5 ms·

For me, the best part of running Linux as the base OS is not having to deal with Windows. No ridiculous start menu spam; a sane, non-bloated operating system (

• phendrenad2 1y ago
  I have a theory that 99.9% of preferring Windows or Linux comes down to "do ads in the start menu trigger my OCD".
  • lxgr 1y ago
    It runs much deeper than that for me. Windows at its core just does not seem like a serious operating system to me. Whenever there are two ways to do something, its developers seem to have picked the non-reasonable one compared to Unix – and doing that for decades adds up. But yes, first impressions undoubtedly matter too.
    • iLemming 1y ago
      I have used Windows for years, and I loved it. I never understood why Linux and Mac users kept bashing on it. I just didn't know any better. These days I'm avoiding booting into Windows unless I really have no choice. The ridiculousness of it is simply limitless. I would open a folder with a bunch of files in it and the Explorer shows me a progress bar for nearly a minute. Why? What the heck is it doing? I just want to see the list of files, I'm not even doing anything crazy. Why the heck not a single other file navigator does that — not in Linux, not on Mac, darn — even the specialized apps built for Windows work fine, but the built-in thing just doesn't. What gives? I would close the window and re-open the exact same folder, not even three minutes later and it shows the progress bar again. "WTF? Can't you fucker just cache it? Da fuk you doing?" Or I would install an app. And seconds after installing it I would try to search for it in the Start menu, and guess what? Windows instead opens Edge and searches the web for it. wat? Why the heck I can't remove that Edge BS once and for all? Nope, not really possible. wat? Or like why can't I ever rebind Cmd+L? I can disable it but can't rebind it, there's just no way. Is it trying to operate my computer, or 'S' in 'OS' stands for "soul"? Or for whatever reason it can't even get the time right. Every single time I boot into it, my clock time is wrong. I have to manually re-sync it. It just doesn't do it, even with the location enabled. Stupid ass bitch. And don't even let me rant about those pesky updates. I dunno, I just cannot not hate Windows anymore. Even when I need to boot in it "for just a few minutes", it always ends up taking more time for some absolute fiddlesticks made of bullcrap. Screw Windows! Especially the 11 one.
      • skydhash 1y ago
        I loved windows XP and Windows 7. They were a bit brittle regarding malware, but I was using a lot of pirated software at the times, so that may have been me. Win 8 was bad UX wise, but 8.1 resolved a lot of the issues. But since then, I barely touched windows. I want a OS, not an entertainment center, meaning I want to launch a program, organize my files, and connect to other computers. Anything that hinders those is bad. I moved from macOS for the same reason, as they are trying to make those difficult too.
        • iLemming 1y ago
          > I want a OS, not an entertainment center Exactomundo! I'm a software developer, not a florist. I don't care about all those animations, transitions, dancing emojis, styled sliding notifications, windings and dingleberries. If I want to rebind a fucking key I should be able to. If I want to replace the entire desktop with a tiling manager of my choosing — that should be possible. And definitely, absolutely, in no way, should just about any kind of app, especially a web-browser, be shoved in my face. "Edge is not that bad", they would say. And would be completely missing the whole point.
      • dsego 1y ago
        > Or for whatever reason it can't even get the time right. Every single time I boot into it, my clock time is wrong. Dual booting will do that because linux & windows treat the system clock differently. From what I recall one of them will set it directly to the local time and the other always sets it to UTC and then applies the offset.
        • iLemming 1y ago
          Yeah, well, I use ntfs in Linux. It somehow knows how to treat the partitions. Even though it can't fix the issues when they arise (which almost never happens) — there's no chkdsk for Linux. So, I just don't understand why Windows can't automatically sync the clock (as it explicitly set to do it) when it boots? Why does one have to get creative to fix the darn clock? If I can't even trust the OS to manage the time correctly, what can I trust it with, if anything at all?
    • nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
      I have no idea what Windows does with the various network services but my Pi-Hole gets rate-limited* when it connects to the network--there's just constant DNS lookups to countless MS domains, far beyond what could reasonably be expected for a barebones install. This isn't even a corpo-sloptop with Qualys and Zscaler and crap running, Just a basic WIndows box I rarely boot. It's deeply offensive to me.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      When you compare thing on API level, NT is generally superior to POSIX - just look at what a mess fork() is for one example, or fd reuse, or async I/O.
      • guappa 1y ago
        Want to talk about how each process has to implement their own custom escaping and splitting of the command line string? That's much more complicated and error prone than fork.
        • int_19h 1y ago
          The C runtime will do that for you, and it has been a standard OS component since Win10. But also, no, it's not worse than fork. Fork literally breaks every threaded app.
          • guappa 1y ago
            > standard OS component since Win10. So, basically yesterday, and not default like how it is with execve, and you can never know if the command you're trying to call implements it the same way or does a different escaping. Care to explain how fork "breaks" threaded apps? You can't mix them for doing multiprocessing, but it's fine if you use one model or the other.
            • int_19h 1y ago
              Win10 has been around for literally a decade now. So much so that it's going out of support. fork() breaks threaded apps by forking the state of all threads, including any locks (such as e.g. the global heap lock!) that any given thread might hold at that moment. In practice this means that you have to choose either fork or threads for your process. And this extends to libraries - if the library that you need happens to spawn a background thread for any reason, no more fork for you. On macOS this means that many system APIs are unusable. Nor is any of this hypothetical - it's a footgun that people run into regularly (just google for "fork deadlock") even in higher level languages such as Python.
  • sssilver 1y ago
    I would say in my case it’s less about OCD and more about, inexplicably, dignity.
  • specproc 1y ago
    Advertising triggers a lot more than OCD in me outside of my start menu. On my machine, where I spend most of my waking hours, it was certainly the last straw for me. But there's also the thing where Microsoft stops supporting older machines, creating a massive pile of insecure boxes and normie-generated e-waste; and the thing where it dials home constantly; and the thing where they try and force their browser on you, and the expensive and predatory software ecosystem, and the insane bloat, and the requiring a Microsoft account just to use my own computer. Oh yeah, and I gotta pay for this crap?! I went full Linux back when Windows 11 came out and will only use it if a job requires. Utterly disgusting software.
  • II2II 1y ago
    The reason varies by the decade. Microsoft has a tendency to fix one thing, then break another. That said, a distaste for advertising goes beyond OCD. Advertisers frequently have questionable ethics, ranging from intruding upon people's privacy (in the many senses of the word) to manipulating people. It is simply something that many of us would rather do without.
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    Seems sorta not cool toward people with OCD to use their condition for rhetorical effect.
    • porridgeraisin 1y ago
      Take a chill pill.
      • bee_rider 1y ago
        What makes you think I’m not chill already? You engaged in a slightly rude trope, and I provided a very mild push back, at least from my point of view the stakes are all correctly low.
• bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot That's... a very weird criticism to level at Windows, considering that the advice I've seen for Linux is to reboot if you update glibc (which is very much a user space library).
  • lxgr 1y ago
    Why? It directly results in almost every Windows update requiring a reboot to apply, compared to usually only an application restart or at most desktop logout/login on Linux. Having to constantly reboot my computer, or risk missing important security patches, was very annoying to me on Windows. I've never had to reboot after updating glibc in years of using Linux, as far as I can remember.
  • deepsun 1y ago
    The only time I need to reboot my Linux Mint is when the Linux kernel is updated. I understand why.
    • samtheprogram 1y ago
      I responded "This is not true" to a sibling comment about this same topic, but about "shared libraries", which is the opposite problem (multiple programs could load the same shared library and try to interact). This is absolutely not true for Linux kernel updating. While you won't be using the new kernel before rebooting, there's 0 risk in not rebooting, because there's exactly 1 version of the kernel running on the machine -- it's loaded into memory when your computer starts. There's of course rare exceptions, like when a dynamically linked library you just installed depends on a minimum specific version of the Linux kernel you also just installed, but this is extremely rare in Linux land, as backwards compatibility of programs with older kernels is generally a given. "We do not break userspace"
      • doubled112 1y ago
        One problem not rebooting with the kernel is drivers. They aren’t all built in. Most distros leave the current running kernel and boot into the new one next time. Some, like Arch, overwrite the kernel on an update, so modules can’t be loaded. It is a shock the first time you plug in a USB drive and nothing happens.
• 0x457 1y ago
  > For me, the best part of running Linux as the base OS is not having to deal with Windows. This is correct, but let's not pretend that linux is perfect. 99% of linux _for me_ is my terminal environment. WSL delivers on that _for me_. I don't see any start menu spam because I rarely use it, when I do I type what I'm looking for before my eyes even move to look at that start menu. oh, I can play destiny 2 and other games without shenanigans. Also don't need to figure out why Slack wants to open links in chromium, but discord in firefox (I have to deal with edge asking to be a default browser, but IMO it's less annoying). Oh and multi-monitor with multiple DPI values works out of the box without looking up how to handle it in one of the frameworks this app uses.
  • viraptor 1y ago
    > when I do I type what I'm looking for before my eyes even move to look at that start menu. That's a /s, right? When I start typing immediately after the windows button, the initial letters are lost, the results are bad either way, and most turn into just web suggestions rather than things named exactly like the input.
    • aydyn 1y ago
      Turn off web suggestions then?
      • viraptor 1y ago
        I did. They come back after some of the updates.
    • 0x457 1y ago
      > That's a /s, right? When I start typing immediately after the windows button, the initial letters are lost, the results are bad either way, and most turn into just web suggestions rather than things named exactly like the input. No, I rarely have issues with search in start menu.