8 ms·

Windows 11 is amazing, I left Linux

39 points by quyleanh 3y ago

twelfthnight 3y ago
Linux desktop has issues, but at least it doesn't have ads on the lock screen, tracking, upsells to one drive and forced updates. Also it's free.
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  Absolutely as a work tool it is perfect. No chance I'd be as productive if I was to be forced to use Windows in a software development professional environment. I find it really surprising on the rare occasion these days that somebody shares the screen and suddenly Windows is there.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  > > Also it's free Windows is also free if you know where to look for it :)
  - twelfthnight 3y ago
    I wonder if it's actually easier to get a hold of a free copy of Windows than pick and install a Distro? :p
  - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
    https://www.golem.de/news/windows-und-office-tausende-verfahren-wegen-unserioeser-microsoft-lizenzen-2103-154691.html https://www.golem.de/news/windows-und-office-tausende-verfah... "Thousands of proceedings due to dubious Microsoft licenses Anyone who buys a very cheap license key for Microsoft products must expect to be summoned by the police or have their house searched."
    - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
      Sure thing, they'd be storming the place with Apache helicopters.
  - mavhc 3y ago
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11 ?
    - m45t3r 3y ago
      You still need a license.
      - mavhc 3y ago
        It'll work fine without one though
  - mikecoles 3y ago
    Still not worth it for the price tag of "free".
- Volundr 3y ago
  Windows constantly nags me to "back up my files to OneDrive". There does not appear to be a way to turn off this nag, just silence it for 30 days at a time. This is just one of the many annoyances that mean I rarely boot windows anymore.
sho 3y ago
Is this sarcasm/trolling? I honestly can't tell.
- dtech 3y ago
  Not sure, but if there's any place you could find genuine posts like this it's a subreddit dedicated to the product that's being praised.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Are people not allowed to have a positive opinion about an OS you dislike? The OS is like a tool, not a religion. If it works for you great, if not then pick another tool, no need to go into a heated holy-war debate about how your tool is the beast and other people are using the wrong tool.
  - s3p 3y ago
    How did OP go into a holy war debate about his favorite OS? Where is the comment of him saying that? Where is him praising an alternative to windows? Or, maybe, is it possible that he was only asking a question?
  - fsflover 3y ago
    > Are people not allowed to have a positive opinion about an OS you dislike? The original post has no details whatsoever, it's just praising Windows for no reason. To me it does look like trolling.
    - taylodl 3y ago
      ^^^^^ This. Echoes my thoughts. Completely devoid of any details.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >The original post has no details whatsoever, it's just praising Windows for no reason. To me it does look like trolling. The details are in his post: "this is the most beautiful OS UI ever, more than GNOME and MacOS in my opinion" The author lets us know he likes the interface of W11 more. Very important aspect for a OS you'll have to use regularly. "After years of distro hopping and constant problems [...] not have to worry about Wayland, Nvidia" The author lets un know he distro hopped but had issues with Wayland and Nvidia. Again an important point, what use is a OS that has issues with your HW/setup? Better stick to what already works for you. Most people don't have time to go into wikis, forums and tutorial rabbit holes to get $DISTRO working on their HW if Windows already works out of the box. To me at least, the author has made it clear why W11 is better than Linux -FOR HIM-. So either you didn't read his post or you're the one who's trolling.
Boogie_Man 3y ago
Using Windows 11 is, for me personally, absolutely brutal. The defaults feel anti user. An example in the form of an issue I encountered recently: if you have an OS that fails to boot, and you had files on demand enabled in directories backed up with one drive, the files are totally inaccessible on the local disk, even if you had them "synced". It seems like retrieving files from my SSD should be a basic function of a general purpose OS, but they've gone and bungled it in order to push dependence on their cloud services.
- mavhc 3y ago
  Why would you need to if they're synced to the cloud, just download them again
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    I think the question he is asking is why download something sitting on the local disk.
  - Boogie_Man 3y ago
    Two answers General answer: Because it's needless complexity (relying on a company's service rather than... reading from a local disk) that masks what is actually happening behind the scenes. It will always be less reliable. Answer in that specific situation: They were files in a OneDrive that no longer existed after a tenant migration (they hired a consulting company that seemed to bungle things).
    - mavhc 3y ago
      Pretty sure logging into a service you decided to use on another computer is easier than trying to recover files from a computer that won't boot If you set up files on demand, you have to demand your files, it's in the name. Hope they never paid the consulting company
      - Boogie_Man 3y ago
        If software prevents me from performing a simple action on my files on my machine (unless this is the specific intended function I had for the program) it is, in the simplest sense of the term, malware. It has done me malice. People pay to be harmed, go figure.
hashtag-til 3y ago
Said no one, ever.
perryizgr8 3y ago
Windows is easily the best desktop os right now. Linux requires a vast amount of intricate knowledge, constant troubleshooting, just to keep your system running. There is a way to not do this, but it needs you to never update the system at all. And macos is not even available for people to install on their pc, so that's not an option. My windows PC stays updated without issues, never faced any strange issues with audio, graphics, nothing. My games run the best they can on my hardware, I don't have to worry about tinkering with stuff. What's not to like?
- imgabe 3y ago
  Hi there. So nice of you to join us from 20 years ago. Linux these days runs quite well and has no driver issues. Meanwhile my Windows machine randomly hangs every 30 minutes or so while it spins the hard drive for no reason at all.
- Loughla 3y ago
  Have you used linux in the last 10-12 years? Install linux mint. It's literally point and click. The only difference between it an windows is that it asks you to confirm the updates it installs, and lets you know if the updates have changed the information the software collects from you or has access to. You are wildly out of date.
- K0balt 3y ago
  I think that is maybe the case where you use more technical applications that require elaborate environment setups… but I have a classroom of 20 Linux laptops running on Ubuntu LTS and have had years of automatic updates with zero issues, and more than a decade on some of my backend systems which have been cloned through several hardware iterations. YMMV?
- dwringer 3y ago
  I too like Windows and use it as my daily OS everywhere, but I am firmly against ever upgrading to Windows 11 and, with each update, Windows 10 gets more unpleasantly like 11. Recently I tried to open an image, and the Windows Store asked me to pay 99 cents for the codec. Actually, for a video codec pack - it showed me as already having the codec pack for exactly these images installed. But they wouldn't open, only the Windows Store appeared asking me to pay 99 cents. Adding insult to injury, it seems that anyone who did this earlier than a couple of years ago got the pack for free - I was only asked to pay for it because I hadn't secured my rights at the time, apparently. Even though the Windows store verly clearly indicates that I already had the image codec installed. [even more fun, the Windows store had additional prominent listings for what appeared to be these codecs, for free, but were very transparently third party spyware and not really the codecs at all.] Windows 11 vs 10 feels in many ways analogous to me to Windows ME vs Windows 2000, at least in terms of user-hostility.
glimshe 3y ago
These comparisons tend to be very tedious. I use Windows 11, MacOS and Linux in different scenarios. They have advantages and disadvantages for different applications. My main computer is Windows because it works better for my needs, but Linux is great too. I like MacOS the least, but it does really well in battery life with the M2 processor.
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  Windows is the the OS that keeps the family always in touch with you.
  - gwnywg 3y ago
    My mom is on arch, and she is as happy as if it was windows but with faster boot and faster response time. She could not tell the difference since all she needs is browser.
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      What about all the time she spends telling people that she's an arch user?
      - gwnywg 3y ago
        She knows it's some flavour of linux and she knows it's way faster than windows she had before. These are simple facts improving her day-to-day experience, no need to be negative about that.
        ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
        Sorry - I wasn't intending to be negative, but making a quip about how arch users love to tell everyone about it. I've got Arch in use on a couple of machines (Steam Deck being my favourite, though I strictly use that just for games) and it's one of my favourite flavours of Linux. The best part of Arch is the wiki which has quality information on a lot of Linux tools - it's useful for all Linux wranglers (maybe not your mum unless she likes reading documentation).
pockybum522 3y ago
Boy it didn't take much scrolling there for the comments to get inane. "the Micro$oft haters would have you belive that opensource is a wonderful garden of altruistic developers all helping out with each other's code for free. Well if anyone thinks that I suggest they go and look at how many billions the companies like Debian and Redhat are worth. Nobody is working for free and it's simply do you pay for the ownership and get free support or do you get product for free and pay for support." Yep. Those sure are the only two options when you use Linux. /s
- akagusu 3y ago
  Debian is not a company.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > how many billions the companies like Debian and Redhat are worth Er, why would you even mention those in the same sentence? RH is worth a fortune. Debian is a community effort with no company behind it. They're completely different.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  This is what Reddit has become.
musha68k 3y ago
Nice guerilla marketing attempt MSFT :P
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I'm very much a Linux person, having used it for decades, but I still find whenever I need to do something in Windows, that it's a total mess with regards to the different GUI paradigms in use in different tools. For instance, setting up an iSCSI volume drops you into some archaic window that isn't resizable despite having lengthy WWIDs that need to have their column size increased so that you can then scroll and actually see the relevant bit at the end. And that's just one example from the top of my head. Maybe I just notice the glaring inconsistencies and user-unfriendliness of it because I'm much more at home using a CLI which is typically very flexible and doesn't force you to interact with poorly designed GUIs.
- soco 3y ago
  If you need to connect iSCSI I'd say you're definitely not the target user base for Windows 11. I use W11 at home (streaming, browsing, emails, word) completely happy, it's a no-brain-required environment and W11 is perfect for that. At work I happily use Linux for all the tricks and updates and whatnot I actually need to do to win my bread. And someone else will happily use MacOS for artistry... so? Does that deny the use case of any others? No it doesn't.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    I have no issue with people using whatever OS they want to - that's part of why I had a big grudge against Microsoft over the years with their anti-competitive strategies. It just amazes me that other people don't pick up on the obvious issues that come with competing teams producing different parts of the OS. There's still a bunch of old style control panel tools in use in Win11 and they've been there since Vista at least.
- pnutjam 3y ago
  My kids windows computers suddenly activated Family mode so I need to log onto my MS account to authorize absolutely everything; but only in Edge, not Chrome. What's the point. It's very frustrating. I'll probably switch it to Linux for the one that uses Google classroom at school.
rvz 3y ago
Perhaps WSL2 won over this user when work needed to be done rather than distro hopping for years and fighting over drivers, desktops and window managers. Windows with WSL2 is the best Linux distro anyway. No need to dual boot, format drives or whatever. Just run the system and move on.
31337Logic 3y ago
Prepare to get demolished by this community, you Microsoft shill. How insulting.
PedroBatista 3y ago
Of course that Reddit post and discussion is going as anyone would expect. ( and here too to a lesser degree - I hope ) I think the one thing we can all agree regardless of OS we like or are using is: Windows 11 is NOT amazing. It's.. Windows. It's good/bad/ok/whatever but not amazing. As for Linux, reading the comments it's safe to say 2023 doesn't look like it's the year of Linux on the desktop. Maybe 2024 :)
- twelfthnight 3y ago
  I feel like Windows is the bud light of operating systems. It's corporate, a worse experience than alternatives, increasingly focused on advertising and is only popular because it's the only beer on tap at your favorite bar (video games).
jchw 3y ago
It's a troll post. The best giveaway is use of the term "distro-hopping" which, while a legitimate term, is probably more common in flamebait than actual usage. Then it brings up Android vs iOS for basically absolutely no reason. Could be legitimate. It's not, but it totally could be if you believe hard enough.
neilalexander 3y ago
Amazing is the new Outlook app for Windows, which inserts adverts inline into your inbox and disguises them to look like emails so that you'll click on them. Better yet, the new Outlook will forcefully replace the existing built-in Mail app in 2024. Amazing is the new Edge browser, which syndicates clickbait articles and adverts from some of the worst and most divisive publishers right onto the opening screen. Attempts to download other browsers are met with nagware popups pleading with you to use Edge. Truly amazing.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Isn't that basically Microsoft Gmail?
- pieter_mj 3y ago
  the new Outlook also steals your imap credentials.
nu11ptr 3y ago
I just did my first install of Windows 11. Based on what I had read before (which wasn't much), I expected Windows 10 + a new UI. Maybe it was my low expectations, but I was seriously impressed. It feels like MS really put a lot of work into polishing things. First, the biggest change does seem to be the new UI, but it is a HUGE improvement. Not only does it look nice and have more of a dock focus, but I also noticed everything is very smooth, even on the same hardware previously running Windows 10. With WSL2, it would be pretty easy to use Win11 UI for graphical apps, but use WSL2 for all my dev stuff. I am not sure if I will "switch" my home system at some point from PopOS Linux, but this is the first time I have ever even contemplated such in a very long time.
swe_dima 3y ago
I have switched to Windows for development on a laptop as well. Linux still feels very "raw" to me on laptops outside of laptops designed to run Linux, and those are very few, hard to buy, not enough options. MacOS laptops are great... unless you need to work with Docker, then it's still a nightmare. And these days most devs who work with backend need Docker. Windows with WSL offers a sweet middle spot.
- hoistbypetard 3y ago
  Docker just incorporated rosetta by default on apple silicon, and it's a night-and-day difference for the way I was using it. I had gone so far as to stop using docker for python app vms, and only use it for postgres and redis. Now I can use it for django and celery again.
  - swe_dima 3y ago
    Personally, I have used it on Intel macs and on my wife's M1 Pro about a year ago. But we recently had a couple of new folks join our team who opted for M2 laptops and they've been having more or less the same pains I had a year ago, so have to run images with emulation (and those sometimes have nasty segfaults).
    - hoistbypetard 3y ago
      The update that made it not terrible for me came about a week ago.
      - swe_dima 3y ago
        oh, in that case it's awesome news!
carlos22 3y ago
I'm not so sure about which W11 hype they are talking about. But the numbers tell different, in Germany win10 was growing faster then 11.
- gwnywg 3y ago
  I wonder at what point MS will force W11 :)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 3y ago
Trying to use the file browser (Explorer) on Windows 11 is enough to make me want to gouge my eyes out. I only use Windows for launching Call of Duty. As soon as the game is off, the PC gets turned off. Linux gets a lot of flack for having UI issues - but truth be told modern Windows is a case study in lava driven development where some apps look like they were made in 1998 and others look like they were made by the IKEA childrens department. Heck even the OS installer has not been touched since Windows 7 and is pretty terrible. Modern KDE is really worth taking for a spin. I find it to be far more visually consistent than Windows 11. The customization can be all the rope to hang yourself with but if you don't go hogwild with that I find it is a very clean, modern and consistent desktop experience.
- superchroma 3y ago
  You aren't really suffering because the group policy manager or whatever isn't written in the latest winui framework. I'd rather continuity than apple style shenanigans in the name of an annual rebrand and spitshine.
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    Apple is literally the definition of continuity. All of their apps have looked great and have remained consistent since OS X was initially released. Recent exception is the changes to the system settings panel, but the old design was the same for like 15 years. Just going through the "Let's finish setting up your PC!" that pops up after certain Windows updates (which is a problem in and of itself) illustrates the design inconsistency. Each stage of the wizard is a distinct web view rendering a completely different UI that has different fonts and buttons. You can get them to glitch and scroll a-la old school iframes, too. The context menus in Win11? They are fancy and new but 90% of the functions you want and need are hidden behind a disclosure menu that - you guessed it - pops out an ancient looking Windows 10 menu. Why even add the facade with limited functions? Just keep the old menu. I could probably write a 20 page blog post on all the UI fuckery in Windows 11. There is something to be said for the MSC stuff / management console remaining the same all these years ... but at that point we could all just be happy on Windows 2K shell with modern kernel and security enhancements.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
The key thing is WSL is very good. A real Linux environment with the distro of your choice running unmodified Linux binaries. It integrates well with Windows. Some things are a bit funky, like the networking, under the covers it's just a VM with all the usual issues that entails. But it mostly works great. Combined with Windows Terminal and VS.Code and Microsoft has a very nice UI for developing on Linux machines.
- gwnywg 3y ago
  is gpu exposed to docker containers started within wsl?
fzimmermann89 3y ago
I thought the same, until I noticed a really annoying WSL2 bug: On two machines I own, waking up from hibernate or standby causes a wsl related process (vmmem) to consume 100% CPU, with wsl becoming completely unresponsive (including wsl terminate etc). You have to kill all wsl processes, which requires admin rights. So without elevated rights, Ubuntu on windows is not usable on these laptops. The issue is known for years and has hundreds of comments on GitHub without a fix (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6982 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6982)
- nyantaro1 3y ago
  I ran into this issue as well. I also spent a few hours debugging problems with a database just to discover that I could not reach a server because WSL2 does not support IPV6 (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4518 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4518)
gunselginsel 3y ago
[flagged]
runjake 3y ago
Windows 11 could be great but Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot with bad decisions, ads, and other user-hostile actions. I’m curious who at Microsoft is blowing this opportunity by making these bad decisions and burning the credit they earned with developers? Brandon Leblanc? Someone higher up? Satya?
V__ 3y ago
I'm using Windows 10 right now as my main machine. I never experienced any crashes/blue screens except when my GPU started failing, but I can't count that against the OS. It is the most stable system I have ever used. Windows 11 on the other hand seems absolutely horrible to me. The privacy issues and anti user patterns keep piling on. I'm open to switch to a Linux distro (and use it on all my servers anyway), but they all seem horrible on desktop. A few weeks ago I installed Ubuntu for testing, set a light background and wanted to change the text colors of the desktop. Not possible, except if you want to start messing with some CSS files. I also wanted to add an app shortcut to the desktop, also not possible without some extension and then the icons sometimes don't match and not all apps were supported. If they would just create feature parity with the Windows Explorer, Windows might be toast in a few years, but it seems there is just no interest in that.
- timbit42 3y ago
  Ubuntu stopped being a good desktop when Canonical gave up on Unity quite a few years ago. I would recommend trying Linux Mint for a better desktop experience on Linux.
darthrupert 3y ago
Windows doesn't even do gaming better than Linux anymore. That was its last bastion for the last 3 decades but no more.
antisthenes 3y ago
This is written by GPT right? Or some 12-year old who hasn't done anything on a computer except some school assignments and a few emails? Cmon.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pupppet 3y ago
I'm not a fan, but I do find the Windows 11 animations buttery smooth.
daft_pink 3y ago
Gosh. Is the Linux experience terrible? Moved from Windows 10 to 11, and still use Windows 10 at work. Windows 11 is not better in anyway.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
We're so past April though.
gxonatano 3y ago
I wanted this to be true, and I really gave Windows 11 a fair trial for a while, but I hated it. Windows feels like a cobbled-together mess compared to nearly any flavor of Linux. Take for example the process of installing software. On Linux, type `sudo apt install the-program` and it's installed. What's that like on Windows? Open a web browser and search for the software publisher's website. Click around until you can find a package download. Download the installer. Double click the installer. Click "yes, I understand that I'm installing software downloaded from the Internet, and that's dangerous." Start the installation "wizard." Click "full install." Select the location you want to install the software. Click that you agree to like a hundred pages of the license terms and legal stuff. Delete the installer. After doing that a few times, I really started to miss Linux. Updating software is also crazy on Windows. Every single program bugs you individually that it needs to be updated. In some cases you then have to download a whole new version of the software package and go through all the above steps. On Linux you can just type `sudo apt upgrade` or equivalent and all your software is updated.
- azretd 3y ago
  There is ‘winget’ which is an attempt to make installing software easier. It is native with recent versions of Windows 11.
nipperkinfeet 3y ago
It's the opposite in my situation. After using Windows 11 for a few months, I considered moving to EndeavourOS. After two years, not much seemed to improve... In fact, it seemed to get worse. The company's decisions about user interface, web-based bloat, and regressions ultimately led me to decide to quit using any Microsoft products.
cdelsolar 3y ago
No it’s not lol

39 points by quyleanh 3y ago

Linux desktop has issues, but at least it doesn't have ads on the lock screen, tracking, upsells to one drive and forced updates. Also it's free.

hashtag-til 3y ago
Absolutely as a work tool it is perfect. No chance I'd be as productive if I was to be forced to use Windows in a software development professional environment. I find it really surprising on the rare occasion these days that somebody shares the screen and suddenly Windows is there.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > Also it's free Windows is also free if you know where to look for it :)
- twelfthnight 3y ago
  I wonder if it's actually easier to get a hold of a free copy of Windows than pick and install a Distro? :p
- 2-718-281-828 3y ago
  https://www.golem.de/news/windows-und-office-tausende-verfahren-wegen-unserioeser-microsoft-lizenzen-2103-154691.html https://www.golem.de/news/windows-und-office-tausende-verfah... "Thousands of proceedings due to dubious Microsoft licenses Anyone who buys a very cheap license key for Microsoft products must expect to be summoned by the police or have their house searched."
  - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
    Sure thing, they'd be storming the place with Apache helicopters.
- mavhc 3y ago
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11 ?
  - m45t3r 3y ago
    You still need a license.
    - mavhc 3y ago
      It'll work fine without one though
- mikecoles 3y ago
  Still not worth it for the price tag of "free".
Volundr 3y ago
Windows constantly nags me to "back up my files to OneDrive". There does not appear to be a way to turn off this nag, just silence it for 30 days at a time. This is just one of the many annoyances that mean I rarely boot windows anymore.

sho 3y ago

Is this sarcasm/trolling? I honestly can't tell.

dtech 3y ago
Not sure, but if there's any place you could find genuine posts like this it's a subreddit dedicated to the product that's being praised.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Are people not allowed to have a positive opinion about an OS you dislike? The OS is like a tool, not a religion. If it works for you great, if not then pick another tool, no need to go into a heated holy-war debate about how your tool is the beast and other people are using the wrong tool.
- s3p 3y ago
  How did OP go into a holy war debate about his favorite OS? Where is the comment of him saying that? Where is him praising an alternative to windows? Or, maybe, is it possible that he was only asking a question?
- fsflover 3y ago
  > Are people not allowed to have a positive opinion about an OS you dislike? The original post has no details whatsoever, it's just praising Windows for no reason. To me it does look like trolling.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    ^^^^^ This. Echoes my thoughts. Completely devoid of any details.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >The original post has no details whatsoever, it's just praising Windows for no reason. To me it does look like trolling. The details are in his post: "this is the most beautiful OS UI ever, more than GNOME and MacOS in my opinion" The author lets us know he likes the interface of W11 more. Very important aspect for a OS you'll have to use regularly. "After years of distro hopping and constant problems [...] not have to worry about Wayland, Nvidia" The author lets un know he distro hopped but had issues with Wayland and Nvidia. Again an important point, what use is a OS that has issues with your HW/setup? Better stick to what already works for you. Most people don't have time to go into wikis, forums and tutorial rabbit holes to get $DISTRO working on their HW if Windows already works out of the box. To me at least, the author has made it clear why W11 is better than Linux -FOR HIM-. So either you didn't read his post or you're the one who's trolling.

Boogie_Man 3y ago

Using Windows 11 is, for me personally, absolutely brutal. The defaults feel anti user. An example in the form of an issue I encountered recently: if you have an OS that fails to boot, and you had files on demand enabled in directories backed up with one drive, the files are totally inaccessible on the local disk, even if you had them "synced". It seems like retrieving files from my SSD should be a basic function of a general purpose OS, but they've gone and bungled it in order to push dependence on their cloud services.

mavhc 3y ago
Why would you need to if they're synced to the cloud, just download them again
- lelanthran 3y ago
  I think the question he is asking is why download something sitting on the local disk.
- Boogie_Man 3y ago
  Two answers General answer: Because it's needless complexity (relying on a company's service rather than... reading from a local disk) that masks what is actually happening behind the scenes. It will always be less reliable. Answer in that specific situation: They were files in a OneDrive that no longer existed after a tenant migration (they hired a consulting company that seemed to bungle things).
  - mavhc 3y ago
    Pretty sure logging into a service you decided to use on another computer is easier than trying to recover files from a computer that won't boot If you set up files on demand, you have to demand your files, it's in the name. Hope they never paid the consulting company
    - Boogie_Man 3y ago
      If software prevents me from performing a simple action on my files on my machine (unless this is the specific intended function I had for the program) it is, in the simplest sense of the term, malware. It has done me malice. People pay to be harmed, go figure.

hashtag-til 3y ago

Said no one, ever.

perryizgr8 3y ago

Windows is easily the best desktop os right now. Linux requires a vast amount of intricate knowledge, constant troubleshooting, just to keep your system running. There is a way to not do this, but it needs you to never update the system at all. And macos is not even available for people to install on their pc, so that's not an option. My windows PC stays updated without issues, never faced any strange issues with audio, graphics, nothing. My games run the best they can on my hardware, I don't have to worry about tinkering with stuff. What's not to like?

imgabe 3y ago
Hi there. So nice of you to join us from 20 years ago. Linux these days runs quite well and has no driver issues. Meanwhile my Windows machine randomly hangs every 30 minutes or so while it spins the hard drive for no reason at all.
Loughla 3y ago
Have you used linux in the last 10-12 years? Install linux mint. It's literally point and click. The only difference between it an windows is that it asks you to confirm the updates it installs, and lets you know if the updates have changed the information the software collects from you or has access to. You are wildly out of date.
K0balt 3y ago
I think that is maybe the case where you use more technical applications that require elaborate environment setups… but I have a classroom of 20 Linux laptops running on Ubuntu LTS and have had years of automatic updates with zero issues, and more than a decade on some of my backend systems which have been cloned through several hardware iterations. YMMV?
dwringer 3y ago
I too like Windows and use it as my daily OS everywhere, but I am firmly against ever upgrading to Windows 11 and, with each update, Windows 10 gets more unpleasantly like 11. Recently I tried to open an image, and the Windows Store asked me to pay 99 cents for the codec. Actually, for a video codec pack - it showed me as already having the codec pack for exactly these images installed. But they wouldn't open, only the Windows Store appeared asking me to pay 99 cents. Adding insult to injury, it seems that anyone who did this earlier than a couple of years ago got the pack for free - I was only asked to pay for it because I hadn't secured my rights at the time, apparently. Even though the Windows store verly clearly indicates that I already had the image codec installed. [even more fun, the Windows store had additional prominent listings for what appeared to be these codecs, for free, but were very transparently third party spyware and not really the codecs at all.] Windows 11 vs 10 feels in many ways analogous to me to Windows ME vs Windows 2000, at least in terms of user-hostility.

glimshe 3y ago

These comparisons tend to be very tedious. I use Windows 11, MacOS and Linux in different scenarios. They have advantages and disadvantages for different applications. My main computer is Windows because it works better for my needs, but Linux is great too. I like MacOS the least, but it does really well in battery life with the M2 processor.

hashtag-til 3y ago
Windows is the the OS that keeps the family always in touch with you.
- gwnywg 3y ago
  My mom is on arch, and she is as happy as if it was windows but with faster boot and faster response time. She could not tell the difference since all she needs is browser.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    What about all the time she spends telling people that she's an arch user?
    - gwnywg 3y ago
      She knows it's some flavour of linux and she knows it's way faster than windows she had before. These are simple facts improving her day-to-day experience, no need to be negative about that.
      - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
        Sorry - I wasn't intending to be negative, but making a quip about how arch users love to tell everyone about it. I've got Arch in use on a couple of machines (Steam Deck being my favourite, though I strictly use that just for games) and it's one of my favourite flavours of Linux. The best part of Arch is the wiki which has quality information on a lot of Linux tools - it's useful for all Linux wranglers (maybe not your mum unless she likes reading documentation).

pockybum522 3y ago

Boy it didn't take much scrolling there for the comments to get inane. "the Micro$oft haters would have you belive that opensource is a wonderful garden of altruistic developers all helping out with each other's code for free. Well if anyone thinks that I suggest they go and look at how many billions the companies like Debian and Redhat are worth. Nobody is working for free and it's simply do you pay for the ownership and get free support or do you get product for free and pay for support." Yep. Those sure are the only two options when you use Linux. /s

akagusu 3y ago
Debian is not a company.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> how many billions the companies like Debian and Redhat are worth Er, why would you even mention those in the same sentence? RH is worth a fortune. Debian is a community effort with no company behind it. They're completely different.
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
This is what Reddit has become.

musha68k 3y ago

Nice guerilla marketing attempt MSFT :P

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

I'm very much a Linux person, having used it for decades, but I still find whenever I need to do something in Windows, that it's a total mess with regards to the different GUI paradigms in use in different tools. For instance, setting up an iSCSI volume drops you into some archaic window that isn't resizable despite having lengthy WWIDs that need to have their column size increased so that you can then scroll and actually see the relevant bit at the end. And that's just one example from the top of my head. Maybe I just notice the glaring inconsistencies and user-unfriendliness of it because I'm much more at home using a CLI which is typically very flexible and doesn't force you to interact with poorly designed GUIs.

soco 3y ago
If you need to connect iSCSI I'd say you're definitely not the target user base for Windows 11. I use W11 at home (streaming, browsing, emails, word) completely happy, it's a no-brain-required environment and W11 is perfect for that. At work I happily use Linux for all the tricks and updates and whatnot I actually need to do to win my bread. And someone else will happily use MacOS for artistry... so? Does that deny the use case of any others? No it doesn't.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  I have no issue with people using whatever OS they want to - that's part of why I had a big grudge against Microsoft over the years with their anti-competitive strategies. It just amazes me that other people don't pick up on the obvious issues that come with competing teams producing different parts of the OS. There's still a bunch of old style control panel tools in use in Win11 and they've been there since Vista at least.
pnutjam 3y ago
My kids windows computers suddenly activated Family mode so I need to log onto my MS account to authorize absolutely everything; but only in Edge, not Chrome. What's the point. It's very frustrating. I'll probably switch it to Linux for the one that uses Google classroom at school.

rvz 3y ago

Perhaps WSL2 won over this user when work needed to be done rather than distro hopping for years and fighting over drivers, desktops and window managers. Windows with WSL2 is the best Linux distro anyway. No need to dual boot, format drives or whatever. Just run the system and move on.

31337Logic 3y ago

Prepare to get demolished by this community, you Microsoft shill. How insulting.

PedroBatista 3y ago

Of course that Reddit post and discussion is going as anyone would expect. ( and here too to a lesser degree - I hope ) I think the one thing we can all agree regardless of OS we like or are using is: Windows 11 is NOT amazing. It's.. Windows. It's good/bad/ok/whatever but not amazing. As for Linux, reading the comments it's safe to say 2023 doesn't look like it's the year of Linux on the desktop. Maybe 2024 :)

twelfthnight 3y ago
I feel like Windows is the bud light of operating systems. It's corporate, a worse experience than alternatives, increasingly focused on advertising and is only popular because it's the only beer on tap at your favorite bar (video games).

jchw 3y ago

It's a troll post. The best giveaway is use of the term "distro-hopping" which, while a legitimate term, is probably more common in flamebait than actual usage. Then it brings up Android vs iOS for basically absolutely no reason. Could be legitimate. It's not, but it totally could be if you believe hard enough.

neilalexander 3y ago

Amazing is the new Outlook app for Windows, which inserts adverts inline into your inbox and disguises them to look like emails so that you'll click on them. Better yet, the new Outlook will forcefully replace the existing built-in Mail app in 2024. Amazing is the new Edge browser, which syndicates clickbait articles and adverts from some of the worst and most divisive publishers right onto the opening screen. Attempts to download other browsers are met with nagware popups pleading with you to use Edge. Truly amazing.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Isn't that basically Microsoft Gmail?
pieter_mj 3y ago
the new Outlook also steals your imap credentials.

nu11ptr 3y ago

I just did my first install of Windows 11. Based on what I had read before (which wasn't much), I expected Windows 10 + a new UI. Maybe it was my low expectations, but I was seriously impressed. It feels like MS really put a lot of work into polishing things. First, the biggest change does seem to be the new UI, but it is a HUGE improvement. Not only does it look nice and have more of a dock focus, but I also noticed everything is very smooth, even on the same hardware previously running Windows 10. With WSL2, it would be pretty easy to use Win11 UI for graphical apps, but use WSL2 for all my dev stuff. I am not sure if I will "switch" my home system at some point from PopOS Linux, but this is the first time I have ever even contemplated such in a very long time.

swe_dima 3y ago

I have switched to Windows for development on a laptop as well. Linux still feels very "raw" to me on laptops outside of laptops designed to run Linux, and those are very few, hard to buy, not enough options. MacOS laptops are great... unless you need to work with Docker, then it's still a nightmare. And these days most devs who work with backend need Docker. Windows with WSL offers a sweet middle spot.

hoistbypetard 3y ago
Docker just incorporated rosetta by default on apple silicon, and it's a night-and-day difference for the way I was using it. I had gone so far as to stop using docker for python app vms, and only use it for postgres and redis. Now I can use it for django and celery again.
- swe_dima 3y ago
  Personally, I have used it on Intel macs and on my wife's M1 Pro about a year ago. But we recently had a couple of new folks join our team who opted for M2 laptops and they've been having more or less the same pains I had a year ago, so have to run images with emulation (and those sometimes have nasty segfaults).
  - hoistbypetard 3y ago
    The update that made it not terrible for me came about a week ago.
    - swe_dima 3y ago
      oh, in that case it's awesome news!

carlos22 3y ago

I'm not so sure about which W11 hype they are talking about. But the numbers tell different, in Germany win10 was growing faster then 11.

gwnywg 3y ago
I wonder at what point MS will force W11 :)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 3y ago

Trying to use the file browser (Explorer) on Windows 11 is enough to make me want to gouge my eyes out. I only use Windows for launching Call of Duty. As soon as the game is off, the PC gets turned off. Linux gets a lot of flack for having UI issues - but truth be told modern Windows is a case study in lava driven development where some apps look like they were made in 1998 and others look like they were made by the IKEA childrens department. Heck even the OS installer has not been touched since Windows 7 and is pretty terrible. Modern KDE is really worth taking for a spin. I find it to be far more visually consistent than Windows 11. The customization can be all the rope to hang yourself with but if you don't go hogwild with that I find it is a very clean, modern and consistent desktop experience.

superchroma 3y ago
You aren't really suffering because the group policy manager or whatever isn't written in the latest winui framework. I'd rather continuity than apple style shenanigans in the name of an annual rebrand and spitshine.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Apple is literally the definition of continuity. All of their apps have looked great and have remained consistent since OS X was initially released. Recent exception is the changes to the system settings panel, but the old design was the same for like 15 years. Just going through the "Let's finish setting up your PC!" that pops up after certain Windows updates (which is a problem in and of itself) illustrates the design inconsistency. Each stage of the wizard is a distinct web view rendering a completely different UI that has different fonts and buttons. You can get them to glitch and scroll a-la old school iframes, too. The context menus in Win11? They are fancy and new but 90% of the functions you want and need are hidden behind a disclosure menu that - you guessed it - pops out an ancient looking Windows 10 menu. Why even add the facade with limited functions? Just keep the old menu. I could probably write a 20 page blog post on all the UI fuckery in Windows 11. There is something to be said for the MSC stuff / management console remaining the same all these years ... but at that point we could all just be happy on Windows 2K shell with modern kernel and security enhancements.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

The key thing is WSL is very good. A real Linux environment with the distro of your choice running unmodified Linux binaries. It integrates well with Windows. Some things are a bit funky, like the networking, under the covers it's just a VM with all the usual issues that entails. But it mostly works great. Combined with Windows Terminal and VS.Code and Microsoft has a very nice UI for developing on Linux machines.

gwnywg 3y ago
is gpu exposed to docker containers started within wsl?

fzimmermann89 3y ago

I thought the same, until I noticed a really annoying WSL2 bug: On two machines I own, waking up from hibernate or standby causes a wsl related process (vmmem) to consume 100% CPU, with wsl becoming completely unresponsive (including wsl terminate etc). You have to kill all wsl processes, which requires admin rights. So without elevated rights, Ubuntu on windows is not usable on these laptops. The issue is known for years and has hundreds of comments on GitHub without a fix (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6982 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6982)

nyantaro1 3y ago
I ran into this issue as well. I also spent a few hours debugging problems with a database just to discover that I could not reach a server because WSL2 does not support IPV6 (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4518 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4518)

gunselginsel 3y ago

[flagged]

runjake 3y ago

Windows 11 could be great but Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot with bad decisions, ads, and other user-hostile actions. I’m curious who at Microsoft is blowing this opportunity by making these bad decisions and burning the credit they earned with developers? Brandon Leblanc? Someone higher up? Satya?

V__ 3y ago

I'm using Windows 10 right now as my main machine. I never experienced any crashes/blue screens except when my GPU started failing, but I can't count that against the OS. It is the most stable system I have ever used. Windows 11 on the other hand seems absolutely horrible to me. The privacy issues and anti user patterns keep piling on. I'm open to switch to a Linux distro (and use it on all my servers anyway), but they all seem horrible on desktop. A few weeks ago I installed Ubuntu for testing, set a light background and wanted to change the text colors of the desktop. Not possible, except if you want to start messing with some CSS files. I also wanted to add an app shortcut to the desktop, also not possible without some extension and then the icons sometimes don't match and not all apps were supported. If they would just create feature parity with the Windows Explorer, Windows might be toast in a few years, but it seems there is just no interest in that.

timbit42 3y ago
Ubuntu stopped being a good desktop when Canonical gave up on Unity quite a few years ago. I would recommend trying Linux Mint for a better desktop experience on Linux.

darthrupert 3y ago

Windows doesn't even do gaming better than Linux anymore. That was its last bastion for the last 3 decades but no more.

antisthenes 3y ago

This is written by GPT right? Or some 12-year old who hasn't done anything on a computer except some school assignments and a few emails? Cmon.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pupppet 3y ago

I'm not a fan, but I do find the Windows 11 animations buttery smooth.

daft_pink 3y ago

Gosh. Is the Linux experience terrible? Moved from Windows 10 to 11, and still use Windows 10 at work. Windows 11 is not better in anyway.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

We're so past April though.

gxonatano 3y ago

I wanted this to be true, and I really gave Windows 11 a fair trial for a while, but I hated it. Windows feels like a cobbled-together mess compared to nearly any flavor of Linux. Take for example the process of installing software. On Linux, type `sudo apt install the-program` and it's installed. What's that like on Windows? Open a web browser and search for the software publisher's website. Click around until you can find a package download. Download the installer. Double click the installer. Click "yes, I understand that I'm installing software downloaded from the Internet, and that's dangerous." Start the installation "wizard." Click "full install." Select the location you want to install the software. Click that you agree to like a hundred pages of the license terms and legal stuff. Delete the installer. After doing that a few times, I really started to miss Linux. Updating software is also crazy on Windows. Every single program bugs you individually that it needs to be updated. In some cases you then have to download a whole new version of the software package and go through all the above steps. On Linux you can just type `sudo apt upgrade` or equivalent and all your software is updated.

azretd 3y ago
There is ‘winget’ which is an attempt to make installing software easier. It is native with recent versions of Windows 11.

nipperkinfeet 3y ago

It's the opposite in my situation. After using Windows 11 for a few months, I considered moving to EndeavourOS. After two years, not much seemed to improve... In fact, it seemed to get worse. The company's decisions about user interface, web-based bloat, and regressions ultimately led me to decide to quit using any Microsoft products.

cdelsolar 3y ago

No it’s not lol