7 ms·

Well, it's bald-faced lie but I wouldn't disagree that it's bold. The idea that you need to confirm you're connected to the internet and that creating a Micros

Well, it's bald-faced lie but I wouldn't disagree that it's bold. The idea that you need to confirm you're connected to the internet and that creating a Microsoft account is merely for that purpose is preposterous on its face. Not that I was ever a regular on windows, but I think I've at least found there to be a necessity to be on windows for certain desirable games or for PC apps. So I've always kind of recognized a necessity, but I do think I can't imagine myself ever intentionally signing up for this. The Linux-based gaming experience is now so advanced, and there's nothing I truly need on Windows. I know it's a cliche indulge in a kind of performative version of a goodbye cruel world post so I don't want to go that far, because I think I would considered the contract to have been broken a while ago, but I don't think I have ever considered myself forever away from Windows, perhaps until just now.

WD-42 2y ago
I'm with you. The very few games I play work great on Linux. As a professional dev, there's absolutely no reason to choose Windows (or any OS, for that matter) over Desktop Linux at this point. I'm convinced Windows is mainly for people that buy computers at Best Buy and corporate IT that are unfortunately funneled into the ecosystem (hats off salute to all you).
- Numerlor 2y ago
  I'm a dev using Windows, tried Linux multiple times for a couple of months and it always felt like it was getting in my way in daily usage. Dev experience is usually at worst the same as Linux when you use wsl as you don't really need more than the terminal
  - gorjusborg 2y ago
    I honestly have the opposite experience. I am guessing upu either develop on the .net platform or games. Unix-likes are far more productive environments for what I do.
    - Numerlor 2y ago
      I'm mostly doing server code in Python nowadays. From what I remember only the c/++ toolchains were a problem on windows but the couple of times I needed them they were either managed by some other build process and ran fine or I could just compile and run in wsl
  - WD-42 2y ago
    If all you need is the terminal than windows is definitely getting in your way, WSL is a worse experience. Plus you still have to put up with candy crush in your start menu, Cortana annoying the hell out of you, and the taskbar giving you unwanted updates on the latest news from the Kardashians.
    - Numerlor 2y ago
      I don't have any of that in Windows. I'm not using the home version but the preinstalled apps can be removed in a minute, I think cortana has been deprecated for a while now, and the only unwanted thing I've seen on the taskbar has been the weather that I've hidden with two clicks. For wsl, it's just a normal VM that's integrated with Windows. Maybe it'd get in the way of I did development that needed to work closer with the hardware, but I don't at the time
      - remram 2y ago
        You can remove them in a minute, but they'll come back. ChatGPT will pop in there when Microsoft adds it. You will get a full-screen blue "get windows ready" wizard every few days to "remind" you to log in. OneDrive will reappear on your desktop. You can still choose most things, but they will keep asking and twist your arm as much as possible.
  - sho_hn 2y ago
    OK, I'm coming from Linux, but I have to say my experience has been the opposite. I have a semi-complex app I've decided to port to Windows (it's so far on Linux and MacOS and configures/debugs/tests servo motors on serial and CAN busses), and after a couple of days I've been unable to make any sane workflow work without installing three seperate half-assed copies of Linux userspace (Git for Windows w/ its bash install, cygwin and wsl2) and choco on top to install more Linux/Unix-originated stuff. It's a lot like MacOS and needing to fiddle with homebrew, except worse and you need four of them. Let me give you an example: I have a serial device connected to an SBC mini computer that I want to interface with from my dev PC, so I want to proxy that serial port over tcp to Windows and make it available as a COM port. On Linux this is trivial to do using socat, or ser2net+socat. On Windows, plenty of similar tools exist. Usually you need two of them, one to make a virtual pair of COM ports, and another one to pipe a TCP socket connection into one end of the pair. So far, so good. Except all of the utilities, drivers, etc. I've tried have just plain not worked, and I've tried a good half dozen. Often their last version is from somewhere in the 2007-2012 time frame, and something no longer works on Windows 11. I think a lot of devs of tools like this just nope'd out when Microsoft started enforcing signing and pushed the Store model harder, and moved to Linux or Mac. In the end I had to write my own thing for the COM pair and run socat in cygwin. And I've jumped through a few hoops like this. I'm sure if all you do is need a place to run npm from and the rest of your stuff is all in the browser, the OS barely matters. But for native dev, Windows feels dead and barren, and fully reliant on the Linux ecosystem to be productive at this point. It's where all the reliable and well-maintained stuff comes from, whereas Windows-native tools are a ghost town of abandoned, frequently closed-source binaries. The many years Windows couldn't make their minds up between the managed code .NET stack and native C/C++ APIs, and one was incomplete while the other bitrotted away, have really taken their toll, I think.
- hatthew 2y ago
  I do all my development work on linux. I have a self-hosted linux server. I used ubuntu as my main desktop computer OS for a full year, and in that time I struggled with compatibility issues, games that wouldn't run as well as people said they would, driver update issues, necessary tools that simply don't exist on linux, and various configuration failures that simply don't exist on windows. Saying that you can game on linux is like saying you can host a web server on windows. Sure, it's technically possible, and for some things it works smoothly. But 99% of resources on the web assume that you're on the normal OS, and as soon as you try to do anything even slightly outside of the basics, you're going to run into trouble.
  - WD-42 2y ago
    I mean the steam deck is proof you can game on Linux. I hate to say it, but it sounds like you might just need to try harder.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      It depends a lot on what you play. E.g. multiplayer stuff that requires online anti-cheat rarely works well.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    What you're describing sounds like the Linux gaming experience of 4-5 years ago. Steam and Proton have been complete game changers though, bringing the normal gaming experience with thousands (tens of thousands?) of games to Linux. It's not like it used to be.
    - hatthew 2y ago
      There are a lot of games that work well on linux. Maybe even most games! But there are also many games that do not work on linux. It's not fun to tell my friends "hey I'll be sitting this one out, let me know when we move on to another game"
      - 2y ago
- technofiend 2y ago
  My gaming PC has four NVME slots. Currently it hosts Windows 10 and Fedora, but since a new update was released it's also about to host SteamOS. When W 10 support ends later this year, I'll use Windows 11 ARM in a VM on my MacBook and that'll be that. The only thing I really needed Windows for was gaming, tax preparation and running Scrivener. You can get native versions of Taxcut and Scrivener for MacOS and SteamOS is good enough for me 99% of the time. If I really must play something that's Windows-only there's always GeForce Now which has the added benefit of only tying a Windows instance to my Steam account and no other online identities. Sayonara, Windows.
  - decide1000 2y ago
    I switched to 100% linux (PopOs, Suse) and the only app I really miss is Scrivener.
    - technofiend 2y ago
      A mac mini is cheap if it's worth in investing in a platform to buy an app ala buying an Apple II to run Visicalc.
      - decide1000 2y ago
        I don't want to run a closed source OS anymore.
- z3ratul163071 2y ago
  What a time to be alive. I used to be certain Linux will always be crap for the desktop. And here I am now typing this on Wayland KDE :)
  - glenstein 2y ago
    And to be fair, I would say the success for Linux in this case is increasingly approximating what we have come to understand as an optimal desktop experience without screwing anything up rather than outcompeting by necessarily achieving a noticeably higher standard. I personally would say Linux does desktops objectively better both in the higher standard but also in the not screwing up sense but I am willing to accept that it might be a little bit opinionated about that and for some people it amounts to too much customization.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it. 2. Once a month I have a task of checking 100k images for duplicates. Strangely, the only app that actually works is VisiPics from 2013. It does something smarter than just binary comparison, it works very fast. I guess I'll be running a Windows VM forever just for this one app, unless someone explains to me the algorithm it uses, so that I could write a more modern replacement.
  - 0xdeafbeef 2y ago
    Have you tried https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka?
    - anal_reactor 2y ago
      1. Can it detect duplicates that have different resolution and compression? 2. Does it work in linear time, or square?
  - WD-42 2y ago
    You could try running it with wine.
  - averagefluid 2y ago
    [dead]
  - glenstein 2y ago
    >1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it. Office 365 is web-based and Linux accesses the web. If you're deep enough in the weeds that your survival hinges on desktop only features that can only be accessed from Windows then you're in a use case that can be resolved by getting a laptop for that purpose or being furnished one by your work. And while your use case is fascinatingly specific, my understanding is that the paradigm there is what might be called visual hashing or perceptual hashing, which is more than mere file size comparison, but kind of hashing a more generalized notion of image similarity. You may already know this, but from checking with chatgpt, there's something called DupeGuru which appears to be cross-platform. And also, it looks like there's some powerful Python and Perl libraries. Again, I'm sure your use case has some specific wrinkles to it, and you may very well know all of that already, so those might not help. But I suppose the interesting thing here is that the more idiosyncratic a use case is, the more closely it approximates things solved by programming languages which puts you back in the paradigm where Linux is not merely usable but I would argue the friendliest option.

WD-42 2y ago

I'm with you. The very few games I play work great on Linux. As a professional dev, there's absolutely no reason to choose Windows (or any OS, for that matter) over Desktop Linux at this point. I'm convinced Windows is mainly for people that buy computers at Best Buy and corporate IT that are unfortunately funneled into the ecosystem (hats off salute to all you).

Numerlor 2y ago
I'm a dev using Windows, tried Linux multiple times for a couple of months and it always felt like it was getting in my way in daily usage. Dev experience is usually at worst the same as Linux when you use wsl as you don't really need more than the terminal
- gorjusborg 2y ago
  I honestly have the opposite experience. I am guessing upu either develop on the .net platform or games. Unix-likes are far more productive environments for what I do.
  - Numerlor 2y ago
    I'm mostly doing server code in Python nowadays. From what I remember only the c/++ toolchains were a problem on windows but the couple of times I needed them they were either managed by some other build process and ran fine or I could just compile and run in wsl
- WD-42 2y ago
  If all you need is the terminal than windows is definitely getting in your way, WSL is a worse experience. Plus you still have to put up with candy crush in your start menu, Cortana annoying the hell out of you, and the taskbar giving you unwanted updates on the latest news from the Kardashians.
  - Numerlor 2y ago
    I don't have any of that in Windows. I'm not using the home version but the preinstalled apps can be removed in a minute, I think cortana has been deprecated for a while now, and the only unwanted thing I've seen on the taskbar has been the weather that I've hidden with two clicks. For wsl, it's just a normal VM that's integrated with Windows. Maybe it'd get in the way of I did development that needed to work closer with the hardware, but I don't at the time
    - remram 2y ago
      You can remove them in a minute, but they'll come back. ChatGPT will pop in there when Microsoft adds it. You will get a full-screen blue "get windows ready" wizard every few days to "remind" you to log in. OneDrive will reappear on your desktop. You can still choose most things, but they will keep asking and twist your arm as much as possible.
- sho_hn 2y ago
  OK, I'm coming from Linux, but I have to say my experience has been the opposite. I have a semi-complex app I've decided to port to Windows (it's so far on Linux and MacOS and configures/debugs/tests servo motors on serial and CAN busses), and after a couple of days I've been unable to make any sane workflow work without installing three seperate half-assed copies of Linux userspace (Git for Windows w/ its bash install, cygwin and wsl2) and choco on top to install more Linux/Unix-originated stuff. It's a lot like MacOS and needing to fiddle with homebrew, except worse and you need four of them. Let me give you an example: I have a serial device connected to an SBC mini computer that I want to interface with from my dev PC, so I want to proxy that serial port over tcp to Windows and make it available as a COM port. On Linux this is trivial to do using socat, or ser2net+socat. On Windows, plenty of similar tools exist. Usually you need two of them, one to make a virtual pair of COM ports, and another one to pipe a TCP socket connection into one end of the pair. So far, so good. Except all of the utilities, drivers, etc. I've tried have just plain not worked, and I've tried a good half dozen. Often their last version is from somewhere in the 2007-2012 time frame, and something no longer works on Windows 11. I think a lot of devs of tools like this just nope'd out when Microsoft started enforcing signing and pushed the Store model harder, and moved to Linux or Mac. In the end I had to write my own thing for the COM pair and run socat in cygwin. And I've jumped through a few hoops like this. I'm sure if all you do is need a place to run npm from and the rest of your stuff is all in the browser, the OS barely matters. But for native dev, Windows feels dead and barren, and fully reliant on the Linux ecosystem to be productive at this point. It's where all the reliable and well-maintained stuff comes from, whereas Windows-native tools are a ghost town of abandoned, frequently closed-source binaries. The many years Windows couldn't make their minds up between the managed code .NET stack and native C/C++ APIs, and one was incomplete while the other bitrotted away, have really taken their toll, I think.
hatthew 2y ago
I do all my development work on linux. I have a self-hosted linux server. I used ubuntu as my main desktop computer OS for a full year, and in that time I struggled with compatibility issues, games that wouldn't run as well as people said they would, driver update issues, necessary tools that simply don't exist on linux, and various configuration failures that simply don't exist on windows. Saying that you can game on linux is like saying you can host a web server on windows. Sure, it's technically possible, and for some things it works smoothly. But 99% of resources on the web assume that you're on the normal OS, and as soon as you try to do anything even slightly outside of the basics, you're going to run into trouble.
- WD-42 2y ago
  I mean the steam deck is proof you can game on Linux. I hate to say it, but it sounds like you might just need to try harder.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    It depends a lot on what you play. E.g. multiplayer stuff that requires online anti-cheat rarely works well.
- glenstein 2y ago
  What you're describing sounds like the Linux gaming experience of 4-5 years ago. Steam and Proton have been complete game changers though, bringing the normal gaming experience with thousands (tens of thousands?) of games to Linux. It's not like it used to be.
  - hatthew 2y ago
    There are a lot of games that work well on linux. Maybe even most games! But there are also many games that do not work on linux. It's not fun to tell my friends "hey I'll be sitting this one out, let me know when we move on to another game"
    - 2y ago
technofiend 2y ago
My gaming PC has four NVME slots. Currently it hosts Windows 10 and Fedora, but since a new update was released it's also about to host SteamOS. When W 10 support ends later this year, I'll use Windows 11 ARM in a VM on my MacBook and that'll be that. The only thing I really needed Windows for was gaming, tax preparation and running Scrivener. You can get native versions of Taxcut and Scrivener for MacOS and SteamOS is good enough for me 99% of the time. If I really must play something that's Windows-only there's always GeForce Now which has the added benefit of only tying a Windows instance to my Steam account and no other online identities. Sayonara, Windows.
- decide1000 2y ago
  I switched to 100% linux (PopOs, Suse) and the only app I really miss is Scrivener.
  - technofiend 2y ago
    A mac mini is cheap if it's worth in investing in a platform to buy an app ala buying an Apple II to run Visicalc.
    - decide1000 2y ago
      I don't want to run a closed source OS anymore.
z3ratul163071 2y ago
What a time to be alive. I used to be certain Linux will always be crap for the desktop. And here I am now typing this on Wayland KDE :)
- glenstein 2y ago
  And to be fair, I would say the success for Linux in this case is increasingly approximating what we have come to understand as an optimal desktop experience without screwing anything up rather than outcompeting by necessarily achieving a noticeably higher standard. I personally would say Linux does desktops objectively better both in the higher standard but also in the not screwing up sense but I am willing to accept that it might be a little bit opinionated about that and for some people it amounts to too much customization.
anal_reactor 2y ago
1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it. 2. Once a month I have a task of checking 100k images for duplicates. Strangely, the only app that actually works is VisiPics from 2013. It does something smarter than just binary comparison, it works very fast. I guess I'll be running a Windows VM forever just for this one app, unless someone explains to me the algorithm it uses, so that I could write a more modern replacement.
- 0xdeafbeef 2y ago
  Have you tried https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka?
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    1. Can it detect duplicates that have different resolution and compression? 2. Does it work in linear time, or square?
- WD-42 2y ago
  You could try running it with wine.
- averagefluid 2y ago
  [dead]
- glenstein 2y ago
  >1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it. Office 365 is web-based and Linux accesses the web. If you're deep enough in the weeds that your survival hinges on desktop only features that can only be accessed from Windows then you're in a use case that can be resolved by getting a laptop for that purpose or being furnished one by your work. And while your use case is fascinatingly specific, my understanding is that the paradigm there is what might be called visual hashing or perceptual hashing, which is more than mere file size comparison, but kind of hashing a more generalized notion of image similarity. You may already know this, but from checking with chatgpt, there's something called DupeGuru which appears to be cross-platform. And also, it looks like there's some powerful Python and Perl libraries. Again, I'm sure your use case has some specific wrinkles to it, and you may very well know all of that already, so those might not help. But I suppose the interesting thing here is that the more idiosyncratic a use case is, the more closely it approximates things solved by programming languages which puts you back in the paradigm where Linux is not merely usable but I would argue the friendliest option.