4 ms·

tl;dr 6% faster on Linux. Basically, once a year I try to run Linux instead of Windows and I've been doing that since 1999 (seriously). It still has enough anno

tl;dr 6% faster on Linux. Basically, once a year I try to run Linux instead of Windows and I've been doing that since 1999 (seriously). It still has enough annoyances that it isn't worth 6% or extra freedom for me.

alskdj21 2y ago
Geniunely curious, what are these annoyances? I only started using Linux (Ubuntu) around 2013 so I might miss most of these issues. Tho I'm still dual-booting Windows cuz of an old game with anti-cheat that refuses to run on Wine.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  To me, most of the annoyances are with the unpolished UI. No matter what desktop environment you use, it’s still 15 years behind Windows.
  - Xerox9213 2y ago
    I’ve found KDE Plasma to be quite stable. At least compared to Windows. I haven’t used macOS in quite a few years but AFAIC it’s pretty much impossible to beat that UI.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    For as long as I used Windows it always had a bizarre strata of inconsistent and increasingly archaic GUI styles going all the way back to Windows 3.1. I'm a regular user of Ubuntu, Fedora, and PopOS, and they all look and feel better than Windows.
  - reginald78 2y ago
    I have far more annoyances with Windows 11 than mint these days but that is a matter of opinion and use cases I suppose. I actually generally used to like the Windows UI, but it keeps getting less responsive. I wish they'd just stop. Here's one: Why does the OneDrive option load 3-4 seconds AFTER the new right click context menu loads causing everything to move down and for me to click the wrong thing as it moves under my mouse cursor? I hated that on the web so they brought it to the desktop UI.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      What I love about Windows Terminal is the ability to run shaders on the contents of the windows. This should be a feature of the whole Windows desktop.
  - homebrewer 2y ago
    You're saying it like it's a bad thing. This is one of the major reasons I use FOSS UNIX-like operating systems. (Not just linux, but FreeBSD too.) Because the desktop environment of my choice has stayed the same for more than 20 years without the need to relearn everything and adjust your workflow every time somebody in Microsoft needs a promotion. Scary to think how much time for bullshitting on internet forums has been saved over that period.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      And, if you appreciate consistency that much, even CDE is available as an option (although I don't love it that much).
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    I guess there is no accounting for taste, but I really find Gnome Desktop to be the one that wastes me the least amount of time. Mac is a close second (even though some things are hidden in hard to find places, such as the user's Python environment).
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Same here. The only thing I do to avoid trouble is to stick to the average business laptop setting for laptops and tower servers for my desktops. I've been trouble free since the early 2000's.
- defparam 2y ago
  Just converted a month ago from windows 10 to kbuntu 24lts The first thing is really weird bugs when dealing with multi-monitors in plasma/sddm (getting into UI locked states or xrandr settings not sticking for whatever reason). The second annoyance is not having first party support for peripherals like my mouse and webcam (looking at you Logitech) or generally thick client software that has windows/macos candidates but not Linux. Third is publishers with anticheat DRM being extremely hostile to VFIO gaming. EA announced Apex losing Linux support and recently they just blocked all their EAAC protected games from running on VM. And even despite all that and more I am so happy to be rid of windows as a daily driver.
- coreyh14444 2y ago
  Two things: 1) missing apps. Recent examples are 1password having a browser extension but no desktop client and I use several browser profiles, which results in me having to enter my 1password over and over again. Claude and OpenAI desktop apps missing. There are other more esoteric/personal ones of course, but those were the most annoying. 2) installing stuff is still a disaster. I most recently used PopOS and a mainstream app like Slack suggested Snap install, and I didn't have the Snap store. So I installed that and Slack installed but didn't work. Ended up installing the rpm instead which worked, but then the Snap Slack instance started working. So now I have two Slacks running and no idea which is which. Yes, I'm a "noob" but like I said I have been doing this for 20 years. Have been a fulltime CTO for most of those years. Do server side linux admin fairly regularly as well.
  - mkesper 2y ago
    Use a tested distribution and not something odd like PopOS.
    - coreyh14444 2y ago
      Exactly the Linux attitude. Blame the user (◔_◔)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cheema33 2y ago
  > Geniunely curious, what are these annoyances? For me, it is lack of business critical applications. For example I use Microsoft Teams to attend meetings multiples times a day. And there is no Teams client for Linux.
tester756 2y ago
Especially when you have WSL
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Performance under WSL can be atrocious depending on which side of the machine your files live. It's OK if they are on the Linux side, but if they are on the Windows side, you'll access them as a network mounted file share. Not great if you open/close lots of files.
  - nickjj 2y ago
    Yep, I have an rsync script which I run from WSL to backup both my WSL home directory and a bunch of files on a separate Windows drive to an external hard drive. It takes something like 8 minutes for rsync to get the metadata about files before it starts potentially transferring anything. On native Linux a comparable amount of files takes less than 10 seconds.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      The worst case scenario is when the data has to go over the WSL border twice (one to be processed by whatever Unix thing you are using) and another when it's written to an NTFS filesystem somewhere else. My personal happy space is actually Cygwin. It's Unixy enough and doesn't cross the WSL border. Not great because NTFS doesn't perform that well under it, but definitely better than WSL.
  - voidfunc 2y ago
    Have you tried the Dev Drive feature in Windows 11? It's still network mount but supposedly speeds things up.
  - ninkendo 2y ago
    Same thing with e.g. docker for macOS… it’s the primary reason I opted for running Linux on my dev machine at work. Using a virtualization layer to get docker/k8s/etc gives such abysmal performance it’s really crazy that it’s such a popular approach. I’m not even sure what I’d have to do if I used windows… how do people even use git nowadays? Run it in WSL with files shared to your editor in windows? Run git natively in windows? Is NTFS still dog slow scanning tons of small files? Is that “git bash” cygwin distro still the way to go? It sounds like a total mess.
franczesko 2y ago
Running games was the only thing holding me back. I was surprised how far Linux has come. 95% of my work is done in a browser, so I can't comment on any software dependencies.
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  Modern games work for me in steam on archlinux with nvidia drivers, like cyberpunk, satisfactory, rdr2, ... I do play single player games mostly though (so I don't know if any anticheat mechanisms may break). Then again the recent age of mythology and age of empires remakes work in multiplayer
IAmGraydon 2y ago
That’s funny. I do the exact same thing, and I’m about to do it again. I believe the problem with Linux is that it’s being worked on by Linux guys.
- api 2y ago
  The problem is little to no funding. Programmers generally have to be paid to do the not fun parts of programming like fixing issue #74738547 “settings app labels have the last letter cut off when running on a high DPI display on a Tuesday when it is raining in Delhi, India but only on an even numbered year.” UI development is an endless procession of nit picky long tail aesthetic and usability bugs.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    When I worked for Canonical, they made it a point not to have a reference corporate laptop precisely for that - we all ran different brands with different configurations (one of my colleagues had a late MIPS sub-laptop as his travel companion). The Japanese laptops were by far the most interesting and unique. I picked an unimaginative Dell (my house was burglarized right before I started and I lost my then daily driver) because it had the shortest delivery time.
  - qayxc 2y ago
    > The problem is little to no funding. I honestly don't believe that to be the case. There's a big difference between commercial products like MacOS or Windows and Linux. That difference isn't so much funding (remember that Linux is backed by all major companies), but the fact that Linux itself is really just the kernel, whereas Windows and MacOS aim to be the whole package (with varying degrees of success). There is simply no such thing as "Linux, the OS including desktop and UI". It's dozens of projects with different philosophies and goals. KDE differs from Gnome, Mate, or XFCE and those have a different approach to the desktop UI metaphor than say i3 or xmonad. A standardized Linux Desktop experience would help with bundling resources as well as polish and fixing the "boring" stuff. But this would fly in the face of the "make-it-your-own"-approach that desktop Linux tends to take. The constant dance between stability/maturity and bleeding edge is another big factor. The former allows for little annoyances to be ironed out, while the latter attracts more developers because that's the fun stuff to work on. As a user you do have the choice to go for a stable, more conservative distro or play with the latest toys on rolling release distros. Specialized distros like SteamOS do quite well in their respective niche, though. In summary, the Linux eco system is simply too diverse to point at a single issue like funding as the main reason for its perceived shortcomings on the Desktop side of things. The comment above pretty much nailed it - it's developed by Linux guys and their goal simply isn't to emulate Windows.
dmichulke 2y ago
What is it that outweighs cortana, telemetry, license fees, ads, silence on security issues, and a 6% performance penalty?
- coreyh14444 2y ago
  I don't get this one. I don't see ads, Cortana hasn't been a thing for like 2 years. My work pays for my license. Security seems fine in 2024. My time is very valuable.
  - bitsandboots 2y ago
    > My time is very valuable. Same that's why I don't use Windows in a professional setting. Programming in it is slower and doing office work in it is 'fun' when things change for the sake of it.
    - XCSme 2y ago
      > Programming in it is slower Does VSCode run better on Linux? Or are you coding directly in vim/nano? Or what part exactly is faster? Before Docker it was annoying to run all the Linux software/packages/services/dependencies, but now it's one command away.
      - dmichulke 2y ago
        I use Linux at home and Windows professionally: - Booting my PC until login takes approx 10s for Linux and 60-120s for Windows. Logging in takes another 1s for Linux (i3wm) or 60-120s for Windows. In Windows, I often need to manually connect to my local wifi after logging in. - Accessing a local file (as in git status, or opening a file in emacs) while having VPN turned off takes <1s in Linux and somewhere between 10-30s in Windows. - Windows forces me to stop using all Office products during Office updates - After approx 50% of all Windows updates, Windows gives me nag messages until I restart my computer I use emacs as editor in both scenarios. Compilation and running programs is subjectively similarly fast.
      - 2y ago
Maakuth 2y ago
In my case I tried to work on Windows with some ThinkPad 5ish years ago when I got annoyed of unrealiable docking behaviour on Linux. It turned out it was flaky hardware of firmware on the Lenovo dock and it didn't work appreciably better on Windows.
kokada 2y ago
> It still has enough annoyances that it isn't worth 6% or extra freedom for me. It is funny that I found modern Windows an annoyance instead. Every time I have to boot my Windows machine (I boot in Windows maybe once every month), generally one of those followings things happen: - I need to type my BitLocker recovery key because for some reason Windows always reset it (from my search it seems that the fault is my Lenovo docker that acts as a PCI-e device and Windows doesn't like when a PCI-e is removed/reattached and invalidates the BitLocker key in TPM, but it is still annoying) - Windows need to download a bunch of updates. Not a big issue, but now that Windows 11 is all about "feature updates", at least twice a year I need to see that dreadful "Welcome Screen" asking the same questions that I already answered a few months ago - If the above happens, this also generally also brings some feature that I need to hunt to disable. "We think it would be so fun if we can show to you a random lock screen wallpaper, especially if we can also show you some ads for money, so let's active this by default even if you already disabled this in your previous Windows install". - Even if it is not a big Windows update, every time I boot Windows I still need to wait a while until my system is usable again since every other program will run their update process. Of course they're all separate updaters, so they have no idea they're running at the same time, slowing down both my system and network in the process I mean, I understand your complain. If I was not deep in Linux since my colleage days I don't think I could get used to the system today. NixOS also definitely helps because once I fix an issue, I know this issue will stay fixed even if I need to reinstall the system. The fact that Linux seems to be the only major operational system that respect my choices today is a huge to me.

alskdj21 2y ago

Geniunely curious, what are these annoyances? I only started using Linux (Ubuntu) around 2013 so I might miss most of these issues. Tho I'm still dual-booting Windows cuz of an old game with anti-cheat that refuses to run on Wine.

IAmGraydon 2y ago
To me, most of the annoyances are with the unpolished UI. No matter what desktop environment you use, it’s still 15 years behind Windows.
- Xerox9213 2y ago
  I’ve found KDE Plasma to be quite stable. At least compared to Windows. I haven’t used macOS in quite a few years but AFAIC it’s pretty much impossible to beat that UI.
- kibwen 2y ago
  For as long as I used Windows it always had a bizarre strata of inconsistent and increasingly archaic GUI styles going all the way back to Windows 3.1. I'm a regular user of Ubuntu, Fedora, and PopOS, and they all look and feel better than Windows.
- reginald78 2y ago
  I have far more annoyances with Windows 11 than mint these days but that is a matter of opinion and use cases I suppose. I actually generally used to like the Windows UI, but it keeps getting less responsive. I wish they'd just stop. Here's one: Why does the OneDrive option load 3-4 seconds AFTER the new right click context menu loads causing everything to move down and for me to click the wrong thing as it moves under my mouse cursor? I hated that on the web so they brought it to the desktop UI.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    What I love about Windows Terminal is the ability to run shaders on the contents of the windows. This should be a feature of the whole Windows desktop.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  You're saying it like it's a bad thing. This is one of the major reasons I use FOSS UNIX-like operating systems. (Not just linux, but FreeBSD too.) Because the desktop environment of my choice has stayed the same for more than 20 years without the need to relearn everything and adjust your workflow every time somebody in Microsoft needs a promotion. Scary to think how much time for bullshitting on internet forums has been saved over that period.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    And, if you appreciate consistency that much, even CDE is available as an option (although I don't love it that much).
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I guess there is no accounting for taste, but I really find Gnome Desktop to be the one that wastes me the least amount of time. Mac is a close second (even though some things are hidden in hard to find places, such as the user's Python environment).
rbanffy 2y ago
Same here. The only thing I do to avoid trouble is to stick to the average business laptop setting for laptops and tower servers for my desktops. I've been trouble free since the early 2000's.
defparam 2y ago
Just converted a month ago from windows 10 to kbuntu 24lts The first thing is really weird bugs when dealing with multi-monitors in plasma/sddm (getting into UI locked states or xrandr settings not sticking for whatever reason). The second annoyance is not having first party support for peripherals like my mouse and webcam (looking at you Logitech) or generally thick client software that has windows/macos candidates but not Linux. Third is publishers with anticheat DRM being extremely hostile to VFIO gaming. EA announced Apex losing Linux support and recently they just blocked all their EAAC protected games from running on VM. And even despite all that and more I am so happy to be rid of windows as a daily driver.
coreyh14444 2y ago
Two things: 1) missing apps. Recent examples are 1password having a browser extension but no desktop client and I use several browser profiles, which results in me having to enter my 1password over and over again. Claude and OpenAI desktop apps missing. There are other more esoteric/personal ones of course, but those were the most annoying. 2) installing stuff is still a disaster. I most recently used PopOS and a mainstream app like Slack suggested Snap install, and I didn't have the Snap store. So I installed that and Slack installed but didn't work. Ended up installing the rpm instead which worked, but then the Snap Slack instance started working. So now I have two Slacks running and no idea which is which. Yes, I'm a "noob" but like I said I have been doing this for 20 years. Have been a fulltime CTO for most of those years. Do server side linux admin fairly regularly as well.
- mkesper 2y ago
  Use a tested distribution and not something odd like PopOS.
  - coreyh14444 2y ago
    Exactly the Linux attitude. Blame the user (◔_◔)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cheema33 2y ago
> Geniunely curious, what are these annoyances? For me, it is lack of business critical applications. For example I use Microsoft Teams to attend meetings multiples times a day. And there is no Teams client for Linux.

tester756 2y ago

Especially when you have WSL

rbanffy 2y ago
Performance under WSL can be atrocious depending on which side of the machine your files live. It's OK if they are on the Linux side, but if they are on the Windows side, you'll access them as a network mounted file share. Not great if you open/close lots of files.
- nickjj 2y ago
  Yep, I have an rsync script which I run from WSL to backup both my WSL home directory and a bunch of files on a separate Windows drive to an external hard drive. It takes something like 8 minutes for rsync to get the metadata about files before it starts potentially transferring anything. On native Linux a comparable amount of files takes less than 10 seconds.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    The worst case scenario is when the data has to go over the WSL border twice (one to be processed by whatever Unix thing you are using) and another when it's written to an NTFS filesystem somewhere else. My personal happy space is actually Cygwin. It's Unixy enough and doesn't cross the WSL border. Not great because NTFS doesn't perform that well under it, but definitely better than WSL.
- voidfunc 2y ago
  Have you tried the Dev Drive feature in Windows 11? It's still network mount but supposedly speeds things up.
- ninkendo 2y ago
  Same thing with e.g. docker for macOS… it’s the primary reason I opted for running Linux on my dev machine at work. Using a virtualization layer to get docker/k8s/etc gives such abysmal performance it’s really crazy that it’s such a popular approach. I’m not even sure what I’d have to do if I used windows… how do people even use git nowadays? Run it in WSL with files shared to your editor in windows? Run git natively in windows? Is NTFS still dog slow scanning tons of small files? Is that “git bash” cygwin distro still the way to go? It sounds like a total mess.

franczesko 2y ago

Running games was the only thing holding me back. I was surprised how far Linux has come. 95% of my work is done in a browser, so I can't comment on any software dependencies.

Aardwolf 2y ago
Modern games work for me in steam on archlinux with nvidia drivers, like cyberpunk, satisfactory, rdr2, ... I do play single player games mostly though (so I don't know if any anticheat mechanisms may break). Then again the recent age of mythology and age of empires remakes work in multiplayer

IAmGraydon 2y ago

That’s funny. I do the exact same thing, and I’m about to do it again. I believe the problem with Linux is that it’s being worked on by Linux guys.

api 2y ago
The problem is little to no funding. Programmers generally have to be paid to do the not fun parts of programming like fixing issue #74738547 “settings app labels have the last letter cut off when running on a high DPI display on a Tuesday when it is raining in Delhi, India but only on an even numbered year.” UI development is an endless procession of nit picky long tail aesthetic and usability bugs.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  When I worked for Canonical, they made it a point not to have a reference corporate laptop precisely for that - we all ran different brands with different configurations (one of my colleagues had a late MIPS sub-laptop as his travel companion). The Japanese laptops were by far the most interesting and unique. I picked an unimaginative Dell (my house was burglarized right before I started and I lost my then daily driver) because it had the shortest delivery time.
- qayxc 2y ago
  > The problem is little to no funding. I honestly don't believe that to be the case. There's a big difference between commercial products like MacOS or Windows and Linux. That difference isn't so much funding (remember that Linux is backed by all major companies), but the fact that Linux itself is really just the kernel, whereas Windows and MacOS aim to be the whole package (with varying degrees of success). There is simply no such thing as "Linux, the OS including desktop and UI". It's dozens of projects with different philosophies and goals. KDE differs from Gnome, Mate, or XFCE and those have a different approach to the desktop UI metaphor than say i3 or xmonad. A standardized Linux Desktop experience would help with bundling resources as well as polish and fixing the "boring" stuff. But this would fly in the face of the "make-it-your-own"-approach that desktop Linux tends to take. The constant dance between stability/maturity and bleeding edge is another big factor. The former allows for little annoyances to be ironed out, while the latter attracts more developers because that's the fun stuff to work on. As a user you do have the choice to go for a stable, more conservative distro or play with the latest toys on rolling release distros. Specialized distros like SteamOS do quite well in their respective niche, though. In summary, the Linux eco system is simply too diverse to point at a single issue like funding as the main reason for its perceived shortcomings on the Desktop side of things. The comment above pretty much nailed it - it's developed by Linux guys and their goal simply isn't to emulate Windows.

dmichulke 2y ago

What is it that outweighs cortana, telemetry, license fees, ads, silence on security issues, and a 6% performance penalty?

coreyh14444 2y ago
I don't get this one. I don't see ads, Cortana hasn't been a thing for like 2 years. My work pays for my license. Security seems fine in 2024. My time is very valuable.
- bitsandboots 2y ago
  > My time is very valuable. Same that's why I don't use Windows in a professional setting. Programming in it is slower and doing office work in it is 'fun' when things change for the sake of it.
  - XCSme 2y ago
    > Programming in it is slower Does VSCode run better on Linux? Or are you coding directly in vim/nano? Or what part exactly is faster? Before Docker it was annoying to run all the Linux software/packages/services/dependencies, but now it's one command away.
    - dmichulke 2y ago
      I use Linux at home and Windows professionally: - Booting my PC until login takes approx 10s for Linux and 60-120s for Windows. Logging in takes another 1s for Linux (i3wm) or 60-120s for Windows. In Windows, I often need to manually connect to my local wifi after logging in. - Accessing a local file (as in git status, or opening a file in emacs) while having VPN turned off takes <1s in Linux and somewhere between 10-30s in Windows. - Windows forces me to stop using all Office products during Office updates - After approx 50% of all Windows updates, Windows gives me nag messages until I restart my computer I use emacs as editor in both scenarios. Compilation and running programs is subjectively similarly fast.
    - 2y ago

Maakuth 2y ago

In my case I tried to work on Windows with some ThinkPad 5ish years ago when I got annoyed of unrealiable docking behaviour on Linux. It turned out it was flaky hardware of firmware on the Lenovo dock and it didn't work appreciably better on Windows.

kokada 2y ago

> It still has enough annoyances that it isn't worth 6% or extra freedom for me. It is funny that I found modern Windows an annoyance instead. Every time I have to boot my Windows machine (I boot in Windows maybe once every month), generally one of those followings things happen: - I need to type my BitLocker recovery key because for some reason Windows always reset it (from my search it seems that the fault is my Lenovo docker that acts as a PCI-e device and Windows doesn't like when a PCI-e is removed/reattached and invalidates the BitLocker key in TPM, but it is still annoying) - Windows need to download a bunch of updates. Not a big issue, but now that Windows 11 is all about "feature updates", at least twice a year I need to see that dreadful "Welcome Screen" asking the same questions that I already answered a few months ago - If the above happens, this also generally also brings some feature that I need to hunt to disable. "We think it would be so fun if we can show to you a random lock screen wallpaper, especially if we can also show you some ads for money, so let's active this by default even if you already disabled this in your previous Windows install". - Even if it is not a big Windows update, every time I boot Windows I still need to wait a while until my system is usable again since every other program will run their update process. Of course they're all separate updaters, so they have no idea they're running at the same time, slowing down both my system and network in the process I mean, I understand your complain. If I was not deep in Linux since my colleage days I don't think I could get used to the system today. NixOS also definitely helps because once I fix an issue, I know this issue will stay fixed even if I need to reinstall the system. The fact that Linux seems to be the only major operational system that respect my choices today is a huge to me.