Using windows/osx will always be more convenient at first. But then you hit a wall and can't patch/write something easily. ...even on this article intro it boast how he prefers a tiling window manager, then move to a platform that makes them a nuisance.
It's the basic trade off of short term vs long term reward.
Using closed source is like having a diet of candy. Great in small amounts, but bad if you are past 5 years old. And ridiculous if you are writing articles to defend it.
> Using windows/osx will always be more convenient at first.
Or, you know, forever. The number of things the Linux Desktop community is actively hostile to that could make computing life so much simpler is ridiculous. Portable applications? Relative icon paths in .desktop files? A standardized set of base libraries developers can rely on being present? Linux Desktop cares not for such things. If you don't want to do things their way, fuck you, that's their motto. Then they wonder why people keep choosing other OSs.
> If you don't want to do things their way, fuck you, that's their motto. Then they wonder why people keep choosing other OSs.
I definitely feel your pain (I can't count the number of times I have run into UX issues on various Linux distros, and in search for a fix/answer find many people that ran into the exact same issue but find that the maintainer has stubbornly refused to consider changing or fixing it), but really? If you don't like something on Linux, you can fork and fix it yourself.* If you don't like something on Windows or macOS, it's Microsoft and Apple that are telling you 'fuck you, deal with it.'
* Whether or not doing so is feasible is a different story..
Other OSs still have the advantage of, well, working in ways that aren't dreamed up by keyboard-only terminal jockeys who've only ever had GUI's described to them. I mean seriously, just look at the .desktop spec, or really any FreeDesktop.org spec, and tell me the person who wrote it had ever in their life used the GUI as anything other than a really fancy tmux.
I literally laughed out loud when I saw the author's name and now wonder why the headline wasn't: "Apple leaves Linux for Windows"
Yes, Windows has gotten far better in recent years; then again, there have been great tools available for it for a while, like ConEmu and it's derivative Cmdr, so when it was recently announced that Windows 10 does SSH I smirked because I've been doing that -- and Vim and other things -- from Cmdr for years.
I use Windows 10 Enterprise for a project I work on. I really like File Explorer, the taskbar, and the window switching system, but for system-level scripting and cli-based development, nothing beats a good ol’ bash terminal, whether on Linux or macOS. However, I detest Windows 10 Home for its extremely bloated menu layout, pre-installed spyware, and forced no-questions-asked-no-matter-how-much-you-protest updates. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of some mission-critical task because it. will. update. For that reason alone, I completely abandoned Windows for home/personal use and now use either Mint or macOS (mostly macOS tbh). I’m no fanboi of any particular OS, and all I care about is an OS that’s stable, easy to use, and that does what I tell it (or tell it not) to do.
I never had OP’s experiences with Mint, so in that regard he’s generalizing. Like Christianity and its many denominations, it REALLY depends on the distro.
I don’t question his decision, people should do what is right for them.
That said, something caught my eye: he was spending a lot of time tweaking the Linux UI instead of working. This was me fifteen or twenty years ago: wasting tons of time tweaking things. Now, I use Pop Linux as is in my System76 laptop and before that for years I just accepted the default Ubuntu setup. Good enough.
I switched to Arch expecting to tweak a bunch of stuff, and now I just use essentially stock GNOME with a couple of extensions downloaded through the GNOME extension manager and haven't touched it in years.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It sounds like an article written to show that Windows is finally understanding and has now embraced Linux, therefore users do not need to run away anymore : "Come back guys, we have all the Linux you love here inside Windows." This article does not seem to be an honnest point of view to me.
Linux only took off on PC because POSIX support was pretty lame in the beginning, and later on not many care about SUA and Interix.
So we had to look elsewhere to run UNIX at home.
Nowadays Linux ABI is more valuable than plain POSIX source compatibility, hence WSL. Which by the way Windows wasn't the first to go through this route.
Windows 10 is honestly really good as a user desktop as long as you run the appropriate optimization and debloat scripts on an LTSC image.
I'm still using Linux as well, but I've been really impressed by the stability of the LTSC Win10. Even fewer problems than the recent iterations of MacOS, in my experience. It's worth considering especially if you need access to commercial software like Excel or Adobe CC products.
This is a good point. WSL is a good addition, but Windows 7 felt more streamlined and less cluttered. I almost dread dealing with Windows 10, the updates and Cortana trying to activate have definitely made me lose trust using it as a daily driver. Then again, I'll be putting off the Catalina upgrade as long as possible, too
This is the reason I use Gnome. Sure, I could spend time tweaking and theming KDE Plasma's bars or messing around with i3 config files. But Gnome is pretty straightforward. Sure there are extensions and GTK themes. But it's primarily designed with one workflow in mind, kind of like iOS. I find myself doing more work when I'm using a Gnome desktop environment.
When I use Windows, there's a lot of "update work" to do that ends up distracting me. Updating WSL Ubuntu, updating chocolatey, checking individual apps for updates, checking windows for updates, etc. I end up being more focused when I'm using Linux.
Mint MATE. Quite spartan. The Gnome part is more or less Gnome 2 and quite minimal. I cut down the panels to just one thin (24mm) strip at the top, and most that is filled with just my everyday launch-icons, date, and desktop switcher.
With my daily back-up, and a couple of scripts, I can completely re-install my system from an absolute disaster to up-and-running normally within about an hour or an hour and a half.
I bought a 5700 after my GTX 970 died and I wanted to play games and do some game programming.
I waited to buy it after it had been out for two months and I could get a good 3rd party cooler.
I had to wait another two weeks for support to get into Manjaro (Arch). The 5700 series Navi cards had several dependencies. Mesa 19.2.1 (19.2.0 was not a production release), LLVM 9.0, Linux 5.3, anddddd... a linux-firmware pkg update.
Navi had been out for almost 2.5 months at this point...
Windows 7 just required an AMD Radeon graphics driver to be installed. And, I could install it, justed booted into VESA mode, download it, install, reboot.
Nvidia had been having issues with elements flashing on their closed source Linux drivers. An issue my 970 had in abundance. Which is why I went AMD, better value and I can use proper open source drivers.
Recent AMD hardware support is really pitful for new Linux users. Especially since I usually recommend Ubuntu, which is often using much older mesa and Linux kernels than Arch distros. The 2000 series APU launches were an absolute joke (although Windows users had similar issues).
Windows 10's rolling updates has it's issues (Orange Screenshots). But I recently installed it to my laptop, wifi worked out of box w/o updated. Windows Update complained about Intel drivers not being properly installed when it tried to install, rebooted, everything worked fine as far I could tell.
I bought AMD to support their support of open standards (Freesync) and their open source software contributions (Nvidia didn't open source PhysX until AMD released it's open source equivalent). AMD recently open sourced their AI mage anti-aliasing tech for their cards which were ported to all cards by the community.
AMD needs to do a better job of getting their open source drivers into mesa and the kernel. Intel tries to get their initial support at least a year into the kernel (source Phoronix).
From what I hear, Ubuntu 19.10 didn't update their linux-firmware pkgs for their ISOs so you can't boot with the 5700 series Navi cards with Ubuntu 19.10... let alone for the rumored 5600 mainstream Navi cards coming out soon.
If you can claim Linux is the equivalent of Windows or macOS and advocate for people using Linux instead of other OSes, you can’t also say “you’re not allowed to complain about it because it didn’t cost anything”.
Either it’s comparable or it’s “deal with it’s problems because it’s free”. It can’t be both.
At the end of the day if you care about those subjects, macOS and Windows are where the fun is.
My Asus Netbook, which was bought with GNU/Linux nowadays still doesn't have the same DirectX 11 feature parity level, hand hardware video decoding, that the previous proprietary AMD drivers provided, so is the beauty of the new open source ones.
Meanwhile Asus has provided updated DirectX 11 drivers to all Windows generations since Windows 7.
In an effort to reinvigorate my computer chops, I've been bouncing between macOS, linux (Manjaro), and Windows 10 on my personal laptop, switching to the next OS in rotation every Sunday night. I'm set up to develop a number of my personal web projects in all three operating systems, with my environment being (more or less) the same across all three (Angular and Python development) using Sublime as my primary text editor, Firefox as my primary browser. I've gone out of my way to NOT rely on the Linux subsystem on Windows, trying to keep my Windows experience more 'vanilla'. I'm only on my second week of using Windows, but I have to say, it is BY FAR my least favorite environment to work in of the three.
Why restrict yourself to not use WSL? For me it's the best of all worlds currently - your favorite package manager giving you all Linux binaries you want, to operate on the same data that your windows GUI tools can also. Especially with VS code it is seemlessly integrated through remote tools and the "code" Linux binary. Only thing I'm missing is a terminal on the same level as Terminal.app or iterm, but I assume the coming update should solve that.
I have a Linux config I wrote for my desktop manager 8? Years ago. It took me about a week to write, and is themed to my hearts consent. I’ve barely touched it since then, once a couple years ago to add more workspaces, and another a couple weeks ago to change the theme
It gives me the same keybjndings I want everywhere. Linux now feels the same regardless of what distro I’m using, and it’s just the way I like it now.
It’s easy to get suckered in to ricing you’re environment, but you get tired of it eventually and just copy/paste the config around.
Windows scares me at this point, it doesn’t have a nice timing window manger and I inevitably lose what I’m working on in a pile of windows.
Starting a job in a "Windows dependant" software house, I was forced to have both WLS and Linux VM. They gave me a brand new HP computer they prepared with company software, security software, etc. I was "Windows free" since 2009, ten year without Windows. The first problem was BSOD, that computer start randomly to crash, even after the software / system / driver upgrades the administrator installed on the machine and it still does, randomly. The same happen to my collegues. For the first time I noticed that now BSODs have a nice QR-Code. My impression about WLS is that's nice but still a toy with lot of limitation: first of all you can't full iteract using WSL tools with what is running in Windows space. It's useful to have access to Linux tools like grep, interpreters, etc to use against object resident on Windows file system. Sometimes Linux programs silently doesn't work well I noticed this using some Linux tool and Python libs, for example. This is the reason of the Linux VM running on my PC. IMHO WLS is far to be a replacement of a native Linux pc / VM, I still prefer to work on a Linux or OSX pc, even if Apple and Systemd are spending big effort to make me hate both, with the result I'm evaluating BSD.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadIt's the basic trade off of short term vs long term reward.
Using closed source is like having a diet of candy. Great in small amounts, but bad if you are past 5 years old. And ridiculous if you are writing articles to defend it.
Or, you know, forever. The number of things the Linux Desktop community is actively hostile to that could make computing life so much simpler is ridiculous. Portable applications? Relative icon paths in .desktop files? A standardized set of base libraries developers can rely on being present? Linux Desktop cares not for such things. If you don't want to do things their way, fuck you, that's their motto. Then they wonder why people keep choosing other OSs.
I definitely feel your pain (I can't count the number of times I have run into UX issues on various Linux distros, and in search for a fix/answer find many people that ran into the exact same issue but find that the maintainer has stubbornly refused to consider changing or fixing it), but really? If you don't like something on Linux, you can fork and fix it yourself.* If you don't like something on Windows or macOS, it's Microsoft and Apple that are telling you 'fuck you, deal with it.'
* Whether or not doing so is feasible is a different story..
Yes, Windows has gotten far better in recent years; then again, there have been great tools available for it for a while, like ConEmu and it's derivative Cmdr, so when it was recently announced that Windows 10 does SSH I smirked because I've been doing that -- and Vim and other things -- from Cmdr for years.
I never had OP’s experiences with Mint, so in that regard he’s generalizing. Like Christianity and its many denominations, it REALLY depends on the distro.
That said, something caught my eye: he was spending a lot of time tweaking the Linux UI instead of working. This was me fifteen or twenty years ago: wasting tons of time tweaking things. Now, I use Pop Linux as is in my System76 laptop and before that for years I just accepted the default Ubuntu setup. Good enough.
So we had to look elsewhere to run UNIX at home.
Nowadays Linux ABI is more valuable than plain POSIX source compatibility, hence WSL. Which by the way Windows wasn't the first to go through this route.
I'm still using Linux as well, but I've been really impressed by the stability of the LTSC Win10. Even fewer problems than the recent iterations of MacOS, in my experience. It's worth considering especially if you need access to commercial software like Excel or Adobe CC products.
When I use Windows, there's a lot of "update work" to do that ends up distracting me. Updating WSL Ubuntu, updating chocolatey, checking individual apps for updates, checking windows for updates, etc. I end up being more focused when I'm using Linux.
With my daily back-up, and a couple of scripts, I can completely re-install my system from an absolute disaster to up-and-running normally within about an hour or an hour and a half.
MacOS and Windows sucks. The sooner we abandon them, the sooner we can have open source freedom.
I bought a 5700 after my GTX 970 died and I wanted to play games and do some game programming.
I waited to buy it after it had been out for two months and I could get a good 3rd party cooler.
I had to wait another two weeks for support to get into Manjaro (Arch). The 5700 series Navi cards had several dependencies. Mesa 19.2.1 (19.2.0 was not a production release), LLVM 9.0, Linux 5.3, anddddd... a linux-firmware pkg update.
Navi had been out for almost 2.5 months at this point...
Windows 7 just required an AMD Radeon graphics driver to be installed. And, I could install it, justed booted into VESA mode, download it, install, reboot.
Nvidia had been having issues with elements flashing on their closed source Linux drivers. An issue my 970 had in abundance. Which is why I went AMD, better value and I can use proper open source drivers.
Recent AMD hardware support is really pitful for new Linux users. Especially since I usually recommend Ubuntu, which is often using much older mesa and Linux kernels than Arch distros. The 2000 series APU launches were an absolute joke (although Windows users had similar issues).
Windows 10's rolling updates has it's issues (Orange Screenshots). But I recently installed it to my laptop, wifi worked out of box w/o updated. Windows Update complained about Intel drivers not being properly installed when it tried to install, rebooted, everything worked fine as far I could tell.
I bought AMD to support their support of open standards (Freesync) and their open source software contributions (Nvidia didn't open source PhysX until AMD released it's open source equivalent). AMD recently open sourced their AI mage anti-aliasing tech for their cards which were ported to all cards by the community.
AMD needs to do a better job of getting their open source drivers into mesa and the kernel. Intel tries to get their initial support at least a year into the kernel (source Phoronix).
From what I hear, Ubuntu 19.10 didn't update their linux-firmware pkgs for their ISOs so you can't boot with the 5700 series Navi cards with Ubuntu 19.10... let alone for the rumored 5600 mainstream Navi cards coming out soon.
> I had to wait another two weeks for support
This situation is completely unacceptable. I hope you called Manjaro and asked to speak to a manager to get a refund on your free operating system.
Either it’s comparable or it’s “deal with it’s problems because it’s free”. It can’t be both.
And, if you actually read my post.
You would have known I blamed AMD for not properly supporting the card I paid for 2.5 months after launch.
Linux is even listed as a supported OS on the box. (Which is awesome btw!)
"Hey, I have a problem with your product..."
"It was FREE! Why are you complaining!?"
--Why Linux Desktop will never be a serious contender, part 12.
My Asus Netbook, which was bought with GNU/Linux nowadays still doesn't have the same DirectX 11 feature parity level, hand hardware video decoding, that the previous proprietary AMD drivers provided, so is the beauty of the new open source ones.
Meanwhile Asus has provided updated DirectX 11 drivers to all Windows generations since Windows 7.
Isn't this person the CEO of Apple according to you know who.
It gives me the same keybjndings I want everywhere. Linux now feels the same regardless of what distro I’m using, and it’s just the way I like it now.
It’s easy to get suckered in to ricing you’re environment, but you get tired of it eventually and just copy/paste the config around.
Windows scares me at this point, it doesn’t have a nice timing window manger and I inevitably lose what I’m working on in a pile of windows.