Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
(himthe.dev)1860 points by bobsterlobster 4 days ago
1860 points by bobsterlobster 4 days ago
As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple there were three things that stood out: The M processors are amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
> mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn't do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
> Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.
And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.
I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.
I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.
From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.
I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.
It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
I can give you a few examples:
Packages are not done well compared to linux. Brew is a poor replacement. It feels like the terminal and everything involved is constantly out of date.
The OS just has a lot of weird things, like the ribbon at the bottom taking up so much space. When I made is smaller and hidden except on mouse over it was incredibly rough.
Window management is decades behind windows or linux. It doesn't like maximizing windows and doesn't make partitioning screen space easy. I had to download a third party app to make it better, which was still worse than windows even in windows 7, and miles worse than linux with i3.
Mac has a lot of rough spots. I have two external monitors and occasionally after updates one monitor would be fuzzy or different resolutions, and it wouldn't go back until the next update.
MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.
Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.
On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.
If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!
If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
I’d frame it slightly differently.
With Linux/Windows you’re supplied with a toolbox and from that toolbox you’re expected to cobble together a workflow that works for you and maintain it.
I spent a significant amount of time trying to learn Tasks inside of Outlook and come up with a system that would make it remotely useful. I failed repeatedly. They eventually bought Wunderlist and replaced it with that, which still has some rough edges (last I tried) due to the legacy Outlook Tasks integration.
Apple, more often than not, is looking to identify a problem and give an opinionated solution on how to handle it. If you’re ok with their solution, great, problem solved. If you’re not, you end up either fighting with the Apple tools or finding a 3rd party toolbox style app that lets you cobble together a workflow. I found just going with the opinionated solution removes a lot of needless stress from my life. There are some places I do go 3rd party, but I reevaluate often to ask if I really need these things and if they’re worth the trouble.
It ends up being a question of what my goals are with the computer. Am I looking to work on the operating system and apps to tune them to exactly what I want, or am I just looking for the system to fade into the background so I can do other things. When I was younger, I found tweaking and playing with everything to be a bit of a hobby. These days, I just want to do what I need to get done and move on with my life.
Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard).
Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. (Yes I know there is some magic keystroke that will do it, but who even wants the standard behavior? Like why even do that?)
If there is a window under another window, and you click on something in it, the OS will ignore the click, it will just activate the window.
So now you have to click twice, except what if it's actually active? So now you have to always check if a window is active - which is harder than necessary because of how Macs have the toolbar on top, not near the actual window. (This is especially bad when you have two monitors.)
The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements.
There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button.
If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back (you have to pick tile windows or something like that to make the mac move it). If you do show all windows, and click on it, nothing obvious happens.
I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.
The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such thing as directories.
If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order.
If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up, even though I moved it down. (This is especially funny when you realize it frequently manages to place windows off screen - why can't it be helpful then?)
When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen - I have yet to figure out when this activates and when it doesn't.
When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it - sometime. But despite that it manages to place the window offset - so it's the right size, but like 40 pixels to the left.
Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.
E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.
Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".
Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.
I haven't had that Bluetooth issue (but I haven't tried connecting my non-airpods to my mac).
Have you tried this? I saw it as a fix over on Reddit.
Privacy & Security > Bluetooth > Click the + > Add Music from Applications > Toggle to disabled
(This is insane to have to do, but better than running a script to monitor for it and kill it)
> and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use Mac.
Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to the OS is very limited.
Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all the previous releases.
Anything in particular? I get that it takes some tweaking but so does Linux. The biggest thing that you'll probably never get the way you want is window tiling - it's my personal bugaboo with MacOS. Maybe there's a way to get what I want ...
For me, the biggest pain point is the way it decides which window to bring to the front. If I minimize a window, and then click on the application in the bar, it won't show the window just minimized, instead it always seems to show the older window. Really annoying when using an app with many windows
There's a couple but nothing I've found at the level of i3 or whatever the hyprland equivalent is.
Shouldn't need to install third party stuff for such a basic feature. One more thing that will possibly break with updates or not play nice with something.
Interesting. My experience over a decade was that (expensive) Apple hardware was unreliable or poorly designed ... from the IIsi to the iMac. One exception: the murdered Power clone was great. The iMac vertical screen-stripe fiasco (affected hundreds of users within the warranty period, before they shut down the forum, then took years to respond to) was capped with a hard-drive fail after a year. My 'never again' still in effect 15 years later.
My home-made AMD tower is in its 6th year (running Linux) with no, zero, fails.
Man, we didn't have this all along.
Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple's board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can't handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.
Windows is absolute garbage, I agree. But the application windows behave normally, maximize when I want them, will take half a screen, quarter screen, etc. with just a quick hotkey. Mac doesn't have that extremely basic functionality without a 3rd party extension, which is absurd. But I don't use windows other than if my work gives me one, I am purely linux otherwise.
It's only fair that Linux should pay 10% of the license fee for their software to Microsoft in exchange
For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front (multimedia), work in back (dev).
And then:
- Butterfly keyboard
- Touchbar
- M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.
Your website has stained my screen. lol
background-image: radial-gradient(circle at 12% 24%, var(--text-primary) 1.5px, transparent 1.5px),
radial-gradient(circle at 73% 67%, var(--text-primary) 1px, transparent 1px),
radial-gradient(circle at 41% 92%, var(--text-primary) 1.2px, transparent 1.2px),
radial-gradient(circle at 89% 15%, var(--text-primary) 1px, transparent 1px);
Joking aside, I often hear people say "they should" when talking about GNU/Linux (for example: "they should just standardize on one audio stack"), as if there were a central authority making those decisions. What many don't realize is that with FOSS comes freedom of choice... and inevitably, an abundance of choice. That diversity isn't a flaw, it's a consequence of how the ecosystem works.
There's free choice for those OSes to use different kernels, but they don't, they all use the same Linux (rather than say BSD). There's a lot of advantage in getting aligned on things, even though anyone can choose not to.
I guess Linus Torvalds and co? First they'd need to standardize a Linux desktop OS.
As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chips in M4 series. And with RAM/storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).
So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.
I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.
Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.
I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.
I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.
I'd like to use this kind of setup but unfortunately every time I try there's just soo many annoying edge cases that are wasting my time. Especially when I need to do FE/Mobile - but even BE has gotchas. I guess it depends on your environment - I'll try making this setup work sometimes in the next few months again.
> Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming
and any contemporary ergonomics. Seriously, macbooks are an environmental hazard at this point: ultra glossy screen, hand twisting keyboard, wrist cutting sharp edges, lack of modern surge protections etc. etc. I genuinely don't understand this sentiment that macbook hardware is good.
So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can't speak for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times fewer resources to run the OS itself.
There is Asahi Linux project for Apple Silicon Macs.
If Linux had a revenue stream and model, this would make sense. But the style of open-source is to make good software, and let others gravitate to you as a result.
HP Zbook Ultra G1a, 128GB RAM. Add SSD to taste. HP supported (Canonical OEM) Ubuntu with KDE. Works great as a daily driver with a UGreen GAN charger.
Frameworks are built like crap. Sorry for the language. Watch the laptop olympics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M96O0Sn1LXA
Still reading the article, but early on it says:
"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.
That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?
They stick with you. I remember our first family computer well (an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.)
Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)
Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they should be somewhat indelible memories.
Haha, I wondered if someone would complain about 32MB. We had the board maxed out. My grandfather’s computer before ours.
A few months after taking possession, I upgraded the disk to a luxurious 400MB.
My Dad had one of them. The first machine I actually purchased myself was a Dragon 32 (6809 processor, 32k RAM) sometime around 1981 - i can remember everything about it, including all the terrible cassette games I bought for it and the money I spent on ROM cartridges (word processor, assembler/debugger). These days I can't even remember what's in my Steam library.
I still have my Mac 128k with external disk drive and printer. Bought new in Jan 1985 or late Dec 1984. I paid the exorbitant price to upgrade it to 512k during the first year I owned it. I think the RAM needed to be desoldered and new chips soldered in place so it needed to be returned to the store where I bought it.
Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.
Interestingly I can't remember any specs since about 22 years ago.
First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it's just "whatever".
First family PC was a used IBM PC XT, 8088 w/ 640kb ram and a cga card with an amber monochrome monitor attached. I remember getting a 14.4 modem on it, and it would freeze, had to force it to 9600bps. Then managed to wranle a 486sx w/ 4mb ram and an EGA card and display.
First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I'd traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS/2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I've mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I've ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.
I documented all of my early computers throughout early college, and I'm glad I did. I remember the first computers well, but without those notes, I wouldn't remember the first ten in so much detail. My first computer that was not a family computer was: UMAX 233mhz Pentium 2, 64Mb Ram, 8Gb HDD (was crushed when sat on by sibling)
The 5150 was just an "IBM PC" not an XT, but still... I think we're talking about the same thing.
I still have mine! 4.77 MHz 8088, 8087 math coprocessor, CGA graphics card, 5.25" floppy (360K, double-sided, double-density), 20 MB Seagate hard drive (I believe the motherboard has newer ROM chips to support that), AST SixPakPlus expansion card to bring it up to 640 KB RAM and a Parallel Port, a Serial Port, a Game Port, and a Real Time Clock (so you don't have to type in the date and time every bootup.) At one point I had a Sound Blaster as well, which was nice. The floppy drive and the hard drive each have their own controller cards so there's almost no more room for expansion! The motherboard also has the keyboard and cassette (!!!) port. I get an error code about the cassette port so I doubt it would work but I never had the equipment to try it out anyway.
Nah, I think it's awesome. Great computer by the way. With all that raw power I bet you were doing tons of computering.
How likely is a future where Microsoft
(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,
(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,
(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,
(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?
It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.
(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)
> (c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again
Microsoft and OpenAI have the same problem in that they have a massive userbase that costs them money but doesn’t generate any revenue. The only known ways of sustaining such a structure is ads or becoming a marketplace and they failed at the second so I doubt your wish will ever come true.
I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features, and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.
0%
I think the most likely thing that will happen is MS will have a hard split between the corporate and consumer OSes. Much like they tried to do with windows 2000 vs windows 9x.
And much like what happened with that split, I think you'll see consumers getting copies of corporate windows to get around/away from consumer windows.
Give me back the proper search which last worked Windows 7-ish (or XP?). And traditional Office interface (not stupid "context-specific" tiles).
I still install (and use) FAR every time I rebuild Windows :)
Edit: Reinstall, not rebuild obviously.
>How likely is a future where Microsoft
>(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,
I actually laughed out loud when I read this, so I think extremely unlikely.
As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.
I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.
Bitwig was developed by ex-Ableton devs, and the layout is incredibly similar. It's a very easy transition compared to coming from a DAW like FL or Logic.
It's also a really attractive offering once you hear about it. It's intuitive, cross-platform, half the price of Ableton for a 3-device lifetime license without geofencing, and the software contains a modular software synth atop which most of the preset instruments are built that is so versatile that its value alone exceeds the price tag of the entire daw.
Big fan. Share your thoughts if you give it a whirl.
You're so welcome!
The soft modular synth is called The Grid, fyi. Little square button on the lower left corner of any instrument lets you see it in Grid form.
Oh, man, and just wait until you find out that you can modulate literally every control in the UI...
Have fun :)
My problem (having moved Win to Lin, Ableton to Bitwig too) is with sound. Latency is one and bad. Getting any sound at all on Bluetooth is also hard, where the latency is even worse. Wish there was a simple "apt install make-audio-work-well-for-daw" I could run on my KDE Ubuntu 24.04...
Hmm. I'm on a stock Arch install and had no latency or quality issues to speak of. Bluetooth works out of the box using `bluez` and `blueman`, though Bluetooth is still Bluetooth, with inherent latency. Some headphones have low-latency modes that can be activated in their respective apps at the expense of ANC/battery life, maybe that'll help?
The apt command you're looking for may be the audio backend, though. `apt install pipewire wireplumber -y`. Won't break your existing pulseaudio setup, but will allow low-latency operations. (I think--I avoid the dumpster fire that is Ubuntu like the plague, so ymmv)
I switched from Windows (11) to Linux (Xubuntu) back in November, mostly because of all the AI stuff I didn't trust. While Linux is working ok for me, I can see why people complain about its not being user-friendly, particularly if you're not a Real Programmer. I've had to go to forums too many times to figure out why this or that doesn't work. The latest is the fact that 'apt update' has stopped working today for Vivaldi--it worked ok yesterday, but I have not been able to get it working after spending an hour or more. (If you're interested, there's a thread here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/115133/public-key-is-not-ava....)
Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.
Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?
I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)
I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.
So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.
Can't help you with AV but otherwise your issues and confusions are all Ubuntu and Canonical and nothing on there is representative of other Linux dists.
Ubuntu is highly opinionated. Great for some/many people but not the best fit for everyone or even an obvious recommendation for newcomers (anymore). For your consideraion: Mint is basically a project that repackages Ubuntu to adress those issues to make it accessible for people not onboard with the Ubuntu idiosyncracies and more casual users who just want their desktop. Should be an easy migration for you.
Your Vivaldi problem comes from that you trusted gpg key for their stable. release repo, and fail verifying package from their archive. repo. Change repo to stable (that's prob what you want) or get the key for archive.
Your Ubuntu experience as told is not representative of desktop Linux experienced outside of Ubuntu. "But Linux sure could work better" is a misleading conclusion to share when that's all you know.
I've installed the Xfce Mint (you wren't the only one suggesting that). I don't have the same problems I had with Xubuntu, but I have different ones, like tearing on one of my two monitors. I initially had that with Xubuntu, but was able to find settings to fix it there-- IIRC by changing the refresh rate on that monitor. No luck so far on Xfce Mint. I've tried all seven of the Window Managers it offers, and both the configurations and most of the tweaks.
Also can't find the red mouse cursor theme that I had on Ubuntu. (If I could remember the name, I might be able to find it, but the "after market" mouse cursor themes I've found are so much eye candy--I just want an ordinary set of cursors, but red. Yes, I could probably generate my own, but I shouldn't have to.)
And when I reboot, the windows don't come up in the same place they were when I closed them. Some apps couldn't do that under Ubuntu either, but most could. I think it has to do with Wayland, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to go back to a purely X-windows system in Mint.
Sigh...
I recommend Mint over Ubuntu, the snap issue does not exist there.
> And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus... you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.
This is a misunderstanding of the threat model of Wifi. Stick to software from the signed repos and SSL. Avoid attachments, keep updated. I've never used antivirus with Linux, despite working on symantec antivirus back in the day.
I've spent a long career getting good at Linux. Real good. But I'm only human. Over the decades, the number of how-tos, wiki pages, Linux distros, Linux kernel source, other programs documentation and source; all of that which I've ingested and used in practice and gotten good at, doesn't hold a candle to AI having been trained on every single last one of them. The solution to your apt/Vivaldi problem is easy: install Claude code, and paste in the error. Hit ctrl-o to gain insight on how it fixes it.
You used to be able to charge a decent hourly consulting rate to do some Linux, but because Claude code is so good at it, there's no market for that anymore.
(for one, your URI is wrong, resulting in apt looking for .../deb/dists/stable/dists/stable/Release )
Like the author says:
> Linux is the preferred platform for development
Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge
I'm basically developing on Linux despite running windows. I just set the terminal emulator to open wsl by default, and have VSCode connect to the WSL instance. This also gives you the "native docker" the author mentions, just ignore Docker for Windows exists and install docker in your wsl.
This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
That seems to be the preferred path for many devs on Windows - unless you can get your hands on a Mac at work WSL is much better/easier. Most non-software companies may not even offer a Linux laptop.
Both MacOS and Windows with wsl are perfectly fine for development. Especially MacOS.
There's literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.
I would have to agree with this. I don't understand people how say developing on Linux is somehow better. I have built C++ software across Windows, macOS and Linux and I can't say one is easier than the other at all. Perhaps it is because of the package management system that makes installing a compiler "easier" than downloading Xcode or downloading/running the Visual Studio installer??
I certainly don't find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows/Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.
I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don't see the difference.
I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best to work in. It allows for snapshots, backups, and sharing development environments. Solution A might need a different environment than Solution B.
Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.
This depends entirely on your stack and preferred workflow. MacOS is increasingly hostile to powerusers. If you don't mind following their golden path, all is fine, otherwise... I wonder how long before you have to enable a scary "developer mode" to install software outside the app store.
and iTerm on Mac is better than any of the Linux terminals
I guess I'd argue that "it depends on lot on what you mean by development".
For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.
The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.
> For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.
I've been at several corporations and companies where the target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had multiple projects on my own where it was the same.
Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is developed on Mac and runs on Linux.
Did you have a particularly bad experience? Things have changed _a little_ since 1992.
I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.
On Linux: pip install, done.
Linux since 1996! In chronological order: Slackware, SuSE, DLD, LSF, Gentoo, Ubuntu (starting with 04.10!), eventually Debian 12, now 13.
Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D
Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.
I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.
One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.
Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.
Memory and storage were far more expensive and limited in 1996 than they are today.
Go a few years earlier and you find that Microsoft introduced a boot-time menuconfig system mostly to enable people to select which *drivers* to load because, if you weren't careful, you could wind up leaving too little memory for the game you were trying to run.
With Windows 10 EOL, I had to decide whether to upgrade my laptop to Windows 11 or Linux. I've been a Windows user for decades, but with all the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft and the degradation of performance on Windows 11, I decided to go with Ubuntu instead.
I'm still on a Windows 11 desktop for the time being, but seriously considering switching there as well. The main thing stopping me is the undeniably better ecosystem on Windows for professional video editing and music production, with no comparable open-source options. I've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on high quality virtual instruments and effects plugins. But if I can manage to run these under emulation on Linux or find equivalent Linux-native versions, I will happily abandon all Microsoft products at this point.
Recommend to split your music workstation from your personal files machine to get some privacy back. Then run cleanup scripts to pare Windows down to the bone. Also Mint over Ubuntu.
They are quite similar but Mint doesn't use snap.
Mint can use X11 or Wayland. I think Cinnamon didn't have Wayland support for a while, but that was fixed a couple of years ago.
Ah, the Microsoft "updates".
After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).
The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.
Worth clicking for the "Microslop" logo alone!
Apparently it moved (at least for me): https://m0u9gezmt0.ufs.sh/f/5F1wx5BYZG1wbDc8WftgL2Nrvz9BolE3...
Windows is under 10% of their revenue these days. It’s simply not important to leadership. Just like Xbox - just let it slowly die as you squeeze any last remaining cents out
Windows is a small part of their revenue on purpose, because the OS monopoly enables them to sell and push a lot of their other revenue streams. Windows has always been easy to pirate for the same reason.
But make no mistake, it is very important for Microsoft and leadership, or they wouldn't keep updating it so much and talking about it so much on their keynotes and marketing.
Nah, they have a good strategy. In fact, they have all the strategies.
I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles, more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc). Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.
But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.
For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.
That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.
My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if you pick a distro that prioritizes it. I run bazzite-DX (nvidia rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR), GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so hdr videos get those popping brights.
>Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue.
This is an overblown issue. For the most it is a case of installing the proprietary driver package following the instructions for your distro. One more step than AMD which just works, but not really any more difficult than installing another package.
That's not my experience at all. The majority of games, especially on Steam, work out of the box.
I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).
That didn't work for me. I had my email, documents, some software I used on Windows and files it created (think Photoshop and PSDs). I needed time to find out if I could find similar/equivalent software on Linux, set up new workflows for my work and stuff like that. So I had my primary machine still on Windows and used the secondary to see how all this would work. And then gradually moved all the software, data, and workflows to Linux, until I didn't have anything left that could only work on Windows (well, except games I guess).
As for games, I think a lot of them DO work on Linux but it's easier for me to have dedicates gaming rig on Windows instead of guessing if this new game that I like will work on Linux.
Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11 without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running Windows outside of a VM.
Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.
I was away from Windows for the past 12 years. Recently we bought a desktop and had to install Wondows on it. I was just shocked by the level of shittification that happened. I can't even find a Solitaire game that is not littered with ads.
I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.
Right now I'm running a setup with Fedora on my work machine, CachyOS on my laptop, Windows on my home battlestation gaming rig and a Mac Mini M4 I bought for a educational discount. I basically run 3 different kernels, and I feel the same with the author here.
Windows 11 is such a mess that Microsoft thought that they are Apple, so they want to enforce Microsoft Account just like Apple enforces Apple ID to some extent, except this time Microsoft is staking in higher than Apple -- Any active "exploits" that bypasses Microsoft Account got patched not so soon after they are published, and that is what finally intrigued me.
Unfortunately, some of my games runs on Easy Anti-Cheat, and to my knowledge, the Linux switch is opt-in rather than opt-out, most game developers simply didn't put the Linux as a matter on the table even with the introduction of Steam Deck and Steam OS.
I'm planning to wipe my PC after settling some scores, and I still have to go for Windows, but except I will be rolling back to Windows 10 IoT LTSB. Chances are, if I have another drive (which is slowing going into the unobtainium territory, just like RAM)
But, long as I settled that dust, I will bring another PC back to my home. I'm planning to get another CachyOS on that.
I think I might be the only developer left on this forum, and maybe on the planet, who still uses Microsoft OS daily (for over 30 years). I rarely have issues with it, find it incredibly stable, and have made a lot of money using it.
Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.
Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.
> Actually, scratch that, I think it really started with the non-consensual updates
MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.
Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns, it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams
I had a different issue with Windows on my old daily driver but similar experience. The whole system began crashing randomly, but only occasionally, and only when not under load. It never once crashed while being taxed. I tried everything. Reinstalling the OS, reseating everything, tweaking memory timing, frequency, voltage, installing new firmware. Nothing fixed it. What did fix it? Installing Linux.
I still don’t know what was wrong. I have to imagine there was something with my exact hardware configuration that Windows did not like.
I’m getting closer and closer to making the same decision.
I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won’t enable the AI cruft so I got somewhat lucky there.
But the copilot business is AAF.
And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I’m pretty much done with visual studio development.
Not sure what’s left.
Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows ecosystem.
I don't understand why he thinks all users will use WSL in Windows. I have never ever touched it, and I've developed on Windows for decades (C++/C#/JS/web). It seems like trying to make Windows non-native or some semi-Linux.
I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).
Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).
Between using macOS at work and macOS at home, I really only had my Windows 10 PC for running games in Steam (and I don't even really game very much. I had originally built it with all new parts for Flight Simulator 2020) so its behavior was already becoming annoying whenever I went to use Windows such as the nagging and lack of consent implied with the "finish setting up your PC" window having "continue" (in a bold button) or whatever and "maybe later" (in a tiny link) as options, for example. (The linked article also pointed this out.)
So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact type of system it expected:
64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)
AMD Radeon graphics.
NVMe SSD primary boot drive.
UEFI BIOS support
Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet, but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated something or maybe it just needed a reboot.
If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.
So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all the others. Windows 7 was peak.
I've been using Linux as my main system for ~25 years, but always kept Windows installed for games. On my latest computer I've build 3 years ago, thanks to Steam with Proton, I no longer have Windows and have been happily playing Windows-only games without major issues.
There are some commercial Applications that just won't work on wine. But virt-manager makes Qemu/kvm backing images for windows 10 or 11 easy. Freezing Windows in time is an absolute must if you do builds with vendors badly maintained development software.
Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or Games.
I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big" problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3
There’s a lot of odd things said in this article. Like “no more file explorer hanging”, “no more waiting for the start menu to open” - is this something that actually happens to people? Perhaps on very old hardware I could see it, but it’s not my experience at all. Lots of weird emotional and very biased parts to this article.
But it’s just gonna take off here anyway because it’s a switching to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.
These are real things and they happen on very good hardware. They are even acknowledge by Microsoft. The explorer issue is from waiting on for a response from network drives that the explorer thinks exists or tries to find. The start menu I'm not sure, but I get the issue from time to time and I think its because of some background process hanging the UI or something.
Of course those are things that happen to people, why would they make them up?! If anything, your reaction seems like an emotional and biased one, refusing to acknowledge the experiences of others when they conflict with your beliefs.
(and I say all this as a happy Windows user with no plans to move to Linux).
> All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises.
Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)
That's correct, proper open source Linux is always limited to the weakest tiers of streaming DRM (i.e. fully software based) which usually means you only get low resolution streams. Locked-down Linux derivatives like ChromeOS and Android can support the stronger DRM tiers of course but that's not the same thing.
Widevine on Linux now is 720p. I usually don’t notice, only once in a while that show is not full HD.
I had the same story but 15 years ago. I was so happy with XP, but Vista was terrible, so I put Ubuntu on my laptop. When 7 came, it became my OS on my desktop. But then it was 8 time. Couldn't bare it. Now it's Linux everywhere, including my sister, parents, grand parents, girlfriend, brother. Linux Mint is perfect for non technical people BTW. I heard good things about Zorin OS as well.
> I might be starting down the path of introducing Linux to family members soon. I need to make sure I have enough spare time for the initial 'speed hump' of transition questions...
The first couple of months are high touch after the switch. After that it's usually just smooth sailing for years. Much less work support-wise.
Been that way for my family and friends.
Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and bought a mid-range System76 laptop.
Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year
Honestly that's what it feels like when something breaks. Linux - you see what's wrong, you fix it, it's done
Windows - you pull your hair out trying to figure out what caused the issue, you fix it, it's back with the next update
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device [0], so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again. You might think that in 2026 you shouldn't get BSOD, but here we are.
So I am now very wary of any Windows updates, including a Out of Band Update [1], which it is claimed that it resolves some issue. However, since it's never mention whether the Out of Band Update will solve mine, I'm very hesitant to update.
[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
Windows has always been a bit of a high-maintenance OS. To keep it running well used to consume a lot of time on a weekly/monthly basis. That went down to almost nothing after I switched to Ubuntu LTS a couple of decades ago. Heard it had gotten a bit better in Winland in the recent past but it appears things are going downhill again.
I am thankful that so far Microsoft hasn't removed local admin capabilities of Windows, but I dread the day that happens (mainly because it remains the most consistent ways one can deny windows updates).
Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.
Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.
Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.
He doesn't get into why he didn't switch to Apple. Kind of a middle ground - it's still got the maddening things about being from a corporate behemoth, but it's closer to Unix and you can run your audio software there. (I would be using Linux instead of Apple yesterday if it weren't for a single music program I can't live without).
My Windows 11 installation broke down after one of the updates. Now I get "Please reinstall Windows" warning in Windows Update settings. And some error hex code which doesn't really help. I've installed like 5 different apps on this machine and never ran any "tweaking" scripts or apps.
I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.
Yeah Windows 2000 had countless software test engineers, I was one of them and on my team there were 5000 of us. I stared in tech support in 97 and moved into QA and always filed bugs on behalf of the customer, sadly everyone must code and customers must test. It's just not working out but Microsoft really only cares about Corporate America and Windows running on all the main languages. It's great to have alternatives and I've moved to MacOS after using Windows since 1.0.
Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.
I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can't be read properly. :(
Ha! You're very welcome! Ah the good ol' days of CD install media, CD Keys and install times that took hours!
RIP to your install CD!
Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use. The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows is just awful.
macOS has been quite popular in the United States for a long time now (and I suspect it's not so popular in other region not due to product, but price), showing that things can exist without those "features".
I'm not even sure what macOS have for its own since I basically open either the browser or the terminal. I am vaguely aware that Finder exist when I accidentally open it maybe twice a month.
I never advocated for Windows, but I always used it because it "just worked". At a certain point, I realized - as OP had - that I was spending just as much time configuring Windows as I would be spending configuring Linux.
I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone who is on Windows to reconsider.
Everyone are very unhappy with Windows 11. They kind of were OK with Windows 10. It's continuing the same old cycle. Windows 12 they will make hopefully things tolerable again..
I use Windows to play some games. I remember dual booting on 2000s -- my grub entry for Windows was called "WOW Client".
It seems to be, for most users who switch, that the driver is if they are primarily a consumer or creator. Unix systems have always been a preferred platform for some creators, but this effect seems to be multiplying as the focus for Windows become less and less creator friendly. Yeah, if you are a gamer and watch YouTube videos, then your path to least resistance is Windows; but if you are a software developer, web developer, music editor, video editor, et al... the ability to control, easily automate, and flexibility of your environment (not to mention the reduced system resources) become a huge advantage. There are reasons why MOST creators are moving away from Windows... and most consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with tablets and Chromebooks.
My main operating system is Linux since 2005 or so, or actually late 2004. I still use Win10 on my laptop, for various reasons; in part to test java code and ruby code on windows, in part due to elderly relatives.
Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.
It's funny, but I had my grandmother on Linux for about a long while before she passed... Wine managed to run the 3 Windows 9x era games games she was still playing into the 2010's (where real Windows wouldn't) and her browser/email. I wasn't even able to do that for myself. All I had to do was run updates for her every few months (because she didn't) and the one time she had a hardware failure, I'm the one who fixed it.
In the end, I'd say for most people, who aren't their own computer admins/repair anyway... Linux is probably fine. Since most people don't use more than the browser for the most part.
My other grandmother was on a docked Chromebook after the 5th time I had to clean malware off her computer, and she didn't need any windows apps anymore... she couldn't help but click on the "you might have a virus" ads.
> Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional
That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.
Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.
For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.
The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.
> The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.
I've heard of people doing this, do they?
I'm so desperate for Premiere, even 6+ years after switching OSes. Resolve won't install on Fedora (???), our all-Flatpak future cannot get here soon enough...
It’s possible but I’ve never used it as a daily driver.
One thing that scares me is that Adobe apps are already buggy on their own officially supported platforms. If I encountered a glitch, I’d always have in the back of my mind “is it because of my crazy set up or is it their fault?”
For a while when I bought new computer (recently Intel NUC), I'd just keep the Windows installed there in case I needed it and I'd dualboot into Linux. More recently I just reflash the whole ssd with Debian and I haven't looked back. Interestingly enough I also have older Macbook Pro from 2015 that I also installed clean Debian on and it's been working amazingly well too. The only thing that would need any patching is the camera, but I don't use it. Everything else worked out of the box - keyboard backlight with nice UI controls in GNOME, LCD brightness, sound, bluetooth, etc.
I remember reading an article many years ago about product management being like being a parent, and there being a latter point where you need to let the product go and admit it's done. Windows is clearly there, and Microsoft are doing a terrible job of it. Yes, it's less relevant than it's ever been, but it's still vastly widely deployed, earns money, and delivers other cash cows (like Office) - all they have to do is do the basic stuff to keep it going and not mess it up, but somehow that is not what's happening. Wild.
He's a musician, he's switched to Bitwig. Ok, but what about VSTs? I have a collection of instruments I can't leave behind, many are NI, so I'm currently forced to use Windows or Mac.
NI recently filed for bankruptcy! This means that the licence server will probably be shut down at some point. Take the opportunity now. :-P I've been using Bitwig for two years now. And already produced a complete album with success. Next album is already following. :-) Many of Bitwig's own plugins are very good, and there are now top-notch native VSTs for Linux! Alternatively, there is yabridge for running Win VSTs.
Great Linux VST manufacturers: U-he, DDMF, Toneboosters, TAL, Bluelabs, etc.
And more, more, more native plugins: https://linuxmusic.rocks/
If the license server goes down I'll just pirate them, I guess. The point is that I can't really throw aways years of investment because Windows sucks. The other important lesson is: if they have a licensing server, it's OK to pirate them from the start.
I switched my parents to linux during the gnome 2 days and have given them a consistent environment ever since (kept them on mate).
It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).
Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.
The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4 years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid transition.
The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.
When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.
Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.
Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.
"All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises."
This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.
Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.
Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.
And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.
It's still not quite there yet, for me. A lot of older games (which I'm a big fan of) won't run well or at all - and support for Nvidia is still not great.
If I could get within even 10% of the performance I get on Windows, and know I could safely choose to play some old 2000's game or something that just released just fine, I really wouldn't mind. But it feels like a roulette wheel and some important game I wanted to play just may not work, or may run terribly.
For older games: MechWarrior 3 and 4 (plus expansions). Thief 1+2. Freespace 2. Gothic 1+2. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
But in general, I play a lot of weirder, niche games that just don't get a lot of traction for community fixes and so on.
My wife was complaining about her Windows 11 laptop crashing. I tried everything and even did fresh installs. Still crashing (and honestly pretty slow). I gave up on Windows and installed Ubuntu and Chromium for her. She can instagram, facebook, save her memes, and its all fast. No crashes. She's a happy camper now. I think a lot of (even) non technical people would like Linux a lot more than they realize if they gave it a shot.
I'll copy my comment on another article here:
2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11
- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting
- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was
- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
> Windows 10 went EOL
Kinda. But LTSC IoT is still on until 2032.
Another very important feature which does not get mentioned enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal with the driver problems Linux always has, community support is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and people directed me to the Arch Wiki page that I wrote. I stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on W10/WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.
Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for it? Yes. Is there experience with it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?
Only weird because you were only 6 years old. My first computer was an IBM XT clone, with the full 640k of RAM, a 30 MB harddrive, 5 1/4" floppy drive, Hercules graphics and the amber-colored screen. Also had the turbo button that took it from 4.77 MHz to 10 MHz. Ran DOS v3.3 for a while but eventually upgraded to v5.0.
I take an adversarial approach to Windows. Which started with Windows XP and its supremely annoying zip-files-as-folders approach. Sorry, but I didn’t want that, and I still gleefully rip it out of every Windows install I touch.
And then things started snowballing with every version.
Plus, I have elderly clients that got hopelessly lost on any UI after XP, so I had a lot of hacking-and-slashing to do there for not only them, but also myself. Like, just give me the option of a traditional XP-style start menu, goddammit. Thank goodness for StartIsBack.
But what took me about 6-8hrs of directed work with XP is now about 24-48hrs of work with Windows 11. Honestly, I am at the point where I just want to create a highly opinionated one-click configuration app that does everything for me.
And I would, if I still did as many installs as I was doing even half a decade ago.
Hmmm… as a DotNet developer… anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?
>anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?
I'm not, MS already lost me. But I would bet there's a market for such an app, if done right.
That is exactly why I ditched Microsoft for Mac thirty years ago. I’ve never looked back or regretted leaving MSFT during my "formative" years; in fact, I’m glad I did. That said, it’s great to see Linux stay the course and build a real alternative for PC users.
I’ve always wanted to try running Linux on one of my Macs, but I never seem to find the time to actually explore it. One of these days...
I just want to mention that most apps that would be laggy on Wine just work via https://flathub.org/en/apps/ru.linux_gaming.PortProton. Install PortProton double click .exe install app and off you go.
- xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR - professional radio station
They lost me at Vista lol
In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)
Many years ago before I stopped using Windows and switched back to NetBSD (I had originally used it on the VAX), I used Cygwin and later MSYS on Windows in the process of moving back to UNIX
I was not interested in graphical programs, I only wanted a UNIX shell and standard UNIX utilities
I recently received a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home for personal use so I will be experimenting with it offline^1
I used Windows Services for UNIX ("SFU") on work computers back in the day to compile programs I wrote for UNIX. I am curious about using "WSL" in a similar way
NetBSD is still favorite OS but I use Linux the most
1. I can boot this computer from USB stick so I will also use it to run NetBSD from RAM
Past week I got to know about InputActions [0] so I installed Kubuntu 25.10 to test it, and it is very promising. Linux never had a proper mouse gesture support, and I won't go into details, but this was one of the three dealbreakers for me. The other one was a Windows-only app which ran so sluggishly on all previous tests I've made over the years, but with Wine 11 the app is just as good and fast as on Windows. Though I first need to populate the registry with an icon set. But now with AI this can be easily automated (letting it write a script I then run). The third is some custom electron-based launcher which is heavily Windows-customized, which I will need to migrate to Linux, but also this should be easy with AI.
For the first time I feel like there is a real path for me to switch to Linux, and it's about time!
I have always used Linux personally, only work made me use Windows and Mac (controlled endpoints) for the past 20 years. For 4 years I have my own company, 100% Linux.
I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.
I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.
Every company I’ve worked at has used Google Docs anyway so the experience for me is the same on Linux. What’s so appealing about the classic Office suite?
Well, it's mostly annoying if people store office docs on some samba share instead of in SharePoint/Teams. Also Teams has issues on Firefox, and sometimes also in Chromium. But overall works well enough (even with my AirPods on Linux). Things like drawing in PowerPoint in the Browser have become significantly better over the last year, before that I avoided it like the plaque. Whats missing in MS365 online is numbered captions for figures (unforgivable!), or reference management. That just really annoying if people use those features. Also, I worked in an org still on Office 2019 but mixed it with MS365, that also lead to lot of pain. It's papercuts mostly, nothing fatal.
I tried to make this shift, but managed to somehow brick Linux Mint, so now I'm back on Windows for now...
I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?
But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.
Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.
No such thing as brick when you have a “live drive” available. Reinstall and be up again in a half hour.
The codec issues are caused by the companies that make them, not a free operating system. Next time download an open codec movie or install from the “store” GUI.
You're slightly missing the point. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to me, the end user, whose fault it is that my OS doesn't have codecs.
The problem is that when doing an extremely basic operation that works on every system I've used before, it doesn't work, and the most readily available advice on how to resolve the issue tells me to run commands. Regardless of the reasons why it is that way, it just simply isn't user friendly.
Everyone has to balance how much pain they get on Windows from the restarts, slowness, updates, etc versus how much pain they get from occasionally having to run some command in terminal window. I get your points about there being rough edges - the good thing is that Linux is a very good system for fixing Linux issues. Everything is tailored for that :)
Learning the basics of linux can be very powerful and now with AIs you can get essentially anything done just by asking the AI to give you the right commands. Linux is friendlier to be fixed by AI suggestions, which I think will actually be the big difference this year.
And to be fair, I'm not a fan of Linux Mint. I much more prefer Debian or Fedora with clean GNOME.
There are tradeoffs in life, not perfection. Bondage vs. convenience, your choice.
Having to install codecs once every few years is a tiny inconvenience compared to the dystopia offered elsewhere. I also run commands on Win and Mac all the time to fix things. For example Windows wastes tens of gigabytes of space unless you run a couple of inscrutable commands to free it.
I can echo problems with Mint.
Currently using https://getaurora.dev which is basically fedora + kde but curated by people that actually care. So codecs are preinstalled, and other sensible defaults out of the box which makes sense as its in the same family as bazzite (without the gaming focus).
I think the steam thing was solved some years ago after being featured on LTT.
>"If you're always finding the next reason not to switch, you're not looking for solutions, you're looking for excuses to stay complacent."
No, my friend. It is not the reason. I have over 50 apps installed, many of which are corporate applications, such as Teams and other Microsoft products. VMwaresing VMWare and WSL foLinux distributionsnux distros. The other things that Linux is missing are ShareX (has flameshot I know), no WhatsApp (PWA might work, but it is a hack). Google Drive that I use to share my KeePass databases (no GDrive on Linux afaik). And gaming is not 100% with linux becuase of anti-cheat (author mentions it).
The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux entirely is that I must find a way to port all of these without compromises. Reinstalling Windows is one thing; changing OS types is another. We all want to be Mr. Robots, but reality is different. It is like moving to a new house. Exciting but sucks.
I finally installed Windows 11 last year so I could use Wifi 6E. Other than that, it is certainly a downgrade. With some debloating and ExplorerPatcher, its mostly the same as Windows 10 now, but I'm praying that an update wont brick my install. Thankfully the latest forced feature update didn't affect me.
I switched to Linux circa 2010 when I needed a word processor but didn't want to go to the store to buy Office (was pretty young and poor at the time). After some Googling I found LibreOffice and Ubuntu. I had used Suse Linux years earlier when I was a kid but it definitely wasn't ready for use (2003) so I was also curious about Ubuntu and the current state at the time. I installed Ubuntu, used LibreOffice for the thing I needed, and never looked back. Linux was a breath of fresh air and it did all the things I needed. I went to university using only Linux (2012-2016), opened businesses, did all sorts of things, all 100% on Linux. Nice to see everyone else finally catching up.
Also has always been interesting seeing people whine about Linux the whole time I've been using it problem-free, across 4 PCs and 16 years.
The two things I find unacceptable are no local accounts and non consensual reboots. The latter may need legislation. They don’t even notify you that it happened. They try to restart apps and put things back the way they were but you can still tell that your house was broken into by the missing data that wasn’t saved.
One of the things I like most about CachyOS is that the configuration is all just in text files, one of the things I like least is that I am never quite sure whether to modify the systemd unit settings that are usually in /usr/lib somewhere, the app settings in /etc or the personal configs in ~/.config. For packages that I am unfamiliar with, I usually end up trying all three locations until I notice that my changes seem to stick.
The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.
Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.
There was a post here a while back saying that Microsoft will eventually switch to Linux instead of maintaining Windows. Given all the negativity around Windows this seems more and more likely (I haven’t used Windows myself for over 20 years so I have no idea what its like now. Last time I used it, it was XP)
Unlikely but growing as profit dwindles. Previously it was unfathomable that Apple would offer RISC/Unix Workstations, or MS would jettison IE.
This is the discussion I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673264
Except the problem is their UX more than the kernel itself. I don't see them keeping Gnome or KDE as a desktop UI even if they did fully adopt Linux for desktop usage.
MS should really just buckle down, finish simplifying the UI and make it consistent again... the last time it was mostly consistent was Windows 7, and even then.
I'm willing to bet that System76 gets COSMIC to the level that Win7 reached faster than MS can turn anything around in terms of Windows at this point.
> I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based distribution
Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.
The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"
For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.
Now? CachyOS. Yikes.
I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for music & gaming.
I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.
It's not anything about CachyOS in particular, frankly I don't know it and I'm sure it's fine. It's that the culture of "I'll grab this known-good base and tweak it, then advertise it to the world as the next best thing" is just toxic for Regular People wanting to learn about stuff.
Imagine if you were trying to, I dunno, introduce your friend to Minecraft. And instead of the base game someone handed you a menu of crazy modlists. Is that representative of the feature set you think they're looking for in a casual game?
People coming to Linux are coming from a culture of "I've used MacOS or Windows for years and know how it works, where's the browser?". They're very much NOT looking for experimental kernel scheduler implementations!
There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros with decades of history and support in addition to the cool new “hey guys I made a OS!” types.
> There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros
Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.
Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.
But that's the point. Choice and customization. It's the natural result of FOSS and the as-designed modularity of the Linux ecosystem.
Exploring popular options and finding what works for you is easier than it has ever been, and fun too. The difference between Linux today and the Linux of old is that for most setups, all the pieces you choose can fit together nicely and "just work." Despite all the different flavors and variations and distributions and desktop environments and window managers and the like, pretty much every popular distro uses a recent or near recent version of the monolithic Linux kernel + system-d, so all the important stuff is more or less the same (with tweaks here or there.)
I use it for a month as daily driver. For Linux it is ok.
So happy to see so many new Linux users as a long time user and developer for the platform. I want to welcome anyone and PLEASE feel free to use AI to make awesome stuff or solve problems. The FOSS community is still adapting to the new influx of developers and tools, vibe coders, etc.
Be cautious with running commands or making package changes based on suggestions from AI tools. Ask clarifying questions and it may realize doing so would either break your system or be attempting to vastly modify it.
My advice is get Docker installed and do most of your stuff in there. If you mess up and expose a Postgres container it will get hacked, but not escape the container, whereas if you install Postgres as a system package and make that same mistake you will be fully owned.
I made the same switch but all linux always feels slightly jank. I think Macos is the best premium decoupling from Winblows, but that comes with its own ecosystem lock in. I use all three equally daily and it just drives me insane. Lots of games on Windows ONLY work on windows due to anti cheat. Ie BattleField 6.... MacOs Gaming is non existent and any attempt with say wine/parallels or whatever brings you back to windows.... Linux / PopOS / Cosmic is so close to being there but the gaming restrictions takes you back to Windows.. I tried the whole WSL2 but lots of apps need so much tuning to work properly.. Ie android studio needs to be specially configured to use the WSL2 paths and it gets broken fast.
Which would almost be unfortunate, but Battlefield 6 is the same slop as 2042 with a fanservice texture pack on top. You can play BF4, BF2, Bad Company, Arma 2/3/Reforger, and even DCS World without issue on Linux - why are you spending $70 to install a rootkit for a game you'll put 20 hours into, tops?
Giving up Windows pushed me to play better games and stay off the unhealthy AAA release cycle that has strangled innovation for years. If I was still playing Rainbow Six Siege then I wouldn't know how to cold-start an F-16 blk. 50.
Escape From Tarkov doesn't have functional anticheat on Windows. Most people either play EFT against bots (which is a $10 DLC) or modded SPT (which is free and works on Linux). Even livestreamers are struggling to play a match without cheaters post 1.0 release, you might as well play Anomaly EFP.
There's definitely a list of games that don't work; they're usually outnumbered 10:1 by better titles. I haven't booted into Windows for 7 years, there's just not many new releases worth the effort.
Just saw a video on YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwt9AiItqU - starts at 3:25) that talked about the windows experience in the present day and I totally forgot about booting up and magically having software appear I never asked for due to some partnerships Microsoft made. I've been on Mac for 16 years/iPhone for 10 years and have never looked back. The most annoying thing about Apple is when the OS updates and suddenly you have a different experience like liquid glass. But like all things I usually get used to it after about a week and most of the times I see the benefits (in this case, even more screen real estate).
I really wish linux had a decent answer for DRM-protected VST plugins. Yes you can run stuff in WINE but I need to be able to use iLok and the bullshit DRM systems for about a dozen other publishers.
I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.
Put that on a dedicated machine and move everything else, especially your personal files, over for privacy reasons.
I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to install Windows 11.
Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?
All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.
Kind of interesting after using Manjaro recently, I had stayed away from Ubuntu for a while and started researching to see if it had gotten any better. I found a bunch of blog and reddit posts about how Linux sucks so bad and how much superior Windows and MacOS are.
Only to see this article today. lol
I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.
I’m kind of curious why Adobe hasn’t gone all-in on Linux by now. IIRC Adobe apps were built on cross-platform tooling like Java (InDesign) and AIR (all the CS UI, and then the underpinnings in C++).
I guess Adobe doesn't exactly have much to win by Windows failing, but their inaction does mean the open source alternatives will continue to get better, and that will hurt them.
Every few years someone posts the same thing in the Adobe forums which then piss off the moderators and Adobe "experts". They continue to say the same thing which makes zero sense.
I'm paraphrasing here but its something along the lines of: "Linux users are open source people and expect everything for free. They'll never pay for our products, so we see no need to port them for Linux users because so few of them would be willing to pay for our products."
A lot of other comments are cheeky ones like, "Adobe is already on a Linux OS, its called MacOS." - rolls eyes-
And you are correct, the OSS alternatives are getting better and closing the gap, but they're just not there yet - but I hold out hope they will be one day.
I have to disagree here.
There's an aphorism that I like to use every time someone tells me that Windows is the easy choice: Windows makes accomplishing easy tasks easy, and hard tasks impossible.
To this day and for the past 20 years, every time I go back to my parents' house, it's Windows tech support time. Every time, I have to go through the same routine of cleaning up all sorts of crap that make their computer slow to a crawl, even when I purposely created non privileged accounts for them. Every time, the same ritual: diagnose why the printer stopped working, why apps look pixelated, why some sites stopped working.
So, it works for my parents, and possibly works for the vast majority of people, because it has created this ecosystem where these users either depend on folks like me, or have to pay up at the repair shop. And somehow, something as simple as not breaking a critical component during an update, or prevent users from installing harmful stuff, has not been addressed properly. And that's without mentioning what Microsoft does that's very much anti-consumer, like stuffing the consumer versions of the OS with ads.
I think Linux adoption will rapidly grow with the adoption of LLMs.
Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.
This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.
1. This is not a likely effect of LLM adoption.
2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.
People don't switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.
My feeling is that I consistently find on-point solutions for my Linux problems with a quick search. However if my Windows install gets in trouble my search will yield some DISM.exe invocation which doesn't help at all. A bit anecdotal, but this is my experience. I've always been able to fix my Linux installs.
1. It is. It makes me more likely to use Linux, and I'm not that far from the average. On Reddit r/gaming I've seen people who literally made the step and say exactly this "I installed Linux and when I can't figure something out I ask an LLM and it has done a great job so far".
It's happening right now. Maybe you're so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it's the reality.
> or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares
Your concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.
I'm an Apple guy through and through, but I am in Georgia Techs OMSCS program. For some of the classes, you need to use a VM that doesn't play nicely with Apple Silicon. So I went over to Microcenter and picked up a cheap PC with Windows. I loathe using it, even if I am in the VM the whole time. I'm amazed at the amount of ads that pop up and for a while, sound just didn't work. Like not with headphones or just out of the normal speakers until eventually a random update fixed it. I get not wanting to be in the Apple ecosystem, but at this point in time I don't know why you would want Windows and not go for Linux.
I think Windows 11 would have had much more consumer buy-in in the early days if they would have at least extended non-OEM support back to the Skylake generation, if not further, which it looks like it would have be easy to do, since it ran just fine on much older machines. I didn't object to them making TPM 2.0 mandatory for new OEM builds, just to the making it mandatory for people wanting to upgrade to it.
Of course, then the ads and other broken-ness got a lot worse. But people might put up with that more if they had upgraded to Windows 11 years ago instead of just looking at doing it now that Windows 10 support has ended.
For literally decades we've hoped that Linux will get like Windows in some crucial areas like sleep and hibernations support for laptops, supported first-party drivers, correct and reliable multi-monitor setups, games, etc. Never ever could I imagine that Linux parity, which I'd like to argue is closer than ever before, would be reached by Windows getting worse in exactly those areas we, the Linux freaks, got told to get Windows for -- sleep not working, graphics drivers bringing whole systems down, incoherent configuration etc. Only games got better and we have to thank Valve for that.
I always like to chime in on these things that I've been a delighted Arch user for about a year now, for similar reasons. Took a lot of setup, but it's dialed now and just works. My computer belongs to me again for the first time in years.
I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.
Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.
Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.
I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.
Gentoo forced me to switch to Apple.
jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.
I just hope that more people are forced into this! I understand that the transition, learning path can be daunting but once someone's head gets the mindset on a Unix OS there is basically no turning back.
Speaking of "Content Creation", I'd also like to add the Affinity Suite. I don't particularly like it after being bought by Canva, but it works almost flawlessly on Linux.
You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/release...
I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the meantime, this works really good.
My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is working on a new one), and GPU acceleration, let alone partitioning, isn’t really a thing for Windows guests which is something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.
I switched back in 2022 to Ubuntu 20. I barely knew JavaScript at the time. I had zero problems doing so. Maybe my use case is narrow enough--I just use it for dev work and web browsing--but it was the least daunting process ever. Everything worked out of the box basically. Learning bash and unix changed my life. I don't understand how one could complain about Linux unless they've never even tried it
That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of fun,though.
There are many really good ones these days that will have a much better experience than windows. I’ve used Ubuntu, Pop, Mint and Fedora workstation in the last 5 years and all worked great. Personally Mint Cinnamon had the least issues so I tend to run that on my machines now.
Once SteamOS becomes generally available I’ll switch to that. It’s incredibly polished on Steam Deck
I was a big fan of windows and I am still currently using it but recently, I am getting weird problems, crashes, frozen laptop etc. So right now, after 23 years later, I decided to switch MacOS. I've used it before but couldn't adapt because I was efficiently using windows with no-alternatives tools in MacOS. But anymore, Windows is no longer usable, it's unbearable.
Give it a few more years and Linux will complete its inevitable evolution into Microsoft, same consolidation, same gatekeeping, just with better slogans and a smug sense of moral superiority.
How is this possible? I don't think you quite understand what "Linux" is.
There is no corporation, board, or CEO to force unwanted changes. Pretty much every piece of the operating system is free and open source.
If you don't like your "Linux", you can swap it out for another distribution or "distro".
thanks for the clarification on how the kernel development works. do you mind expanding on what is the benefit for companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Red Hat, Meta, Oracle, SUSE, Canonical, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcom, Samsumg, Broadcom, Cisco, arm to spend an enormous amount of capital, both employing individuals to work full time on the kernel and making donations to cncf/linux foundation? Certainly all of the big players behind linux have our best interest in mind and certainly NONE of this companies have some history of making decisions in detriment of consumer agency and freedom. I would love to hear more about how linux is driven by passion and generosity if you don`t mind, please share!
I fail to see your point. Kernel development by the aforementioned big players benefits everyone and is all done in the open. Hence, "open source". In fact they use a public mailing list to submit patches.
All of the patches are auditable. If I don't want a patch, I can *trivially* omit it from my kernel before compiling.
How exactly are open source kernel modules and drivers affecting my freedom?
Not bingo. The kernel doesn't provide antifeatures such as ChatGPT and ads on your start menu.
That would be your desktop environment... Which is also typically open source on Linux.
If KDE (desktop environment) developers decide to add ChatGPT or Claude integration, I can simply uninstall it and install a different DE.
Well, look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Yeah, you don't really understand what "Linux" is. It isn't one thing, you can't force anything into "Linux" because there are so many distros to choose from. With Windows that isn't possible - there's either Windows, or something else (or an old version of Windows).
Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the incremental market share they have. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...
My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.
LibreOffice does fine, though you’ll probably be unhappy. What is more important to you? Freedom, privacy, consent, or spreadsheet features?
VMs are an option to partition your life as well.
There are many features of Excel that LibreOffice Calc doesn't support. Most importantly: structured references, VBA, PowerQuery. Not to mention its UI is very laggy even on powerful machines.
For real financial/business work, Calc is just not a serious player.
I have a spreadsheet I've been using since 2017 to track all my spending and savings accounts on a weekly basis, plus some trend analytics, plus some simple graphs on multiple sheets. A few hundred rows and columns, both entered and calculated values (simple formulas, nothing fancy). Haven't noticed any slowness. When I have some data to look at (like .csv or even .xlsx), I always use Calc. I work with Excel at work all the time, it might be faster on larger data sets, but Libre's Calc is more than enough for many use cases.
I think there is a recent performance regression but hopefully will be fixed soon. Hasn't affected me. Learn Python, much better than VB.
Fedora + Google's Office Suite is the best way.
Don't bother with Libreoffice. Its trash. I'm convinced that Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging the project.
I want to switch to Linux for my EOL Windows 10 originally-built-for-gaming rig. It was “new” in 2016, so I hold out hope that there will be few compatibility issues. My biggest concerns are being able to play my library of steam games on it. Overall the problems I have are that last time I tried to put Linux on that machine I tried a dual boot system, and at the time UEFI did not play well with dual booting. I don’t know if it’s gotten better, but as of now I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway so conceivably it wouldn’t be an issue.
I doubt the dual boot issue was due to UEFI. It's more likely, Windows was clobbering over GRUB and overwriting your bootloader, as it likes to do. Windows really wants to be the only OS on your drive.
Most reliable way I've ran dual boot systems is to have each OS on it's own separate drive, and then choose with the UEFI boot menu which one to boot instead of choosing in GRUB off a single drive.
As for games, plug them into protondb (https://www.protondb.com) to see compatibility & read through the comments
> I wouldn’t be dual booting anyway
This tends to be better overall anyway, if you are really looking to switch. Dual booting is enough of a hassle that I've always ended up staying in whatever OS I felt required me to think I needed to dual boot, and the other aspirational OS gets forgotten.
Going all-in requires that you figure out new workflows, find new software, or in some cases change what you use the computer for and accept it.
I tried building a gaming PC, but I hated PC gaming. It felt like it was half sys admin work, half gaming... if the sys admin work went well that day. I dual booted it for a while, then ran straight Linux on it, and eventually sold it. I liked the idea of one box that did everything, but the reality of it wasn't so great. I now have computers I don't care about gaming on, and have consoles that require 0 effort and let me play games when I feel like playing games.
This seems to historically have been a pattern. There was a period where Windows Vista was forced on everyone and downgrading to Windows XP until Vista was better was forbidden.
Lots of people jumped to Mac or Linux at that time. There's article floating around that the Macbook Pro ironically was the best laptop to run Windows XP on via dual boot because it was so intel.
Still to this day I don't understand how people manage to do software development on a Windows PC. I started with my first secondhand MacBook which was one before the unibody, and then upgraded to unibody and never have left ever. The only reason I was forced to use Windows was for clients that didn't have support for MacOS or Linux. The only thing I need Windows for is rootkit enabled games... which pains me, otherwise I'd have Linux on my desktop
I understand the frustration when things don’t just work. Also I find it kind of funny when people act like Linux just solved all their problems, despite recurring driver and dependency issues, compatibility problems, etc. These all get hand-waved somehow because it’s not Linux’s “fault” I suppose? Good for the author but the opportunity cost of moving to Linux alone is prohibitive based on the comments I see here, my own experience notwithstanding…
I agree with you that there's some friction involved and a bunch of trade-offs.
The thing is that I absolutely lost it, because of the bugs and the ads, and just wanted something reliable that doesn't nag me all the time.
I know that other people's linux experience may be radically different due to different hardware, so I'll consider myself lucky it all worked out.
> Just read the other comments in this thread, all the evidence you need is in plain sight.
Do anecdotes constitute citable/useful data for OSes with millions of users? Especially for comparison?
> Conversely, I’ve been on windows 11 for work for a few years now with zero issues.
By your previous standard, this thread (and the OP's article) are the evidence of Win11 being especially problematic. :)
Also, is there an entire IT team supporting your Win 11 instance to make it usable? :)
I have 2 Windows 11 laptops for different jobs. One (part time job) has a small help desk team to support it (though overwhelmingly the issues there tend to relate to their choice of VPN, not the OS). The other is a company with maybe a headcount of 20-30? So no dedicated IT.
That said, I bring up my point just to agree with you. I think there are plenty of cases where people had bad experiences with both Windows and Linux (and MacOS too, of course). Sometimes it’s hardware. Sometimes it’s the use cases. Sometimes it’s personal preference. Whatever it is, the anecdotes don’t make either of them the better choice.
> Basic operations are so much faster on Linux. Opening directories,
The fact that "opening directories" is something specifically mentioned as a point of difference hints to me that there is something terribly wrong in Microsoft / Windows -land.
If "opening directories" isn't a solved problem in any Operating System that's no longer in beta, never mind one that's been around for 30-odd years, there's something rotten in the foundations.
I only need Windows for a few programs, mostly licensed EDA programs that [dumb] companies didn't manage to port to Linux. Most engineers who use EDA tools are into linux so having to run a few things on Windows is a pain. The 'A' in EDA stands for automation and Windows is not the OS for that. I installed a standalone WIN10, then enabled the TPM and installed WIN11. Seems pretty solid but I had to guard against MSFT repeatedly trying to lead me into servitude.
You've sold me. Does anyone have a lightweight guide or something of a no-nonsense tutorial on how to do this without causing an even bigger headache than using windows?
Ubuntu with the Gnome Desktop works well as a family PC. Very easy installer with a GUI that walks you through everything.
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
Linux Mint is nice, but it's been a few years since I installed it. Back in 2018ish we had a lot of machines with old dual cores and 2-4GB of RAM that chugged on Windows. But after installing Linux Mint, they were given new life and ran very well.
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...
I have been daily driving Ubuntu Cinnamon at work for ~3 years and it works pretty well. Some minor bugs here and there, but I can't imagine going back to Windows for a work machine.
There is a bit of a learning curve for Linux, so might be worth dipping your toes in to start before you go 100%.
I use linux all the time for work - i just haven't acutally ever installed it myself haha. Thanks for the links.
The whole upgrade to Windows 11 was forced on me by Microsoft, basically using trickery. I opened windows update and it said there were some updates… Did not make it clear at all that it would be taking my system from Windows 10 to 11. I thought it was just installing security updates. I would’ve had to change it anyway when 10 support ended, but I still had about four months and wanted to wait.
I spent over a decade developing rendering software used in VFX, and ran CentOS Linux as my development platform at work.
We tried to follow the VFX reference platform once that became a thing back in 2014.
Unity works fine for example. I used it for a bit over a year on a project we did for multiple platforms
Sort of funny that Nadella quotes Steve Jobs from 35 years ago with the "bicycles for the mind" quip. Given enough time, MSFT's marketing will eventually catch up with NeXT's marketing.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...
Ok so Arch apparently has an install script that does everything[0]. I tried it the other day and it's pretty flawless, albeit terminal-based so not for everyone I guess.
Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.
Possibly. If the installer happy path fails (which has happened to me), Arch is "here's root shell, figure it out", Ubuntu is slightly more user-friendly :)
I will say Arch wiki is amazing, even if you're not using it. I'm on Debian nowadays and still often refer it for random obscure hardware setup details.
I started with Slackware Linux—something arguably even more “hard-core” than Arch.
What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.
Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware/Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.
Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.
That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.
Yeah agree completely. Started with Slack at around 2.x, took a long time to switch to Debian and occasionally Ubuntu.
That was when you compiled your own kernel and installed software by running ./configure && make && make install
Normies fleeing Windows dumpster fire today won't do that.
Yeah, likely not. There are all kinds of shaes of gray in between that and windows style OS instalation, though.
Arch Linux just sits somewhere in the middle, where you don't build anything, but you get a guided tour of partitioning and formatting a disk, installing some set of packages and setting up a bootloader, from a fairly rich adn comfortable command line environment of a USB live distro.
Everyone says this but I have only ever used arch. Wiped windows and started with Manjaro. No VM to test straight to bare metal. I learned how Linux worked and then installed the base arch distro. If you can read a wiki, you can use arch. It's not rocket science. All the available arch flavored distros make it even easier today. I tried debian once and found it even more cumbersome. Is it apt or apt-get? is it install or update? Never stuck around to find out.
Apple forced me to switch to Linux!
Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!