8 ms·

Sad you didn't see Linux as a better alternative to OSX. I credit it with making me at least 10% more productive over the twenty years I've used it, partly beca

Sad you didn't see Linux as a better alternative to OSX. I credit it with making me at least 10% more productive over the twenty years I've used it, partly because it is stable and fast, but mostly because it isn't trying to sell me stuff while I work.

smt88 3y ago
My experience is the opposite. I spent 15 years on Linux desktops until finally switching to Windows for the sake of my producivity. I've seen promoted links in Win10/11, but never anything that harmed my productivity. Most importantly, the OS just fades into the background. I never think about it. Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  > Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. I usually try to avoid discussions of the OS, since it's such a terribly boring topic. However, this is quite an extraordinary claim that is made without any details. Perhaps you could elaborate. As someone that has used various Linux distros for nearly twenty years, I don't think I could construct a scenario in which someone doing the usual things has to open a terminal to "fix or change something" on a daily basis. It's probably less than once a year that I have to fix anything on my Linux desktop computers. Did you build your own Linux distribution? Were you running IT at a company with 50,000 Linux desktops? Were you testing the development version of a desktop environment?
  - sam345 3y ago
    I believe it. I've used linux desktops for 20 years also and command line is definitely a must on a daily basis. Ive also used Windows and agree that it just fades into background. Windows 10/11 definitely less paiinful on the desktop. These days with better integration with and tools for Linux cli, Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment. Many Linux fans don't know better or won't admit it because hate tends to blind.
    - mixmastamyk 3y ago
      I just set up Windows and spent an entire week googling how to tame it. Turns out dism.exe at the CLI is required to make it free up 20 to 30GB! of disk space it was wasting. Many, many hours and late nights figuring out how to turn off telemetry, Edge and more. Multiple Group policy editor settings to force it to do what is asked and no more. For some reason updates and uninstalls take forever and uninstalls can’t be batched. (A powsh I found didn’t work) I could go on… “Fades in the background” my ass. :-P
      - mrweasel 3y ago
        > spent an entire week googling how to tame it Part of the reason Windows doesn't fade into the background for you is that you insist on fighting it, you're tweaking stuff you should just leave alone... according to Microsoft. Physically it's not possible for me to use Windows, my hand cramps up, not completely sure why that happens, but it provides a constant physical reminder that I'm using Windows.
      - cbozeman 3y ago
        2TB 2.5" SATA SSDs are $61. 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs are $63. Why are you worried about 20-30 GB again??
        mixmastamyk 3y ago
        Bandwidth - was building a VM. A 10GB VM is much more convenient than 40GB one, to move copy, share, run from network drive etc. And yes, a few older drives are kinda small here. Laptop vendors overcharge on storage so most of ours have a half TB, which goes fast. We could buy a number of new drives, or we could look up an esoteric CLI and free up 30g.
        cbozeman 3y ago
        Ahhh yes, now that makes sense. Point taken!
    - anothernewdude 3y ago
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    It's 2023 and I still can't get a Dell laptop with Linux pre-installed to sleep properly without crashing without editing things in the terminal and mucking about in the bios. Even giving up on that and disabling sleep on lid close requires using the terminal. Sure the Gnome Tweaks tool has a setting for that but it's not installed by default and check the comments here, it doesn't actually work. https://askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-to-do-nothing-when-i-close-my-laptop-lid https://askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-... https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz/000179566/how-to-disable-sleep-and-configure-lid-power-settings-for-ubuntu-or-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7 https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz/000179566/how-to-di...
    - dspillett 3y ago
      It is 2023, and they seem to have completely broken hibernate on Windows. Didn't work reliably for a while, intermittently failing to wake up correctly in various ways, one of those ways being a black screen with no choice but to reboot¹, and it seems to have vanished as an option on most (maybe all) laptops I've used recently². And sleep doesn't always stay slept. We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty³. So sleep/hibernate not working right is hardly a significant difference when comparing Linux to Windows. In fact one of the laptops I had trouble with did sleep and hibernate properly when Linux went on it for a while, so at least sometimes the difference is not in favour of Windows. ---- [1] the couple of times that happened to me, the machine would still work via RDC and other such so an orderly restart could be arranged if I had another machine on the same network, but if I had no such machine available like when travelling a hard-reset had to be forced [2] I'm told you can force it to be available again, but I assume the removal is an admission that is doesn't work properly so enabling it is risky [3] being in a bag isn't great for cooling airflow!
      - alpaca128 3y ago
        > We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty I've seen a hypothesis for this relatively common issue, which is: laptop goes to sleep while connected to charger, then charger is unplugged but the laptop still believes it gets charged and starts downloading OS updates, emptying the battery and almost overheating in a bag. I don't have a Windows laptop to test it myself, though.
  - kuboble 3y ago
    I think when you are such a proficient user of some technology you don't even realize how many mistakes you can make along the way. And some small annoyance that you don't even notice might be a burden and a day-long struggle for someone less experienced. As an example of such a behavior on Windows. My customers (too often) complain that my console-based program suddenly stopped and they tried everything and can't make it to restart. The problem is that they don't realize that selecting some text in the window blocks the stdout and the program won't continue until they remove the selection. So for a more experienced user it's nothing, but for someone new to terminal behavior it's a huge obstacle. On Linux you have much more traps like that.
    - rendaw 3y ago
      GP said 15 years though, not exactly someone less experienced.
      - dspillett 3y ago
        I know people who seem to have managed to have the same year of experience 15 times over, learning nothing along the way… Time spent is not necessarily experience, especially if you are trying to do something else at the time. In this case trying to do DayJob so not having time/care to commit much operating system management knowledge to memory, which is more understandable than the people mentioned in my first sentence who were failing to learn what was their job.
  - gokhan 3y ago
    My son got a Lenovo T16 AMD for school, wanted to go with Kubuntu and spent one week setting up hibernate. Only solution that works is still hacky, he runs a script that disables then enables some things after returning from hibernation to make networking work. This, on a machine that you can buy with Linux.
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      My dad bought a Dell and reboots it almost every day because the wifi or USB drivers randomly stop working, on Windows. My own old Dell had a similar issue with the audio driver, it would just randomly stop working and every app trying to play a sound would instantly crash. Luckily in that case a generic Windows driver worked better. So two of three Dell laptops in our family were basically shipped in a broken state. My Surface Pro soft bricked itself during a normal shutdown. I had great experiences with Windows in the past, but not anymore.
- brian-armstrong 3y ago
  I don't think I agree with this. I left Macos for Linux a few years ago and the first month was pretty frustrating, but it got much easier after that. I think it does help to invest time in making it work though. On the upside, I've had many fewer instances where an update suddenly breaks things and causes me to stop working unexpectedly to fix them.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  I work on Linux and game on Windows (for the moment). I switched to Linux around 12 years ago, after Entity Framework was the last straw developing .Net stuff. Configuring Linux is fun, so yes, I've done a reasonable amount of playing around with it. But I chose this. There was always the option of picking a "batteries included" distro and just running that with no playing around. I've never encountered a situation where I had to open a terminal to fix or change something that I didn't cause. Windows repeatedly gets in my face about updates, often at inconvenient times. It's just generally a worse experience, in part because it seems so condescending compared to Linux. The tone is always "are you sure you want to do this?", "these are super-advanced settings that we don't think you should be messing with", and so on. I'm always swearing at the bloody thing to just get out of my way.
  - tremon 3y ago
    it seems so condescending compared to Linux This is my experience as well. To use a power tools analogy, Windows is the DIY line of equipment: moderately powered, relatively easy to use, if it breaks/wears down you buy a new one. Linux, on the other hand, is the professional's choice: much more powerful, harder to master, but it's user servicable and infinitely better customizable for each use case.
- anon-3988 3y ago
  > Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually. Really? What kind of things do you have to google for Linux to work these days? The opposite is true for me in Windows, I am not about to relearn how to use the Windows terminal.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    In my personal experience it's usually random little things that technically work but not quite right, and occasionally it's stuff that's just outright broken. There's also been a fair amount of googling for how to set up X in Linux to do Y only to find a trail of half-functional or abandoned packages. Getting global menus set up in your DE of choice for example takes a surprising amount of twiddling and even at its best doesn't work with a lot of software. Getting everything functioning as expected with a minimal WM setup is also a surprising amount of work (e.g. laptop volume keys not working if some daemon isn't running). Admittedly it's not as bad if all your want is a Win9x-type or iPad-type desktop.
    - bergon 3y ago
      It's frustrating that you can't change DE in Windows though, and that it changes from version to version.
      - anticensor 3y ago
        You actually can, but there is no viable alternative DE. If only KDE had a Win32-free build for Windows.
        bergon 3y ago
        I didn't know that, thanks for mentioning. It's apparently called shells in Windows lingo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_f...
    - 3y ago
- topaz0 3y ago
  > [Windows 10/11] fades into the background I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something works and fix it, but there are generally many months between those events, when everything just works and gets out of my way.
  - Novosell 3y ago
    Windows key+E opens explorer. Or do you mean that it's so slow that it takes several seconds?
    - dspillett 3y ago
      On my work machine (approx 4 years old, Win10) and home machine (mostly 2 years old, graphics card, a 1060/6GB is more elderly, Win10) both take most of a second to bring up a fresh Explorer window, timing by eye from Win+E to the whole UI being present. It seems far more variable (sometimes feeling quicker, sometimes taking a couple of seconds) on my laptop (<1 year old, i5 CPU 16G RAM, Win11). All are using decently speedy SSD drives. Several seconds sounds like an exaggeration, but it never seems anything but sluggish to me. One UX delay that irritates me is the time it often takes between hitting Win+R and the run dialogue finally being ready for input. Regularly the first few characters of what I type after that ends up going to the app that originally had focus. That used to be instant, on much older kit.
      - topaz0 3y ago
        Several seconds is not an exaggeration. The window appears quickly enough, but then spins for several seconds (there's a progress bar in the path field) before showing any file. Win11 personal, on a brand new, middle-of-the-road desktop.
      - vladvasiliu 3y ago
        Have you tried opening some files over the network, then coming back to the explorer? It'll insist on showing those files in the Recents screen. Except it actually tries to touch them or something. Which, when I'm not at work anymore, takes forever waiting for a timeout. Hell, even at work it sometimes takes a while, while doing the AD handshake or whatever it is that it does instead of letting me use the freaking explorer. I don't use Windows often enough to go out of my way to customize it, plus I know that the next update will probably undo everything anyway, but now I have to wait around multiple seconds for it to realize the files are not there. And it won't even remember it from one instance of explorer to the next, or try to check on those files without blocking the entire app's UI. This shitshow also happens in the open / save as dialogs when called from other apps.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  I've had the same experience. Linux just requires too much babysitting for me, while Windows 11 just works. I haven't had any major problems nor any issues with my productivity.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
codebolt 3y ago
My 8 year old son inherited an old laptop this week, that was too slow to consider installing Win 11, so I ended up loading it with XUbuntu. The first thing I did was actually to install Edge, because that makes it possible to monitor his web browsing using MS Parental Controls. I actually think it's a good browser, certainly better than Chrome (too bloated) or Firefox (too buggy). I'll never understand HNs relentless hatred for all things MS.
- makapuf 3y ago
  When a company uses dirty tactics against your project, forcing its (at the time) inferior product by strong arming pc vendors, call your project a Cancer and tries to undermine java and the Web and has been found guilty on court, some animosity is in order. Yeah its been a long time. Seeing current practices, not so much it seems.
- devsda 3y ago
  What are these bugs that people encounter that often in Firefox? I've been using using Firefox on Linux and Mac for a long time now and I'm yet to see any bug(a rare occurrence) that is a show stopper(for me atleast).
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    I guess the "best viewed with" and "please use the last version of chrome" banners preventing you from logging in some services could be seen as a bug from normal users.
    - codebolt 3y ago
      This is the reason. Too often I will go to a site and find that it's unusable with Firefox.
  - deutschepost 3y ago
    Some anti virus software will impede site loading times in firefox or even normal operation. Windows will protect edge and other microsoft software from AV. But depending on how bad the AV is, other software will have less luck.
biogene 3y ago
Sure, nobody can say you "can't do" something with Linux. But the "can't" is more meant as "can't easily do". To give you an example - I have a small+fast SSD for my OS and a large+slow spinning disk for data storage. When I install software on Windows I sometimes point to the other drive. This task is easier to do on Windows. The last I looked at it, Linux had a solution, but it was very convoluted. I see computer hardware and software products as purely a means to an end, I will use whatever that gets the job done. Each person only has a limited quota of things that they can give a lot of energy to, and for me F/OSS is not something that I particularly go out of my way to support. My 'things that I give a shit about' quota is filled to the brim with the work I'm doing in healthcare.

smt88 3y ago

My experience is the opposite. I spent 15 years on Linux desktops until finally switching to Windows for the sake of my producivity. I've seen promoted links in Win10/11, but never anything that harmed my productivity. Most importantly, the OS just fades into the background. I never think about it. Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.

bachmeier 3y ago
> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. I usually try to avoid discussions of the OS, since it's such a terribly boring topic. However, this is quite an extraordinary claim that is made without any details. Perhaps you could elaborate. As someone that has used various Linux distros for nearly twenty years, I don't think I could construct a scenario in which someone doing the usual things has to open a terminal to "fix or change something" on a daily basis. It's probably less than once a year that I have to fix anything on my Linux desktop computers. Did you build your own Linux distribution? Were you running IT at a company with 50,000 Linux desktops? Were you testing the development version of a desktop environment?
- sam345 3y ago
  I believe it. I've used linux desktops for 20 years also and command line is definitely a must on a daily basis. Ive also used Windows and agree that it just fades into background. Windows 10/11 definitely less paiinful on the desktop. These days with better integration with and tools for Linux cli, Windows is definitely my preferred gui productivity environment. Many Linux fans don't know better or won't admit it because hate tends to blind.
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    I just set up Windows and spent an entire week googling how to tame it. Turns out dism.exe at the CLI is required to make it free up 20 to 30GB! of disk space it was wasting. Many, many hours and late nights figuring out how to turn off telemetry, Edge and more. Multiple Group policy editor settings to force it to do what is asked and no more. For some reason updates and uninstalls take forever and uninstalls can’t be batched. (A powsh I found didn’t work) I could go on… “Fades in the background” my ass. :-P
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      > spent an entire week googling how to tame it Part of the reason Windows doesn't fade into the background for you is that you insist on fighting it, you're tweaking stuff you should just leave alone... according to Microsoft. Physically it's not possible for me to use Windows, my hand cramps up, not completely sure why that happens, but it provides a constant physical reminder that I'm using Windows.
    - cbozeman 3y ago
      2TB 2.5" SATA SSDs are $61. 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs are $63. Why are you worried about 20-30 GB again??
      - mixmastamyk 3y ago
        Bandwidth - was building a VM. A 10GB VM is much more convenient than 40GB one, to move copy, share, run from network drive etc. And yes, a few older drives are kinda small here. Laptop vendors overcharge on storage so most of ours have a half TB, which goes fast. We could buy a number of new drives, or we could look up an esoteric CLI and free up 30g.
        cbozeman 3y ago
        Ahhh yes, now that makes sense. Point taken!
  - anothernewdude 3y ago
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  It's 2023 and I still can't get a Dell laptop with Linux pre-installed to sleep properly without crashing without editing things in the terminal and mucking about in the bios. Even giving up on that and disabling sleep on lid close requires using the terminal. Sure the Gnome Tweaks tool has a setting for that but it's not installed by default and check the comments here, it doesn't actually work. https://askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-to-do-nothing-when-i-close-my-laptop-lid https://askubuntu.com/questions/15520/how-can-i-tell-ubuntu-... https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz/000179566/how-to-disable-sleep-and-configure-lid-power-settings-for-ubuntu-or-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7 https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz/000179566/how-to-di...
  - dspillett 3y ago
    It is 2023, and they seem to have completely broken hibernate on Windows. Didn't work reliably for a while, intermittently failing to wake up correctly in various ways, one of those ways being a black screen with no choice but to reboot¹, and it seems to have vanished as an option on most (maybe all) laptops I've used recently². And sleep doesn't always stay slept. We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty³. So sleep/hibernate not working right is hardly a significant difference when comparing Linux to Windows. In fact one of the laptops I had trouble with did sleep and hibernate properly when Linux went on it for a while, so at least sometimes the difference is not in favour of Windows. ---- [1] the couple of times that happened to me, the machine would still work via RDC and other such so an orderly restart could be arranged if I had another machine on the same network, but if I had no such machine available like when travelling a hard-reset had to be forced [2] I'm told you can force it to be available again, but I assume the removal is an admission that is doesn't work properly so enabling it is risky [3] being in a bag isn't great for cooling airflow!
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      > We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty I've seen a hypothesis for this relatively common issue, which is: laptop goes to sleep while connected to charger, then charger is unplugged but the laptop still believes it gets charged and starts downloading OS updates, emptying the battery and almost overheating in a bag. I don't have a Windows laptop to test it myself, though.
- kuboble 3y ago
  I think when you are such a proficient user of some technology you don't even realize how many mistakes you can make along the way. And some small annoyance that you don't even notice might be a burden and a day-long struggle for someone less experienced. As an example of such a behavior on Windows. My customers (too often) complain that my console-based program suddenly stopped and they tried everything and can't make it to restart. The problem is that they don't realize that selecting some text in the window blocks the stdout and the program won't continue until they remove the selection. So for a more experienced user it's nothing, but for someone new to terminal behavior it's a huge obstacle. On Linux you have much more traps like that.
  - rendaw 3y ago
    GP said 15 years though, not exactly someone less experienced.
    - dspillett 3y ago
      I know people who seem to have managed to have the same year of experience 15 times over, learning nothing along the way… Time spent is not necessarily experience, especially if you are trying to do something else at the time. In this case trying to do DayJob so not having time/care to commit much operating system management knowledge to memory, which is more understandable than the people mentioned in my first sentence who were failing to learn what was their job.
- gokhan 3y ago
  My son got a Lenovo T16 AMD for school, wanted to go with Kubuntu and spent one week setting up hibernate. Only solution that works is still hacky, he runs a script that disables then enables some things after returning from hibernation to make networking work. This, on a machine that you can buy with Linux.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    My dad bought a Dell and reboots it almost every day because the wifi or USB drivers randomly stop working, on Windows. My own old Dell had a similar issue with the audio driver, it would just randomly stop working and every app trying to play a sound would instantly crash. Luckily in that case a generic Windows driver worked better. So two of three Dell laptops in our family were basically shipped in a broken state. My Surface Pro soft bricked itself during a normal shutdown. I had great experiences with Windows in the past, but not anymore.
brian-armstrong 3y ago
I don't think I agree with this. I left Macos for Linux a few years ago and the first month was pretty frustrating, but it got much easier after that. I think it does help to invest time in making it work though. On the upside, I've had many fewer instances where an update suddenly breaks things and causes me to stop working unexpectedly to fix them.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
I work on Linux and game on Windows (for the moment). I switched to Linux around 12 years ago, after Entity Framework was the last straw developing .Net stuff. Configuring Linux is fun, so yes, I've done a reasonable amount of playing around with it. But I chose this. There was always the option of picking a "batteries included" distro and just running that with no playing around. I've never encountered a situation where I had to open a terminal to fix or change something that I didn't cause. Windows repeatedly gets in my face about updates, often at inconvenient times. It's just generally a worse experience, in part because it seems so condescending compared to Linux. The tone is always "are you sure you want to do this?", "these are super-advanced settings that we don't think you should be messing with", and so on. I'm always swearing at the bloody thing to just get out of my way.
- tremon 3y ago
  it seems so condescending compared to Linux This is my experience as well. To use a power tools analogy, Windows is the DIY line of equipment: moderately powered, relatively easy to use, if it breaks/wears down you buy a new one. Linux, on the other hand, is the professional's choice: much more powerful, harder to master, but it's user servicable and infinitely better customizable for each use case.
anon-3988 3y ago
> Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually. Really? What kind of things do you have to google for Linux to work these days? The opposite is true for me in Windows, I am not about to relearn how to use the Windows terminal.
- jwells89 3y ago
  In my personal experience it's usually random little things that technically work but not quite right, and occasionally it's stuff that's just outright broken. There's also been a fair amount of googling for how to set up X in Linux to do Y only to find a trail of half-functional or abandoned packages. Getting global menus set up in your DE of choice for example takes a surprising amount of twiddling and even at its best doesn't work with a lot of software. Getting everything functioning as expected with a minimal WM setup is also a surprising amount of work (e.g. laptop volume keys not working if some daemon isn't running). Admittedly it's not as bad if all your want is a Win9x-type or iPad-type desktop.
  - bergon 3y ago
    It's frustrating that you can't change DE in Windows though, and that it changes from version to version.
    - anticensor 3y ago
      You actually can, but there is no viable alternative DE. If only KDE had a Win32-free build for Windows.
      - bergon 3y ago
        I didn't know that, thanks for mentioning. It's apparently called shells in Windows lingo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_f...
  - 3y ago
topaz0 3y ago
> [Windows 10/11] fades into the background I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something works and fix it, but there are generally many months between those events, when everything just works and gets out of my way.
- Novosell 3y ago
  Windows key+E opens explorer. Or do you mean that it's so slow that it takes several seconds?
  - dspillett 3y ago
    On my work machine (approx 4 years old, Win10) and home machine (mostly 2 years old, graphics card, a 1060/6GB is more elderly, Win10) both take most of a second to bring up a fresh Explorer window, timing by eye from Win+E to the whole UI being present. It seems far more variable (sometimes feeling quicker, sometimes taking a couple of seconds) on my laptop (<1 year old, i5 CPU 16G RAM, Win11). All are using decently speedy SSD drives. Several seconds sounds like an exaggeration, but it never seems anything but sluggish to me. One UX delay that irritates me is the time it often takes between hitting Win+R and the run dialogue finally being ready for input. Regularly the first few characters of what I type after that ends up going to the app that originally had focus. That used to be instant, on much older kit.
    - topaz0 3y ago
      Several seconds is not an exaggeration. The window appears quickly enough, but then spins for several seconds (there's a progress bar in the path field) before showing any file. Win11 personal, on a brand new, middle-of-the-road desktop.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Have you tried opening some files over the network, then coming back to the explorer? It'll insist on showing those files in the Recents screen. Except it actually tries to touch them or something. Which, when I'm not at work anymore, takes forever waiting for a timeout. Hell, even at work it sometimes takes a while, while doing the AD handshake or whatever it is that it does instead of letting me use the freaking explorer. I don't use Windows often enough to go out of my way to customize it, plus I know that the next update will probably undo everything anyway, but now I have to wait around multiple seconds for it to realize the files are not there. And it won't even remember it from one instance of explorer to the next, or try to check on those files without blocking the entire app's UI. This shitshow also happens in the open / save as dialogs when called from other apps.
deafpolygon 3y ago
I've had the same experience. Linux just requires too much babysitting for me, while Windows 11 just works. I haven't had any major problems nor any issues with my productivity.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

codebolt 3y ago

My 8 year old son inherited an old laptop this week, that was too slow to consider installing Win 11, so I ended up loading it with XUbuntu. The first thing I did was actually to install Edge, because that makes it possible to monitor his web browsing using MS Parental Controls. I actually think it's a good browser, certainly better than Chrome (too bloated) or Firefox (too buggy). I'll never understand HNs relentless hatred for all things MS.

makapuf 3y ago
When a company uses dirty tactics against your project, forcing its (at the time) inferior product by strong arming pc vendors, call your project a Cancer and tries to undermine java and the Web and has been found guilty on court, some animosity is in order. Yeah its been a long time. Seeing current practices, not so much it seems.
devsda 3y ago
What are these bugs that people encounter that often in Firefox? I've been using using Firefox on Linux and Mac for a long time now and I'm yet to see any bug(a rare occurrence) that is a show stopper(for me atleast).
- Zetobal 3y ago
  I guess the "best viewed with" and "please use the last version of chrome" banners preventing you from logging in some services could be seen as a bug from normal users.
  - codebolt 3y ago
    This is the reason. Too often I will go to a site and find that it's unusable with Firefox.
- deutschepost 3y ago
  Some anti virus software will impede site loading times in firefox or even normal operation. Windows will protect edge and other microsoft software from AV. But depending on how bad the AV is, other software will have less luck.

biogene 3y ago

Sure, nobody can say you "can't do" something with Linux. But the "can't" is more meant as "can't easily do". To give you an example - I have a small+fast SSD for my OS and a large+slow spinning disk for data storage. When I install software on Windows I sometimes point to the other drive. This task is easier to do on Windows. The last I looked at it, Linux had a solution, but it was very convoluted. I see computer hardware and software products as purely a means to an end, I will use whatever that gets the job done. Each person only has a limited quota of things that they can give a lot of energy to, and for me F/OSS is not something that I particularly go out of my way to support. My 'things that I give a shit about' quota is filled to the brim with the work I'm doing in healthcare.