7 ms·

Over time they're going to touch things that people were waiting for Microsoft to do for years. I don't have an example in mind at the moment, but it's a lot be

Over time they're going to touch things that people were waiting for Microsoft to do for years. I don't have an example in mind at the moment, but it's a lot better to make the changes yourself than wait for OS or console manufacturer to take action.

benoau 10mo ago
"It just works" sleep and hibernate. "Slide left or right" CPU and GPU underclocking.
- pmontra 10mo ago
  Sleep and hibernate don't just work on Windows unless Microsoft work with laptop and boards manufacturers to make Windows play nice with all those drivers. It's inevitable that it's hit and miss on any other OS that manufacturers don't care much about. Apple does nearly everything inside their walls, that's why it just works.
  - Insanity 10mo ago
    “It just works” sadly isn’t true across the Apple Ecosystem anymore. Liquid Glass ruined multitasking UX on my iPad. :( Also my macbook (m4 pro) has random freezes where finder becomes entirely unresponsive. Not sure yet why this happens but thankfully it’s pretty rare.
  - pbh101 10mo ago
    Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature. (And same for Windows to the degree it is more inconsistent on Windows than Mac)
    - spauldo 10mo ago
      It's not the development model at fault here. It's the simple fact that Windows makes up nearly the entire user base for PCs. Companies make sure their hardware works with Windows, but many don't bother with Linux because it's such a tiny percentage of their sales.
      - tharkun__ 10mo ago
        Except when it doesn't. I can't upgrade my Intel graphics drivers to any newer version than what came with the laptop or else my laptop will silently die while asleep. Internet is full of similar reports from other laptop and graphics manufacturers and none have any solutions that work. The only thing that reliably worked is to restore the original driver version. Doesn't matter if I use the WHQL version(s) or something else.
    - mschuster91 10mo ago
      > Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature. The problem is: the specifications of ACPI are complex, Windows' behavior tends to be pretty much trash and most hardware tends to be trash too (AMD GPUs for example were infamous for not being resettable for years [1]), which means that BIOSes have to work around quirks on both the hardware and software. Usually, as soon as it is reasonably working with Windows (for a varying definition of "reasonably", that is), the ACPI code is shipped and that's it. Unfortunately, Linux follows standards (or at least, it tries to) and cannot fully emulate the numerous Windows quirks... and on top of that, GPUs tend to be hot piles of dung requiring proprietary blobs that make life even worse. [1] https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/11/working-around-the-amd-gpu-reset-bug-on-proxmox/ https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/11/working-around-the-amd-...
    - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature. The real problem is that the hardware vendors aren't using its development model. To make this work you either need a) the hardware vendor to write good drivers/firmware, or b) the hardware vendor to publish the source code or sufficient documentation so that someone else can reasonably fix their bugs. The Linux model is the second one. Which isn't what's happening when a hardware vendor doesn't do either of them. But some of them are better than others, and it's the sort of thing you can look up before you buy something, so this is a situation where you can vote with your wallet. A lot of this is also the direct fault of Microsoft for pressuring hardware vendors to support "Modern Standby" instead of rather than in addition to S3 suspend, presumably because they're organizationally incapable of making Windows Update work efficiently so they need Modern Standby to paper over it by having it run when the laptop is "asleep" and then they can't have people noticing that S3 is more efficient. But Microsoft's current mission to get everyone to switch to Linux appears to be in full swing now, so we'll see if their efforts on that front manage to improve the situation over time.
    - gf000 10mo ago
      The feature itself works. There are just hardware that is buggy and don't support it properly. That's a vastly different statement.
    - pbh101 10mo ago
      I should have said ‘product development’ model versus just ‘development’ to be more clear. To state another way: Linux has no way, no function, no pathway to providing this. This is not really surprising, because it isn’t the work software developers find fun and self-rewarding, but rather more the relatively mundane business-as-usual scope of product managers and business development folks. … And that’s all fine, because this is a super niche need: effectively nobody needs Linux laptops and even fewer depend on sleep to work. If ‘Linux’ convinced itself it really really needed to solve this problem for whatever reason, it would do something that doesn’t look like its current development model, something outside that. Regardless, the net result in the world today is that Linux sleep doesn’t work in general.
  - ls612 10mo ago
    Sleep has always worked on my desktop with a random Asus board from the early 2020s with no issues aside from one Nvidia driver bug earlier this year (which was their fault not MS's). Am I just really lucky?
- dijit 10mo ago
  “it just works” sleep was working, at least on basically every laptop I had the last 10 years… until the new s2idle stuff that Microsoft and Intel have foisted on the world (to update your laptop while sleeping… I guess?)
  - dabockster 10mo ago
    From what I read, it was a lot of the prosumer/gamer brands (MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS) implementing their part of sleep/hibernate badly on their motherboards. Which honestly lines up with my experience with them and other chips they use (in my case, USB controllers). Lots of RGB and maybe overclocking tech, but the cheapest power management and connectivity chips they can get (arguably what usually gets used the most by people).
    - zargon 10mo ago
      Sleep brokenness is ecosystem-wide. My Thinkpad crashes/freezes during sleep 3 times a week. Lenovo serviced/replaced it 3 times to no avail.
      - miohtama 10mo ago
        I have had never any sleep issues with my Macs.
        yencabulator 9mo ago
        And my wife's Macbook Air wakes itself up again if it tries to suspend when connected to a Dell monitor. Apple has plenty of bugs too, and only Apple can fix them.
  - chocochunks 10mo ago
    It never really worked in games even with S3 sleep. The new connected standby stuff created new issues but sleeping a laptop while gaming was a roulette wheel. SteamOS and the like actually work, like maybe 1/100 times I've run into an issue. Windows was 50/50.
- Krssst 10mo ago
  On my Framework 13 AMD : Sleep just works on Fedora. Sleep is unreliable on Windows; if my fans are all running at full speed while running a game and I close the lid to begin sleeping, it will start sleeping and eventually wake up with all fans blaring.
- seba_dos1 10mo ago
  Both of these have worked fine for the last 15 years or so on all my laptops.
- devnullbrain 10mo ago
  I don't understand this comment in this context. Both of these features work on my Steam Deck. Neither of them have worked on any Windows laptop my employers have foisted upon me.
- tremon 10mo ago
  That requires driver support. What you're seeing is Microsoft's hardware certification forcing device vendors to care about their products. You're right that this is lacking on Linux, but it's not a slight on the kernel itself.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
asveikau 10mo ago
I was at Microsoft during the Windows 8 cycle. I remember hearing about a kernel feature I found interesting. Then I found linux had it for a few years at the time. I think the reality is that Linux is ahead on a lot of kernel stuff. More experimentation is happening.
- dijit 10mo ago
  yeah, but you have IO Completion Ports… IO_Uring is still a pale imitation :(
  - loeg 10mo ago
    IOCP is great and was ahead of Linux for decades, but io_uring is also great. It's a different model, not a poor copy.
    - torginus 10mo ago
      I think they are a bit different - in the Windows kernel, all IO is asynchronous on the driver level, on Linux, it's not. io_uring didn't change that, it only got rid of the syscall overhead (which is still present on Windows), so in actuality they are two different technical solutions that affect different levels of the stack. In practice, Linux I/O is much faster, owing in part to the fact that Windows file I/O requires locking the file, while Linux does not.
      - senderista 10mo ago
        io_uring makes synchronous syscalls async simply by offloading them to a pool of kernel threads, just like people have done for decades in userspace.
        layla5alive 10mo ago
        It's not the async part, it's the not invoking the function part - io_uring replaces syscalls with producer consumer ring buffers.
duped 10mo ago
> I don't have an example in mind at the moment I do, MIDI 2.0. It's not because they're not doing it, just that they're doing it at a glacial pace compared to everyone else. They have reasons for this (a complete rewrite of the windows media services APIs and internals) but it's taken years and delays to do something that shipped on Linux over two years ago and on Apple more like 5 (although there were some protocol changes over that time).
guidopallemans 10mo ago
Surely a gaming handheld counts
packetlost 10mo ago
Kernel level anti-cheat with trusted execution / signed kernels is probably a reasonable new frontier for online games, but it requires a certain level of adoption from game makers.
- dabockster 10mo ago
  This is a part of Secure Boot, which Linux people have raged against for a long time. Mostly because the main key signing authority was Microsoft. But here's my rub: no one else bothered to step up to be a key signer. Everyone has instead whined for 15 years and told people to disable Secure Boot and the loads of trusted compute tech that depends on it, instead of actually building and running the necessary infra for everyone to have a Secure Boot authority outside of big tech. Not even Red Hat/IBM even though they have the infra to do it. Secure Boot and signed kernels are proven tech. But the Linux world absolutely needs to pull their heads out of their butts on this.
  - codeflo 10mo ago
    There are plenty of locked down computers in my life already. I don't need or want another system that only runs crap signed by someone, and it doesn't really matter whether that someone is Microsoft or Redhat. A computer is truly "general purpose" only if it will run exactly the executable code I choose to place there, and Secure Boot is designed to prevent that.
  - mhitza 10mo ago
    I don't know overall in the ecosystem but Fedora has been working for me with secureboot enabled for a long time. Having the option to disable secureboot, was probably due to backlash at the time and antitrust concerns. Aside from providing protection "evil maid" attacks (right?) secureboot is in the interest of software companies. Just like platform "integrity" checks.
  - ndriscoll 10mo ago
    The goals of the people mandating Secure Boot are completely opposed to the goals of people who want to decide what software they run on the computer they own. Literally the entire point of remote attestation is to take that choice away from you (e.g. because they don't want you to choose to run cheating software). It's not a matter of "no one stepped up"; it's that Epic Games isn't going to trust my secure boot key for my kernel I built. The only thing Secure Boot provides is the ability for someone else to measure what I'm running and therefore the ability to tell me what I can run on the device I own (mostly likely leading to them demanding I run malware like like the adware/spyware bundled into Windows). I don't have a maid to protect against; such attacks are a completely non-serious argument for most people.
mstank 10mo ago
Valve... please do Github Actions next
- xmprt 10mo ago
  I wonder what Valve uses for source control (no pun intended) internally.
  - harrisoned 10mo ago
    They use Perforce. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Using_Source_Control_with_the_Source_SDK https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Using_Source_Contro...
6r17 10mo ago
Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market ; with steam doing all the hard work and having a great market to play with ; the vast distributions to choose from, and most importantly how easy it has become to create an operating system from scratch - they not only lost all possible appeal, they seem stuck on really weird fetichism with their taskbar and just didn't provide me any kind of reason to be excited about windows. Their research department rocks however so it's not a full bash on Microsoft at all - i just feel like they are focusing on other way more interesting stuff
- Arainach 10mo ago
  Kernel improvements are interesting to geeks and data centers, but open source is fundamentally incompatible with great user experience. Great UX requires a lot of work that is hard but not algorithmically challenging. It requires consistency and getting many stakeholders to buy in. It requires spending lots of time on things that will never be used by more than 10-20% of people. Windows got a proper graphics compositor (DWM) in 2006 and made it mandatory in 2012. macOS had one even earlier. Linux fought against Compiz and while Wayland feels inevitable vocal forces still complain about/argue against it. Linux has a dozen incompatible UI toolkits. Screen readers on Linux are a mess. High contrast is a mess. Setting font size in a way that most programs respect is a mess. Consistent keyboard shortcuts are a mess. I could go on, but these are problems that open source is not set up to solve. These are problems that are hard, annoying, not particularly fun. People generally only solve them when they are paid to, and often only when governments or large customers pass laws requiring the work to be done and threaten to not buy your product if you don't do it. But they are crucially important things to building a great, widely adopted experience.
  - einr 10mo ago
    …and you are implying that Microsoft Windows 11 is a better example of ”great user experience”?
    - Arainach 10mo ago
theLiminator 10mo ago
Imagine if windows moved to the linux kernel and then used wine/proton to serve their own userspace.
- layer8 10mo ago
  The Linux kernel and Windows userspace are not very well matched on a fundamental level. I’m not sure we should be looking forward to that, other than for running games and other insular apps.
  - theLiminator 10mo ago
    Ah, I was being facetious, I think it would be pretty funny if it happened though.
    - Apocryphon 10mo ago
      Sounds like the sort of oddball corporate experiment that Action Retro or Michael MJD would be examining in fifteen years.
- m4rtink 10mo ago
  It kinda looked like this is the future, about at the same time they introduced WSL, released dotNET for Linux and started contributing to the Linux Kernel - all the while making the bank with Azure mostly thanks to running Linux workloads. But then they deCided it is better to show adds at OS level, rewrite OS UI as a web app, force harware DRM for their new OS version (TPM requirement) as well as automatically capturing content of you screen and feed it to AI.
shantara 10mo ago
I’ve heard from several people who game on Windows that Gamescope side panel with OS-wide tweakables for overlays, performance, power, frame limiters and scaling is something that they miss after playing on Steam Deck. There are separate utilities for each, but not anything so simple and accessible as in Gamescope.
amlib 10mo ago
A good one is the shader pre caching with fossilize, microsoft is only now getting around it and it still pales in comparison to Valve's solution for Linux.

benoau 10mo ago

"It just works" sleep and hibernate. "Slide left or right" CPU and GPU underclocking.

pmontra 10mo ago
Sleep and hibernate don't just work on Windows unless Microsoft work with laptop and boards manufacturers to make Windows play nice with all those drivers. It's inevitable that it's hit and miss on any other OS that manufacturers don't care much about. Apple does nearly everything inside their walls, that's why it just works.
- Insanity 10mo ago
  “It just works” sadly isn’t true across the Apple Ecosystem anymore. Liquid Glass ruined multitasking UX on my iPad. :( Also my macbook (m4 pro) has random freezes where finder becomes entirely unresponsive. Not sure yet why this happens but thankfully it’s pretty rare.
- pbh101 10mo ago
  Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature. (And same for Windows to the degree it is more inconsistent on Windows than Mac)
  - spauldo 10mo ago
    It's not the development model at fault here. It's the simple fact that Windows makes up nearly the entire user base for PCs. Companies make sure their hardware works with Windows, but many don't bother with Linux because it's such a tiny percentage of their sales.
    - tharkun__ 10mo ago
      Except when it doesn't. I can't upgrade my Intel graphics drivers to any newer version than what came with the laptop or else my laptop will silently die while asleep. Internet is full of similar reports from other laptop and graphics manufacturers and none have any solutions that work. The only thing that reliably worked is to restore the original driver version. Doesn't matter if I use the WHQL version(s) or something else.
  - mschuster91 10mo ago
    > Regardless of how it must be implemented, if this is a desirable feature then this explanation isn’t an absolution of Linux but rather an indictment: its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature. The problem is: the specifications of ACPI are complex, Windows' behavior tends to be pretty much trash and most hardware tends to be trash too (AMD GPUs for example were infamous for not being resettable for years [1]), which means that BIOSes have to work around quirks on both the hardware and software. Usually, as soon as it is reasonably working with Windows (for a varying definition of "reasonably", that is), the ACPI code is shipped and that's it. Unfortunately, Linux follows standards (or at least, it tries to) and cannot fully emulate the numerous Windows quirks... and on top of that, GPUs tend to be hot piles of dung requiring proprietary blobs that make life even worse. [1] https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/11/working-around-the-amd-gpu-reset-bug-on-proxmox/ https://www.nicksherlock.com/2020/11/working-around-the-amd-...
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature. The real problem is that the hardware vendors aren't using its development model. To make this work you either need a) the hardware vendor to write good drivers/firmware, or b) the hardware vendor to publish the source code or sufficient documentation so that someone else can reasonably fix their bugs. The Linux model is the second one. Which isn't what's happening when a hardware vendor doesn't do either of them. But some of them are better than others, and it's the sort of thing you can look up before you buy something, so this is a situation where you can vote with your wallet. A lot of this is also the direct fault of Microsoft for pressuring hardware vendors to support "Modern Standby" instead of rather than in addition to S3 suspend, presumably because they're organizationally incapable of making Windows Update work efficiently so they need Modern Standby to paper over it by having it run when the laptop is "asleep" and then they can't have people noticing that S3 is more efficient. But Microsoft's current mission to get everyone to switch to Linux appears to be in full swing now, so we'll see if their efforts on that front manage to improve the situation over time.
  - gf000 10mo ago
    The feature itself works. There are just hardware that is buggy and don't support it properly. That's a vastly different statement.
  - pbh101 10mo ago
    I should have said ‘product development’ model versus just ‘development’ to be more clear. To state another way: Linux has no way, no function, no pathway to providing this. This is not really surprising, because it isn’t the work software developers find fun and self-rewarding, but rather more the relatively mundane business-as-usual scope of product managers and business development folks. … And that’s all fine, because this is a super niche need: effectively nobody needs Linux laptops and even fewer depend on sleep to work. If ‘Linux’ convinced itself it really really needed to solve this problem for whatever reason, it would do something that doesn’t look like its current development model, something outside that. Regardless, the net result in the world today is that Linux sleep doesn’t work in general.
- ls612 10mo ago
  Sleep has always worked on my desktop with a random Asus board from the early 2020s with no issues aside from one Nvidia driver bug earlier this year (which was their fault not MS's). Am I just really lucky?
dijit 10mo ago
“it just works” sleep was working, at least on basically every laptop I had the last 10 years… until the new s2idle stuff that Microsoft and Intel have foisted on the world (to update your laptop while sleeping… I guess?)
- dabockster 10mo ago
  From what I read, it was a lot of the prosumer/gamer brands (MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS) implementing their part of sleep/hibernate badly on their motherboards. Which honestly lines up with my experience with them and other chips they use (in my case, USB controllers). Lots of RGB and maybe overclocking tech, but the cheapest power management and connectivity chips they can get (arguably what usually gets used the most by people).
  - zargon 10mo ago
    Sleep brokenness is ecosystem-wide. My Thinkpad crashes/freezes during sleep 3 times a week. Lenovo serviced/replaced it 3 times to no avail.
    - miohtama 10mo ago
      I have had never any sleep issues with my Macs.
      - yencabulator 9mo ago
        And my wife's Macbook Air wakes itself up again if it tries to suspend when connected to a Dell monitor. Apple has plenty of bugs too, and only Apple can fix them.
- chocochunks 10mo ago
  It never really worked in games even with S3 sleep. The new connected standby stuff created new issues but sleeping a laptop while gaming was a roulette wheel. SteamOS and the like actually work, like maybe 1/100 times I've run into an issue. Windows was 50/50.
Krssst 10mo ago
On my Framework 13 AMD : Sleep just works on Fedora. Sleep is unreliable on Windows; if my fans are all running at full speed while running a game and I close the lid to begin sleeping, it will start sleeping and eventually wake up with all fans blaring.
seba_dos1 10mo ago
Both of these have worked fine for the last 15 years or so on all my laptops.
devnullbrain 10mo ago
I don't understand this comment in this context. Both of these features work on my Steam Deck. Neither of them have worked on any Windows laptop my employers have foisted upon me.
tremon 10mo ago
That requires driver support. What you're seeing is Microsoft's hardware certification forcing device vendors to care about their products. You're right that this is lacking on Linux, but it's not a slight on the kernel itself.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

asveikau 10mo ago

I was at Microsoft during the Windows 8 cycle. I remember hearing about a kernel feature I found interesting. Then I found linux had it for a few years at the time. I think the reality is that Linux is ahead on a lot of kernel stuff. More experimentation is happening.

dijit 10mo ago
yeah, but you have IO Completion Ports… IO_Uring is still a pale imitation :(
- loeg 10mo ago
  IOCP is great and was ahead of Linux for decades, but io_uring is also great. It's a different model, not a poor copy.
  - torginus 10mo ago
    I think they are a bit different - in the Windows kernel, all IO is asynchronous on the driver level, on Linux, it's not. io_uring didn't change that, it only got rid of the syscall overhead (which is still present on Windows), so in actuality they are two different technical solutions that affect different levels of the stack. In practice, Linux I/O is much faster, owing in part to the fact that Windows file I/O requires locking the file, while Linux does not.
    - senderista 10mo ago
      io_uring makes synchronous syscalls async simply by offloading them to a pool of kernel threads, just like people have done for decades in userspace.
      - layla5alive 10mo ago
        It's not the async part, it's the not invoking the function part - io_uring replaces syscalls with producer consumer ring buffers.

duped 10mo ago

> I don't have an example in mind at the moment I do, MIDI 2.0. It's not because they're not doing it, just that they're doing it at a glacial pace compared to everyone else. They have reasons for this (a complete rewrite of the windows media services APIs and internals) but it's taken years and delays to do something that shipped on Linux over two years ago and on Apple more like 5 (although there were some protocol changes over that time).

guidopallemans 10mo ago

Surely a gaming handheld counts

packetlost 10mo ago

Kernel level anti-cheat with trusted execution / signed kernels is probably a reasonable new frontier for online games, but it requires a certain level of adoption from game makers.

dabockster 10mo ago
This is a part of Secure Boot, which Linux people have raged against for a long time. Mostly because the main key signing authority was Microsoft. But here's my rub: no one else bothered to step up to be a key signer. Everyone has instead whined for 15 years and told people to disable Secure Boot and the loads of trusted compute tech that depends on it, instead of actually building and running the necessary infra for everyone to have a Secure Boot authority outside of big tech. Not even Red Hat/IBM even though they have the infra to do it. Secure Boot and signed kernels are proven tech. But the Linux world absolutely needs to pull their heads out of their butts on this.
- codeflo 10mo ago
  There are plenty of locked down computers in my life already. I don't need or want another system that only runs crap signed by someone, and it doesn't really matter whether that someone is Microsoft or Redhat. A computer is truly "general purpose" only if it will run exactly the executable code I choose to place there, and Secure Boot is designed to prevent that.
- mhitza 10mo ago
  I don't know overall in the ecosystem but Fedora has been working for me with secureboot enabled for a long time. Having the option to disable secureboot, was probably due to backlash at the time and antitrust concerns. Aside from providing protection "evil maid" attacks (right?) secureboot is in the interest of software companies. Just like platform "integrity" checks.
- ndriscoll 10mo ago
  The goals of the people mandating Secure Boot are completely opposed to the goals of people who want to decide what software they run on the computer they own. Literally the entire point of remote attestation is to take that choice away from you (e.g. because they don't want you to choose to run cheating software). It's not a matter of "no one stepped up"; it's that Epic Games isn't going to trust my secure boot key for my kernel I built. The only thing Secure Boot provides is the ability for someone else to measure what I'm running and therefore the ability to tell me what I can run on the device I own (mostly likely leading to them demanding I run malware like like the adware/spyware bundled into Windows). I don't have a maid to protect against; such attacks are a completely non-serious argument for most people.

mstank 10mo ago

Valve... please do Github Actions next

xmprt 10mo ago
I wonder what Valve uses for source control (no pun intended) internally.
- harrisoned 10mo ago
  They use Perforce. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Using_Source_Control_with_the_Source_SDK https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Using_Source_Contro...

6r17 10mo ago

Tbh i'm starting to think that I do not see microsoft being able to keep it's position in the OS market ; with steam doing all the hard work and having a great market to play with ; the vast distributions to choose from, and most importantly how easy it has become to create an operating system from scratch - they not only lost all possible appeal, they seem stuck on really weird fetichism with their taskbar and just didn't provide me any kind of reason to be excited about windows. Their research department rocks however so it's not a full bash on Microsoft at all - i just feel like they are focusing on other way more interesting stuff

Arainach 10mo ago
Kernel improvements are interesting to geeks and data centers, but open source is fundamentally incompatible with great user experience. Great UX requires a lot of work that is hard but not algorithmically challenging. It requires consistency and getting many stakeholders to buy in. It requires spending lots of time on things that will never be used by more than 10-20% of people. Windows got a proper graphics compositor (DWM) in 2006 and made it mandatory in 2012. macOS had one even earlier. Linux fought against Compiz and while Wayland feels inevitable vocal forces still complain about/argue against it. Linux has a dozen incompatible UI toolkits. Screen readers on Linux are a mess. High contrast is a mess. Setting font size in a way that most programs respect is a mess. Consistent keyboard shortcuts are a mess. I could go on, but these are problems that open source is not set up to solve. These are problems that are hard, annoying, not particularly fun. People generally only solve them when they are paid to, and often only when governments or large customers pass laws requiring the work to be done and threaten to not buy your product if you don't do it. But they are crucially important things to building a great, widely adopted experience.
- einr 10mo ago
  …and you are implying that Microsoft Windows 11 is a better example of ”great user experience”?
  - Arainach 10mo ago

theLiminator 10mo ago

Imagine if windows moved to the linux kernel and then used wine/proton to serve their own userspace.

layer8 10mo ago
The Linux kernel and Windows userspace are not very well matched on a fundamental level. I’m not sure we should be looking forward to that, other than for running games and other insular apps.
- theLiminator 10mo ago
  Ah, I was being facetious, I think it would be pretty funny if it happened though.
  - Apocryphon 10mo ago
    Sounds like the sort of oddball corporate experiment that Action Retro or Michael MJD would be examining in fifteen years.
m4rtink 10mo ago
It kinda looked like this is the future, about at the same time they introduced WSL, released dotNET for Linux and started contributing to the Linux Kernel - all the while making the bank with Azure mostly thanks to running Linux workloads. But then they deCided it is better to show adds at OS level, rewrite OS UI as a web app, force harware DRM for their new OS version (TPM requirement) as well as automatically capturing content of you screen and feed it to AI.

shantara 10mo ago

I’ve heard from several people who game on Windows that Gamescope side panel with OS-wide tweakables for overlays, performance, power, frame limiters and scaling is something that they miss after playing on Steam Deck. There are separate utilities for each, but not anything so simple and accessible as in Gamescope.

amlib 10mo ago

A good one is the shader pre caching with fossilize, microsoft is only now getting around it and it still pales in comparison to Valve's solution for Linux.