6 ms·

I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance. But it has since then stalled and got increasingly wors

I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance. But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu. I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks). I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.

pbohun 10mo ago
It sounds weird to say, but Steve Ballmer was probably the best CEO of Microsoft.
- phillipcarter 10mo ago
  Yeah, it sounds weird because the person you’re replying to is using examples of things that came in under Nadella, not Ballmer.
- hackyhacky 10mo ago
  Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it. A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
  - schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
    >including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism. Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
    - steve1977 10mo ago
      macOS has Cocoa since 2000, which is still useable, and SwiftUI since a few years. No comparison to the mess of UI toolkits on Windows.
      - schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
        And what about Carbon? Gone. 32-bit apps? Gone. PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old? Forget it. You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps! Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today. Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux. It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
        seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
        steve1977 10mo ago
        Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility. I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon. But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff. Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
        schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
        Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore. Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious. With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out. When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
  - drnick1 10mo ago
    I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API. Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.
  - franktankbank 10mo ago
    Experimentation is a cost center?
- Calavar 10mo ago
  Danluu has a great piece on why Ballmer was better than people gave him credit for: https://danluu.com/ballmer/ https://danluu.com/ballmer/
- lysace 10mo ago
  Feb 2014: Satya Nadella becomes CEO. July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people. The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers. I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
  - 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
    Ultimately it still comes down to someone in the chain giving a damn. There are obvious, surface level bugs across most technologies. Yet, developers, PMs, VPs all sign off and say, "Close enough".
    - lysace 10mo ago
      And that's also on the CEO, especially after this much time. He has failed to correctly incentivize/hire/motivate/plan/structure/etc.
  - conradfr 10mo ago
    Does Satya Nadella even use a windows laptop?
    - lysace 10mo ago
      Yes, probably.
spikej 10mo ago
Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
- SilasX 10mo ago
  This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options! And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
  - mrec 10mo ago
    Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
    - SilasX 10mo ago
      So, you're just screwed if you need a working editor in safe mode now?
      - netsharc 10mo ago
        This makes me want to suggest to Microsoft to have AI-enhanced safe mode. "Computer can't boot? Reboot to the Recovery Copilot and have this advanced spell-checker try to troubleshoot it!"
  - uxcolumbo 10mo ago
    Use MetaPad - like Notepad. https://liquidninja.com/metapad/ https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
  - baal80spam 10mo ago
    I recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++
thunky 10mo ago
> I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy Never heard of it and the website and GitHub repo sure aren't doing a great job of describing it's benefits. "Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated" are vague and really aren't adjectives I'd be looking for in an OS.
- wackget 10mo ago
  When anything is described as "opinionated" I just read it as "wilfully inflexible".
  - TomatoCo 10mo ago
    Although there are some places you want that! WireGuard is often described as cryptographically opinionated because it doesn't even bother trying to negotiate crypto primitives which makes it immune to downgrade attacks. Though, to be fair, that also means that if its primitives ever do get broken you need to roll out an entirely new release.
  - theParadox42 10mo ago
    It’s opinionated coming from Arch Linux. Compared to MacOS or Windows it’s a big giant push over. Opinionated in this context just means it comes with defaults rather than asking you to research your own display compositor.
  - zemo 10mo ago
    opinionated versus unopinionated is a tradeoff. Things that boast about how unopinionated they are often require a lot of hand holding or manual config. I think there's a big audience of people that have non-Appleware that want an OS that is not Windows, but don't actually care to customize it.
  - throw4r5t6y3 10mo ago
    It’s by David Heinemeier Hansson. Based on his writings, he’s very inflexible. He’s even unwilling to accept that a person of color who was born and raised in Britain can be British.
doodlesdev 10mo ago
Why would you go for a random Linux distribution backed by DHH (a Ruby developer) instead of a established upstream distribution such as Debian or Fedora?
- Cornbilly 10mo ago
  It's just Arch Linux with hyprland pre-configured and bunch of pre-installed software. People have been flocking to it for reasons like 1. They don't want to configure hyprland themselves. 2. They want to say they are running an "elite" distro like Arch. 3. They're part of DHH's weird following that is a mix of insufferable smugness and right-wing politics.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- broof 10mo ago
  I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo ago
  Because of hyprland. There aren't many alternatives with hyprland (or niri) preconfigured for you
  - user205738 10mo ago
    It's not such a difficult task to set up hyprland. And niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo ago
      From my understanding, to get something at the level of omarchy you need to setup multiple pieces of software. In the end it has to replace the whole "desktop"
lolive 10mo ago
Utilities to circunvent the stupid original design. Even Microsoft is forced to use this pattern to correct itself. But hey, you know what they say: "Selling the disease and the cure is the best bizness plan ever".
zdragnar 10mo ago
You may also want to consider Cosmic. PopOS has consistently been the distro that "just works" for me, though I don't use it much as I prefer to tinker more. That said, they're doing a lot of good work making Cosmic as a better replacement for the ton of gnome 3 hacks they had to do before.
jamespo 10mo ago
Try EndeavourOS
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
If you want an OS to simply do stuff Linux is now clearly superior. However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs. On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.
- aeon_ai 10mo ago
  To each their own. I find Omarchy to simply "make sense" out of the box for me. And, I've never used a tiling WM before it (and feel crazy for not having done so)
  - hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
    I guess that’s the difference. I have used a tiling WM before. So I wonder whether the benefits you’re seeing in Omarchy are simply the result of using a tiling WM for the first time, which overrode what I believe Omarchy detracted from a general tiling WM. Or whether my poorer experience was a result of the fact that having used a tiling WM I was more comfortable customizing and so found the Omarchy opinionated behavior restrictive or if the benefits Omarchy brings to someone who’s new to a tiling WM are lost on me.
- jaredhallen 10mo ago
  I love Linux. I've been using it for about 25 years now. I try to be a realist, and historically, it has always been my opinion that it is a less polished experience, suitable mainly for power users. But my opinion now is that many flavors actually do offer a superior desktop user experience for most use cases.
  - doubleg72 10mo ago
throwaway-11-1 10mo ago
macOS is in the worst state I’ve ever experienced since I started using it, but I’d go back to a shitty performing x86 laptop with Linux before living on windows again. Just using it on my gaming pc makes my skin crawl
antisthenes 10mo ago
> I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. Surely there's a typo there, and you meant late 2000s, e.g. 2009? Late 2010s Windows was W10 with constant system-breaking bugs, mobile-first interface, more and more data mining and adware my MS, etc.
- spixy 10mo ago
  Windows 8/10 were more stable than XP/Vista. Not sure what is bad with data mining / telemetry (as long it is anonymised and respects GDPR). Adware is issue only on Windows 11.
whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
> Omarchy Had high hopes for it but in my testing the mouse cursor chokes and drops frames/precision under load which I just can’t deal with.
renegade-otter 10mo ago
I installed Mint on my Alienware and uninstalled Steam on the Windows partition. My tolerance for this BS is pretty high (and I just don't want to spend time on this), but it broke even my patience.

pbohun 10mo ago

It sounds weird to say, but Steve Ballmer was probably the best CEO of Microsoft.

phillipcarter 10mo ago
Yeah, it sounds weird because the person you’re replying to is using examples of things that came in under Nadella, not Ballmer.
hackyhacky 10mo ago
Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it. A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
- schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
  >including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism. Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
  - steve1977 10mo ago
    macOS has Cocoa since 2000, which is still useable, and SwiftUI since a few years. No comparison to the mess of UI toolkits on Windows.
    - schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
      And what about Carbon? Gone. 32-bit apps? Gone. PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old? Forget it. You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps! Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today. Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux. It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
      - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
      - steve1977 10mo ago
        Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility. I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon. But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff. Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
        schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
        Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore. Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious. With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out. When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
- drnick1 10mo ago
  I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API. Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.
- franktankbank 10mo ago
  Experimentation is a cost center?
Calavar 10mo ago
Danluu has a great piece on why Ballmer was better than people gave him credit for: https://danluu.com/ballmer/ https://danluu.com/ballmer/
lysace 10mo ago
Feb 2014: Satya Nadella becomes CEO. July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people. The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers. I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
- 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
  Ultimately it still comes down to someone in the chain giving a damn. There are obvious, surface level bugs across most technologies. Yet, developers, PMs, VPs all sign off and say, "Close enough".
  - lysace 10mo ago
    And that's also on the CEO, especially after this much time. He has failed to correctly incentivize/hire/motivate/plan/structure/etc.
- conradfr 10mo ago
  Does Satya Nadella even use a windows laptop?
  - lysace 10mo ago
    Yes, probably.

spikej 10mo ago

Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!

SilasX 10mo ago
This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options! And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
- mrec 10mo ago
  Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.
  - SilasX 10mo ago
    So, you're just screwed if you need a working editor in safe mode now?
    - netsharc 10mo ago
      This makes me want to suggest to Microsoft to have AI-enhanced safe mode. "Computer can't boot? Reboot to the Recovery Copilot and have this advanced spell-checker try to troubleshoot it!"
- uxcolumbo 10mo ago
  Use MetaPad - like Notepad. https://liquidninja.com/metapad/ https://liquidninja.com/metapad/
- baal80spam 10mo ago
  I recommend https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html - it's even snappier than Notepad++

thunky 10mo ago

> I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy Never heard of it and the website and GitHub repo sure aren't doing a great job of describing it's benefits. "Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated" are vague and really aren't adjectives I'd be looking for in an OS.

wackget 10mo ago
When anything is described as "opinionated" I just read it as "wilfully inflexible".
- TomatoCo 10mo ago
  Although there are some places you want that! WireGuard is often described as cryptographically opinionated because it doesn't even bother trying to negotiate crypto primitives which makes it immune to downgrade attacks. Though, to be fair, that also means that if its primitives ever do get broken you need to roll out an entirely new release.
- theParadox42 10mo ago
  It’s opinionated coming from Arch Linux. Compared to MacOS or Windows it’s a big giant push over. Opinionated in this context just means it comes with defaults rather than asking you to research your own display compositor.
- zemo 10mo ago
  opinionated versus unopinionated is a tradeoff. Things that boast about how unopinionated they are often require a lot of hand holding or manual config. I think there's a big audience of people that have non-Appleware that want an OS that is not Windows, but don't actually care to customize it.
- throw4r5t6y3 10mo ago
  It’s by David Heinemeier Hansson. Based on his writings, he’s very inflexible. He’s even unwilling to accept that a person of color who was born and raised in Britain can be British.

doodlesdev 10mo ago

Why would you go for a random Linux distribution backed by DHH (a Ruby developer) instead of a established upstream distribution such as Debian or Fedora?

Cornbilly 10mo ago
It's just Arch Linux with hyprland pre-configured and bunch of pre-installed software. People have been flocking to it for reasons like 1. They don't want to configure hyprland themselves. 2. They want to say they are running an "elite" distro like Arch. 3. They're part of DHH's weird following that is a mix of insufferable smugness and right-wing politics.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
broof 10mo ago
I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo ago
Because of hyprland. There aren't many alternatives with hyprland (or niri) preconfigured for you
- user205738 10mo ago
  It's not such a difficult task to set up hyprland. And niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo ago
    From my understanding, to get something at the level of omarchy you need to setup multiple pieces of software. In the end it has to replace the whole "desktop"

lolive 10mo ago

Utilities to circunvent the stupid original design. Even Microsoft is forced to use this pattern to correct itself. But hey, you know what they say: "Selling the disease and the cure is the best bizness plan ever".

zdragnar 10mo ago

You may also want to consider Cosmic. PopOS has consistently been the distro that "just works" for me, though I don't use it much as I prefer to tinker more. That said, they're doing a lot of good work making Cosmic as a better replacement for the ton of gnome 3 hacks they had to do before.

jamespo 10mo ago

Try EndeavourOS

hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago

If you want an OS to simply do stuff Linux is now clearly superior. However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs. On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.

aeon_ai 10mo ago
To each their own. I find Omarchy to simply "make sense" out of the box for me. And, I've never used a tiling WM before it (and feel crazy for not having done so)
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
  I guess that’s the difference. I have used a tiling WM before. So I wonder whether the benefits you’re seeing in Omarchy are simply the result of using a tiling WM for the first time, which overrode what I believe Omarchy detracted from a general tiling WM. Or whether my poorer experience was a result of the fact that having used a tiling WM I was more comfortable customizing and so found the Omarchy opinionated behavior restrictive or if the benefits Omarchy brings to someone who’s new to a tiling WM are lost on me.
jaredhallen 10mo ago
I love Linux. I've been using it for about 25 years now. I try to be a realist, and historically, it has always been my opinion that it is a less polished experience, suitable mainly for power users. But my opinion now is that many flavors actually do offer a superior desktop user experience for most use cases.
- doubleg72 10mo ago

throwaway-11-1 10mo ago

macOS is in the worst state I’ve ever experienced since I started using it, but I’d go back to a shitty performing x86 laptop with Linux before living on windows again. Just using it on my gaming pc makes my skin crawl

antisthenes 10mo ago

> I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. Surely there's a typo there, and you meant late 2000s, e.g. 2009? Late 2010s Windows was W10 with constant system-breaking bugs, mobile-first interface, more and more data mining and adware my MS, etc.

spixy 10mo ago
Windows 8/10 were more stable than XP/Vista. Not sure what is bad with data mining / telemetry (as long it is anonymised and respects GDPR). Adware is issue only on Windows 11.

whywhywhywhy 10mo ago

> Omarchy Had high hopes for it but in my testing the mouse cursor chokes and drops frames/precision under load which I just can’t deal with.

renegade-otter 10mo ago

I installed Mint on my Alienware and uninstalled Steam on the Windows partition. My tolerance for this BS is pretty high (and I just don't want to spend time on this), but it broke even my patience.