reason. Also, not everyone wants their files in the cloud. Although that's getting harder and harder with Office too.
  - jacob019 5y ago
    LibreOffice reads and writes MSOffice files just fine. I do it every day. Maybe there are some edge cases that affect someone, but it's never been an issue for me.
- FourthProtocol 5y ago
  I will stick with MS Office. I can use it when disconnected from everything, and (note hyperbole, but the cynicism is real) I avoid the creepy feeling that Google is logging every mouse movement and keystoke I make for teh ads. In fact I welcome my evil Microsoft overlord any day before I use something from Google. I see MS as the lesser of two evils.

pdimitar 5y ago

Heh, exactly. I bought an amazing all-AMD laptop this summer and its 2TB SSD and 32GB RAM still lie on my desk right next to it. I'll get to opening it up and upgrading it and then will proceed to try and make it my main machine with Linux, including for light AAA gaming and main gaming machine for everything that's not AAA -- console emulators, MAME / arcade emulators, Steam Proton, you name it. (Well, for programming too of course but a 6c / 12t mobile CPU might not be good enough for a main dev machine. We'll see.) So yep, my sentiment is exactly like yours. I'll start slowly but seriously work towards ridding myself of Windows forever. It has been on a downward spiral for far too long to ignore anymore. Linux is not all sunshine and rainbows either but at this point I am willing to take the plunge and create my own Frankenstein monster of scripts and workarounds so that it can work perfectly for me. Plus, if more people start doing it, desktop Linux will eventually improve (lol; but who knows?).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]