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Using Windows after 15 years on Linux

• Saris 5y ago
  I use windows full time for a desktop OS and I find myself agreeing with everything in here, I just don't normally notice it day to day because I'm used to it. I wish CAD software companies would support linux, I've tried FreeCAD and whatnot, but they're nothing like Fusion360.
  • djbusby 5y ago
    Have you tried using Wine? I've an architect friend who wanted to ditch Windows - except for his cad software - which we run in a VM on the home server so can access anywhere.
    • Saris 5y ago
      I haven't, my experience with Wine is a long and complex setup, and then the software updates and breaks everything.
• dflock 5y ago
  I've been using Linux exclusively for ~15 yrs. I've recently started a fantastic new job -- the only wrinkle was that it came with a Windows 10 laptop. This is my first time using Windows after a 15-year break. This is how it's been going.
  • silviot 5y ago
    > Screw you software, I’m in charge, not you. This is exactly my reaction: I don't understand how people can be Ok with this. I remember seeing this more than ten years ago already: you demand your computer to shut down (maybe you're done with your work, and you need to catch a train, and your laptop needs to shut down _right now_) and it replies with a command: "Do not shut down the computer". WHAT? Why is my computer not doing what I ask it to do? I don't think it's healthy to tolerate this kind of behavior.
• jonatron 5y ago
  No mention of WSL?
  • strawhatguy 5y ago
    yeah, surprised by this, as this answers some of OP's issues. Windows is still a mess, and WSL kind of adds a third inconsistent UI, but being able to essentially have two platforms in one is the nice part.
• glitchc 5y ago
  Addendum: It is impossible to turn Windows Update off unless one is running an Enterprise License.
  • CreatedAccount 5y ago
    I'm fairly certain you can accomplish it with a pro license as well.
    • vetinari 5y ago
      You can, by pointing your windows to a WSUS for updates. That WSUS doesn't have to really exist.
  • cortic 5y ago
    I'm on Enterprise, and you can't actually turn it off permanently, after a time (maybe a reboot, or scheduled that i can't find) it just turns itself back on, and usually knackers my nvidia drives, even though i have it set to not update drivers, and even though i killed the medic service as well ffs. Found a trick where you basically remove windows access rights to wuauclt.exe and wuaueng.dll, causing an error code 5 whenever it tries to run its update service.. so far its been stable. Not sure if this would work for other versions.
• protomyth 5y ago
  If you are going to work on a Windows box for a while, you can install some Unix tools and have a poor Unix experience, use WSL, or learn PowerShell. Some places are Windows only environments so learning PowerShell might cut down the frustration and allow you to do the automation you want.
• ktpsns 5y ago
  Don't forget there is still Cygwin. I recently had to work on Windows, and Cygwin was actually the rescue, with a terminal which just works and proper bash commands that put PowerShell at shame. I guess WSL is similar but still painful/impossible to install if you don't have BIOS access for enabling CPU virtualization.
  • criddell 5y ago
    What can you do in bash that can't be done in PowerShell? To me, it always felt like there is a lot more stuff you can do in PowerShell. For example, it's easy to read the registry, create COM objects, etc...
    • satya71 5y ago
      Never bothered learning powershell, it’s just too verbose for my taste. bash has been my shell for two decades, not going to change anyone soon.
    • xxs 5y ago
      why bother learning powershell, as it's extremely unlikely to run in production (or any other linux box) environment. Bash works well and it's ubiquitous with tons of documentation.
• rufusroflpunch 5y ago
  You mention that no one has figured out how to make GUIs as composable as command lines. I would argue Apple is actually getting there with Shortcuts. Combining that with the Share Sheet/Share Menu and you get some pretty nice composability.
  • avereveard 5y ago
    > how to make GUIs as composable as command lines beos did
  • acuozzo 5y ago
    Apple has been there since the start of OS X thanks to NeXT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk
  • badsectoracula 5y ago
    Microsoft did with VBX, OLE and later ActiveX, the entire point was to have embeddable reusable UIs. They sabotaged themselves by tying those to separate products you had to buy though instead of having a simple drag-and-drop form/window designer to put things - basically something like the QBasic equivalent of Visual Basic but also closer to the original idea of VB1 where instead of writing basic code you'd drag connections between controls to activate methods or pipe data between them. X11 supports this by allowing programs to "swallow" each other - the XEmbed protocol as well as normal IPC can be used for communication between them. Older desktop environments and window managers (CDE, FVWM, etc) can use this to compose programs. Some minimalistic window managers rely on this using single-purpose tools like dmenu. BeOS, as mentioned elsewhere also has a very limited form of OLE-like functionality. I'm sure there are others but TBH i think MS came closest, but they abandoned the entire idea after they decided to focus on .NET. FWIW the underlying tech is still there and in theory such QB-like-VB-lite app could be made but nothing really exposes reusable controls anymore so it'd be pointless. After all having the tech and ability is only half the battle at most, you also need applications to support it and nowadays everything GUI is made to be cross platform agnostic so any such solution would need to work everywhere there is a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse - not impossible but much harder nowadays than when computers were synonymous with Windows.
• bradjohnson 5y ago
  I'm surprised that the bloat and ads in the start menu were not mentioned.
  • BanazirGalbasi 5y ago
    Enterprise and Pro editions don't have the same bloat as Windows Home, in my experience. Since the author is using a work computer, it's likely that they didn't encounter Candy Crush pre-installed and pinned to their start menu.
    • forgotpwd16 5y ago
      What's even the reason Candy Crush is pre-installed?
      • NotTheDr01ds 5y ago
        Windows has a long history of preinstalled games of various quality all the way back to Reversi in Windows 1.0. Solitaire, of course, was the third most popular application in Windows 3.1. But there hasn't been a single version of Windows that hasn't had games preinstalled.
• homerowilson 5y ago
  Wow, this was almost my exact experience (except that I had somehow gone through life never using Windows). Using WSL is working out pretty well for me for the most part, except networking seems to break when the corporate VPN is on that I'm required to use (which is very irritating). I find myself prototyping things on my personal Linux laptop and only using the corporate machine for required company stuff. It's been an awful experience.
• xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  I feel pretty fortunate to be able to turn down jobs where I'd need to use windows as a daily driver. I don't mind using it occasionally, and I've gotten quite good at targeting Windows cross compiling from Linux, but using it daily just grinds me into a paste. I mostly use Macs for work now, and while they do a pretty good job of exposing a Unix environment, they've been getting steadily worse over the past couple of years. I've had so many problems with recent critical OS patches that I'm debating convincing my employer to let me have a Linux machine, not that I would ever recommend that for a company who wants their employees to be productive. That being said I'm actually really impressed at how good Linux on the Desktop is right now. I've got my whole family running KDE on NixOS and it's basically flawless.
  • derekp7 5y ago
    What workflow do you use to target Windows builds from Linux? For myself I've used mingw64 to compile, then NSIS as an installer. Only problem is that quite a few Windows anti-malware systems automatically flag NSIS compiled based packages as suspicious. Also, any good guides for targeting Windows APIs for Linux programmers?
    • psyclobe 5y ago
      The problem has nothing to do with NSIS, instead you must sign your application with a ev cert that requires a hardware device to use.
  • spaniard89277 5y ago
    If you want to please corporate, maybe suggesting Suse is a good idea. I have a VM for remote desktop with OpenSuse and it has been good so far.
  • mkmk3 5y ago
    >> not that I would ever recommend that for a company who wants their employees to be productive. That's a little odd to read considering you've got your whole family on it. I could imagine a lot of work going into internal software for the most part, are there other reasons you'd advise against it these days?
• sergius 5y ago
  If you install git for windows, https://gitforwindows.org/ https://gitforwindows.org/, you get a ready to go Cygwin installation of most tools you need, including bash. But probably WSL is you best bet for a saner environment.
  • adzm 5y ago
    This is actually mingw-based, not cygwin. Regardless it still works very well.
    • DHowett 5y ago
      Funny enough, it’s a bit of both. The msys2 runtime is a fork of the Cygwin runtime, and they keep parity pretty well. https://github.com/msys2/msys2-runtime https://github.com/msys2/msys2-runtime
    • rossy 5y ago
      To be even more pedantic, the Unix tools that come with Git for Windows are MSYS2-based, not MinGW-based, and MSYS2 is more like Cygwin than it's like MinGW (it's Cygwin with a few patches.)
    • ntauthority 5y ago
      MSYS2, rather, which often seems to be bundled with a hybrid mingw install, but itself is based on a patchset to the main cygwin DLL and generally is a 'saner cygwin'.
  • Jedd 5y ago
    git bash is definitely one of the first things I install on any Microsoft Windows build -- gives me a half-way decent terminal, vim, and of course a complete and modern git.
  • bsuvc 5y ago
    If the way to make Windows better is to install things that make it more like Linux, then I have to ask, why not just use Linux instead?
• dsego 5y ago
  I remember trying ubuntu for the first time in cca 2007. Then few years after that, I bought my first mac. Both linux and mac os felt like the UI was a veneer on top of the actual system. I grew up with windows, old version like 95 or 98, they never felt like a veneer or facade, the user interface was the OS for me. Well, windows 11 feels like a facade, cheap toy interface bolted onto an ageing platform.
• jaboutboul 5y ago
  I think most of the issues he brings up can be pretty easily addressed with WSL.
  • diffeomorphism 5y ago
    Addressing issues by installing a complete different OS sounds very similar to just giving up.
  • ttyprintk 5y ago
    Then we read different articles. Window arrangement, multi-monitor mode, depth of the Windows Store, and automatic rebooting are still bothersome after tuning a perfect WSL.
  • Ourgon 5y ago
    Before I started using Linux I used OS/2. The system had many idiosyncrasies and was quite ramshackle in a lot of ways but it did multitask quite a bit better than Windows. Its main problem was the dearth of good software, a problem which was "solved" by the addition of WinOS/2 which enabled you to run Windows 3.1 applications in OS/2. It ran most Windows software quite well, often better and faster than "real Windows". Did this solve OS/2's problems, though? It did not. All it did was tell OS/2 users about the world of Windows software. When Microsoft finally launched a slightly less horrid version of Windows most users migrated to it, leaving OS/2 but a footnote in history where it concerns desktop use. Enter the current situation: Windows is a horrid mess, it consists of layers of plaster upon plaster upon jury-rigged interfaces built on quicksand. For those who are used to the way things work on Linux it feels like an enormous step back, like having leaden shoes and gloves fitted for no good reason. This problem is supposedly "solved" by the addition of WSL which enables you to run Linux applications in Windows. It runs most Linux applications quite well even though performance is lacking in many ways. Does this solve Windows' problems, though?
• dagw 5y ago
  That was surprisingly balanced and reasonable. Even as long time Windows user I have to agree with everything he wrote and don't really have any real quibbles.
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    Really? It's balanced even though the only advantage he gave to Windows is that firmware updates happen automatically? It's about the most biased thing I've ever read. He even lists some advantages (it doesn't have two different copy/paste buffers) as a disadvantage. What happened to: * Hardware all works mostly without issue. * Software is easy to install even if it isn't in the official store (e.g. apt). * Power management (sleep etc.) works reliably. * Settings are almost all GUI-accessible. You rarely have to fiddle on the command line etc.
    • dagw 5y ago
      I'm guessing those things didn't apply to him or his use case. Yes, hardware support is better, but if your needs are simple you buy smartly, Linux also works pretty well. Yes, installing third party and closed source software is much easier on Windows and there is much more of it to chose from. This is in fact my main reason for using Windows. However if you're a developer and your entire job can be done using open source dev tools then this doesn't matter. Power management is better on Windows, but I wouldn't say it works "reliably". I've pulled many a hot, dead laptop from my backpack after it decided to wake up and kill itself after I thought it had gone to sleep. Apple is the only company that really be said to have solved this in my opinion. Settings being GUI-accessible is at best questionable advantage. It's nice for people who don't want to use the command line and don't see its point, but if you're used to and comfortable with the command line (like the author seems to be) it is far from a selling point. Plus just because the setting exists in GUI, that doesn't in any way solve the problem of actually locating where and how the set that setting.
    • AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
      > * Software is easy to install even if it isn't in the official store (e.g. apt). You can install any .deb package not in the "official store" simply by typing: `dpkg -i package.deb`. This has essentially never failed in my decade+ of using Debian-based Linux OSes. It's pretty dang easy to install anything nowadays.
• jmmv 5y ago
  From a quick look at the article, I can see a few subtle "omissions" or "rants that have easy fixes". I can't tell how long the author has spent on Windows (it's not in the article) so it's hard to know how much effort they have put in getting adjusted. It takes a really long time to switch platforms and feel comfortable in them, and without spending a long time adjusting, it's too easy to complain and quite hard to provide a fair review... For a more positive spin, I'll leave here my own review of Windows after being off the platform for 25 years, spending 15 of those on macOS, and then spending the last year primarily on Windows. TL;DR: I'm quite happy with the switch, but obviously there are many things that could be different/better and some of the issues that the OP highlights are valid. The intro and index: https://jmmv.dev/2022/03/a-year-on-windows-intro.html https://jmmv.dev/2022/03/a-year-on-windows-intro.html [edit: wording]
  • wiz21c 5y ago
    Funny, I've read the "finale" part and the PowerShell part. When I read you, my fealing is that PowerShell is not there yet and telemetry and Defender have big issues (telemetry 'cos it allow MSFT to remove feature, spy on me) and Defender ('cos sometimes it just eats my time)... As a dev/data scientist/netflix/websurfer/photo-sorter/privacy-aware dude, well, my Linux box just rocks and Windows is not fun (although it does the job).
    • aerique 5y ago
      Perhaps PowerShell will be ready in the same year as Linux for the Desktop?
      • majkinetor 5y ago
      • _carbyau_ 5y ago
        Powershell runs on linux too so it can be the Year for both of them!
    • guessbest 5y ago
• greenail 5y ago
  I just realized I've been using windows for 30 years... wow! The main problem here is that this is a work machine. Generally you can't do what ever you want on those. I imagine Linux is harder to lock down in a corp environment and the complaints are rooted in that notion. WSL fixes many issues, I don't think I'd be spending much time in power shell if I had the option to use WSL.
  • NotTheDr01ds 5y ago
    Got you beat by ... 1 year ;-) It was a pretty big change when our (already outdated at that time) lab in college scrapped the PDP11-44 and replaced it with 20 Windows 3.0 machines and 10 Macs. Been using Linux since I picked up a Yggdrasil CD in 1993. Sorry to hear you can't use WSL ... it's great IMO.
• recursive 5y ago
  A couple of notes from a Windows user: Your powershell profile script path is also available using `$Profile`. You can access a clipboard history by pressing Win + V.
• vmoore 5y ago
  I use Ubuntu & Mint as my daily driver. I have relegated Windows to a VM (Windows 8.1) and need it for iTunes (which has no Linux alternative). I also have an old version of Photoshop installed in the VM which I use a lot. I don't connect the VM to the Internet for security (what if I get a rogue .DOCX or Excel macro script trying to download malware?).
• sylens 5y ago
  The points about non-composable software and paths is why I try to keep all of my development work when using Windows relegated to WSL2. I have no interest in dealing with Windows paths and figuring out syntax for PowerShell when I will never actually interact with a Windows Server in my life.
• 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  This article just comes across in bad taste, or lacking a bit of self awareness. Linux is not really a viable alternative for most mainstream non technical users. I really really don't see how you can take holier than thou view of installing software on Windows vs Linux when it seems half the packages I install on Linux never even start! Windows is built around legacy support. They're spinning a lot of plates, which is why it feels and looks the way it does to some extent.
  • travisathougies 5y ago
    > Linux on the other hand is just better for people who don't value their time as much and are happy to tinker with things at a very low level You criticize the author for lacking self awareness, but then turn around and do the same. Many linux users (myself included) do not spend time 'tinkering'. I've had the same experience as the author. I've used linux almost exclusively since around 2000 and the few times I have to use windows, I'm completely stuck. It takes forever to get things done. Just helping my parents out with simple things like 'move these files', 'rename these photos', etc take hours and hours of work, whereas on linux it's like a minute. > Linux is not really a viable alternative for most mainstream non technical users. Perhaps that's true, but technical users are ... still users. > They're spinning a lot of plates, which is why it feels and looks the way it does to some extent. That's great, and while it may excuse their poor operating system, it doesn't suddenly make it a great OS.
    • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      *>things like 'move these files' [...] take hours and hours of work Just how, may I ask? I never needed more than a few seconds to trigger the moving files action via the GUI.
      • travisathougies 5y ago
        If it's more complicated than 'move this one file from folder A to folder B' it gets very complicated very fast. On linux, the 'normal' way to move files is using the terminal using 'mv'. On Windows, the terminal is available, but the main interface is the UI. It's easy to move one file. It's even easy to move several files 'next to' each other in the window. It's not easy to move files matching a particular name, or across multiple folders. So usually what happens is I have to find (perhaps even purchase) a purpose-built utility to do exactly what I want. Or, sit there and move files. Like ctrl+click on them (that interface is terrible by the way, because one click makes the entire selection go away... who thought that up?) and then move them. What other way is there without delving into automation? Windows Explorer cannot even do the most basic selection of 'select all files with NNN in the name'. It's completely useless for anything but the most silly of operations. Also, if you have to do actual work moving files between different filesystems or across network filesystems, it becomes even worse. You have to find something compatible with Windows, install it. It's probably some ad-containing shareware non-sense, so you pay for the license so you don't get bombarded with ads, a browser toolbar, and whatever other nonsense the MSI decided to install. Then, after about 30 minutes of downloading, installing and endless clicking on the 'do you want to allow this software to do blah' (which I never really read and click by default), it may or may not work. On linux, it's just mount. I don't really get the complaints about linux being hard to use. Different sure. But if you're used to it; if you grew up with it, it's mind-numbingly easy.
• anotherhue 5y ago
  Both Windows and OS X have become utterly unreliable for my professional and increasingly personal use. Here's the smell test: If I stop working on something and go to the shop, or to sleep, or say "It's 8pm on Friday, I can pick this back up on Monday", can I reliably walk away and have my stuff (apps, sessions, etc.) where I left it when I come back? Not. A. Hope. I've done all the regedit hacks, the group policy changes, the mouse jiggler, but it's never enough. Your computer shouldn't fight you. Homeservers have uptimes measured in weeks or months, that's what I need my desktop to be like.
  • xxs 5y ago
    Ok: - enable sleep after 20mins - enable hibernate, after 50mins - disable all timers interrupts That would make your machine hibernate itself w/o dumb restarts, activity. Ugly as ugly goes, but it appears to be better
  • ink_13 5y ago
    Windows, sure, but OS X? Not in my experience. It's been rock solid and utterly reliable.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      MacOS does better, but it still does the "restart by default if an update appears" usually, and it is pretty darn good about opening everything where you had it, but it's not perfect by a long shot.
      • 28304283409234 5y ago
        Atm: "....About 4 minutes remaining...." My third Macbook (company provided) doing an unexpected update. That takes 10(!) minutes. After the download. My ElementaryOS on a 6 year old thinkpad downloads and installs 3GB+ updates weekly, without rebooting, in 2 minutes! Mac and Windows are ages and miles behind Linux.
        • taylodl 5y ago
• vips7L 5y ago
  You don't need coreutils on Windows if you just embrace PowerShell. It has everything you need built in. Grep, wget, curl, jq, you name it and PowerShell already has it. For environment variables you only have to set them via the environment variable: $env:SOMETHING = 'something'
• duxup 5y ago
  The whole multiple design languages in the UI is insane and I can't believe they didn't fix it by Windows 11... rather they're poking at it slowly / poorly. But aside from that Windows is fine for me... I don't find there's anything I can't do easily. "I am a software & web developer - and Linux is a toolbox, full of highly polished tools, crafted over decades by software developers, for software developers. Windows is… not that. It’s a commercial OS, aimed at users of Word, Excel & Outlook, pretty much. You can feel this difference all the time that you’re using it - it pervades everything." Isn't this just familiarity? When I use Linux I hardly imagine it to be some magic developer playland, at least not without a lot of my own work put into it to make it so... just like my experience in Windows.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    > The whole multiple design languages in the UI is insane and I can't believe they didn't fix it by Windows 11... rather they're poking at it slowly / poorly. That's because MS's basic selling point is that nothing gets removed. I mean, obviously over time some things do get removed, but they're deprecation timeline is measured in decades. Some of the things they deprecated in Vista they notified people they were going to deprecate when they released the new versions at the launch of XP. That's how long they gave people to shift over.
    • duxup 5y ago
      I think the poking / changes they're doing in Windows 11 indicates that they are happy to change things. But they're just really bad at it / should have done it all or not at all until they were ready. They seem to have finally picked some UI overlords to make decisions, but sadly they're bad decisions... and doing it bit by bit.
      • CursedUrn 5y ago
        Are they actually updating some of the old UI this time? Usually they just add a new version of some UI, with less features than the original, so you often have to dig back through layers of Windows versions to find the option you want.
• rhinoceraptor 5y ago
  I've found the new version of WSL plus the Windows Terminal pretty good. I have a small side project using Docker/Docker Compose and it was pretty easy to get WSL to talk to Docker for Windows just as if I were using my work Mac using Docker for Mac. There's still all of the numerous headaches of Windows, but everything has its own headaches. My work Mac for example, loses its monitor arrangement for my dual monitors about once every other day, so much so that I have a shell script to fix it.
• ansible 5y ago
  Yeah, I was surprised that even with Windows 11, we still have some subsystems using the old interface. It is better than it was (Windows 8... having to look in multiple places to change various settings, yuck), but still far from consistent. I do wonder why they didn't (couldn't?) update everything to the latest standard by now. BTW, you can theoretically set "active hours" for Windows, so that updates and such don't bother you so much. This is far better than it was, where Windows would basically say "I'm going to restart, you have 5 minutes to save your work". [1] If you need to run X apps remotely, there are various X servers you can get. I've been using X410 with PuTTY successfully, though most of the time I'm in WSL instead. Also, since you did skip the last 15 years, you have missed the "joy" of UAC prompts with Windows Vista, so you should count yourself lucky there. [1] OK, it wasn't quite _that_ bad. But it was kind of bad.
  • sedatk 5y ago
    > I do wonder why they didn't (couldn't?) update everything to the latest standard by now. Many people has been asking this same question on this thread. The answer is simple: backwards compatibility. That begets tough trade-off decisions. Otherwise, no product designer loves inconsistency. The other alternatives are either to never innovate, or to keep support timeframes short. Windows 1.0 had 100% consistent UI.
• jordache 5y ago
  windows blows.. I only use it for gaming.
• johnturek 5y ago
  Please don't forget WinGet for package management. No need for Scoop/3rd party.
• cube00 5y ago
  > This is not how we do things in Linux land: > $ uptime > 09:33:15 up 56 days, 16:33, 1 user, load average: 1.36, 1.29, 0.91 We have to move beyond using uptime as the measure of stability. Unless you're live patching (and I doubt most people are) all this does is tell the world you're not applying security updates in a timely manner.
  • thanatos519 5y ago
    Absolutely. The last time any of my current Linux systems rebooted for anything other than a power failure, hardware problem, or a kernel update was ... never.
    • gigel82 5y ago
      Same for my Windows servers.
      • timbit42 5y ago
        What about your Windows desktops?
        • gigel82 5y ago
          I shut down my Windows desktops at the end of the day, just like I do with my Linux desktops.
  • noasaservice 5y ago
    Unlike Windows, you CAN shutdown a service in Linux, update it, and restart it. Uptime gets the *system* uptime, not a service uptime. And only Kernel and glibc require reboots... And with hotpatches, a reboot isn't strictly required either.
    • cube00 5y ago
      I was thinking about the kernel, 65 CVEs so far this year.
• gundamdoubleO 5y ago
  Windows 10 is quite tolerable for me as a gaming machine. Although, Proton is fantastic there's still a few things that "just work" on Windows in terms of gaming so I like to keep an install around. >This lets me pick the distro that’s closest to my needs and customize anything I want to change. I’ve been using Xubuntu for years and it suits me - but there are hundreds of Linux Distro’s to choose from. That's really what it comes down to for me, it's simply how ugly I think the interface is in terms of visuals and usability. It's difficult to describe but navigating the OS feels so painful and easy to get lost in. I'm sure it's mainly to do with me lacking familiarity with it but I've never felt that way on my Mac that I use for work. Linux is a far cry from having the perfect window manager UX but it does have plenty of options so it's easy to find something that clicks.
  • tomrod 5y ago
    I simply love Cinnamon these days. I gave Plasma a go but felt it was designed like the mid-2000s MS products -- tons and tons of features but buried and not discoverable. Gnome3 is a joke. More and more reduction and laggy on every system I've used it on. XFCE has never been my flavor; I typically use LXDE when its needed. Xmonad and openbox were a lot of fun for awhile. I'd probably still use Xmonad if I had time to tinker. Cinnamon, the fork of Gnome2, gets a lot right in my view. Or maybe I'm getting old.
  • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    > Windows 10 is quite tolerable for me as a gaming machine. Although, Proton is fantastic there's still a few things that "just work" on Windows in terms of gaming so I like to keep an install around. Gaming is the only reason I'm not on Linux. Yeah, gaming on Linux is getting better, but Windows "just works" as you said.
• donatj 5y ago
  I had a similar experience coming from 10 years of exclusive Mac usage. I had been a Windows guy in the 90s/early aughts before I was given a Mac Mini as a thank you after finishing an internship. I bought a gaming PC at the start of the pandemic as something to do. My general feelings were “This is it? This is Windows 7 with a coat of paint” The single thing that the author didn’t touch on that I do love is WSL. My guess is it would have been a cop out for them, but it’s where I spend most of my time these days. I even have it set up so I can ssh into my PC from Windows, which curiously takes me to a C:\ prompt, but typing WSL and hitting enter brings me to the good stuff. It has some weird limitations though, I can’t access network mounts, namely my NAS from while ssh’d into Windows for instance.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    > . My general feelings were “This is it? This is Windows 7 with a coat of paint” My general feeling is if Windows 7 still receive free secure updates, I'd be using it. I have no real need for anything more than Windows 7 but more secure, and don't see how any computer OS has improved in the past decade.
    • p1peridine 5y ago
      > My general feeling is if Windows 7 still receive free secure updates, I'd be using it. For security, you can Micropatch it. I tried W7 recently and it was even better, more polished than I remembered. USB3 drivers could be an issue though. Depends on the motherboard.
      • HWR_14 5y ago
        What's Micropatch?
        • p1peridine 5y ago
          Check out 0patch by ACROS Security. They do support Windows 7. > A patch (also called a micropatch) is a small package with a few code instructions that replace a vulnerable section of code in a running application. A patch therefore fixes a vulnerability. > A licensed patch can get applied to a module(usually, a DLL–dynamic-link library) inside a running process in order to eliminate a vulnerability in that process. This means that the vulnerable code section in the module inside the process is replaced with corrected code from the patch. > 0patch does not change executable files on the file system. It only modifies code in memory of running processes, which allows it to easily and quickly apply and remove patches without even relaunching applications, much less restarting your computer. https://0patch.com/ https://0patch.com/ User Manual: https://0patch.com/files/0patch_Agent_User_Manual_21.05.05.10500.pdf https://0patch.com/files/0patch_Agent_User_Manual_21.05.05.1... Windows Central article: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-7-approaches-end-life-one-group-has-plan-keep-patching-it https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-7-approaches-end-life...
• justsomehnguy 5y ago
  > There’s a new shell now, called PowerShell, to run inside your terrible 1980s terminal window, but the terminal it’s running inside, still sucks. Well no, PS and pwsh has their own terminals.
  • DHowett 5y ago
    All console subsystem executables on Windows are hosted by the same application (today known as “conhost”[2],) which provides the UI and terminal emulation facilities and implements the Win32 console APIs. PowerShell, therefore, uses the same console host as the legacy Command Prompt does[1]. It just styles it differently. [1]: The version of PowerShell that comes with windows also ships with something called the “PowerShell ISE,” which is a different UI for PowerShell that offers no terminal emulation capabilities and bears only a passing resemblance to a console window. [2]: it used to be part of CSRSS, but in Windows 7 it became a standalone application.
    • justsomehnguy 5y ago
      > technically correct, the best kind of correct While this is true, the UX of PS/pwsh and default cmd differs enough what to me their behaviour is differs enough to treat them differently.
• synergy20 5y ago
  I have been using Linux for 15+ years as my main desktop(via dual boot but I only boot into windows 3~5 times a year to do my annual turbotax which did not have a linux version) Recently I started to do linux development under Windows10/WSL2, worked very well so far except I can not do mouse select/paste easily. It's more responsive than running a virtualbox+linux inside Windows. I still do my work with Linux, Windows is just a host OS for that, and WSL2 is good enough to the point I no longer use Virtualbox+linux.
• trhoad 5y ago
  WSL + Windows Terminal could be great, but if your organisation uses Windows Secure Channel, you can't use Git on it. Which pretty much renders it useless for me. I endure Powershell, but even after six months on Windows, for a professional software developer it still feels like coding with boxing gloves on. It's a second rate experience vs. Mac/Linux in almost every way. I don't think I'll ever understand why there are about 8 versions of System Preferences in Windows 10. And they all look different. Can anyone tell me what the difference is between Control Panel, Settings, Computer Management, Systems Configuration?
  • NotTheDr01ds 5y ago
    Yes, that secure channel thing was a bummer. I saw your Stack Overflow question a couple of days ago (I seem to be your sole upvote on it) and tried to come up with some kind of workaround, but no dice. Not a problem for me personally, but I was hoping I could get you some idea. It's still bugging me. Question - Does secure channel come into play on every git operation? I would expect that it only comes into play when dealing with a remote repository (e.g. clone, push), right? If so, what's the breakdown of your git operations that requires remote repo access? Would it help if you pushed using Git for Windows but did most of your other operations in WSL? > I'll ever understand why there are about 8 versions of System Preferences in Windows 10 There's no good excuse for it; just legacy cruft. Same as with the different window styles.
• homerhomer 5y ago
  The thing about Windows is it doesn't get out of way and let you work. It constantly badgers you like some bad 90's shareware. And this doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me, is people accept it. I guess it no different that eating crappy fast food everyday for lunch or dinner.
  • thanatos519 5y ago
    Right! Some people still watch TV which is interrupted by commercials, too.
• kingaillas 5y ago
  I use Linux and Windows at work and home, and both have advantages and disadvantages. I've been migrating more and more to Linux as my daily driver, so my Windows home machine is basically all games at this point, with a Visual Studio install for occasional software development or things that have to be done on Windows. I used scoop (https://scoop.sh https://scoop.sh) for software installs and it was almost as nice as any Linux distro's package management. UI issues aside, which I'm not that sensitive too, my biggest complaint with Windows is... I can't easily swap CTRL and CAPS LOCK. Every solution I can find involves becoming an Administrator to edit the registry, or install the SysInternals device driver (!!!) - madness! I used to have a Mac, and it was a toggle setting. Linux as well, if gnome-tweak or the equivalent for whatever desktop is installed. And at home, I can become Administrator to do this. But at work I can't, the systems are very locked down. However on Linux even as a lowly regular user I can setxkbmap and do it. This annoys me a ridiculous amount every time I have to work on a Windows machine.
  • rodelrod 5y ago
    > my biggest complaint with Windows is... I can't easily swap CTRL and CAPS LOCK. If your laptop is not too locked down, maybe you can try the AutoHotKey portable version. Unfortunately in one particular corporate laptop I couldn't even run non-whitelisted executables so that was out.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  I find this direct comparison completely bogus. Windows was never a toolbox to begin with. It's messy but part of it for backward compatibility (important market force.. Microsoft is not GNU). Windows GUI are not composable, news flash: almost no graphical app is, and even in linux it's not the case AFAIK. Fun point, some Desktop Environments have worse keyboard navigation than Win95. I can choose to have anything in linux, but I rarely do (I did LFS twice, now I have dreams of lisp os and smalltalk images). And I'm tech savvy.. the percentage of world population that will even care for dealing with the papercuts of tooling / scripting is probably minuscule (based on my interactions with them normies, even to my best pedagogical efforts, I realized that it's not in their life goals, no matter how much time and money it may save them). The author may fail to realize how many people interact with software in full rote mode.. they memorize sequences of locations on screens and buttons and that's it (which I infinitely understand, I'm not judging). Linux does have a better long term feel though, less moving parts than Windows. I have to admit that often, using windows feels like fighting a living thing that constantly want to make me experience bloat.
  • exfascist 5y ago
    I've become convinced that the same things that make GNU/Linux good for us are exactly the same things that make normal people dislike it. Freedom means responsibility, in this case the freedom to configure your computer means the responsibility to understand its behavior, something people naturally avoid. They don't even mind learning things to avoid it; Microsoft and Google completely rearrange everything twice a decade meanwhile I still have my FVWM2 config from when I was 15. This whole effect even predates Linux: You can watch the archives of the "Computer Chronicles" from the late 80s to see it. You have everyone bringing in the fanciest new software wearing suits (because TV used to cost a zillion dollars a minute) and explaining state of the art OOP abstractions in the GUIs so that the machine "does the right thing" when you drag x onto y and the user "doesn't even have to think about it" (an idea that disturbs most of us because we know it's going to do the wrong thing probably 30% of the time and then you're going to have to untangle the mess.) Then they pan over to the guy at SCO who's got 5 Xclocks/Xterms on the screen who says "look, we've got graphics now! That's why people haven't been using Unix on the desktop in the past." It's not about the graphics, it's not even about learning new UIs or paradigms like shell scripting. People genuinely do not like personal computing.
• a-dub 5y ago
  i've had a similar experience in past, winding up with an employer mandated windows desktop after a decade of pure linux (thanks canonical and debian and everybody else!) was jarring to say the least. in the end i found my way, but it was not fun. the big issue i have with windows is that it normalizes a whole bunch of approaches to computing that i think are bad. i think this is particularly problematic in the context of software design and development. people are influenced by what they interact with everyday...
• Kuinox 5y ago
  Laughable. There was 0 research, most of the claims can be proven wrong with a simple web search. I find it always amazing how Linux users claim you can't customize or tinker Windows, which is plain wrong. Basic search in Windows docs shows it: > You can’t customize anything! You can customize a lot of things, and even, make your own Windows "distribution": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/system-builder-deployment https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur... > It’s a commercial OS, aimed at users of Word, Excel & Outlook, pretty much. The dev-tools are not included, yes, because most of the users doesn't need it. The windows devtools are excellent. Take a look at Event Tracing for Windows as an example. > Non-composable Software ... The command line tools Yeah and Powershell exists ? You can pipe objects with Powershell. > Paths Sigh: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/usmt/usmt-recognized-environment-variables https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/usmt/usm... > Installing Software chocolatey. > multiple clipboards win+v > to match my Linux workflow Exactly, stop, don't, you will scream at a Windows user if they try to use their Windows workflow on Linux, why are you doing the same thing ?
  • nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    You can tinker a lot with windows but your changes will likely be undone with one of the next few updates.
    • Kuinox 5y ago
      Except the edge redirect debacle, windows update at worse will reset a few registry entries. It can't "just undone" all your changes. It doesn't work like this. And there is official docs thats explain how to do it properly: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/waas-wu-settings https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...
      • majkinetor 5y ago
        There are few thing that IT WILL change, like if I disable windows update, it will reenable it, the same goes with Defender. But those are sporadic cases and solvable. It not like it never happened on Linux side either, contrary. You can rolling release your stuff just up to the point, and then good luck.
• AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  WSL + Windows Terminal is enough for 90% of what I need to do. I say this as someone who uses Linux on all my personal machines. You'll even get WSL automatically these days if you install Docker Desktop for Windows. The most annoying part, for me, is having to double-install certain tools both inside and outside of WSL (e.g. having to install git or openjdk twice). But it's a comparatively minor irritation, given how much better WSL2 works in general than previous solutions.
• rasterdog 5y ago
  > PuTTY ... but it’s… not good, at all. Pls explain.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    I've used putty on windows at a job, and tried to use it on my home machines. It works, it's alright. That is, until you use ssh in a *nix terminal. Then you're like "why the hell have I been dicking around with putty?" It's good for serial stuff.
    • Brian_K_White 5y ago
      It's good for saved session profiles. In a heterogeneous environment many of those many many settings actually need to be set to something. The problem is mainly just that standard putty stores those in the registry instead of files, but there are forks that fix that. I even have one I made for a former employer that makes those session files clickable, and has a few other enhancements like detecting your default printer for passthrough print automatically so you can save a session that has working printing without hardcoding a local printer name. I can't point to that right now because the company was sold and the new company took down everything that had the old company name on it. I have to de-brand it then I can put it back up, but by now I think several other forks are as good.
• forgotpwd16 5y ago
  >Windows is such a mess! My thoughts everytime using Windows. >Sadly, nobody has ever really figured out how to make GUI software like this - general purpose & composable. Sounds like an interesting concept. >which means that it doesn’t have this foundation of composable software tools They instead have an object-focused environment (PowerShell) with a foundation of composable commands (cmdlets). >It turns out that answer to this is to install Windows Terminal. I prefer Cmder (basically preconfigured ConEmu bundling some other programs). >No Middle-Click Paste There used to be True X-Mouse Gizmo but idk if it works in recent Windows versions.
• CursedUrn 5y ago
  > Screw you software, I’m in charge, not you. Ahh, this guy didn't get the memo. With modern Windows you're just temporarily borrowing the computer, but Microsoft is in charge of it. They decide what programs you can run, which folders you can look in, which files you can delete and yes, they decide when it updates, even if you're in the middle of something important.
  • ntauthority 5y ago
    With modern x86 or ARM CPUs, you're doing the exact same. The OS you're running on the high-level OS cores being perceived as less unfriendly doesn't change this state about your hardware's monitor OSes (AMD PSP, Intel ME, Qualcomm QHEE/QSEE, other ARM TrustZone, ..) at all.
• toastercat 5y ago
  I use Windows as my main OS on my personal computer. The only way I find Windows usable is with an LTSB/LTSC iso. One thing I appreciate about Windows over any Linux DE is that it is relatively stable in comparison. I have had weird UI bugs/quirks with every Linux distro I have ever tried, usually after an update. Currently I use Linux Mint XFCE on my work PC, and I'm afraid to change to anything else at this point.
• kup0 5y ago
  I'm about to embark on a journey myself of abandoning Windows(11) completely on my primary/gaming PC. The way I use the PC I'm prepared to deal with the trade-offs (and I'm making a backup, but trying to make it not super "easy" to run back to Windows, that way I commit to Linux for a while). Might document this whole process. Proton/etc isn't 100% there yet- but it's doing so well at this point, I want to experience the trade-offs and see if I can live with them. Always can go back to Windows as a last resort. I do know some trade-offs already, from my test-runs (done via dual-booting). Proton + controller vibration issues might be the top issue for me. In Rocket League vibrations happen- but like 2-3 seconds after the feedback should have happened- making vibration useless as a feedback mechanism. I have tons and tons of games installed- many I've tried work flawlessly on Linux so far (or with easy adjustments from suggestions on ProtonDB). I'm sure there are games I may completely lose out on- and that's what I want to experience for myself- if those gaps are fine- or maybe if committing will actually help prod me to be part of the feedback/dev/etc communities trying to improve gaming on Linux for everyone. Either way, this is all personal hardware- work laptops are separate- so this should be a fun experiment with very little downside- I don't do anything critical on my primary home PC that requires Windows
  • nightski 5y ago
    I upgraded to 11 on my laptop and I hate it. I am so glad I still have 10 on my desktop. I'll hold off as long as possible. This is coming from a daily Windows user for almost 30 years now. I use Linux a lot as well but Windows has always been the home desktop PC OS.
    • kup0 5y ago
      I forced 11 to be more like 10 to make it work for me, used various utilities/etc to have a custom taskbar/start menu, bring back normal right-click context menus, etc. So, there are ways to force 11 to work better for you- I agree users shouldn't have to go to those lengths, but the options are there. After those changes, it was close enough to 10 to not bother me. But after trialing Linux for a while, there is so much I enjoy about it. Things are so snappy. Built in screenshot tools are so much better. So many options for utilities and small little apps that just do one thing well. Theming/customizing is great. Sure it all has its quirks, but compared to Windows it's a breath of fresh air. Respectful OS update systems (no forced restarts). I feel like even the networking efficiency of the OS itself feels better. For instance, on Windows 11, even with 300mbps internet connection- if I download a large file in browser window A while watching a Twitch video in browser window B- the Twitch video will hiccup and buffer/etc. For some reason this never happened to me on Linux. I don't know if it's just doing better internal QoS-like things at an OS level, or if I got lucky? But it was an awesome, noticeable difference. Same with opening many tabs at once. If I want to open a folder of 10-20 bookmarks- on Windows, doing that while watching a video causes the video to stutter for a couple of seconds. Again, this is on a 300mbps connection, 10th gen i7, GTX 3070, NVME-drive system. On Linux- I can open like 50 tabs at once with no hiccups at all. Amazing. That's why I think the time has come for me to make the full switchover. That, and Proton's increasing maturity (and even ability to quickly work for some new titles, like Elden Ring).
• bitwize 5y ago
  > Sadly, nobody has ever really figured out how to make GUI software like this - general purpose & composable. Somebody did figure out how to make general purpose, composable GUI software: Microsoft, in the 90s, with COM. COM is a superior model for software composition because it goes beyond the Unix metaphor of the pipe: a single communication channel that produces and accepts streams of unstructured bytes. COM objects have well-defined, strongly-typed, discoverable APIs, can live in- or out-of-process (with the same call semantics for each), and allow seamless integration between components. A custom control, for example, can be placed and configured in a visual GUI builder just the same as the controls that came with the builder. Unix almost faded away in the 90s, and Linux never won, because Windows was simply better. More consistent, easy to use, and a joy to develop for. Old Unix hands like Larry Wall looked at what was possible in Windows and COM and said "Wow, I wish my environment let me do that!" Microsoft's move away from component-based development and towards an "app model" is really one of the great tragedies of modern Windows. That and Windows turning into Bonzi Buddy tier spy/ad/nagware.
  • dflock 5y ago
    I was a Windows desktop application developer during the 90's, so I've done COM development, with VB, Delphi and a tiny bit of C, so I know what you mean. I would say that COM is more special case and embeddable, rather than general purpose and composable? And this is all on the developer side, rather than the user side too. If the OS and applications had just been shipped as pre-packaged collections of COM objects - which you could reuse and remix into new tools and applications, with writing piles of code, then yeah. It was close for a while, but never got all the way to userland, sadly.
• LarryDarrell 5y ago
  It seems his complaints boil down to: 1) You don't have the choice of multiple Desktop Environments (When was the last time this was not true? Litestep?) 2) Windows applications and utilities tend to be GUI based. (I thought that was the whole point of Windows...) 2a) Stuff is stored in the registry (I thought linux people loved digging into and tweaking settings) 2b) Paths are different. (No kidding. But we've known this since DOS vs Unix) 3) Windows sometimes restarts itself (Again, there are settings that help, but Windows has done this for quite some time now.) 4) No apt-get|zypper|etc, must install exe or msi from the internet. Or use the awful Windows Store. (No debate there, the Windows store is awful. But installing the latest Firefox is a lot easier on Windows than Debian Stable. I rather like not having to fight with a central repository of applications.) Those have been the complaints of linux users for over 20 years. I feel like I'm arguing on Arstechnica circa 1998. Use the tool that's best for your job. I don't bitch about my socket set being metric when I need SAE. At this point the differences are known and well understood.
  • guessbest 5y ago
    At least linux doesn't restart itself by default.
  • daemin 5y ago
    Having Windows restart itself is a pet peeve of mine, but as long as you have Windows 10 Pro there are some local admin policies you can set to make sure it never restarts while you're logged in. This is the one key thing I do and it prevents Windows from restarting and losing your work.
    • password4321 5y ago
      https://superuser.com/questions/1110265/how-to-prevent-windows-10-from-restarting-the-computer-after-installing-updates https://superuser.com/questions/1110265/how-to-prevent-windo... Reboot blocker utility https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265417 (Windows Home, etc.)
  • hguant 5y ago
• FridayoLeary 5y ago
  >Half of it is “new” UI and half of it is old Win32/GDI type U
• majkinetor 5y ago
  This is classical case of comfort zone. Nothing to see here. Every single thing said is wrong and embarrassing (I mean, even $HOME works ffs).
• orangetuba 5y ago
  I have used GNU/Linux on a daily basis since 1997. And I must say that I am very disappointed with Linux on the desktop. I currently have two computers (that I was given by my employer) and there is a lot of trouble. On the laptop, the trackpad randomly stops working. If I kill -HUP xorg, it starts working again. The audio system has taken a lot of effort simply to keep it functional between distro updates. The desktop machine, sadly has an nVidia card. Every time the screensaver comes on and provide credentials, it seems to operate at 1% capacity for a time period (that depends on how long I've been away from the computer). Installing the nVidia drivers caused my machine not to boot any more, because SecureBoot was enabled. I tried to do the kernel module certificate signing, and failed (this process is a useful thing to present to someone who says Linux is ready for the desktop - good luck when grandma wants to sign kernel modules). I had to disable SecureBoot eventually, and now it nearly works, except the part about the screensaver. Linux is great, but the desktop system is a tragedy.
  • aaomidi 5y ago
    Recently moved to an AMD gpu. My God are things better now.
    • orangetuba 5y ago
      I should probably consider getting an AMD GPU, but I might as well get a new computer, then.
      • aaomidi 5y ago
        Hah that's basically what happened to me. Got a new gpu and new psu, reused old cables from old psu, fried the rest of my components. Had to buy everything again.
  • nullc 5y ago
    Linux desktop might (also) be a tragedy for other reasons, but your post appears to be almost exclusively about Nvidia being a tragedy. ( in particular, gnome is an astonishing regression in usability compared to the alternatives, or even what was standard a decade ago)
• wink 5y ago
  Very much disagreeing with the putty comment, otherwise it's spot on (for the things I care about). It's not that putty is better than using ssh in my terminal of choice on Linux, it's more that it has the only decent terminal implementation on Windows that I know of. I am a daily user of Linux and Windows and the copy/paste workflow in cmd.exe and powershell is just broken for me, in putty it's reliable enough that I am fine. The only way I can stomach development on Windows is a) VS Code + Remote extension and have a terminal in VS Code open and before that worked b) QtCreator for C++ or anything Javabased where I simply don't need a CLI. Well ok, I still need a CLI for git, but not the usual stuff. I am a heave user of cut/sed/awk/grep etc.
• deadcore 5y ago
  May be the wrong place to ask this - but would be interested to know what peoples experiences are and the advantages of using Windows in a commercial environment over say your distro flavour of choice or Mac? Be interested in hearing both sides of the coin, from laptop to server. Everyone seems to love bashing on Windows (including me) but someone must like it... (except for the obvious DirectX & games reason)
• mrozbarry 5y ago
  I appreciate everyone's taste and opinions on UI, but this seems a lot like confirmation bias. Windows has warts. Linux has warts. OSX has warts. I'd say in terms of consistent UI, OSX probably is the biggest winner. Both Linux and Windows are the losers in UI consistency. Yeah, you can customize it, but customization, in my opinion, can be a real time-suck and it doesn't make you any more or less productive, it's just visual enhancement. Unix is the real commandline winner, because piping and good underlying tools, and as a result, OSX and Linux do very well here. I'm not familiar with the powershell equivalent, but at the very least, it's just a copy of how unix works. Application installs is a very mixed bag across the board. Every distro of linux has their flavor of installs in commandline, and some have graphical. I've never had a lot of success mixing the two, it always puts some package database in a corrupted out-of-sync state. OSX is primarily graphical installs, but there are cli tools like homebrew - neither seem to fight each other, though. Windows is download/installer based. There is a store, but the store is mostly paid applications, and the Windows ecosystem has a large amount of free installer tools that will almost certainly never be on the store. The article doesn't even talk about hardware. My typical experience is hardware "just works" in OSX and Windows, and will often/mostly "just work" in Linux, but also there can is usually is some tinkering (as well as do I want the free/open source drivers vs the binary blobs in cases like graphics cards). So I guess in summary, Windows doesn't suck, in the same way that Linux and OSX don't suck. Every OS has a mess in some capacity, and I would say Linux's biggest mess is there is too much room for customization that will always lead to rabbit holes. For context, I use a company-given OSX laptop for work, and use Linux for my personal computer/daily driver, but have a Windows partition for gaming.
  • majkinetor 5y ago
    Lets not customize it then. What OS vendors should do is give as bare bone version of SO - kernel + package manager. We can take it from there with scripts. With simple strategy to keep those scripts online like vscode keeps your settings would be definite solution but even without it you are one git clone away from your repo that contains all customizations. We could have option in Windows to export system settings as PowerShell script. Its really not that hard, its just that nobody relevant wants to do it. Microsoft, if you are listening, I would even do it for free (because ultimately it would save me time). Just gimme jurisdiction/authority and we can have that.
• quyleanh 5y ago
  Terminal is not for Windows, at least for now. Please don't bring the Linux usage mindset to use Windows. Accept it and make it useful for you.
  • pavon 5y ago
    Not everyone at Microsoft agrees with that stance, or they would have never created PowerShell.
  • majkinetor 5y ago
    Somebody is wrong on the Internet.
• zamalek 5y ago
  > Windows is such a mess! It’s sort of shocking how much of a mess it is. Desktop Linux is often criticized for this, but Windows is much worse, somehow! It’s really inconsistent. Half of it is “new” UI and half of it is old Win32/GDI type UI I've been daily driving Linux (at least on my machine, work is unfortunately MacOS) for a year after 20+ years on Windows. Almost entirely GNOME, I recently switched to KDE for variable refresh rate support (it's easy enough to make KDE behave like GNOME). I had to boot into Windows 11 this weekend, after not using it for a few months, and it was a very jarring and unpleasant experience. But it's not because of inconsistent UI which, to be fair, has seen some rapid progress. Before switching to Linux I very rarely had to visit the old control panel. I can't actually put my finger on why, maybe it feels half-baked compared to GNOME/KDE? It just feels awful to use, within the first 10 seconds. Printers are significantly more reliable with Linux. WSL is fucking fantastic. I feel as though year of the Linux desktop is on the horizon, it's definitely a possibility.
  • NoraCodes 5y ago
    > I feel as though year of the Linux desktop is on the horizon, it's definitely a possibility. What would that mean, for you? It seems like free desktops already work quite well for you.
    • zamalek 5y ago
      Mainstream adoption, at least near to the ground Apple have been able to make against Windows.
• kkfx 5y ago
  Windows is made as a product to be sold, that's means that any part of it is designed to maximize Microsoft and it's partners revenue, not for users. That's why anything is not integrated, incoherent etc. And that's why GNU/Linux itself is far less integrated than classic desktops (Xerox, LispM), after Xerox starting from IBM, desktops was devastated to the point that from end-users desktops, flexible power tools in users hand are evolved into rigid and limited tools that try to conquer users absurdly mimicking physical desktops/classic office works (see General Magick UIs as a good example) instead of pushing a new far superior model. The common ground is that most users do not want/fear changes, so they are easy conquered by those who sell miracles without paradigm changes, of course they regularly fails but since they captured users it's too late for them to escape. People who know something better for a reason or another suffer from the actual state of things, but that's is... A social change is needed to change actual IT, it's not just a matter of code.
• pie_flavor 5y ago
  Maybe I just don't understand The Linux Way but I've truly never actually seen the point in the package manager debate. There exists some website that is the authoritative source for the software. That may be a normal website or it may be a GitHub but it is there. A package manager associates it with some slug, but so does the browser, the latter just has more dots in it. A package manager pulls it from some centralized archive, but you weren't manually inputting the URL to begin with. It does in fact centralize the update flow, but that's only beneficial when you update everything at once, which I don't have any reason to be doing: either I want it on latest, with the only interruption being not quite yet, or I don't want it updating at all. The primary meaningful value-add of a package manager is the package archive being manually checked for compatibility, which is actually bogus if you scratch the surface and regardless not really necessary on Windows where everything just works. Downloading and executing an MSI does not seem to be a meaningfully different operation than writing the apt-get command; I think it is a lot more to do with the visual effect of it not happening in a web browser and showing up in the downloads list.
  • rossy 5y ago
    I'm always uneasy when I install software in Windows because it means I have to trust another third-party. If I have 100 programs on my Windows PC, I've had to trust 100 third-party organisations with my computer and all the data on it. Not only that, but I've also had to trust my own judgement to find the correct website for all those programs, and not copycats that wrap the program in malware. Sometimes I check Wikipedia to find the official site and sometimes I find an official-looking GitHub repo with a lot of stars and work back to find the official site, but sometimes it doesn't matter anyway because the program itself becomes malware (eg. CCleaner.) With a package manager I have to trust one organisation, which is the same that I get my operating system from. I don't even have to trust the website that hosts the packages, since the packages are signed. It's true that someone might try to sneak malware under the package mantainer's nose with obfuscated source code, but that's much harder than sneaking it in a binary. You're practically guaranteed that the software running on your PC matches the publicly available source code, and it's built with the latest compilers and hardening flags. (7-Zip used to build without any hardening flags because they made the binary larger.[1]) It's not even just security issues I'm concerned about when it comes to trusting software. I also have to trust the software not to make global, permanent changes to my system, which isn't uncommon with Windows software[2], but basically unheard of with Linux packages - and when it does happen, it's Microsoft doing it[3]. So I'd say the primary meaningful value-add of a package manager is trust. [1]: https://landave.io/2018/01/7-zip-multiple-memory-corruptions-via-rar-and-zip/ https://landave.io/2018/01/7-zip-multiple-memory-corruptions... [2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081211-00/?p=19873 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081211-00/?p=19... [3]: https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/06/microsofts-failed-attempt-on-debian-packaging/ https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/06/microsofts-failed-att...
• soraminazuki 5y ago
  This neatly sums up the issues I have with Windows, but it also misses the most important point. That is, the increasing contempt for user choice. On the few occasions I start Windows, it almost always demands that I enable their privacy invading options using a full screen prompt that I can't swiftly dismiss. It also bombards me with ads. It installs software I didn't ask for. It won't even respect my choice of browsers. No other OS that I'm aware of shows this much hostility and contempt towards its users. It's the single most issue that turns me off from Windows in recent years.
• nullc 5y ago
  > Did it Just… Restart Itself and Lose All My Terminals‽ Even better when it ruins a $1000 piece of billet by rebooting the computer controlling a CNC mill in the middle of an operation. But Linux is working on catching up. For example, Fedora now ships this "systemd-oomd" that will randomly kill very large processes on system with >64GB ram even when there are terabytes of memory free and which won't stay disabled if you disable it with conventional tools.
• tokumei 5y ago
  I used to use GNU/Linux on the desktop for many years, now I mostly use macOS. I became the same kind of person I used to argue with online.
• dorfsmay 5y ago
  It baffles my mind the length companies who run Linux in PROD will go to NOT provide Linux to their devs and how much effort is put into making Windows and macOS to LOOK LIKE Linux. Common put half as much effort to make Linux work with whatever is so important on the other OSes (what is it? AD/kerberos? Anti-virus? Some spying software?), and let the devs who want to use Linux and be productive!
• zeagle 5y ago
  Does anyone know of a recent fork for evolution for windows? It is one of the few things that I miss when dual booting back to win10. Similarly I love the gnome spotlight search and wish it was also useful in windows.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Windows is mostly fine for Windows development, as long as one doesn't try to bring their UNIX habits. After all, someone is writing software for all those 80% market share desktops and Xbox games consoles.
• throwaway889900 5y ago
  I've heard plenty of arguments for why Windows sucks and plenty for why Linux sucks too. And anytime I read those arguments, there's a distinct lack of care taken to understanding the other's perspective. Pick your poison basically; for most normal users, Windows/Mac has fewer annoyances than Linux and for devs, Linux has fewer annoyances than Windows/Mac. Yes, most normal users would prefer not to use a terminal, which any troubleshooting in Linux basically requires. Yes, most devs would prefer to be able to manually or programmatically update settings, which Windows tries to actively avoid. There's not a lot of discussion to be had here other than advice that can be taken from one to another and try and accommodate as many workflows as possible.
• ComradePhil 5y ago
  I did the same around 2 years ago after 15+ years of Linux Desktop as primary OS but I had completely different experience and have not gone back to Linux and see little reason to do so. > when you install a Linux distribution, it’ll start off either all KDE or all GTK, Yes, you definitely start off with that... and you may even be able to maintain that with GTK to some extent... but if you want to use KDE, you will most definitely end up with a few GTK apps which will look out of place. And don't even get me started with other DEs. Windows, with all the 10 vs 11 and old style vs new style apps, feels much more coherent. > You can’t customize anything You don't need to because things actually work. > I am a software & web developer - and Linux is a toolbox, full of highly polished tools, crafted over decades by software developers, for software developers. Huh? I do all my development on Windows + WSL2 and run all my software on Linux servers. There is exactly ZERO tools I miss. > Non-composable Software Absolute nonsense. Not only does PowerShell is extremely powerful, you can also pipe output from a PowerShell command to a Linux command. The following shows an example of grepping through PowerShell history. cat (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath | wsl grep "ssh .*ubuntu@" > Environment Variables look like this: %PROFILE%, instead of this: $HOME; which is fine, just different; although PowerShell seems to accept either form, which is nice. Unless you want to run legacy batch files, there is absolutely no reason to use legacy cmd.exe over PowerShell on a Windows terminal. Environment variables are accessed differently with $Env:VAR_NAME, which will take some getting used to, but it's fine. > No Middle-Click Paste There are 3rd party applications to do that and more.
  • majkinetor 5y ago
    > You don't need to because things actually work. Customization is not about things working but about user experience. > There is exactly ZERO tools I miss. Yeah, because even if you do, WLS or not, you can have them on Windows in single line: cinst curl wget less jq vim grep gnupg whatever > Non-composable Software Not only PowerShell which is amazing but you had few more different composing technologies all the time such as COM.
  • NotTheDr01ds 5y ago
    > you can also pipe output from a PowerShell command to a Linux command. Agreed - PowerShell <-> WSL integration is pretty nice. Just remember (mostly for others reading) that PowerShell has a nasty habit of automatically appending a trailing newline when piping to external commands like WSL. So you often need a "tr -d '\n'" in the WSL part of your pipeline.
• t0bia_s 5y ago
  For install and update software on Win like repos on linux, I use chocolatey. It is not perfect, but I don't have to download installers from random websites anymore. And update is just one command in cmd. - https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/
• shmerl 5y ago
  If you are stuck in such job, set up openssh server on the Windows laptop, then get a Linux laptop and use Windows laptop as an annoying but necessary network router. That reduces the need of dealing with Windows. I wouldn't want to deal with Windows as a daily driver by any means.
• zeagle 5y ago
  I don't think linux is ready for prime time. My latest experience trying this on a framework laptop was not pleasant and involved 3 installs in short succession. So I installed Fedora. I find it doesn't have a tray to minimize icons into due to a conscious design decision going forward. Unfortunately two obscure pieces of software that I use require this: steam and seadrive. Well shit. I find some tweaks that enable this, most don't, and after half an hour I can get it to show a tray. I install keepassxc from their app store and it can't open my database or key file because the file browse window doesn't seem to open. I also have issues with seadrive but plugging in a external usb mouse solves it and I realize I can't right click wit the touchpad. So I wipe it and try Manjuro. Taking care not to destroy my windows partition which is the default option it boots fine. I update everything and the wifi card no longer shows up in settings. I mean I can lsusb, find it with dmesg but it has errors.. After an evening of tinkering and trying suggestions online ranging from changing windows power settings to editing config files to installing older drivers nothing can get it to work. No reasonable consumer would be into this. So I wipe it and install Manjuro again. Everything the same and it works after updating so I chalk it up to a failed update. This is on a laptop basically designed to run linux with a small set of possible hardware. Plus to boot, I am happy I printed my bitlocker key because windows refused to initially boot with secure boot now disabled.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    Manjaro. But yeah, Windows is designed like the author said for people that use word and outlook and excel. So if you don't need much but the usual buttons to click it just works. But it's so limited. It's designed to just work for the broadest user set, and over the iterations has been honed for that user set, if you're a power user of a machine it's too limiting. Linux is freeing, but that usually means a little rocky start and some setup. Once that's done though, you've got it made. You won't be clicking through a bunch of dialogs and GUI stuff, unless you really want to. "Linux isn't ready for prime time" isn't exactly right, it's not for prime time. Like all free software, it is for people who can get utility out of it, no more, no less.
    • zeagle 5y ago
• mdoms 5y ago
  Incredible amount of misinformation in one post.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    Care to elaborate?
• naikrovek 5y ago
  the complaints in the beginning about theme and style are accurate, but there is a good reason for those things: backwards compatibility. Those control panel applets still exist because of COM interoperability with other things. Those deep-down dialogs that still use WinForms are there because some feature that MS is supporting relies on the library that produces that dialog to be present and unchanged for compatibility reasons. Apple DGAF about backwards compatibility, which definitely has advantages when it comes to keeping things up to date, but I'd like to see someone on Apple run a game or application released for OS9. I can run games released for Windows 95 all day long, and they run well. Those hard corners in Windows are there for good reasons. They're ugly, they give a bad impression, and the customers who rely on them are extremely grateful for them.
• kleiba 5y ago
  Funnily, I'm almost exactly in the same situation right now, having recently switched jobs. With the exception that I don't have admin rights, and our sys admins as a matter of principle refuse to install any additional apps. Windows does not come with any compilers or scripting languages installed out of the box (or so I thought. Thanks to HN - see below - I've now learned that there are some for .NET). But luckily, I discovered HTAs, and so now I'm happily implementing a small Emacs clone in it to get out of Notepad hell and back onto a path of sanity. Also, I'm looking for a new job.
  • larntz 5y ago
    I think powershell is considered a scripting language. Even though the version that is included with windows is outdated you can still do quite a bit with it. And if you can use WSL you basically have all the linux cli stuff available to you. And if they don't blacklist all executables you can probably just download and run zipped packages -- powershell core, python, go, vim/neovim, and probably emacs can all be run as if they were portable apps and for most things you won't need admin rights.
    • kleiba 5y ago
      Technically, yes, I could do that - but they made it pretty clear what the company policy is, so I will certainly not download and install third-party software even where admin rights aren't necessary. But of course, the thought crossed my mind, too... WSL would be a dream, but they said to me that they basically want all machines that they're responsible for to be the same. You see, there are two kinds of sysadmins: those who take their job to be enablers for the rest of the staff (within certain constraints) and there are some that want to make it as easy as possible to themselves, nevermind if that restricts the actual users.
      • mpfundstein 5y ago
        putting an exe in a folder on your desktop counts as installation? is creating a word document also an installation?
• jug 5y ago
  I agree with the maddening UI and library inconsistency on Windows. I disagree with the non-composable software comparison. Comparing Windows GUI composition with CLI composition is apples and oranges. Let's leave GUI tools out of this and compare the Windows apples to the Linux apples. Windows has PowerShell and what's even better: it's about robust object-oriented composition rather compisition by fragile text parsing. In PowerShell, you can pipe well-formed command output (objects) as well as tell which information you want to see and in which format. List, tabular, JSON... You can also use this shell on Linux because Powershell Core is cross-platform. Sure, there are strong arguments in favor of the more Unix-like shells too but I strongly disagree that Windows commands lack composition. It did for a long time, but that's many years ago now. Environment Variables: I honestly find I'm updating env vars mid-session and wanting them refreshed immediately pretty rare these days. But if you must have this, I hear Chocolatey installs a helper utility to re-read them (refreshenv) that can also be grabbed "stand-alone". Bad Terminal: The much improved Windows Terminal is preinstalled with the latest versions of Windows and can be set as the default terminal. Clipboards: Try Microsoft PowerToys for multiple clipboards and much more. No computer enthusiast should honestly be on Windows without PowerToys. SSH: So this is no issue as Windows has Powershell, in turn with a normal SSH client. I don't really understand this one. I'm confused over which Windows version he is comparing to. Map Win+Enter to open Windows Terminal impossible?? Interesting one, because the Windows key is normally off limits due to being reserved for system shortcuts. But that just makes for a fun challenge. Two tools involved to achieve this: Windows enumerates shortcuts via the task bar area. The first icon activates with Win+1, the next Win+2 and so on. The aforementioned PowerToys allows reassigning existing shortcuts to new shortcuts. See where I'm going here? Put the Windows Terminal icon somewhere in your task bar. Assign Win+(position) to Win+Enter in PowerToys. Done! --- This article really highlighted to me how deep the Windows ecosystem in fact is, and how it matters to stay on top of things. Especially since Satya Nadella took Windows out of its slumber and straightened out past misdirections since the Ballmer era, things have moved pretty quickly forward. Today, I find Windows to be a pretty strong development platform with the mature Powershell, as well as the smoothly integrated WSL2.
  • majkinetor 5y ago
    The choco script is called Update-SessionEnvironment (alias refreshenv). It works for both cmd and Powershell. > Clipboards Or use CopyQ wich is FOSS, the best and x-platform
• forrestthewoods 5y ago
  This week I got a new MacBook that was setup clean. I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to use literally anything other than Vi to make a Mercurial commit. It was extremely difficult to specify what text editor to use. And no, don’t you god damn dare reply with any sentence containing the word “just”. I’m a life long Windows user (game dev). I’m fully convinced that Linux and macOS are both garbage dumpster fires for development. Linux and Mac users are fully convinced that Windows is a dumpster fire for development. I’m not sure who’s right and whose wrong. There’s a lot to be said for the devil you know.
• aquanext 5y ago
  I have had the same complaints for a while. I switched to Mac OS X around 2004 because it was just massively better in terms of quality of life for the user. The OS has continued to improve while Windows has been epically stagnant. Even with major pushes to modernize things, it still feels like it's been bolted together with duct tape and bailing wire. It's just horrible. It seems like virtually any linux distribution you can pick at random with a dart and it would have overall better quality of life on things like a basic terminal app. Microsoft has even tried to improve their terminal a few times and it still totally feels terrible. If I didn't have to use windows for a few work things, I would never go near it again. And in future jobs, me using it at all for work is definitely off the table.
  • NotTheDr01ds 5y ago
    I am truly curious what terminal app in Linux you feel is better than Windows Terminal at this point. While the terminal experience in Windows languished for many years, Windows Terminal has quickly evolved to be one of the (if not the) best there is on any platform. But I certainly could be missing out on a great Linux terminal. If there's one that is better than Windows Terminal, I could switch to it under WSL/WSLg on Windows 11. Bonus: Windows Terminal's release notes occasionally include some fun nuggets like: > You spoke up about the scroll bars being WAY TOO THIN, so we chonked them up > Our confidence in the settings UI's Save button has led to us no longer backing up the settings JSON file. We won't be deleting the 61,000 backups we did leave on your hard drive, but what's a couple thousand kilobytes between friends? > The breadcrumbs have been picked up and will no longer navigate you to strange cottages > No longer will dropdown menus and combo boxes fly wildly off the screen if you scroll or drag the window! Rejoice! :-)
    • antiframe 5y ago
      Last I used Windows was Windows 7 and the terminal was serviceable but not as useful as kitty. It wasn't as fast for sure. I also don't think it used a text-based configurtion file I could edit and check into my configs repo.
    • kappattack 5y ago
• kissgyorgy 5y ago
  If you are coming from a Linux background, you should use WSL 2 instead of PowerShell. Using the Windows SSH client? Hell no! I install everything (even Docker) inside WSL, the only thing I have outside is VS Code, but all the extensions are also installed inside WSL, and I only have WSL window open all the time, keeping all my files inside the WSL filesystem. Much more convenient and less learning of Windows things.
  • dkryptr 5y ago
    This is the way. (my setup is 1:1 it sounds like)
  • majkinetor 5y ago
    Nah... I have SSH OTB (its OpenSSH after all), docker-desktop and vscode all outside WSL. Why would I use WSL with its vastly inferior shell ? Docker desktop sucked tho, but its now pretty hassle free. What do you mean, its much more convenient to use virtual machine instead of real thing ?
    • k8sToGo 5y ago
      WSL isn't a shell. You install any shell you want inside WSL. I use fish.
  • temp8964 5y ago
    Still won't solve the update reboot problem.
    • NotTheDr01ds 5y ago
      While that's true, I'm not sure that I consider it a "problem" in the first place. I used to, but not any longer. In my experience, there's never a good time to update/reboot. I always have multiple applications and tabs open, and always several tasks in flight. For many years, I had Windows set to not automatically update. Now, given the rapid speed with which vulnerabilities can be exploited, I'm personally glad that it does. In a corporate environment, though, as the blog author is in, it's really going to be the IT policies that dictate this. They typically have the ability to update not just Windows, but any other software on the system. And often do. That's one of the reasons that IT departments do prefer (and sometimes dictate) Windows -- It does make it easier for them to secure the multitude of systems for which they are responsible.
• minimaul 5y ago
  I've actually done kind of the opposite recently. I've used Linux a lot in the past, and especially on servers pretty much exclusively - but I've always had a Windows PC for gaming and a Mac for everything else for personal use. In the last few months I put together a tiny low power AMD PC (the 35W 8 core 5750GE!) - and I am massively impressed by how well everything works. Proton/Wine and the OSS AMD graphics stack run older Windows games better than Windows 10 or 11 does. The DP MST setup I have just works (unlike on Windows + NVIDIA where it loves to break). Using KDE as a desktop is more consistent as a UI than Windows 11 is. It's come a long way, and the user experience (as someone who was expecting to dislike it) is seriously improved & seriously impressive. edit: a lot of the niggles I used to hit have just gone away - I don't get tearing, multimonitor just worked. I haven't tried disparate DPIs and I expect that would be an issue, but even so... I'm impressed.
• tambourine_man 5y ago
  There's a bug in your sidebar's CSS on large screens https://imgur.com/a/eSMPtiR https://imgur.com/a/eSMPtiR
  • dflock 5y ago
    Thank you, I'll look into it!
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Well this is a tragedy. People should use what they like. If I started a new job and they mandated Linux, I would be equally upset. Windows isn't for everyone, as evidenced by the same complaints over and over.
• tempfs 5y ago
  Windows is for: - People who know nothing about computers and don't want to. - People who are being held hostage by some third party software that isn't built for ARM/Mac/Linux. One can argue that Mac's satisfy the first condition as well. Linux is for people who either don't mind learning how certain things work or outright require an understanding of how they work. Or who just want more choice in how they interact with a computer. Freedom from corporate data-mining and the privacy nightmare that is Windows...and coming soon to MacOS/iOS...is another big reason to seek alternatives. The modern truth is that, for people with relatively simple needs, there are plenty of Linux flavors that just work as long as your hardware is not from Apple.[>=M1] These flavors have app stores that help even the freshest of newbies find media players, games, office apps, browsers, whatever. The fact that so many contemporary apps run either in a browser or use things like electron also further diminishes the requirement of Windows. Even Microsoft realizes that Windows OS as a thing isn't something to explicitly sell to people anymore. They have been taking a page from Apple and trying to market how lovely it integrates with Xbox, Teams, the CloudPC versions, whatever. They've also hilariously made Windows 11 look like MacOS/various Linux DEs by transforming the taskbar into a dock and making the start menu look incredibly like Whisker/KDE's menu setup. They are also introducing stuff like virtual desktops, etc like they are some sort of revolution despite being on Linux DE's for eons. Truth is that there's never been a better time to re-evaluate your computing needs and make some thoughtful choices about your workflows, your privacy, what you actually need vs what's actually on offer in these platforms.
  • oblio 5y ago
    > Windows is for: > - People who know nothing about computers and don't want to. > - People who are being held hostage by some third party software that isn't built for ARM/Mac/Linux. - people who like to use a wide array of hardware without giving a f** about compatibility concerns [1] Those same people might know about computers at least as much as you and as a bonus point, might be less arrogant than you. [1] Because it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to make their hardware compatible with Windows, and the vast majority of them do it, competently enough.
  • tomrod 5y ago
    There is a third category: "People who may become or currently are my clients or others I want to maintain positive relationships with." There are plenty of reasons to use Windows. There are more compelling reasons to use Linux for my personal tooling, but I am not the other person. In this case, its a choice of good, better, and best. Personally, I don't care if my car mechanic is a Windows user so long as they can do their job. If you think Linux protects from viruses, corporate data mining, or more privacy, I suspect you either only use a command-line based browser, are a white-lister with pihole, or are unaware just how actively many utilities are collecting info on you.
• huqedato 5y ago
  This is a article of a Windows hater. Period.
• thefz 5y ago
  I use Linux at home and Windows at work, because I have to; however this is just one of those "it's cool to shit on Windows" posts. Most of the points are half-assed semi-criticisms.
• legalcorrection 5y ago
  Stop fighting the platform: 1. winget is great and is not abandoned, but yes, don't count on it to do software updates for you. Central third-party package updates are not a thing on Windows or MacOS (outside of their app stores). Every application is in charge of its own updating. Linux distributions can pull this off because the software they install is almost all open source. On Windows and MacOS, it's proprietary software shipped as binaries. You could force them to go through an app store, but that would require closing the platform to non-app-store installs in order to get uptake. Microsoft is trying to encourage people to distribute software as msix packages, but because it's a backwards-compatible open platform, uptake is optional. 2. Powershell is great. You do way less text wrangling and escaping and such non-sense as you have to do with bash, and instead you interact with real functions ("commands" or "cmdlets") that take objects as arguments. You can also call into any .NET function. You can embed C# class definitions. And you can even call win32 functions with a little more work (but it's rare you wouldn't be able to accomplish something with either powershell commands or .NET functions). BUT, it is more verbose. Accept this and you will be happy. 3. Windows is extremely customizable. You probably just don't know it. Certainly, with registry tweaks you can customize way more than you can in Gnome. And if you're willing to do some win32 shell programming, you can make it do just about anything. Hence companies like Stardock that will happily sell you software to customize Windows any way you want. 4. You can definitely get middle click paste working with, e.g., an AutoHotKey script. 5. Most of your points are petty complaints about defaults you can easily change.
• bdcravens 5y ago
  Plug in 2 random external monitors that may or may not be the same resolution
• a_shovel 5y ago
  One important benefit of Windows is that nobody has ever told me "submit a patch" after I complained about some part of Windows.
• elzbardico 5y ago
  Maybe I am old, but I think that all modern operating systems are great. I prefer using Mac OS as my Desktop Environment, but this is probably because I am used to Apple Machines. But my home server runs Ubuntu, and my entertainment machine is a samsung book pro running windows 11 because it is light weight as a tablet but without the limitations of a tablet. Mac Book Pros are too heavy to be used outside a table in my option. Yeah, windows have different window styles and a lot of different places to configure stuff. So what? I f* don't care. I could run linux on the Samsung PC? Yeah, I even have it on dual boot, never use it. It is not one of my development machines, and even when I use it for things like doing experiments or learning a new language, I can fire WSL2 and run Emacs on Windows Terminal or VS Code. I used NT 3.5, I used 90's Slackware, I used Mac OS classic. Jesus, I used MS-DOS. Any modern OS is great to me.
  • GeneralMaximus 5y ago
    I feel the same way. All of them have come a long way and are more or less usable for anything you might want to do on a computer. There are strengths and weaknesses of course (e.g pro audio on Windows is pretty bad, gamedev/3D art on macOS is not quite good enough) but they can all do most things reasonably well. I just wish Linux had more high-quality commercial apps. Open source is great and all, but I'd like to just be able to pay people for building things that I rely on.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• gsich 5y ago
  Middle click paste is awful and I'm glad Windows doesn't do that.
• tentack1 5y ago
  Been using Linux for about a year now and was not aware about the middle click being a separate clipboard than the usual Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. That explains some head scratcher moments I've had trying to use it before.
• _8j50 5y ago
  I can see where OP is coming from but it sounds like he hasn't allowed him/herself to learn to do things the windows way. You maybe used to coreutils/binutils and piecing together things in bash like a lego but Powershell in many ways allows you to build powerful scripts or compose one liners like with bash except you have access to .NET and any .NET assembly you can load! Don't even get me started on WMI or GPO. "Windows wasn't made for me" right... it isn't made for anyone that wants to use it like a unix system, it is an entirely different OS. Just like you shouldn't expect Linux to work like windows. It really isn't a competition. Windows is messy in its own way and that affects its performance as well. If you want to feel like you are in control, windows isn't for you. If you want to get things done, windows is a mediocre but acceptable platform. The very things that make Linux powerful and controllable like shared library all over the place, package managers, and more make it more fragile and time consuming to administer. I spent at least 8-10 hours a week getting things to work on Linux when I had it as my daily driver for over a decade. The weeks I didn't do this, it was because I did nothing outside of browsing the web. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed most of that time, and I did feel like I was in control up until distro maintainers decide things for me and my only choice is to beg and plead and be told to fork it if I disagreed. All I am saying is every platform exists for a reason and has issues.
  • Beltalowda 5y ago
    > I spent at least 8-10 hours a week getting things to work on Linux when I had it as my daily driver for over a decade. What did you spend that time on? I never need to look at anything; it's a big reason I use Linux: my system today is the same as it was yesterday, and last year. And will be the same tomorrow, and next year. Of course Firefox and the Linux kernel and all these tools get updates, but overall it's pretty stable from my user-visible perspective. I certainly don't have upgrades which completely change the UI like Windows 8/10/11 "forced" on me, and if something does go wrong (which it rarely does), I can usually figure things out – Windows: not so much.
    • raffraffraff 5y ago
      Not who you asked, but here's my answer: - Webcam on MacBook Pro (some dude reverse engineered it but I packaged it into dkms .deb so I didn't have to compile every time I updated the kernel) - vpn through company firewall (which didn't support Linux, and wasn't openvpn compatible, took absolutely ages to get it working) - getting the thing to properly sleep, wake and not chew the battery - fuck Nvidia and Lenovo (different laptop) I still prefer Linux and use it as my daily driver.
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  I was using Windows 15 years ago and had already solved almost all these complaints with Cygwin.
• throw10920 5y ago
  The author is coming from Linux. Given that, I'm surprised that they don't have more complaints about the blatantly user-hostile stuff that Windows does, as opposed to user interface experience/patterns. They don't mention the Windows 11 forced-cloud-account requirement, but that's because they got a Windows 10 laptop. Lots of their other complaints (GUI tools instead of command-line, environment variables, software installation) are incidental or the result of different design paths. They mention the forced restarts, but that's about it. I'm surprised they don't mention the stuff that Linux users (and power users who actually care about controlling their device) usually get upset about. Why not talk about the awful, slow start menu rework with its web-search-by-default? Cortana? Installation process full of dark patterns? Telemetry? Windows Hello? Dark patterns meant to trick you into using Edge? Windows Defender automatically turning itself on after you disable it?
  • BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    Your last paragraph is getting my blood pressure up. I use Linux for myself but support a number of Windows computers, and use Windows at my (non-tech) job. The Edge dark patterns and the start menu are two particularly sore points with me. I've wrestled with both of those several times. Another new pain point is that at work there's a piece of software on the intranet that needs Internet Explorer, and Edge keeps forgetting that it's supposed to use IE mode for it. Oh, and as far as I can tell, Edge just ignores some group policies.
    • password4321 5y ago
      Yesterday there was no way to close the 'sign in to your account'-ish setup screen that popped up after an Edge update. Should have taken a screenshot; wound up terminating the process.
  • bobsmooth 5y ago
    Why are you disabling Windows Defender?
    • throw10920 5y ago
• causality0 5y ago
  I expected this to be about how Windows was better/worse fifteen years ago. Instead it's just a list of whining about every little way Windows differs from Linux. We get it, you're pissy because your boss is making you use an OS you don't like.
  • pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Oh man, I'm pissy for that reason too. Windows sucks at window management, having to position your windows every day rather than have the DE handle it (as KDE has for decades) is infinitely annoying. Yes, you can use third-party scripts (Autohotkey, etc.) but, like, wtf is the window manager for then?? /rant
    • spartanatreyu 5y ago
      I've read this comment 6 times now and I'm still not sure what your rant is directed at. > having to position your windows every day rather than have the DE handle Are you after a tiling window manager? If so, why aren't you using a tiling window manager? > Yes, you can use third-party scripts (Autohotkey, etc.) Are you after shortcuts for positioning your windows around? Windows already has those.
      • pbhjpbhj 5y ago
        Cool, so when I launch apps from Startup folder, what's the config that puts them on my second [virtual] desktop? When I open a second MS Word window, what's the config to stop that opening maximised, tell it which desktop to open on (stop it maximising all other Word windows would be good too). If I launch an app, then switch desktops, how do I stop the app appearing on the later desktop? Bonus if I can set where an app opens [from a shortcut, say]. Thanks, no-one else seems to know how to do these things.
        • spartanatreyu 5y ago
          Hmm, it depends. Virtual Desktops and Multiple Displays are different. If you are using multiple displays, the app will open on the display it was previously opened on. (Unless a display has been removed or added in between, in which case it gets a little trickier). If Windows can't figure out a proper guess it will open apps on the primary display. Apps will always open in the current Virtual Desktop. There's no point setting an App like Word to open in one Virtual Desktop over another since it's likely to have a word document open in a "Work" virtual desktop and a "Study" virtual desktop. If you want something to be opened in a specific virtual desktop, switch to that virtual desktop with Win + Ctrl + Left/Right, then open the app. If you want to move something between virtual desktops, show all virtual desktops with Win + Tab, then drag whatever windows to whatever desktops you want. As a bit of a tangent: Firefox's containers work amazingly with Virtual Desktops. I can have a firefox window open for personal, work, and D&D. And none of the accounts between them are shared, and there's no history pollution between them.
• professoretc 5y ago
  Heh, the point about multi-monitor setups breaking window layouts really resonated with me... on Linux. I move my laptop between a dock in the office and a dock at home, and it basically never docks with the correct monitor layout. Sometimes only the laptop screen is recognized, and I have to physically unplug/replug one of the monitors. Sometimes one of the monitors is on, and the other is not. My windows are never in the right place, and always have to be moved to where they should be. I have scripts that try to configure the monitor layout, but they randomly don't work. At home, my machine always hard freezes when connected to the dock (same model as in my office!) and has to be rebooted. Now, the lesson here is not "Linux sucks" but rather, avoid Nvidia.
  • nickduggets 5y ago
    I moved to debian testing on my home machine after Windows 11 left the worst taste in my mouth, and I can confirm the multi-monitor support (at least out of the box) is shockingly bad even without Nvidia. I've been pleased with some things, irritated by others. As far as I'm concerned, macOS is still the closest to a great desktop environment, but just like politicians ALL operating systems suck. Of course, I didn't write a rant article about switching to Linux because I'm sure a lot of problems stem from my own lack of experience. I wish this author had recognised the same thing.
• gsich 5y ago
  The Displayport issue is related to the GPU too. My AMD card does not do that, Intel GPU does it (Windows 8 though). Not sure who's to blame.
• copperx 5y ago
  > Installing things is still, mostly, going to random websites, downloading an .exe (or a .msi if you’re lucky) [...] This is slightly terrifying and pretty mind-blowing in 2022! You must be kidding me. I wouldn't want to be in charge of distributing proprietary software on Linux. That would be a nightmare. Downloading an .exe might be prehistoric, but it is a piece of cake for the developer.
  • thomastjeffery 5y ago
    That's the heart of the problem: proprietary software. By making your software closed-source, you take responsibility of distribution, and that's a significant cost. Doing it the Windows way makes it easier for you, sure, but it doesn't make it better. It makes it more difficult and dangerous for your users, which in turn devalues your product.
• osigurdson 5y ago
  For a lot of developer type workflows it is often necessary to add a reference to an unofficial package source or simply using curl to download something. I still prefer this to downloading an MSI and worrying about what might happen to the registry but both are equally unsafe outside of Linux being a less popular target.
• kllrnohj 5y ago
  Meanwhile Ubuntu on my XPS 13 decided to accidentally break wifi by installing 2 network managers. Why are there even 2 of those in the first place (of course it's not actually just 2, there's way more than that!)? Do people really want choice in network managers? Because I sure as heck don't. Sometimes customization is useful. But Linux goes way, way too far, and the result is a system that never really meshes quite right as all the core systems can't be relied upon to be a consistent base system. Like X11 vs. Wayland - GUI apps need to support multiple compositors because of a ridiculous situation, adding complexity to the stack. Or the systemd battle, where again there's a fundamental system that should have all sorts of robust tools & UIs built on top of it that just doesn't because again there's customization where there really doesn't need to be. Audio is almost not a joke on Linux anymore with things kinda standardizing around pipewire, although that's because it's just taking on the burden of supporting all the various APIs from all the various systems that didn't need to all exist itself. You know what I also never have to worry about on my Windows machine? Whether or not hardware video decoding is supported & working or not.
  • ranguna 5y ago
    Yes I want customization with network managers. Personally I use iwd because of its simplicity, last time I checked, there are a lot of people that use network-manager instead (it's also default on a lot of distros).
• hermitdev 5y ago
  > What isn’t fine, is that they’re stored in the Windows Registry, apparently? If you update these, either using setx %var% value, or the GUI… you have to restart your shell - i.e. you type exit, the window/tab goes away, and you open another one. Just let that sink in for a moment. I mean, it's the same story, sort of, on Linux. Edit your profile, rc files, whatever on Linux to define/change an environment variable, and it doesn't magically update in your current shell, either. Use "set" instead of "setx" and it'll affect the current shell, but not other currently running processes. Change your profile? Yeah, restart whatever app to pick up the changes. Somehow expecting this to change environment variables of already running processes? Yeah, no, not so much. Doesn't work that way on Linux, either. Processes inherit env variables from the parent process by default on both Linux & Windows. Not really sure what the concern or issue is here other than a lack of understanding of how environment variables work.
• wycy 5y ago
  I use Linux (RHEL7) at work and have grown to love it. I feel ultra-productive in Linux and completely unproductive in Windows. That said, some of the Windows criticisms seem silly compared to the situation in Linux, and Linux isn't without its warts. > Did it Just… Restart Itself and Lose All My Terminals‽ My DE at work crashes and closes all my stuff somewhat regularly (perhaps once every 1.5mo or so)--much more often than Windows does. To be fair, I do more in Linux, so perhaps that's to be expected. Beyond the occasional DE crash, there are also several other baffling glitches that I've simply learned to live with, most visibly: randomly the graphical theme will switch from dark to light. It switches back to dark simply by opening and closing the appearance settings. Linux still feels extremely unpolished to me, but I'm vastly more productive in it.
• xupybd 5y ago
  As to the middle click mouse http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/ http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/
• ActorNightly 5y ago
  WSL2 has eliminated the need to use linux for me. Its got usb passthrough, graphical app support (with windows 11), as well as super clean VSCode integration. If you are into ML, the Nvidia drivers also support running from WSL2, so you don't even need to touch windows for that. The only reason to run Linux is because its free, and you get more customization of the base OS. I run i3wm under Mint on my laptop for example.
• dleslie 5y ago
  Oof, as someone who had a similar perspective: Don't use scoop. The community and developer aren't sufficiently active. Use choco. Chocolatey should ship with the os. Otherwise, have at it. Yes, Windows Terminal is great and should ship with the OS.
• _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Mentioned in the article but glossed over: Why do I still need both Control Panel and Settings? Where is the cohesive, discoverable model for the (admittedly shedload of) possible settings? I understand MSFT like to keep backwards compatibility but as a 20+ years Windows native user (and later MSFT shop sysadmin) at this stage I use a browser and google to tell me where to find the setting I need. To be fair, as a light linux user I do the same for linux. But that isn't a money making enterprise for millions of users.
• unsignedint 5y ago
  I was on a same boat, but perhaps slightly less to the extent. But I was doing Linux primary for 10 years or so, change to Windows primary around late Windows 7, and now Windows 10/11 mostly. Some of my observations: 1) Linux is great when it is working. It handled at higher load better than Windows. Being able to choose lighter DE when working on a lesser powerful machine were great. Being able to customizing definitely make this more versatile in different environment. Windows does provide modest default -- there are things I don't like about it but at same time (personally) it doesn't bother me too much. 2) Update is more or less caused unpredictable outcome on Linux -- hibernation stops working from one version to another for instance. It actually got worse as the update cycles accumulates. On earlier version of Windows, OS rotting was a thing, but this seems to be bit more severe on desktop Linux these days. 3) International support is bit weak on Linux. (Particularly Japanese in my case.) Most I could make it work. It ranged from input method is not showing up in correct place (bit common -- annoying but easy to workaround) and more severe ones (like Chrome bug[1] -- issue that seems to exist from version 55, still open.) 4) Command line wise, PowerShell definitely made it light years improvement over "command.com" or "cmd.exe" on Windows. I actually like PowerShell that I was using PowerShell Core on Linux for later part of my "Linux era" too. Both Windows and Linux has its own strength, and weaknesses. But I don't know if I miss Linux so much as a desktop, to be honest. (and if I'm so inclined, these days I do have mean to use WSL for some edge cases where I need Linux.) [1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=952181 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=952181
• knu_ttib 5y ago
  Me using Linux after 25 years of Windows: Wow, Linux on the Desktop is in great shape! After Microsoft went to far with their Edge bullshit and "always online and always logged in" and hidden ads and spyware I had enough. So, I've started to play around with some Linux distros in a VM. It was OK. Ubuntu LTS was great. Fedora, too. Linux Mint also. Some weeks later I installed Linux Mint on my workstation. I had to resolve one smaller issue with the NVIDIA driver, but using Linux was one awesome experience. Super fast, super easy. Linux Mint is really nice and easy for people coming from Windows. I've recently installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS beta and it is simply fantastic. (Note: Wayland has fractional scaling issues, so I recommend XOrg if you need fractional scaling.)
• JodieBenitez 5y ago
  No mention of WSL, for a web developer... looks like this person intentionaly chose the hard path.
• Markoff 5y ago
  > You can’t customize anything! Fails to provide single customization he is missing. Stopped reading there. From different perspective I was trying Linux every few years in last 2 decades only to surrender it's unusable and gave up trying few years ago. Btw. on my work laptop I keep Windows 10, I refreshed wife's laptop and deliberately chose W8.1 (instead W10/11) and not even gonna upgrade to W10, I dont see any benefit, I even think in hindsight I should go with W7 for the best performance, that was peak Windows, W10 is still somewhat usable, but from what I read about W11 I am for sure skipping that version and I see no benefits in my daily usage since W7, they are actually making my user experience with each version worse. I like the idea of switching away from Windows, but sadly app I need for work (golden standard in my field) is not available on Linux and everything else is vastly inferior and not gonna run this power hungry app through WINE if it even worked. Btw. my Win never restarts itself or automatically installs anything without my approval, seems like OP didn't do basic search to configure system properly.