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Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support

Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support page shows the simple instructions for opting out of the telemetry. Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!

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wood-porch 3y ago
Not in my experience. I was using a Dell work laptop recently and decided to use Linux instead of windows. Once I got things working mostly to my liking, I updated the GPU drivers and got a kernel panic. I’m lucky to be tech savvy so I can recuperate from that, but after that I asked for a MacBook and now have a solid daily driver that I can rely on, without having to spend hours looking for workarounds, crashes and kernel panics
mcpackieh 3y ago
Is it confirmed that Intel's drivers on Linux aren't doing this too?
- anthk 3y ago
  On libre drivers? No.
  - Aardwolf 3y ago
    I do use the full fledged nvidia drivers on linux (I don't know if with the mentioned libre drivers the steam games, LLM's and image generation I use would work?), so I would also like to know if this telemetry is also present in the linux drivers
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  Intel drivers are part of the kernel, and I imagine Intel's attempt to put telemetry in them would be shut down fairly quickly by Linus Torvalds.
  - cccbbbaaa 3y ago
    Graphics drivers, at least on unices, come in two parts: one in the kernel, another one in the userspace. The latter provides interfaces such as Vulkan. That said, ANV (Intel's driver) is part of mesa, and not bespoke like nvidia's. But that's a moot point: this telemetry component is not a part of the actual driver, but another separate program in the package.
royal_ts 3y ago
KDE is great but also very, very buggy. I'm using it since 2016 and some bugs just won't go away and good luck with openeing a bug report - nobody will care. Especially multi monitor support just isn't good. Multi window support is also, by default, not as good as Windows does it. Sicne a few updates I'm getting some polciykit errors everytime I'm doing anything session related just because - I have not found a solution since then.
- loeg 3y ago
  I use KDE daily, including a multi-monitor setup, and it is not buggy in my experience. Like, at all, much less "very, very." I wonder why we have had such different experiences? I'm using Fedora.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Maybe he's using an older KDE release or on a not-first-class distro which doesn't ship with it out of the box, like Mint.
    - royal_ts 3y ago
      "very very" was a bit exaggerated but it's far from perfect. There's always something. I'm using KDE neon which should be as new as it gets. For multi monitor: it forgets that I had a second desktop, renders it black, switching between two monitors and none is also error prone.. it's not "bad" I'm used to it but as I said, some bug been here for a while now.
      - heyoni 3y ago
        Are you using nvidia drivers by any chance? And correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t KDE neon supposed to be a bit less stable?
        WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
        The black desktop used to happen on every brand of GPU (I have a mix of Intel and AMD), it just had to be the third or the fourth display, something like that. Or after sleeping and waking. I used to have it a lot. I haven’t seen it in a while, though, so it just might be they have fixed it. Fedora + zawertun COPR, for what it’s worth.
OO000oo 3y ago
> Everything works. ...if you're a software engineer. If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  > If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count. But you can always use GIMP, right?! OK, this was a bad joke.
  - yummypaint 3y ago
    To be fair this is adobe's fault. The only reason it isn't available on linux is because adobe goes to great technical and legal lengths to ensure it can't be. A VM with seamless windowing isn't a bad solution for running that kind of forcewear, compromising the whole host OS seems excessive.
    - OO000oo 3y ago
      Blaming doesn't fix anything. The real point here is that it's a political issue and the open source community is too infantile for politics so they keep lying to themselves instead.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      I wonder if it would work under a vfio system.
      - bravetraveler 3y ago
        Almost surely! Outside of seeing obvious signs like VirtIO devices, one can go to great lengths to hide the virtualization Similar tricks that work for the ESEA Anti Cheat client and Nvidia code 43 will likely suffice VFIO takes this a step further and provides one less virtualized device
        3y ago
WillAdams 3y ago
I would if I could, but I don't need/use desktops --- my preference has always been for tablets, preferably portable with a stylus (and touch) --- CellWriter is kind of primitive, and driver support is problematic at best. That said, my next project is connecting my Wacom One screen to a Raspberry Pi 4 (which unfortunately means giving up touch --- I'd be very interested in graphics tablet/screen w/ support for current Wacom styluses _and_ touch). Can't quite justify a Wacom Cintiq since I don't want the complication of a different stylus technology than my other devices (it's really nice to be able to switch between drawing on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 to taking notes on my Kindle Scribe to checking something on my Note 10+). I suppose I should try an Android tablet, but there's not much software there which is suited to the work I do.
gambiting 3y ago
>> Everything works. I'm a video games developer. Neither PS5, Xbox nor Switch toolchains work under linux - not to mention that actual proper Visual Studio doesn't and that alone is worth staying on windows for. For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.
- gorjusborg 3y ago
  There are plenty of niches that use proprietary tools that don't work across platforms. I don't think that's a fair criticism of the platform 'working'. That's just status quo / profit maximizing on the part of the tool selectors and developers. Linux works very well with regards to hardware. Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb. It's a tool that targets windows (mostly) written by the developers that sell windows. You don't have to look very hard for a world class c/c++ tool chain on linux.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    >>Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb Oh sorry this wasn't my intention at all. I'm just countering the argument that I see a lot on HN(and tbf, maybe this isn't what OP was saying) - that Linux is so good that there is literally no reason for anyone to ever stay on Windows. Like......yeah, it's great and a lot of things work really really well - but some things still don't. That's all. It's not a criticism of Linux, or at least I don't mean it in that way.
    - gorjusborg 3y ago
      Yeah, it isn't all roses on the linux side, for sure. It really isn't perfect on any of the platforms though. I have had no end of USB issues with MacOS, and with no indication it will be fixed. I am told to buy 'supported' (Apple) devices. That's not very 'universal'. It is amazing how much improvement there has been in recent years. The main thing that makes me want linux ecosystems to be used is that at least they are slowly improving, not simply positioning for a rent-seeking position in the 'market'.
Workaccount2 3y ago
The worst thing about linux is that it is made an maintained by people who like linux. I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI. People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including right now. I'm someone who does way more than email and youtube, but has less than zero interest in spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux so I can become a proper user.
- rdp36 3y ago
  It's called a Chromebook.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  You might like the ability to use natural language on the CLI, then have AI create and run the command for you. One example of many: https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT
- account42 3y ago
  > a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI ERROR: Does not compute. A CLI is the pinacle of power user friendlyness.
- postmodest 3y ago
  There is a FreeBSD fork that does exactly that, but to use it you need to buy a $3000 hardware dongle.... That's the path a lot of Mac Users are on, though we also have a telemetry problem; the only advantage is that it stays "in house".
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > FreeBSD fork Isn't NeXTSTEP quite a bit older than FreeBSD?
  - ign0ramus 3y ago
    What's the name of the fork?
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
You might want to into who makes Linux. Intel wrote 23% of the changes for kernel 6.0 and AMD wrote 32%. https://lwn.net/Articles/909625/ https://lwn.net/Articles/909625/
- deleted 3y ago
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hef19898 3y ago
Linux is great! And, thanks to Steam, a lot of games wirk as well. Not all, but most. Ubuntu, I haven't tried anything else so far, is a charm on Lenovo hardware. Update wise, it is were Windows was a couple of years ago. Meaning there are random updates that just kill and break certain functions. Happened last week, everything was running fine, including steam, as it always did. Until an update managed to delete the GUI, reinstalling the GUI killed nVidia drivers, Steam couldn't be installed under 23.04 for some missing dataset, installing said data (some 32-bit stuff) killed WiFi... No attack on Linux so, I rember that not too long ago I stopped all Eindows updates because for months the auto-updates had the same effect (save the WiFi bit). So yes, my dqily, private driver is Linux. And will be, except for games, for the time being. All I uave to do now, well after vacation, is to get Steam running properly again. Feels like a throwback to the pre Win 10 days, when Windows randomly did the same thing with regards to drivers and certain games / programs.
- erwincoumans 3y ago
  It would be great if Linux had some automatic checkpoints so you can revert to a working system after an update. So many times updates leave a broken system and re-install Ubuntu from scratch is quicker than fixing the problem.
  - aednichols 3y ago
    Check out immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue & Kinoite.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    I haven't had that happen for a few years now... I will say the RX 5700 XT had a really rough few months after launch on Linux. Other than that, it's been relatively smooth. Mostly been using PopOS and Ubuntu-Budgie.
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Once NixOS is desktop-ready you’ll have a way more powerful checkpoint system
  - 3y ago
devsda 3y ago
Switching to linux is a good option but the ideal solution is one where coporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default. Microsoft has normalized default optout telemetry in the OS, IDE & developer tooling and now others are also following suit even in areas where telemetry doesn't make sense. I wish there is an easy solution to the pervasive telemetry problem for those who can't switch for any reason.
- musicale 3y ago
  Microsoft has really poisoned the well with default-always-on-telemetry. Technical solutions (firewalls, switching to Linux, etc.) aren't necessarily practical for many people. > the ideal solution is one where corporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default This is probably the only effective solution, but I don't see it happening without enforceable legislation.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    I think TV manufacturers don't help either.
    - musicale 3y ago
      Needing an firewall (both incoming and outgoing) for your TV isn't something I would have predicted a few years ago. At least "monitors" don't seem to have telemetry. Yet. Who knew that companies would use 1984 as a product roadmap.
    - joshspankit 3y ago
      The fact that most of them include the content of the screen as telemetry is especially concerning
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Corporations should not be allowed to collect telemetry at all. Information should always be pushed from one party to another, never pulled.
slackfan 3y ago
KDE has been getting progressively worse and less usable since 3.5.
- 72deluxe 3y ago
  So refreshing to see someone else who revels in the nostalgia of 3.5!
  - account42 3y ago
    I believe the correct word is KNostalgia.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  Fully agree, I've been using cinnamon instead for a long time already
_ugfj 3y ago
By everything you mean an extremely narrow slice of hardware and software works -- which admittedly are widely used and can give the false sense of "everything". But https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ is just as true today in spirit: mainstream multimedia has serious issues. Bluetooth often just doesn't work, forget about any decent resolution from any streaming service. Heaven forbid you wanted to dock to an eGPU, might as well reboot because you need to restart your apps anyways. Multifunction printer/scanners are a crapshoot. Strange enterprise VPN and wifi, well, I am wishing you good fortune in the wars to come. Nah. Life is too short to struggle with this. O&O ShutUp10++ handles the telemetry. Way easier to deal with that once then constantly struggle with Linux.
o1y32 3y ago
> Everything just works No it doesn't. Every Linux desktop requires me to spend hours tweaking things or finding workarounds to make it usable for myself. Window management is horrible compared to other OS. Fractional scaling mostly doesn't work. The Pomodoro timer in the "Software" store is no longer maintained and doesn't work at all on the latest Gnome. (Windows 11 has it built-in). Even so, I have to live with certain restrictions. I tried to get into Linux desktop every few years, and I never find the situation has improved much. By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.
- bsder 3y ago
  > By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes. My wife is constantly taking her laptop into her IT staff. The main difference between Windows and Linux is that corporate IT staff are willing to futz with Windows but not Linux. The main difference between macOS and Linux is that macOS users will spend money to futz with macOS but not Linux.
  - vips7L 3y ago
    This is because corporate IT staff are largely responsible for Windows not working. Their endless and senseless configuration changes make Windows not work.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  To be fair, fractional scaling on Windows is kind of garbage, at least if you don't have the same scaling set on every display. If I have one screen at 100% and one at 125%, any application will look okay only on the display it was started on, and blurry on any others. I don't think the situation is any better on Linux, but I'm pretty sure that as long as you're using Wayland (only), it's not any worse.
- coconut08 3y ago
  you are correct about fractional scaling being suboptimal and there are a few quirks here and there but linux has become largely usable at this point. most of the criticisms you have made about linux are due to inexperience and not being familiar with it rather than being fundamental problems with it. If instead of spending the last x years of your life daily driving windows or macos you had instead spent that time daily driving linux you would have all of the understanding infrastructure built up around linux instead and these would be non problems. I use fedora with gnome and I don't install any extensions or do any tweaking or workarounds as you say. I know this is true because i'm a non developer, non power user (though still relatively technical) who has been using linux since 2006 and it works just fine. Not only that my dad has been happily setup using linux since around 2014 and he is as non technical as they come. To really go in on this point I bought a macbook pro when the m1 devices came out and the experience you have with linux I have with macos. It's the worst operating system I have ever used. You complain about linux having bad window management but macos has basically no window management. you double click the top bar and depending on the software sometimes it will maximize, sometimes it will pull the window all the way down the screen and sometimes it will do nothing at all. You drag the window to the top or to the side and nothing happens at all. Window management on macos is so bad that most people say that you need to install external tools to mac it even half way usable. Even when you do its still less performant and buggier than what gnome or windows offers out of the box. You say macos needs no setup, but I spent 10's of hours desperately trying to make the workflow and ux of macos not be a horrible experience for me. Everything from no tools and trying to work within its paradigm, simple window management tools even going so far as to trying yabai and none of them felt right to me. Now that said I would bet a person who has spent a decade daily driving macos probably has internalized the ins and outs and quirks relating to macos and wouldn't find it nearly as problematic. Most of the issues people have with linux are much less problems with linux and much more a lack of workflow understanding that they haven't built up but have built up around other operating systems instead. The main exception being that there are some proprietary tools that are pretty explicitly not supported on linux which require windows or macos.
networkchad 3y ago
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sockaddr 3y ago
Agreed. It is the year of the linux desktop. I installed Pop OS and everything works great right out of the box. It's now good enough that I could install it on my mom's computer.
bacchusracine 3y ago
>KDE gets better every week. As someone who has tried KDE off and on over the years since its version 2.0 release in SuSE Linux, and through various versions and distros since is there a fork that doesn't have twenty different configuration options in their own apps? I was most happy with Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x desktop and am currently using Mate Desktop these days to try to hold on to what I consider the best desktop and what I always felt "home" at when using it. But it gets more and more inconsistent release after release due to intentional theme breakages. I'd love to be able to use KDE or Plasma instead and take advantage of the way that desktop leverages its shared libraries for performance if only I could get over the behavior of its shell and configuration. Is there anything that I can run that re-organizes it into the traditional desktop that I prefer? A script? A combined theme? I see all sorts of themes for Windows (why?) and themes for OSX (also why? especially without the skeuomorphic looks of the past?) but there seems to be very little that would take someone from Gnome 2.x\Mate to KDE. Am I just missing it? Is there any way off this burning platform? I keep hearing how great KDE is and can perform but it makes my skin crawl when using it. Is there any way to change it that doesn't leave me lost at sea going between multiple applications with nested options? Thanks in advance for any advice given.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  I have yet to use a linux desktop which has working drag-and-drop. When you drag a file or file path from the file explorer and drop into the command prompt, it's supposed to put the file path there. Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another. I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level.
  - aruggirello 3y ago
    > When you drag a file or file path from the file explorer and drop into the command prompt, it's supposed to put the file path there > Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another > I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level Guess what, that's exactly what happens in Dolphin (KDE Plasma). Please don't spread falsehoods.
RajT88 3y ago
Companies have not yet woken up to the idea that implementing this kind of telemetry is effectively leaking their private business data to third parties (competitors even). Nobody's been so obviously burned by it yet that the lawsuits have started flying. Just imagine the kind of data (say) Microsoft is leaking to Google, via all those users running Chrome. How about all those AMD users who are running Intel/NVIDIA graphics drivers in their laptops? If I am a big tech company sitting on a pile of that telemetry data, you can bet I'll be tempted to data mine it for such leaked data about what the competition is up to. It'll probably take an email leak to reveal the practice, and cause some sort of consequences for this though.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  Economic espionage is the largest field of espionage. Although I guess if any big tech company would get caught, there will be repercussions for their business.
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darklycan51 3y ago
Proceeds to defend this by arguing that Windows already does it anyways then goes and mentions how Linux doesn't do it... but then your whole comment makes no sense, because there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers
- wtallis 3y ago
  > there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers I feel like you may be making some pretty wild assumptions. The Intel GPU drivers for Linux have little to nothing in common with the Intel GPU drivers for Windows.
Grom_PE 3y ago
Yep. Jumped ship after Windows 7 due to pervasive telemetry. That was a deal breaker for me. It's funny that Windows (and its ecosystem) getting shitty is the major factor of "Linux desktop" happening. I figured that the effort of decrapifying Windows has outgrown the effort of configuring a Linux system, and furthermore, the former becomes obsolete with every Windows update, but the latter stays with you forever. In 2022, Linux port of Far Manager, far2l, got a fork with LuaJIT scripting support, far2m, and that was the last thing holding me on Windows.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wood-porch 3y ago

Not in my experience. I was using a Dell work laptop recently and decided to use Linux instead of windows. Once I got things working mostly to my liking, I updated the GPU drivers and got a kernel panic. I’m lucky to be tech savvy so I can recuperate from that, but after that I asked for a MacBook and now have a solid daily driver that I can rely on, without having to spend hours looking for workarounds, crashes and kernel panics

mcpackieh 3y ago

Is it confirmed that Intel's drivers on Linux aren't doing this too?

anthk 3y ago
On libre drivers? No.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  I do use the full fledged nvidia drivers on linux (I don't know if with the mentioned libre drivers the steam games, LLM's and image generation I use would work?), so I would also like to know if this telemetry is also present in the linux drivers
boomboomsubban 3y ago
Intel drivers are part of the kernel, and I imagine Intel's attempt to put telemetry in them would be shut down fairly quickly by Linus Torvalds.
- cccbbbaaa 3y ago
  Graphics drivers, at least on unices, come in two parts: one in the kernel, another one in the userspace. The latter provides interfaces such as Vulkan. That said, ANV (Intel's driver) is part of mesa, and not bespoke like nvidia's. But that's a moot point: this telemetry component is not a part of the actual driver, but another separate program in the package.

royal_ts 3y ago

KDE is great but also very, very buggy. I'm using it since 2016 and some bugs just won't go away and good luck with openeing a bug report - nobody will care. Especially multi monitor support just isn't good. Multi window support is also, by default, not as good as Windows does it. Sicne a few updates I'm getting some polciykit errors everytime I'm doing anything session related just because - I have not found a solution since then.

loeg 3y ago
I use KDE daily, including a multi-monitor setup, and it is not buggy in my experience. Like, at all, much less "very, very." I wonder why we have had such different experiences? I'm using Fedora.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Maybe he's using an older KDE release or on a not-first-class distro which doesn't ship with it out of the box, like Mint.
  - royal_ts 3y ago
    "very very" was a bit exaggerated but it's far from perfect. There's always something. I'm using KDE neon which should be as new as it gets. For multi monitor: it forgets that I had a second desktop, renders it black, switching between two monitors and none is also error prone.. it's not "bad" I'm used to it but as I said, some bug been here for a while now.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      Are you using nvidia drivers by any chance? And correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t KDE neon supposed to be a bit less stable?
      - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
        The black desktop used to happen on every brand of GPU (I have a mix of Intel and AMD), it just had to be the third or the fourth display, something like that. Or after sleeping and waking. I used to have it a lot. I haven’t seen it in a while, though, so it just might be they have fixed it. Fedora + zawertun COPR, for what it’s worth.

OO000oo 3y ago

> Everything works. ...if you're a software engineer. If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count.

baal80spam 3y ago
> If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count. But you can always use GIMP, right?! OK, this was a bad joke.
- yummypaint 3y ago
  To be fair this is adobe's fault. The only reason it isn't available on linux is because adobe goes to great technical and legal lengths to ensure it can't be. A VM with seamless windowing isn't a bad solution for running that kind of forcewear, compromising the whole host OS seems excessive.
  - OO000oo 3y ago
    Blaming doesn't fix anything. The real point here is that it's a political issue and the open source community is too infantile for politics so they keep lying to themselves instead.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    I wonder if it would work under a vfio system.
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      Almost surely! Outside of seeing obvious signs like VirtIO devices, one can go to great lengths to hide the virtualization Similar tricks that work for the ESEA Anti Cheat client and Nvidia code 43 will likely suffice VFIO takes this a step further and provides one less virtualized device
      - 3y ago

WillAdams 3y ago

I would if I could, but I don't need/use desktops --- my preference has always been for tablets, preferably portable with a stylus (and touch) --- CellWriter is kind of primitive, and driver support is problematic at best. That said, my next project is connecting my Wacom One screen to a Raspberry Pi 4 (which unfortunately means giving up touch --- I'd be very interested in graphics tablet/screen w/ support for current Wacom styluses _and_ touch). Can't quite justify a Wacom Cintiq since I don't want the complication of a different stylus technology than my other devices (it's really nice to be able to switch between drawing on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 to taking notes on my Kindle Scribe to checking something on my Note 10+). I suppose I should try an Android tablet, but there's not much software there which is suited to the work I do.

gambiting 3y ago

>> Everything works. I'm a video games developer. Neither PS5, Xbox nor Switch toolchains work under linux - not to mention that actual proper Visual Studio doesn't and that alone is worth staying on windows for. For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.

gorjusborg 3y ago
There are plenty of niches that use proprietary tools that don't work across platforms. I don't think that's a fair criticism of the platform 'working'. That's just status quo / profit maximizing on the part of the tool selectors and developers. Linux works very well with regards to hardware. Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb. It's a tool that targets windows (mostly) written by the developers that sell windows. You don't have to look very hard for a world class c/c++ tool chain on linux.
- gambiting 3y ago
  >>Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb Oh sorry this wasn't my intention at all. I'm just countering the argument that I see a lot on HN(and tbf, maybe this isn't what OP was saying) - that Linux is so good that there is literally no reason for anyone to ever stay on Windows. Like......yeah, it's great and a lot of things work really really well - but some things still don't. That's all. It's not a criticism of Linux, or at least I don't mean it in that way.
  - gorjusborg 3y ago
    Yeah, it isn't all roses on the linux side, for sure. It really isn't perfect on any of the platforms though. I have had no end of USB issues with MacOS, and with no indication it will be fixed. I am told to buy 'supported' (Apple) devices. That's not very 'universal'. It is amazing how much improvement there has been in recent years. The main thing that makes me want linux ecosystems to be used is that at least they are slowly improving, not simply positioning for a rent-seeking position in the 'market'.

Workaccount2 3y ago

The worst thing about linux is that it is made an maintained by people who like linux. I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI. People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including right now. I'm someone who does way more than email and youtube, but has less than zero interest in spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux so I can become a proper user.

rdp36 3y ago
It's called a Chromebook.
joshspankit 3y ago
You might like the ability to use natural language on the CLI, then have AI create and run the command for you. One example of many: https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT
account42 3y ago
> a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI ERROR: Does not compute. A CLI is the pinacle of power user friendlyness.
postmodest 3y ago
There is a FreeBSD fork that does exactly that, but to use it you need to buy a $3000 hardware dongle.... That's the path a lot of Mac Users are on, though we also have a telemetry problem; the only advantage is that it stays "in house".
- qwytw 3y ago
  > FreeBSD fork Isn't NeXTSTEP quite a bit older than FreeBSD?
- ign0ramus 3y ago
  What's the name of the fork?

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago

You might want to into who makes Linux. Intel wrote 23% of the changes for kernel 6.0 and AMD wrote 32%. https://lwn.net/Articles/909625/ https://lwn.net/Articles/909625/

deleted 3y ago
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hef19898 3y ago

Linux is great! And, thanks to Steam, a lot of games wirk as well. Not all, but most. Ubuntu, I haven't tried anything else so far, is a charm on Lenovo hardware. Update wise, it is were Windows was a couple of years ago. Meaning there are random updates that just kill and break certain functions. Happened last week, everything was running fine, including steam, as it always did. Until an update managed to delete the GUI, reinstalling the GUI killed nVidia drivers, Steam couldn't be installed under 23.04 for some missing dataset, installing said data (some 32-bit stuff) killed WiFi... No attack on Linux so, I rember that not too long ago I stopped all Eindows updates because for months the auto-updates had the same effect (save the WiFi bit). So yes, my dqily, private driver is Linux. And will be, except for games, for the time being. All I uave to do now, well after vacation, is to get Steam running properly again. Feels like a throwback to the pre Win 10 days, when Windows randomly did the same thing with regards to drivers and certain games / programs.

erwincoumans 3y ago
It would be great if Linux had some automatic checkpoints so you can revert to a working system after an update. So many times updates leave a broken system and re-install Ubuntu from scratch is quicker than fixing the problem.
- aednichols 3y ago
  Check out immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue & Kinoite.
- tracker1 3y ago
  I haven't had that happen for a few years now... I will say the RX 5700 XT had a really rough few months after launch on Linux. Other than that, it's been relatively smooth. Mostly been using PopOS and Ubuntu-Budgie.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Once NixOS is desktop-ready you’ll have a way more powerful checkpoint system
- 3y ago

devsda 3y ago

Switching to linux is a good option but the ideal solution is one where coporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default. Microsoft has normalized default optout telemetry in the OS, IDE & developer tooling and now others are also following suit even in areas where telemetry doesn't make sense. I wish there is an easy solution to the pervasive telemetry problem for those who can't switch for any reason.

musicale 3y ago
Microsoft has really poisoned the well with default-always-on-telemetry. Technical solutions (firewalls, switching to Linux, etc.) aren't necessarily practical for many people. > the ideal solution is one where corporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default This is probably the only effective solution, but I don't see it happening without enforceable legislation.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  I think TV manufacturers don't help either.
  - musicale 3y ago
    Needing an firewall (both incoming and outgoing) for your TV isn't something I would have predicted a few years ago. At least "monitors" don't seem to have telemetry. Yet. Who knew that companies would use 1984 as a product roadmap.
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    The fact that most of them include the content of the screen as telemetry is especially concerning
Zambyte 3y ago
Corporations should not be allowed to collect telemetry at all. Information should always be pushed from one party to another, never pulled.

slackfan 3y ago

KDE has been getting progressively worse and less usable since 3.5.

72deluxe 3y ago
So refreshing to see someone else who revels in the nostalgia of 3.5!
- account42 3y ago
  I believe the correct word is KNostalgia.
Aardwolf 3y ago
Fully agree, I've been using cinnamon instead for a long time already

_ugfj 3y ago

By everything you mean an extremely narrow slice of hardware and software works -- which admittedly are widely used and can give the false sense of "everything". But https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ is just as true today in spirit: mainstream multimedia has serious issues. Bluetooth often just doesn't work, forget about any decent resolution from any streaming service. Heaven forbid you wanted to dock to an eGPU, might as well reboot because you need to restart your apps anyways. Multifunction printer/scanners are a crapshoot. Strange enterprise VPN and wifi, well, I am wishing you good fortune in the wars to come. Nah. Life is too short to struggle with this. O&O ShutUp10++ handles the telemetry. Way easier to deal with that once then constantly struggle with Linux.

o1y32 3y ago

> Everything just works No it doesn't. Every Linux desktop requires me to spend hours tweaking things or finding workarounds to make it usable for myself. Window management is horrible compared to other OS. Fractional scaling mostly doesn't work. The Pomodoro timer in the "Software" store is no longer maintained and doesn't work at all on the latest Gnome. (Windows 11 has it built-in). Even so, I have to live with certain restrictions. I tried to get into Linux desktop every few years, and I never find the situation has improved much. By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.

bsder 3y ago
> By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes. My wife is constantly taking her laptop into her IT staff. The main difference between Windows and Linux is that corporate IT staff are willing to futz with Windows but not Linux. The main difference between macOS and Linux is that macOS users will spend money to futz with macOS but not Linux.
- vips7L 3y ago
  This is because corporate IT staff are largely responsible for Windows not working. Their endless and senseless configuration changes make Windows not work.
NoGravitas 3y ago
To be fair, fractional scaling on Windows is kind of garbage, at least if you don't have the same scaling set on every display. If I have one screen at 100% and one at 125%, any application will look okay only on the display it was started on, and blurry on any others. I don't think the situation is any better on Linux, but I'm pretty sure that as long as you're using Wayland (only), it's not any worse.
coconut08 3y ago
you are correct about fractional scaling being suboptimal and there are a few quirks here and there but linux has become largely usable at this point. most of the criticisms you have made about linux are due to inexperience and not being familiar with it rather than being fundamental problems with it. If instead of spending the last x years of your life daily driving windows or macos you had instead spent that time daily driving linux you would have all of the understanding infrastructure built up around linux instead and these would be non problems. I use fedora with gnome and I don't install any extensions or do any tweaking or workarounds as you say. I know this is true because i'm a non developer, non power user (though still relatively technical) who has been using linux since 2006 and it works just fine. Not only that my dad has been happily setup using linux since around 2014 and he is as non technical as they come. To really go in on this point I bought a macbook pro when the m1 devices came out and the experience you have with linux I have with macos. It's the worst operating system I have ever used. You complain about linux having bad window management but macos has basically no window management. you double click the top bar and depending on the software sometimes it will maximize, sometimes it will pull the window all the way down the screen and sometimes it will do nothing at all. You drag the window to the top or to the side and nothing happens at all. Window management on macos is so bad that most people say that you need to install external tools to mac it even half way usable. Even when you do its still less performant and buggier than what gnome or windows offers out of the box. You say macos needs no setup, but I spent 10's of hours desperately trying to make the workflow and ux of macos not be a horrible experience for me. Everything from no tools and trying to work within its paradigm, simple window management tools even going so far as to trying yabai and none of them felt right to me. Now that said I would bet a person who has spent a decade daily driving macos probably has internalized the ins and outs and quirks relating to macos and wouldn't find it nearly as problematic. Most of the issues people have with linux are much less problems with linux and much more a lack of workflow understanding that they haven't built up but have built up around other operating systems instead. The main exception being that there are some proprietary tools that are pretty explicitly not supported on linux which require windows or macos.

networkchad 3y ago

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sockaddr 3y ago

Agreed. It is the year of the linux desktop. I installed Pop OS and everything works great right out of the box. It's now good enough that I could install it on my mom's computer.

bacchusracine 3y ago

>KDE gets better every week. As someone who has tried KDE off and on over the years since its version 2.0 release in SuSE Linux, and through various versions and distros since is there a fork that doesn't have twenty different configuration options in their own apps? I was most happy with Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x desktop and am currently using Mate Desktop these days to try to hold on to what I consider the best desktop and what I always felt "home" at when using it. But it gets more and more inconsistent release after release due to intentional theme breakages. I'd love to be able to use KDE or Plasma instead and take advantage of the way that desktop leverages its shared libraries for performance if only I could get over the behavior of its shell and configuration. Is there anything that I can run that re-organizes it into the traditional desktop that I prefer? A script? A combined theme? I see all sorts of themes for Windows (why?) and themes for OSX (also why? especially without the skeuomorphic looks of the past?) but there seems to be very little that would take someone from Gnome 2.x\Mate to KDE. Am I just missing it? Is there any way off this burning platform? I keep hearing how great KDE is and can perform but it makes my skin crawl when using it. Is there any way to change it that doesn't leave me lost at sea going between multiple applications with nested options? Thanks in advance for any advice given.

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iraqmtpizza 3y ago
I have yet to use a linux desktop which has working drag-and-drop. When you drag a file or file path from the file explorer and drop into the command prompt, it's supposed to put the file path there. Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another. I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level.
- aruggirello 3y ago
  > When you drag a file or file path from the file explorer and drop into the command prompt, it's supposed to put the file path there > Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another > I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level Guess what, that's exactly what happens in Dolphin (KDE Plasma). Please don't spread falsehoods.

RajT88 3y ago

Companies have not yet woken up to the idea that implementing this kind of telemetry is effectively leaking their private business data to third parties (competitors even). Nobody's been so obviously burned by it yet that the lawsuits have started flying. Just imagine the kind of data (say) Microsoft is leaking to Google, via all those users running Chrome. How about all those AMD users who are running Intel/NVIDIA graphics drivers in their laptops? If I am a big tech company sitting on a pile of that telemetry data, you can bet I'll be tempted to data mine it for such leaked data about what the competition is up to. It'll probably take an email leak to reveal the practice, and cause some sort of consequences for this though.

raxxorraxor 3y ago
Economic espionage is the largest field of espionage. Although I guess if any big tech company would get caught, there will be repercussions for their business.

deleted 3y ago

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darklycan51 3y ago

Proceeds to defend this by arguing that Windows already does it anyways then goes and mentions how Linux doesn't do it... but then your whole comment makes no sense, because there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers

wtallis 3y ago
> there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers I feel like you may be making some pretty wild assumptions. The Intel GPU drivers for Linux have little to nothing in common with the Intel GPU drivers for Windows.

Grom_PE 3y ago

Yep. Jumped ship after Windows 7 due to pervasive telemetry. That was a deal breaker for me. It's funny that Windows (and its ecosystem) getting shitty is the major factor of "Linux desktop" happening. I figured that the effort of decrapifying Windows has outgrown the effort of configuring a Linux system, and furthermore, the former becomes obsolete with every Windows update, but the latter stays with you forever. In 2022, Linux port of Far Manager, far2l, got a fork with LuaJIT scripting support, far2m, and that was the last thing holding me on Windows.