Saying Ubuntu has telemetry like Windows is shaky at best. Ubuntu asks you whether you want it, doesn't mandate it for people who don't buy enterprise licenses, and doesn't sneak in new kinds of telemetry when you already disabled what's there.
Saying Ubuntu overrides auto-update settings is just false. If you turn off automatic updates, nothing will automatically update.
I acknowledge that they don't make this easy, but at least there is a way to do it: by downloading a snap manually and then sideloading it from the local file, it won't ever automatically update: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...
This isn't quite true anymore. Snap software will still automatically update even if system updates are off. You have to either edit your hosts file to block the snap domain or disable the snapd.service in a command line to prevent the automatic updates.
Even if Canonical ever become evil, we have distributions and it is open source. You can change any part, a lot of distributions built on top of Ubuntu. For example Google can disable uBlock in Chromium, some would switch to Ungoogled, Iridium, some to Opera, Brave, Vivaldi.
Imagine if Windows, macOS, Google services were easy to fork.
True. From a regular Fedora and occasional windows user
Office runs on it, games work on it, Thinkpad touchpad drivers aren't shit, Microsoft To Do is still better than anything anyone else has come up with, fractional scaling that works properly, power management that works properly, half decent recovery options, best corporate SSO and device management on the market, smoothest full disk encryption.
> Microsoft To Do is still better than anything anyone else has come up with
Not really. It started as Wunderlist minus half the features plus a useless “My Day” system. When did they add the “All Tasks” smart list? (It’s at least 2 years by my count, I don’t know the exact numbers.) How did they launch without it (it was in Wunderlist)?
> smoothest full disk encryption
macOS’ FileVault 2 is the smoothest, and it’s available to everyone. BitLocker works best with hardware not every computer has, and you need Windows 10 Pro or better.
Hmmm, I just bought a Dell Precision laptop that had Bitlocker enabled by default (presumably by Dell) and at no point was I asked to record a backup key. I don't have a Microsoft account either. I'm probably screwed?
You can export the key to something else (and it's worth doing) personally I've gone for passing it to Microsoft (I'm not sure I could find whatever USB key I've stored it on otherwise). The option is under "Manage bitlocker" "backup your recovery key".
I've had bitlocker fail to find the key after doing a BIOS update where the TPM has been messed up (although usually it's just been disabled and needs re-enabling). If Microsoft has the backup key you can login on another PC or phone and get the key again (from memory it's around 25 random characters).
My threat model is theft of a PC not Microsoft one drive being hacked. Just means whoever steals the PC now has to either:
a) Hack the TPM
b) Hack my Microsoft account
c) Give up and reformat the PC before resale
While a & b are not impossible they seem unlikely for a random thief, while option c seems like the most likely response to a PC stolen with bitlocker enabled.
Bitlocker makes me less likely to be a victim of identity theft after having my PC stolen.
The best recovery option is the ability to snapshot a system and restore a computer or another computer to that exact state which has always been a thing even if implemented via rsync instead of zfs rollback/send. Gui installers offered a full disk encryption option when I started using Fedora 1.0.
If you want a pretty gui Timeshift seems to be a thing.
Power management in addition seems to work fine if the machine is properly supported. At least it seems to be as good on a thinkpad as on windows with more options via tlpui.
Linux and other Unices have much better CLI, but the GUI of Windows is far more consistent and complete than the dozen or more variances in UI frameworks/libraries/etc. of the Unix world... that is, until recently, when Electron and other non-native monstrosities took over with their superficially pretty but otherwise horribly unusable dumbed-down mobile-ish UIs.
I say this as a long-time Win32 programmer who actually started writing software for DOS and briefly for Win16 --- the CLI in DOS and Windows is so much less consistent and powerful than the *nixes (and PowersHell is a real abomination of syntax, as powerful as it may be...)
Does it have to be better, or even preferable? Is "it's sufficiently good for my needs but it's free" not enough?
Whole industries have died because a free product has emerged that's "good enough" for 90+% of people. When was the last time anybody bought the electronic Encyclopedia Brittanica now we have Wikipedia?
Strangely I stumbled across an article today on the online Encyclopedia Brittanica which didn’t have an equivalent on Wikipedia. I wonder if anyone has ever done a comparison to find all the article on one but not the other.
Linux would have to be extremely good for most people to take the effort to switch. Switching to Wikipedia doesn't require reformatting your hard drive and installing a new operating system—a completely foreign concept for 98% of the computer-using population.
Reformatting your hard drive and installing a new operating system is just the beginning of it.
Such a drastic change of OS basically disrupts your whole workflow while you get used to the new one. Everything from where to find things to keyboard shortcuts to UX paradigms.
I would argue that the change from Win10 to a KDE linux or a similar windows-like UX is similar to a change from Win7 to Win10.
Its fair to say that even the Win7 to Win10 switch is something people only do if you force them, but I could see the Win10->Linux change happen for a lot of people if they saw anything it had that they needed.
Not having to worry about AV and automatic updates, automatic download and in-OS-ads would be pretty huge already.
Yes, most powerusers on windows know where to turn all that off, but a lot of people, like my parents, are scared to fuck something up, so they dont touch any settings, especially not if windows tells them "this improves your experience, you sure you wanna turn it off? nudge".
A lot of people would not notice or care if you switched their machine to Linux - as long as it means they have to worry about less.
You should be able to install most distros alongside windows without any extra work, just in the installer. UEFI+GPT boot is an option, and that never required me to fuck with the uefi setup, it just installed itself into the EFI partition together with windows's stuff, and you could pick in GRUB "windows" or "linux" :)
It lists file system case sensitivity as a pro, which it isn't. Case sensitivity is the default you get when you don't think about the users, and windows chose the opposite because it's better.
Ignoring the issue of which is better, windows isn't even uniform across the OS in its filesystem case-sensitivity. You can insert identical-other-than-case files with some kernel calls and break everything when you try to modify them later with the more common file interfaces.
>You can insert identical-other-than-case files with some kernel calls and break everything when you try to modify them later with the more common file interfaces.
that doesn't seem like a realistic scenario, nor is it comparable to explaining to granny that "Cookie recipe.txt" and "cookie recipe.txt" are two separate files.
You just need to modify a directory with two different programs using different windows files apis (and create case-insensitive duplicates while doing so). How common that is will depend on how often an end user accidentally tries to create duplicate files (if that's infrequent then a completely case-sensitive system would also only cause issues infrequently), and in the proportion of programs using the different windows file apis.
I think you're right that we would expect that to happen only rarely, but it seems implausible to expect that there's an entire windows file api with zero usage.
Side-note: I don't think explaining "Cookie recipe.txt" and "cookie recipe.txt" being different would be thaat hard -- if they look different then they are different. As long as granny doesn't have to worry about zero-width whitespace or other garbage in her file names then that's a good enough rule of thumb.
I can agree that system case sensitivity is the wrong choice for probably the vast majority of users, but at the same time it's the right choice for me.
I find case sensitivity to be a pro. Once on a case-insensitive OS I tried to rename a file by changing the case on a character and it didn't work...I think it might have been MacOS. Anyway, I simply don't understand how case-insensitivity has any benefit. It's actually quite annoying and a pet peeve of mine.
Objective reasons to prefer anything else over Linux: Security. Linux is now the least secure desktop OS available, with limited sandboxing and no provision for checking binary signatures. It's 2020, the net is a dangerous place, and if you want to avoid malware, signature checks must be done on everything from the bootloader up through the user application code.
> Linux is now the least secure desktop OS available
[citation needed]
> limited sandboxing
seccomp? Namespaces? What exactly do you want Linux to be able to sandbox that it can't?
> no provision for checking binary signatures
Bootloaders already enforce this for the kernel, and the kernel can enforce it for its own modules. Userlands are free to enforce it for userspace programs (e.g., how Android requires APKs to be signed).
Those are toolkits to sandbox processes, but I'm talking in terms of complete solutions. Linux has Snaps and Flatpak, but the modern distros lack in solutions to enforce sandboxing policies systemwide against arbitrary binaries.
While Apple's Gatekeeper and Windows Defender may improve security, their privacy drawbacks are substantial, and as we discovered recently with Apple's Gatekeeper fiasco, yet another thing that could fail and prevent legitimate programs on the computer from opening. Furthermore, Windows Defender will occasionally quarantine binaries and DLLs that are harmless. For a non-power user, fixing these problems is non-trivial. Privacy vs Security is one argument, but the fact that the systems can occasionally break through no fault of the user is a major concern in its own right.
You should check again - Ubuntu applications are now being distributed via Snaps that everyone hates, they are sandboxed tho. For other distributions you have Flatpak that is also sandboxed.
> Linux is now the least secure desktop OS available,
... less secure than Haiku, the OS that runs everything as root?
> with limited sandboxing
With limited default sandboxing (snaps, flatpaks), and assorted add-on options (firejail, bubblewrap), in which respect it's... exactly like NT (sandboxie) and Darwin?
> and no provision for checking binary signatures
I am aware of no package manager which fails to check signatures before installing. They may exist, but at least the major players do.
Few windows users get their software from the Microsoft store where store apps would benefit from sand boxing in the first place. Instead they cruise the web with their web browser hoping that the first link on google for "foo" is the official source of foo not a link to one contaminated with malware. Good thing the odds are pretty good unless foo costs money in which case they are searching for "pirate foo" and now 99% of the links are in fact malware.
Once they find the exe or msi of their choosing is found they quickly double click on it and answer yes to any prompt that comes up regardless of whether it asked for admin rights or to sell their kids to a veal farm.
Fortunately they have an antivirus to catch them if they do anything stupid. Unfortunately so do malware authors who will carefully craft their wares to bypass such protections while the antivirus will spastically check every file that is opened and everything the computer wants to do before it lets it do it catching only the dumbest malware while ruining performance.
Meanwhile Linux users can get all or virtually all software from a single app store which actually contains all or most of what they need. Not installing malware remains a vastly easier solution than trying to contain malware you are stupid enough to install.
Windows is probably considerably more secure against browser 0days, but how much malware is actually distributed that way? I expect most of it comes from people manually running malware executables they mistakenly download from websites.
First off, you are right in that Linux has major security issues and isn't perfect in it. However, outside of the comments that have already been posted in defense of linux's security, in the end, Linux's relative obscurity at the moment DOES effectively lead to less viruses. Compare that to Windows, who for all the security measures they implement ultimately lead to more because it is simply more targeted. While this isn't truly reliable security, at the moment it works better.
Either way, Windows compromises all of your data nonetheless. So not only are you actually getting viruses, your data's stolen anyways. Compare that to Linux, where viruses aren't as frequent and no ones siphoning your data. In the end, who's better off?
None of these reasons have anything to do with user experience -- no wonder none of these reasons have earned Linux any market share outside of picky developers.
> Astronomically lower probability of catching a virus.
Yes because nobody uses consumer desktop Linux. With higher market share the malware will come.
> No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
True, but that also means you're going to end up with a lot more botnet nodes out there because people will never update. Or they'll never update and still complain things are not working.
> No phoning home with you being unable to launch an app when your manufacturer's server is slow.
I hear you, but this doesn't happen enough for anybody to care. People would be more fet up by Facebook downtime.
> No shuffling about trying to install drivers for a thousand components before your computer is usable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Linux drivers still can require endless faffing about. The biggie is that distros won't distribute nonfree drivers by default, for ideological reasons. The average person doesn't understand that they need to go enable some repo in their package manager, only that their machine isn't working.
> > Astronomically lower probability of catching a virus.
> Yes because nobody uses consumer desktop Linux. With higher market share the malware will come.
Linux has a higher server market share already, and its virus problem there is still not as bad as Windows'.
> > No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
> True, but that also means you're going to end up with a lot more botnet nodes out there because people will never update. Or they'll never update and still complain things are not working.
Today, Windows has forced updates and Linux doesn't, and Windows hosts are more likely to be part of a botnet than Linux hosts.
> distros won't distribute nonfree drivers by default, for ideological reasons.
True but misleading. For example, Ubuntu doesn't install nonfree drivers by default, but all you have to do to install them is check the checkbox when the installer asks you. Way easier than dealing with drivers on Windows.
> Linux has a higher server market share already, and its virus problem there is still not as bad as Windows'.
Server use cases are vastly different than Desktop use cases. I have administered a lot of Windows servers in my time and not a one of them has ever had a virus. Workstations on the other hand...
> True, but that also means you're going to end up with a lot more botnet nodes out there because people will never update. Or they'll never update and still complain things are not working.
Or people update when it's convenient for them vs when it's convenient for the OS.
...which is nice from a user control perspective, but completely ignores gp's argument. You can either have user control or everyone up to date. You can't have both.
In fact, the latest versions of Proton are so good, the only games I haven't been able to get to work with regularity are the ones that require EA Origin, and honestly, I've had similar problems on Windows. In fact, sometimes the Proton version of the game works better than the Linux binary. So, if gaming is holding people up from switching (which is a common excuse), that's not as much an obstacle these days.
2. Any time there is an update, it's an opportunity for something to break. If a user has no choice when a computer updates, they risk interrupting important, time-sensitive work. So, a user must ask themselves, are they more worried about their machine possibly used in a botnet, or are they more worried about it rebooting right in the middle of a meeting or video call? Or taking 20-30 minutes to update after an unexpected reboot, such as a power failure? I would rather have the choice, and deal with problems caused by updates only I want to, when I have the time. Also, many zero-days are for software that's over a year old. As long as a user has done an update in the past year, which is a reasonable expectation, the risk of compromised security is much lower.
3. Facebook downtime and the incapability to launch any third-party application at all are two very different problems. Further, Gatekeeper is not the only source is potential problems. Windows Defender has been known to quarantine DLLs and executables that are perfectly harmless, but fixing problems caused by an overzealous update to (and application of) Windows Defender definitions is often beyond the capabilities of the average user.
4. The Linux kernel absolutely supports non-free drivers. Inclusion of non-free driver "blobs" is a common argument.
In fact, I would like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as "ideological Linux", is, in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux...
>"The Linux kernel absolutely supports non-free drivers. Inclusion of non-free driver "blobs" is a common argument."
Linux kernel has no stable ABI for drivers as a matter of ideology / strategy, we can debate it's merits but you certainky can't claim it suppports them.
And when there is no driver available the only option you have is to buy a new device. None of my 4(4!) Sound devices work with a current linux distribution. Not the Realtek Chip on my x570 board, not my logitech webcam, not the speakers in my monitor via hdmi and not my USB Sound Card from Creative.
Not even the onboard Realtek Lan controller works, i had to buy a usb one.
Oh and, i had to plug the cord from all sound devices after a reboot into Windows, because none worked anymore.
This situation is even worse than in the late nineties/early 2000 ish.
Yeah, sadly. The Chips I have are supported, but the device ids they have aren't supported by the kernel, i would have to check it out from source, add those ids and compile it on my own. At least i could find that for the network adapter, i guess its the same for the sound devices, cause they just use normal parts from realtek and the like.
Ive just bought those parts because they had the best performance and features for their price point, i could literally spend over a thousand euros more to only get a little bit more features or performance. I kinda had hopes that nearly everyone who would build a rig these days would buy those and because of that someone would have made them linux compatible in the last two years.
> Astronomically lower probability of catching a virus.
Correct, but when was the last time you got a virus on Windows? (Obviously it's different for Regular Joe User, I'm talking about the HN audience).
> No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
In practice, my Windows install always updates in the middle of the night when I'm not using it. It closes all of my apps and only reopens the web browser. But, it's not so bad. It doesn't bother me. I can however see how it might annoy some people. But I think the effects of this are exaggerated.
> No phoning home with you being unable to launch an app when your manufacturer's server is slow.
Windows phones home, but to be fair, this post is about Linux vs Windows, and being unable to launch an app is a MacOS problem, not Windows.
> No shuffling about trying to install drivers for a thousand components before your computer is usable.
This is true in some situations. For instance, if you install Windows from scratch you'll have to wait while it downloads drivers. More of an automated process, no shuffling about. The alternative on Linux is to roll the dice and hope your drivers are baked into the kernel, if not you're back to (very manual) shuffling about.
> In practice, my Windows install always updates in the middle of the night when I'm not using it. It closes all of my apps and only reopens the web browser. But, it's not so bad. It doesn't bother me. I can however see how it might annoy some people. But I think the effects of this are exaggerated.
Apple has definitely figured out the "reopen apps when you reboot your computer" feature. I wonder why it's taken Microsoft so long to do the same.
Even if Microsoft were to provide some special API for this, tons of legacy programs won't be using it, and most new ones will also ignore it.
Under Microsoft Windows, application installers can register some handler to run on startup, and can implement this themselves: the program can check whether an instance of the program was interrupted by reboot, and if so, start it up in a special way whereby it is told to recover the state from the most recently saved parameters. Those could include volatile state like position of windows, object selections and whatever.
There is really nothing for Microsoft to do there other than maybe lead by example; implement some sort of best practice in a few notable Microsoft programs, document the practice and encourage developers to do same.
I've been using Windows as a daily driver for over 20 years and have never had a virus or malware. For a technical savvy user it's really easy to avoid by just not doing stupid things.
> * No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
Eh... kinda, actually. I can recall many times wanting to try out an application only to discover that my LTS distro which was gasp 4 years old didn't have it in the repo, so I was forced to upgrade in order to get it without setting up a build environment and recompiling.
If AppImage were more widely embraced this sort of thing wouldn't need to happen.
Yeah, but then it is supposed to - you are expected to have knowledge to fix it as a user. And unlike proprietary OSes it gives you legible errors and great logging/debugging tools and a path to downgrade. Last time I had to help my friend troubleshoot his Windows setup all we would get would be an extremely cryptic error code and we solved it by finding a thread on an Italian forum and had to google translate a solution that consisted of creating an arbitrary entry in Windows registry. This is not comparable.
I think the difference is not between legible errors vs none, but how many people who deeply understand computers are in the community. So a community difference instead of a technical one. In Windows land, most folks don't understand it, so most you'll find on the internet is "I reinstalled windows, the problem is gone" and "try Pro Cleaner ^TM 2000, the trial version has some ads but it removed the problem for me. requires E-Mail signup though".
Windows is also far more difficult to debug in the first place. macOS has stuff like the defaults command in the Terminal and verbose mode that give power users the tools to debug issues. Even if the Mac-using community isn't super tech-savvy on average, the architecture of macOS means that you're left with "Something went wrong; please try again later" far less often.
Have had this experience with Windows 10 and OS X in the last two years.
You could argue the Windows issue is the fault of Samsung's migration assistant or the OS X issue was the fault of my employer's mdm software as both ultimately boiled down a partition layout that the updater wasn't anticipating, but OS X was unable to rollback and Windows _did_ rollback, but then immediately tried again with reapplying the update and restarting as it was past the "No really we're just going to update to the new feature release now" period.
I know quite a lot of folks here are fed up with moves away from native apps and towards Electron-wrapped web apps (and often for totally valid reasons) but it's been a godsend for making Linux a usable daily driver OS. IMO if you're doing eg web dev work in a GSuite / Slack / Figma / etc organization, it's never been a better time to try desktop Linux!
Why do you need web apps wrapped in their own window, though? Just open a browser.
Relatedly, Electron is a problem because desktop apps nowadays require a huge browser just to display a window, not because web apps are packaged in a browser to get slightly better desktop integration.
I like Slack and similar having their own icon and entry in the alt-tab switcher. Absent ubiquitous PWA support, electron is sort of the least bad alternative.
ironically, windows just included this for Edge, you can alt tab between browser windows and you can put websites as taskbar apps ( and will also jump to all windows of the app easily as well)
You have to design your site for this, back in the IE days we did this for some corporate tools and went full kiosk mode. The user didn't even know that it was a website.
Most apps don't need that feature. In fact, the apps which insist on electron experience often misuse it. Think of the zoom daemon that remained on mac desktops even if you uninstalled zoom.
Every time I click a zoom link these days on macOS, I get really annoyed that I have to click again to get into the video call: the security issue was unfortunate, but (for me) Zoom was absolutely right about the UX.
works offline
has more permissions
can use udp
separate alt-tab, tray display
is not throttled because it's in the background (on desktop)
unaffected by browser settings
unaffected by clear cookies
unaffected by extensions
less confusion over who handles keybinds
Not well. I'm optimistic about the web in general, but I consider good, reliable clientside storage to still be an unsolved problem, at least for the moment.
Some of the things we're still missing:
- the ability to easily share data between domains without opening yourself up to massive security risks.
- the ability to share data with native apps.
- the ability to move data between browsers without syncing it to an online account.
- the ability for normal users to inspect offline data.
- the ability to trust that browsers like Safari won't just arbitrarily delete your data one day.[0]
- the ability to trust that browser upgrades won't ever corrupt the data you have stored.[1]
- the ability to share large amounts of data without worrying about storage limits (this matters a lot if you're making an editor like Atom or Visual Studio).
Typically, what I see with offline apps is that they'll use offline storage, but they don't trust it. They use it when possible as a progressive enhancement, but then they have to sync that data to a server someplace if it's something that users actually care about. And that matches my experiences as a web developer as well. I can't imagine building something like a password manager or text editor in-browser that was only storing data locally, I wouldn't trust that.
It's also not just a technological problem, it's a problem of UX. If I tried to make a purely offline web app, I'd be getting angry customer calls in a week asking where their data went just from them clearing browser history and not realizing that it deleted all their data as well. There isn't a user-friendly, user-controlled way to indicate that storage for one website should be permanent, and users aren't really trained to think that way about the web anyway -- their instinct is to think of it as transient.
Are these supposed to be advantages over using the browser for these "apps"? As someone who uses the browser for most of these things, I was looking for some reason why the electron app would be better and I don't see any (and see some definite negative aspects).
Do you really not see any of these as advantages, at all?
You don't use a task bar on your computer? You would never want to be able to alt-tab to a programming IDE or music player?
You can't imagine why someone would want to be have a programming IDE like Atom that didn't need to pop up a dialog box literally every time you wanted to save a file to disk?
You can't imagine why someone would want an IDE like Atom to automatically read from their local Git config and hook into native commands for functionality like file grepping? Or why someone would want to be able to use native volume controls to separately control volume in a music player and their overall browser?
You've never wanted to start a long-running process in an application and then alt-tab to a separate program while it completes without that process getting throttled?
You can't imagine why someone would want to clear all local data from normal websites in their browser without also clearing all of the local data stored in every web app that they're using? When you want to clear some old files on your computer or empty your trash, do you prefer to just `rm -rf` your home directory?
> Do you really not see any of these as advantages, at all?
I can see how they would be an advantage to some, but a detriment to others. I don't find any of these things to be enough of an advantage to outweigh the advantages of having it in browser.
> You don't use a task bar on your computer?
Nope.
> You would never want to be able to alt-tab to a programming IDE or music player?
Having these in browser means 1 less window to keep on the desktop taking up space so I don't need to alt-tab as much. I can see both my IDE and my browser at the same time.
> [ .. Atom, more interactive app section ...]
I don't use Atom or VSCode (electron-based editors) so this isn't an issue for me. But I can totally see wanting these to be as native as possible, so using them that way makes sense. So I'll 100% concede the point for code editors.
For data I use Firefox containers to keep that things compartmentalized sufficiently so there to no need to worry about polluting local data stores.
I'm not saying a browser isn't effected by its settings. I'm saying that not being affected by browser settings is not an advantage. If I'm running an in-browser app, I want and expect it to be effected by my browser settings.
Interesting. The context isn't even very far from the comment. It's literally one comment up. I've noticed this quite often on HN. Is it a working memory issue?
Most of that applies to PWAs, daemons with Web UI and native UI Web Widgets, no need to package a browser with the application, contributing to Chrome market share.
Honestly I'd suggest they just use Qt then. Our company is writing a portable replacement to our Electron client right now. The electron option was absolute garbage, very limited, and caused us untold pain. We got tired of telling customers "we can't really do that". The Qt version is already working on Linux and Windows, and on whatever CPUs we compile it for. There's no excuse for Electron, because there are good, portable GUI frameworks and libraries to use instead. Hell, don't like Qt? Use GTK+! I use GTK+ for my own portable personal projects, I like the API better and it integrates better with XFCE.
Qt is nice but costs money for developers of proprietary software. Electron has its own costs but most of them are externalized to the user. So it wins out.
I guess there will be people going to say that QT is LGPL, which allows people to use in proprietary applications. But I think there must be people who just want permissive alternative, and Electron is MIT, so it is indeed more viable (liceise wise).
? It's LGPL, so as long as you link dynamically, it's fine for proprietary software to use it. A lot of commercial proprietary software in the VFX industry does this (Nuke, Katana, Mari, Maya, Houdini, etc).
All written in Python, recently moved to Qt5 and PySide2, runs on Windows and when I figure out packaging for Linux (probably AppImage) will release it for Linux as well.
I believe there are Qt bindings for other languages too.
I like that UI! Out of curiosity, do you use a kind of wysiwyg (a la qt designer) to make your interfaces, or do you write Python code directly? Coming from JavaFX using scenebuilder to design UIs, l tried Pyside2 some years ago, never managed to find a way to make it work with a wysiwyg the way I am used to with JavaFX. Writing and styling widgets by hand is painfully slow.
I use Qt Designer for the layout. I never could get the hang of the Horizontal & Vertical spacers or the Layout Managers in Qt, so it's a static layout.
There are quite a few "pages" in the application which appear or disappear when required. Those are all QWidgets which have their own static layout.
The doughnut chart showing materials available on a planet is a dynamically created web page shown via a QtWebView widget.
There's an Overlay Widget which is basically a QWidget with transparency, with the main window being hidden then called up via a global hotkey - I use Python ctypes to enable the global hotkey, calling the Windows API to enable that functionality.
And the underlying databases used are sqlite3 via SQLAlchemy.
I dumped GTK a few years back due to - and I have no idea if the same thing happens today - weirdness with GTK themes not working between minor releases of it, and I vaguely remember there were other annoyances but by then I was impressed with Qt and the PySide (noe PySide2) bindings so stuck with it.
Agreed. Between Gsuite, Gitkraken, Figma, VSCode, PopOS, and my $700 Ryzen 4700u laptop, web dev is absolutely stellar. Would never go back to Windows or MacOS. Everything with PopOS and this AMD laptop works out of the box.
I can definitely understand people sticking to Windows though if they need gaming or Office.
Disclaimer: I love Linux. I also like Windows (it's extremely solid).
RE path limitations. I actively -- and have for many years -- use paths much longer that 25x characters. Including in Windows Explorer. I can't recall the last time I had a issue, though IIRC there is some sort of operation (that I guess I never use?) via Explorer where one can run into issues.
The main issue, and it exists on Linux as well is this in code:
char path[MAX_PATH]; // or equiv
In Linux this generally gives you a 4k buffer so you're MUCH less likely to hit the issue of course.
The title doesn't appear to match the text. It seems to be mostly a list of things that might trip up Linux developers when moving to Windows. Which is fair enough but not why I clicked this link.
But to address the list's content, it would be interesting to update it to take into account developments made in more recent versions of Windows 10.
This is the real answer. I'm tired of people comparing Linux and Windows, they're based on completely different philosophies and design styles, it's truly apples vs oranges.
I would tend to agree. Linux has been my main OS for the past few years in part because I agree with the principles behind it, but also simply because I _feel_ better using it than using Windows. I'm not at ease with the user experience and the behaviour of Windows. So I'm using Linux and I don't really run into any meaningful issues day-to-day. The biggest issues I had to solve lately were on my VPS, not even my desktop.
But as the GP said : you can always use both, and there are a lot of ways to do so. A few games and softwares I use can't run on Linux so I keep a windows on dual-boot. WLS 2 is a great experience for a lot of folks, etc.
I really hated the intro. There are less confrontational ways of making that point across.
Then the points being made did not resonate with my own reasons for using Linux.
Microsoft loves Linux and Open source, in paper, but the reason you are not using Linux right now is mostly due to Microsoft.
MS Office, the defacto Office suite, runs only on macOS and Windows, and the OOXML standard was created with obfuscation in mind.
Microsoft bought Corel, and shortly after Corel Office dropped its Linux release.
Microsoft lobbies governments so that they adopt MS Office. Some of those goverments are starving impoverished countries that could rather use that money for humanitarian reasons.
OpenGL was the target of a FUD campaign that scared game developers forcing them to adopt DirectX.
I encountered the same problems when I had a Windows 10 machine in 2016 - every couple of months the thing would shit itself for no apparent reason. The only thing I could do was copy all my personal files to an external disk and reinstall the OS.
My next computer was a bit more stable - but I still had a few nasty scares. Installed Mint and never looked back ;)
Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure.
Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
Arch is largely based on binary packages. Packages target x86-64 microprocessors to assist performance on modern hardware. A ports/ebuild-like system is also provided for automated source compilation, known as the Arch Build System.[28]
Arch Linux focuses on simplicity of design, meaning that the main focus involves creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools — the package manager, for example, does not have an official graphical front-end. This is largely achieved by encouraging the use of succinctly commented, clean configuration files that are arranged for quick access and editing.[29] This has earned it a reputation as a distribution for "advanced users" who are willing to use the command line.[30]
And then on the other end you have Distro's like Mint, or Ubuntu:
Mint is designed for ease of use and a ready-to-roll out-of-box experience, including multimedia support on desktops. The operating system is easier to install than most Linux distributions. Mint includes software required for e-mail and online functionality as well as support for multimedia content, whether online or from a user's own files and physical media
There are several different desktop editions of Mint, including Cinnamon, GNOME, XFCE and KDE, to best support various hardware. The operating system is also provided in an alternate Linux Mint Debian Edition for those that are more familiar with Linux. That edition is said to be less intuitive and user-friendly but also faster and more responsive.
Surely Arch is somewhere in the middle, with things like Gentoo, Nix, Guix, LFS (in increasing order of complexity, perhaps) &c. as the opposing end from Ubuntu/Mint.
While I agree with all of these 100%, I'm a UI/UX designer, so Adobe continues to hold me hostage to my Apple and MS boxes.
Some of the Linux alternatives are good, but they still aren't as good as Adobe. I still do quite a bit of JS development and some app development on my older Linux rig, but I just wish at some point Adobe will pull their heads out and support Linux. I remember in several threads on the Adobe forums, the attitude towards Linux users was pretty offensive. Their argument was all the Linux users would want Adobe products to be free and open source and its not something they could do and still support all the Apple and MS people "who actually pay for their products".
It pissed me off enough where I did give it a full go on Linux with Gimp Shop and some other alternative open source alternatives, but it just wasn't the same - which really bummed me out.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that Adobe's Creative Cloud app is a total resource hog as well. Not to mention any of their programs you run will quickly eat up to a gig or more of your resources.
> It pissed me off enough where I did give it a full go on Linux with Gimp Shop and some other alternative open source alternatives, but it just wasn't the same - which really bummed me out.
It kind of looks like maybe it's a marketing site for gimp now?
I was one of those people who moved from Photoshop to gimp and for the longest time I thought gimp was really bad but after customizing a few hotkeys and setting up some pre-made scripts and brushes it's pretty decent. At least for casually making YouTube thumbnails and things like that.
Some design decisions still leave me baffled tho, like not having a default bind to merge a layer down or not being able to easily center things relative to objects in an intuitive and graphical way (ie. dragging something until it snaps in place while seeing some temporary guide lines overlay near where it's snapped and some basic pixel measurements near it).
I originally created Gimpshop, but I'm not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.
….
I don't have a project site for it. I became discouraged after this whole ordeal and I let it slip away into obscurity. …. Gimpshop was a fun little 'prank' that got bigger than I ever expected. Sad what it has become, though.
i was tethered to a windows box for photoshop and then i discovered Krita. it is such a joy! the UX is very thoughtful (unlike my experience with gimp which i could just never get used to). its also very powerful with GMIC (you get content aware fills and other things that used to set Adobe apart. not anymore!)
> Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
Unless "hardware" is many laptops or all tablets, which effectively can't run Linux (unless Android etc.)
Or Nvidia which at this point in time offers the fastest graphics cards on the market and the user experience is subpar on Linux. I'm back on Windows after 17 years and I can finally enjoy a UI that doesn't lag and hardware video acceleration on a $5000 PC built a couple months ago.
It's probably too difficult to fix the underlying design errors, e.g. fork() duplicating the process's entire address space, thus requiring overcommit and copy-on-write, but losing only one process beats losing all of them. earlyoom should be enabled by default.
Or simply disable swap if you have enough RAM. I've been running without swap since 2014 on a 16 GB laptop. I upgraded to 32 GB a couple of years later when I started to routinely use at least 12 GB. At least one browser and editor window per virtual desktop (one VD per customer plus a couple for me), docker, virtualbox, slack, thunderbird, etc.
In practice the benefits of swap mentioned in that article almost never happen on desktop use. I used to use swap on my last install and it was pretty much never used. I don't bother with swap anymore. Server may be different game though.
Not really. While there are still problems without swap, all swap does is move that problem further away while slowing down some things in the meantime.
You can still have thrashing without a swap partition/file: as memory pressure increases, the kernel will flush disk cache and buffers, slowing down operations that need them again. In the extreme case this can mean the program code you are executing being evicted from ram only to be re-read page by page for many times until the kernel finally decides to kill whatever was eating all the ram.
Linux as a server/headless OS has been fantastic for me. I have a home NAS running Linux that hasn't been rebooted in over a year and that was due to swapping out hard drives.
Linux as my desktop OS, not so much. I have to reboot my Linux laptop every few days for various reasons, including complete unresponsiveness to any keyboard input.
That's really weird. Which distro and hardware are you using? I can go months without rebooting. I mostly do so when Linux tells me it needs a reboot to apply some update.
Keep in mind I use my laptop for both coding and gaming (if it ever locks up it's because of a game -- which wasn't uncommon years ago when I used Windows, either).
But I still run Windows because the only really good video editor on Linux (Davinci Resolve) is really unstable there with the hardware I have, the USB audio interface I use has all sorts of issues on Linux and not all games run well on Linux.
Basically what it boils down to is I've been one of those folks who builds their computers from parts for 20+ years with the goal of using 1 computer for everything (dev, video editing, gaming, etc.). I'm afraid Linux isn't ready for such users yet if you don't want to dual boot or set up a Windows 10 guest VM with a GPU pass-through.
If I didn't care about gaming or video editing and only focused on pure software development I would switch in a heart beat.
Which of his problems are you referring to that would work on ReactOS? The last build of ReactOS I tested could barely run the built-in explorer without screen artifacts and weirdness.
It is POSSIBLE to do a lot of things on Linux that you can do in Windows? Yes. The question is: how much time will it take you to make it work?
Lightworks is also a really nice commercial editor that works on Linux. The free version supports 720p output. It is not as fully featured as Davinci Resolve, but then it also requires much more modest system resources.
Yep, I tried that one (along with pretty much every editor). None of them really meshed well with what I was used to doing with Camtasia (on Windows) or Resolve. They were all too limiting[0] in one way or another for the types of videos I create.
Resolve would be perfect if it worked with my set up. I hope one day it gets there.
[0]: I don't make cinema style movies. Mainly 1080p screencasts. So things like nice looking titles, simple animations, zooming / panning, adding overlays of various shapes and sizes, blurs, etc. are really important to me. Nothing I tried on Linux really comes close to how easy it is to do that stuff with Camtasia and make it look nice. Resolve is pretty close tho, after you put in enough time to build up your own custom libraries.
> Linux runs better on both new and older hardware.
This is very much debatable. What's true however is that if your HW is not supported by at least Windows 8.1 you're SoL.
> Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
I haven't observed any slow downs in Windows 10 for ages. As for "less memory and CPU cycles" it's just outright false. Windows offers much better hardware acceleration for everything: display rendering, video encoding and decoding, RDP (VNC in X11/Wayland taxes the CPU quite a lot and forget about effectively streaming video via VNC), etc. Linux is quite horrible in this regard.
> Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure.
Unless you're obsessed with downloading software illegally, it's not an issue in Windows either. I don't remember the last time I had to deal with malware for my +20 of friends using it.
> Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Windows updates are very much in your face.
> Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Except there's 100 times more software in Windows.
> Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
No one has ever proven Microsoft accesses or downloads any of your files, or uses telemetry data to find out what applications you're running.
> Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
This one is true however with a lot of choice comes a lot of confusion and doubt.
> Linux is free.
Windows 10 OEM license can be bought for as little as $10. This is 100% irrelevant nowadays.
You can't buy/use an OEM license for windows on a box you build yourself can you? The last windows machine I put together, I paid > $100 for Windows itself.
People actually pay for Windows on desktops? That still surprises me. I know of course you do pay when buying a laptop, but Windows is basically free, there's a trial and you can just use an activator, or buy an OEM key for 10 bucks as the parent states.
Many PC builders just don't activate Windows at all—other than a few occasional nags, Microsoft doesn't really enforce Windows activation anymore. It's just like how Apple doesn't crack down on Hackintoshing. Both the build-your-own PC market and the Hackintosh market are small enough that it's not worth the time.
Plus, Microsoft is better off having the few prospective Linux-users to have experience tinkering with Windows rather than Linux, even if they don't pay for Windows directly either way. It means they're more likely to be happy using Windows for business IT infrastructure, which is where Microsoft makes its real money.
> Microsoft doesn't really enforce Windows activation anymore
Except an unactivated Windows, once past its trial window, will shut down after an hour of use, without warning. That's very annoying.
MS absolutely does enforce activation. They likely won't come after you for using cracks (unless you have hundreds of corporate machines using them), but they will make your life awkward remotely, as they are entitled to by the EULA.
You can use OEM licenses on Windows boxes you build yourself. The main difference with an OEM license and a retail license is that OEM licenses do not come with as much support. The idea is the system builder is supposed to provide the first level of support, while retail licenses are supported by Microsoft directly.
Parent author reporting back. I am going to have to sort of disagree with you there (in Lumbergh voice).
In all seriousness though, you are wrong on all points. Sorry, yes you are wrong. Rather than write a point by point rebuttal, against my common sense (you know, the thing about arguing with someone one the Internet) I'll just write a few paragraphs, provide some professional anecdotal and maybe quantitative evidence, and allow others to decide what's reasonable.
I build laptops and desktops for students of whom I teach programming and electronics. I build both new and used systems, and I loan and sell a lot of computers. Students get the loaners, buyers fund profits to buy more students computers. That said I experience a wide variety of actual system performance information across a large spectrum of computers.
Linux installs faster than Windows by a lot. When booting it's my experience that Linux can open a task manager (sometimes called system monitor on Linux) quicker than on a Windows system, the same goes for the file manager (explore on Windows). Across the board most programs open faster on Linux. You can disbelieve all you want, but that's just an objective reality.
Regarding less CPU cycles, yes again it 's true, Linux uses less. Linux has far fewer background services and other tasks running in the background doing a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
It's not just the services though. Windows is constantly scanning files for viruses or other malware, it's recording your activity, it's indexing the content of your computer as files are written or change. All this causes guess what? More CPU cycles and more memory being consumed. You may now go back and check my second point.
Moving on, you are wrong again on point number three. You don't need to download illegal Windows software to get malware. You can get it attached as an add on to free legal Windows programs.
Next, Windows updates are notorious for downloading updates in the background without your knowledge or consent. There are well known stories of people who were working on an important task on their Windows computer, who got up for a break and came back to see updates being applied from an automatic reboot causing their work to be forever lost.
Without a doubt Windows has more software, but I said the Linux app store experience is better than Windows. On Linux distributions have app stores that come from a curated list, and those apps are built from source by the distribution maintainer. They are verified to some degree and use the same installation methodology. On Windows this is not the case, a lot of software installs automatically without user consent. I keep getting Espon software each time I install Windows on ...
I think in a previous HN thread I got unkilled I talked about the problems of CompatTelRunner and Appraiser, shipped with Windows 7/8/8.1 updates and which even MS employees like Billy O'Neal complain about. I deliberately installed the updates that contain CompatTelRunner and Appraiser on an old Windows 7 laptop with a hard drive to demonstrate its problems.
Opening the task manager or explorer takes less time than I can measure on both Windows and Linux... what kind of metric is this?
As for background services, of course they spend (at that moment unused resources). But you completely forego that they have an actual usefulness. Indexing files makes searching later faster. Prefetching makes loading commonly used programs faster. Virus scanning keeps your computer safe. Telemetry helps developers recognize issues and prioritize bugs, even stop hackers in time. The article you mentioned wants you to disable the firewall (bad advice) but also a lot of services that are not even consuming resources unless you have the necessary policies/hardware, like the bluetooth service or touch screen service.
Not that Windows these days runs from high-end server to low powered ARM devices, while still looking generally the same. This is not the same Windows from 20 years ago where you could easily tweak the system to get some more performance out of it. These days Windows comes out of the box running as fast as it can, while giving a reasonable user experience.
As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.
Opening software takes a lot of time on Windows. It's mainly due to the antivirus. I recently tested it myself; I forget the numbers but basically having Microsoft's AV enabled adds a good fraction of a second, or maybe more, to every program launch.
It's been my experience that Windows search is anything but fast. On Linux on the other hand, the speed of find(1) was never an issue. There is really nothing to speed up (and in so doing increase median load).
>Opening the task manager or explorer takes less time than I can measure on both Windows and Linux... what kind of metric is this?
I feel like a lot of people here are devs running reasonably modern computers but as someone running dualboots at home (manjaro KDE) and at work from time to time dealing with the kind of desktops most people use in their day to day life.... (As in they're not actually that old but weren't top of the line when bought either)
....this is actually one of my biggest gripes with it.
Windows really is slow as fuck.
Sometimes it's really noticeable on the somewhat older hardware but on the other stuff it doesn't really annoy you until you compare because we're talking very short delays, little bits of lags....the thing is...It's there for just about everything.
There's not a whole lot that feels instantaneous which makes it all perfectly usable but feel off at the same time.
I didn't even think about it till I switched to Linux at home and noticed just how snappy stuff feels.
MacOS has felt similarly snappy the few times i've used it but I don't use it enough to really comment.
>As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.
Tbh I thought similar (and mostly it'll still be true) until I tried to use a playstation 3 controller (a very common item at least at the time) for a windows only game.
It worked out of the box on Linux and I believe an xbox controller would have worked like that and on windows as well but to get the ps3 one I had working on windows i had to jump trough hoops, change some stuff so i could then disable driver signature enforcement and tweak a few other things only to give up in the end when it still didn't work after I had managed.
Even if it worked it wouldn't work every time because the ways of getting around permanently disabling signed drivers constantly keep being patched by Windows.
The slowness is something I particularly notice with python. I'm a linux user, but many of my students work on windows. Every time they show me something on linux and import numpy or scipy it takes like 10s for the import. While on my linux system it's typically instantaneous. Can anyone elaborate on where this is coming from?
≥ Except there's 100 times more software in Windows
Really? I bet dockerhub alone has more linux-capable software than windows has anywhere. I also expect that a randomly chosen GitHub repo is more likely to support Linux than it is to support Windows.
Maybe these aren't fair comparisons, but I'm not sure what would be. The ecosystems are so different it's hard to know how such a count would go.
I'm not saying "I have more tools than you have cars" because I think it makes me win at something. I'm trying to point out that the ecosystems are so different that it's hard to quantify which side has "more".
> I'm trying to point out that the ecosystems are so different that it's hard to quantify which side has "more".
No. In response to "there's 100 times more software in Windows." you started speaking about dockerhub and git. That does not encompass all software, especially software that is required by non-programmers.
Let L be the set of all software for Linux and W be the set of all software for Windows.
If there is a subset of L that is larger than W, then L itself is also larger than W.
I was proposing that if you count every image, or every repo, then dockerhub-only or the GitHub-only subsets of L might be larger than W because the effort of creating an additional windows project is much greater than the effort of creating an additional Linux project.
The amount of software in dockerhub and github is entirely irrelevant when you just for a second stop considering just the subset "developers who use linux-compatible tools".
It really surprises me since there's a developer edition coming natively with Ubuntu (it only exists for the XPS 13 though). Is the underlying hardware that different?
The Asus EEE PC that I bought (1215B) also came with Linux, when I say support Linux OEMs I meant it, yet not everything worked as expected, e.g. wlan and hibernate were an adventure during the first years.
And then the whole story with AMD open source driver, means I am unable to take full advantage of the GPU in Linux.
The Precision 7750 supports Linux and supposedly has the same sound system as the XPS 17. Both are 17” laptops and share similar chassis. Finger print reader isn’t well supported. No gestures.
20 years ago I was convinced Linux would win on the desktop. But we still have the same problems decades later.
That's all true, modern Linux distros are great - but Linux does not have software people got used to use on Windows. And this is the main reason why Linux share on desktop is 1%, not because Linux is not preinstalled. Provided that, developers of desktop software very reluctant to support Linux (even they support Mac), because investing 20-30% of development time for the user base less than 1% is pointless idea from business standpoint.
>Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
Unlike macOS, You can disable ALL telemetry in under 30 seconds on Windows. There is actually even a service named "User Experience and Telemetry" that you can conveniently stop and disable in a number of ways.
Opt-out is almost always possible, but that's missing the point.
Windows is often used as a personal operating system. There is no reason for it to collect analytics, especially after decades of development, I don't think the devs are getting anything actually useful out of knowing how often my grandparents check their email.
They're collecting data, and it doesnt seem to be used to help UX development much.
> Linux runs better on both new and older hardware
.
Seriously asking - Please do suggest a good, powerful laptop and distribution that works issue-free with linux, most specifically:
1. Zero problems with sleep and resume.
2. Zero problems with bluetooth or wireless. Please recommend what vendors work well here.
3. Minimal issues with Slack or Teams.
4. Error free desktop environment.
5. Updates do not break stuff leading to Google searches on how to solve it.
Lenovo T460 here works flawlessy. AS for Bluetooth it's unreliable in Windows as well but usually just works? I don't use Bluetooth much, it probably also depends on the Bluetooth profiles that you're using.
I just bought a Thinkpad L15 (AMD) a week ago, slapped Arch on that bad boy. Please keep in mind that all what im about to say required some manual work since it's Arch, but should all work "out of the box" in any other distro with a recent kernel.
Suspend / resume works perfectly out of the box, backlight worked after updating (which you should anyways after installing). Wireless worked perfectly out of the box, with NetworkManager. I use KDE Plasma, and it works well, too, without any complaints. All the function-buttons work, including volume, screen switching, sleep, mic mute. Webcam works. Didnt test slack or teams, but discord, atom and vscode (all electron apps) work perfectly fine.
Firefox & Chromium work perfectly fine.
I think in general, if you check the ArchWiki page on Laptops, there is a wonderful (and extensive) list of most common laptops and their issues (if any). Thinkpads seem to work very well, and, worst case, have good drivers made by the community for anything that doesnt work.
Thanks for the suggestion. Finding it hard to find a 15" Thinkpad without a number-pad. Non-centered laptop keyboards gives me wrist pain. MacBooks have the right ergonomics here :(
I have used Linux as the primary OS for over 15 years in the last 20 years and I am not sure I agree with all of that.
Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
Simply untrue. It could be true for some distros, some driver versions and some hardware... but if you consider everything, Windows runs better than Linux. Mostly because most hardware is designed to run well on Windows. The Linux versions are either an afterthought or built and maintained by third-party.
Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Windows updates aren't stealthy and they can be disabled. If you really don't want an update, it is MUCH MORE straightforward to avoid installing the optional update in Windows than it is for Linux distros.
* Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Which Linux distro has a better App Store than Windows? Since Microsoft launched the Windows App Store, it is the best App Store in any non-macOS computers.
Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
Some distros do. Ubuntu has it, for example.
Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
This is true. However, this has been a problem, which is why something like Ubuntu which has good defaults which they stick to has been so much successful than anything else.
Linux is free.
Sure! Many things are. That's not always a good reason to use it.
>Simply untrue. It could be true for some distros, some driver versions and some hardware... but if you consider everything, Windows runs better than Linux. Mostly because most hardware is designed to run well on Windows. The Linux versions are either an afterthought or built and maintained by third-party.
You mean drivers instead of hardware right? Typically performance is roughly the same. Sometimes better sometimes worse.
The issue is where they don't exist or are an afterthought indeed and then it's quite frustrating.
>Windows updates aren't stealthy and they can be disabled. If you really don't want an update, it is MUCH MORE straightforward to avoid installing the optional update in Windows than it is for Linux distros.
What? What are you on about?
I have yet to install an update for Linux that I didn't specifically give my permission for.
Automatic updates are turned of by default on any distro I've tried and they don't come as bundled as they do for windows where a recent random update I just checked includes some changes for input devices, office products, basic operations security and the DST start date for the Fiji Islands.
>Which Linux distro has a better App Store than Windows? Since Microsoft launched the Windows App Store, it is the best App Store in any non-macOS computers.
It looks neat but....
For some reason it uses a different language (that I've never selected to be used) in most of it's UI. Is a common problem in Belgium apparently and I guess same in other multilingual countries which is weird because that's not an issue anywhere else in the OS.
Why am I looking at some loading ring for 3-4 seconds when i click on an app?
Where do I add alternative sources?
Can I do stuff like build something differently on install if I want to?
>Some distros do. Ubuntu has it, for example.
An outlier more than anything and one that asks you if you want it on install and later disabling it is a checbox away.
>This is true. However, this has been a problem, which is why something like Ubuntu which has good defaults which they stick to has been so much successful than anything else.
Fully agree it has been a problem and still is for it's adoption. I don't think it's what notably contributed to Ubuntu's success in the past tho.
it has extremely clear separation of permissions, unlike anything windows has. its very possible to set up a user account that can only use the browser and office programs, and that's incredibly valuable. windows can do this, too, but its messy, spotty, and to the user feels like an afterthought rather than something designed deep into the OS like on unix-likes.
I have been running Linux on all my personal machines for the last 8 years and I have to say that one thing windows has going for it is it’s graphics system. I have super sensitive eyes and I have to say that even wayland does not cut it when compared to windows. Everywhere else Linux on desktop is either far better or a bit behind but workable
Sounds more like a mis-configuration on desktop environment specific, rather than a problem with Linux or Wayland. I'm using Sway with Wayland and don't experience any of the issues you mention. In fact, I find that it is easier to read than Windows and definitely a lot snappier.
See that is the problem. Sure everything is fine if all I use is sway + alacritty and terminal based apps on a single screen but as soon as I mix in multiple terminals, x11 apps, glitchy hdpi, experience starts to deteriorate quickly
There is a current bug with Chromium that I'm aware of that causes issues if you have windows open on multiple desktops. Other than that I don't have these problems. May I suggest you check out the Arch Wiki for Sway and Wayland for suggestions for configuration.
I have very sensitive eyes too. And this is also a problem I've had with Linux on certain systems. My desktop is nothing special. My video card is Nvidia and the main monitor is a Dell running at 75hz. Windows is fine. Every distro I've tried is not. I've checked in Linux to make sure the refresh rate is correct. I've used both the open source driver and the closed source blob for the video card. I have no idea why I don't get eye strain from Windows but I do with Linux.
If anyone knows the answer and has a solution, please let me know. I'd love to dual boot this machine.
I'm guessing you prefer ClearType over FreeType. Have you tried using macOS on a standard-resolution monitor? It has very different font rendering from either Windows or Linux. If it turns out that font rendering is what makes your eyes strained, you may benefit from a higher-DPI monitor.
If the issue is screen tearing, try Sway or another Wayland compositor. That's always better in my experience.
>Finally, because Linux is a ubiquitous server operating system, its security is under constant attack, and Linux desktop users benefit from fixes to the vulnerabilities.
I think this kind of argument works both ways
Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but...
Attacking normal people is easier (I think its fair to assume normal user is worse at computers than e.g trained admin), so you can do it at bigger scale and normal user may not want to sue/find you/call cops meanwhile if you're hacking companies then things are more likely to be very serious.
> > Finally, because Linux is a ubiquitous server operating system, its security is under constant attack, and Linux desktop users benefit from fixes to the vulnerabilities.
> Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but Attacking normal people is easier so you can do it at bigger scale...
I think that attacking normal people is easier. I disagree that it scales though. Normal people have huge variances in their systems and the version they run, their network connectivity, their IT savvy, etc. and therefore the kinds of exploits required to break into their home systems will vary a lot.
The variance in commercial systems is probably as high, but who cares since you only need to take down one or two, rather than hundreds or thousands, for equivalent payoff.
The pick-pocket will make a million dollars more slowly than the bank robber.
In the end you have strong arguments both ways. I personally use both on a daily basis. Generally that's Linux for work (coding, mostly) and Windows for fun (games and media).
I used to be on windows. I uninstalled candy crush, bloatware but what can you do. Windows reinstalled it some time later with an update. I have no use for an operating system that doesn't serve my needs but the needs of someone else.
It is strange to me how different people have different experiences. I wonder how much is hardware / driver related? In my case I have an AMD video card, and my system runs for weeks at a time (I reboot when applying kernel updates is all). Also had very good stability on my Thinkpad X2 Yoga (Gen 2) -- this one with the integrated Intel graphics.
I run Fedora, and update to the latest release about a month or two after it is released. Mostly because my job is with RHEL / CentOS, and Fedora keeps me up to date with what will be in the next RHEL major version. However I should correct my previous statement, that I have weird stuff happen with Wayland, and I give it a shot periodically but switch back to X11. (In my case, "weird stuff" is things like desktop screen sharing not working with MS Teams, or having HiDPI scaling interacting badly with older style X apps such as OpenSCAD -- in that case with Wayland the cursor has a hard time grabbing window edges).
Grid view in the file chooser? In my Ubuntu 20.04 system, it only supports standard list view with preview pane on the right side of the dialog.
Gnome throws a huge chunk of functionalities away in favor of UX on version 3, which alienates most of their power users but make it easier for new users to jump in with their mac-like ui.
I've been exclusively using Linux (PopOS specifically) with xanmod for the past 2 months. I do my work (programming), game, etc, etc on this one PC. It's been honestly great.
I've had to change some things I do normally, but for me they weren't a big deal.
Games I play that work well on Linux:
- Overwatch
- League of Legends (not so much anymore because URF is gone)
- Hades
- Frostpunk (highly recommend)
I use an Xbox controller for Hades, and I use it in wired mode (one of the things I needed to change about how I use my computer). Bluetooth has some issues I didn't want to bother fixing.
I am using Xanmod because the regular Linux scheduler is just trash in my opinion for desktop use. It doesn't prioritize UI threads which just makes the linux experience so much worse for me.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadNo overriding auto-update settings.
No license to pay.
Saying Ubuntu overrides auto-update settings is just false. If you turn off automatic updates, nothing will automatically update.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/42895/is-there-a-tool-to-upd...
You can also set RELEASE_UPGRADER_ALLOW_THIRD_PARTY=1 before running the updater to allow third party repos to remain enabled during upgrade.
Imagine if Windows, macOS, Google services were easy to fork.
Office runs on it, games work on it, Thinkpad touchpad drivers aren't shit, Microsoft To Do is still better than anything anyone else has come up with, fractional scaling that works properly, power management that works properly, half decent recovery options, best corporate SSO and device management on the market, smoothest full disk encryption.
Not really. It started as Wunderlist minus half the features plus a useless “My Day” system. When did they add the “All Tasks” smart list? (It’s at least 2 years by my count, I don’t know the exact numbers.) How did they launch without it (it was in Wunderlist)?
> smoothest full disk encryption
macOS’ FileVault 2 is the smoothest, and it’s available to everyone. BitLocker works best with hardware not every computer has, and you need Windows 10 Pro or better.
(I agree with the rest of your points.)
It may be smooth, but it also sends the disk encryption key to Microsoft unless you pay extra for Pro and above, so y'know...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/finding-your-bit...
I've had bitlocker fail to find the key after doing a BIOS update where the TPM has been messed up (although usually it's just been disabled and needs re-enabling). If Microsoft has the backup key you can login on another PC or phone and get the key again (from memory it's around 25 random characters).
My threat model is theft of a PC not Microsoft one drive being hacked. Just means whoever steals the PC now has to either:
a) Hack the TPM
b) Hack my Microsoft account
c) Give up and reformat the PC before resale
While a & b are not impossible they seem unlikely for a random thief, while option c seems like the most likely response to a PC stolen with bitlocker enabled.
Bitlocker makes me less likely to be a victim of identity theft after having my PC stolen.
If you want a pretty gui Timeshift seems to be a thing.
Power management in addition seems to work fine if the machine is properly supported. At least it seems to be as good on a thinkpad as on windows with more options via tlpui.
Task management solutions are a dime a dozen.
However it would be easier to write the list of why Windows is better because it would be a much shorter list
Linux and other Unices have much better CLI, but the GUI of Windows is far more consistent and complete than the dozen or more variances in UI frameworks/libraries/etc. of the Unix world... that is, until recently, when Electron and other non-native monstrosities took over with their superficially pretty but otherwise horribly unusable dumbed-down mobile-ish UIs.
I say this as a long-time Win32 programmer who actually started writing software for DOS and briefly for Win16 --- the CLI in DOS and Windows is so much less consistent and powerful than the *nixes (and PowersHell is a real abomination of syntax, as powerful as it may be...)
Whole industries have died because a free product has emerged that's "good enough" for 90+% of people. When was the last time anybody bought the electronic Encyclopedia Brittanica now we have Wikipedia?
When tax dollars are still being shuttled to the deep pockets of MS and Oracle, a more proactive stance is needed.
Such a drastic change of OS basically disrupts your whole workflow while you get used to the new one. Everything from where to find things to keyboard shortcuts to UX paradigms.
Its fair to say that even the Win7 to Win10 switch is something people only do if you force them, but I could see the Win10->Linux change happen for a lot of people if they saw anything it had that they needed.
Not having to worry about AV and automatic updates, automatic download and in-OS-ads would be pretty huge already.
Yes, most powerusers on windows know where to turn all that off, but a lot of people, like my parents, are scared to fuck something up, so they dont touch any settings, especially not if windows tells them "this improves your experience, you sure you wanna turn it off? nudge".
A lot of people would not notice or care if you switched their machine to Linux - as long as it means they have to worry about less.
It would be great if Steam had non game applications.
that doesn't seem like a realistic scenario, nor is it comparable to explaining to granny that "Cookie recipe.txt" and "cookie recipe.txt" are two separate files.
I think you're right that we would expect that to happen only rarely, but it seems implausible to expect that there's an entire windows file api with zero usage.
Side-note: I don't think explaining "Cookie recipe.txt" and "cookie recipe.txt" being different would be thaat hard -- if they look different then they are different. As long as granny doesn't have to worry about zero-width whitespace or other garbage in her file names then that's a good enough rule of thumb.
https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/nov/26/case/
[citation needed]
> limited sandboxing
seccomp? Namespaces? What exactly do you want Linux to be able to sandbox that it can't?
> no provision for checking binary signatures
Bootloaders already enforce this for the kernel, and the kernel can enforce it for its own modules. Userlands are free to enforce it for userspace programs (e.g., how Android requires APKs to be signed).
... less secure than Haiku, the OS that runs everything as root?
> with limited sandboxing
With limited default sandboxing (snaps, flatpaks), and assorted add-on options (firejail, bubblewrap), in which respect it's... exactly like NT (sandboxie) and Darwin?
> and no provision for checking binary signatures
I am aware of no package manager which fails to check signatures before installing. They may exist, but at least the major players do.
Once they find the exe or msi of their choosing is found they quickly double click on it and answer yes to any prompt that comes up regardless of whether it asked for admin rights or to sell their kids to a veal farm.
Fortunately they have an antivirus to catch them if they do anything stupid. Unfortunately so do malware authors who will carefully craft their wares to bypass such protections while the antivirus will spastically check every file that is opened and everything the computer wants to do before it lets it do it catching only the dumbest malware while ruining performance.
Meanwhile Linux users can get all or virtually all software from a single app store which actually contains all or most of what they need. Not installing malware remains a vastly easier solution than trying to contain malware you are stupid enough to install.
Either way, Windows compromises all of your data nonetheless. So not only are you actually getting viruses, your data's stolen anyways. Compare that to Linux, where viruses aren't as frequent and no ones siphoning your data. In the end, who's better off?
* No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
* No phoning home with you being unable to launch an app when your manufacturer's server is slow.
* No shuffling about trying to install drivers for a thousand components before your computer is usable.
How's that?
Yes because nobody uses consumer desktop Linux. With higher market share the malware will come.
> No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
True, but that also means you're going to end up with a lot more botnet nodes out there because people will never update. Or they'll never update and still complain things are not working.
> No phoning home with you being unable to launch an app when your manufacturer's server is slow.
I hear you, but this doesn't happen enough for anybody to care. People would be more fet up by Facebook downtime.
> No shuffling about trying to install drivers for a thousand components before your computer is usable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Linux drivers still can require endless faffing about. The biggie is that distros won't distribute nonfree drivers by default, for ideological reasons. The average person doesn't understand that they need to go enable some repo in their package manager, only that their machine isn't working.
> Yes because nobody uses consumer desktop Linux. With higher market share the malware will come.
Linux has a higher server market share already, and its virus problem there is still not as bad as Windows'.
> > No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
> True, but that also means you're going to end up with a lot more botnet nodes out there because people will never update. Or they'll never update and still complain things are not working.
Today, Windows has forced updates and Linux doesn't, and Windows hosts are more likely to be part of a botnet than Linux hosts.
> distros won't distribute nonfree drivers by default, for ideological reasons.
True but misleading. For example, Ubuntu doesn't install nonfree drivers by default, but all you have to do to install them is check the checkbox when the installer asks you. Way easier than dealing with drivers on Windows.
Server use cases are vastly different than Desktop use cases. I have administered a lot of Windows servers in my time and not a one of them has ever had a virus. Workstations on the other hand...
Or people update when it's convenient for them vs when it's convenient for the OS.
In fact, the latest versions of Proton are so good, the only games I haven't been able to get to work with regularity are the ones that require EA Origin, and honestly, I've had similar problems on Windows. In fact, sometimes the Proton version of the game works better than the Linux binary. So, if gaming is holding people up from switching (which is a common excuse), that's not as much an obstacle these days.
2. Any time there is an update, it's an opportunity for something to break. If a user has no choice when a computer updates, they risk interrupting important, time-sensitive work. So, a user must ask themselves, are they more worried about their machine possibly used in a botnet, or are they more worried about it rebooting right in the middle of a meeting or video call? Or taking 20-30 minutes to update after an unexpected reboot, such as a power failure? I would rather have the choice, and deal with problems caused by updates only I want to, when I have the time. Also, many zero-days are for software that's over a year old. As long as a user has done an update in the past year, which is a reasonable expectation, the risk of compromised security is much lower.
3. Facebook downtime and the incapability to launch any third-party application at all are two very different problems. Further, Gatekeeper is not the only source is potential problems. Windows Defender has been known to quarantine DLLs and executables that are perfectly harmless, but fixing problems caused by an overzealous update to (and application of) Windows Defender definitions is often beyond the capabilities of the average user.
4. The Linux kernel absolutely supports non-free drivers. Inclusion of non-free driver "blobs" is a common argument.
In fact, I would like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as "ideological Linux", is, in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux...
Linux kernel has no stable ABI for drivers as a matter of ideology / strategy, we can debate it's merits but you certainky can't claim it suppports them.
Not even the onboard Realtek Lan controller works, i had to buy a usb one.
Oh and, i had to plug the cord from all sound devices after a reboot into Windows, because none worked anymore.
This situation is even worse than in the late nineties/early 2000 ish.
Ive just bought those parts because they had the best performance and features for their price point, i could literally spend over a thousand euros more to only get a little bit more features or performance. I kinda had hopes that nearly everyone who would build a rig these days would buy those and because of that someone would have made them linux compatible in the last two years.
Correct, but when was the last time you got a virus on Windows? (Obviously it's different for Regular Joe User, I'm talking about the HN audience).
> No bullshit forced updates when the OS feels like it.
In practice, my Windows install always updates in the middle of the night when I'm not using it. It closes all of my apps and only reopens the web browser. But, it's not so bad. It doesn't bother me. I can however see how it might annoy some people. But I think the effects of this are exaggerated.
> No phoning home with you being unable to launch an app when your manufacturer's server is slow.
Windows phones home, but to be fair, this post is about Linux vs Windows, and being unable to launch an app is a MacOS problem, not Windows.
> No shuffling about trying to install drivers for a thousand components before your computer is usable.
This is true in some situations. For instance, if you install Windows from scratch you'll have to wait while it downloads drivers. More of an automated process, no shuffling about. The alternative on Linux is to roll the dice and hope your drivers are baked into the kernel, if not you're back to (very manual) shuffling about.
Apple has definitely figured out the "reopen apps when you reboot your computer" feature. I wonder why it's taken Microsoft so long to do the same.
Under Microsoft Windows, application installers can register some handler to run on startup, and can implement this themselves: the program can check whether an instance of the program was interrupted by reboot, and if so, start it up in a special way whereby it is told to recover the state from the most recently saved parameters. Those could include volatile state like position of windows, object selections and whatever.
There is really nothing for Microsoft to do there other than maybe lead by example; implement some sort of best practice in a few notable Microsoft programs, document the practice and encourage developers to do same.
Eh... kinda, actually. I can recall many times wanting to try out an application only to discover that my LTS distro which was gasp 4 years old didn't have it in the repo, so I was forced to upgrade in order to get it without setting up a build environment and recompiling.
If AppImage were more widely embraced this sort of thing wouldn't need to happen.
Been there, done that, didn't get a T-shirt but a lot of scorn from IRC
You could argue the Windows issue is the fault of Samsung's migration assistant or the OS X issue was the fault of my employer's mdm software as both ultimately boiled down a partition layout that the updater wasn't anticipating, but OS X was unable to rollback and Windows _did_ rollback, but then immediately tried again with reapplying the update and restarting as it was past the "No really we're just going to update to the new feature release now" period.
Relatedly, Electron is a problem because desktop apps nowadays require a huge browser just to display a window, not because web apps are packaged in a browser to get slightly better desktop integration.
Some of the things we're still missing:
- the ability to easily share data between domains without opening yourself up to massive security risks.
- the ability to share data with native apps.
- the ability to move data between browsers without syncing it to an online account.
- the ability for normal users to inspect offline data.
- the ability to trust that browsers like Safari won't just arbitrarily delete your data one day.[0]
- the ability to trust that browser upgrades won't ever corrupt the data you have stored.[1]
- the ability to share large amounts of data without worrying about storage limits (this matters a lot if you're making an editor like Atom or Visual Studio).
Typically, what I see with offline apps is that they'll use offline storage, but they don't trust it. They use it when possible as a progressive enhancement, but then they have to sync that data to a server someplace if it's something that users actually care about. And that matches my experiences as a web developer as well. I can't imagine building something like a password manager or text editor in-browser that was only storing data locally, I wouldn't trust that.
It's also not just a technological problem, it's a problem of UX. If I tried to make a purely offline web app, I'd be getting angry customer calls in a week asking where their data went just from them clearing browser history and not realizing that it deleted all their data as well. There isn't a user-friendly, user-controlled way to indicate that storage for one website should be permanent, and users aren't really trained to think that way about the web anyway -- their instinct is to think of it as transient.
----
[0]: https://ar.al/2020/03/25/apple-just-killed-offline-web-apps-...
[1]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/17/google-fixes-chrome...
You don't use a task bar on your computer? You would never want to be able to alt-tab to a programming IDE or music player?
You can't imagine why someone would want to be have a programming IDE like Atom that didn't need to pop up a dialog box literally every time you wanted to save a file to disk?
You can't imagine why someone would want an IDE like Atom to automatically read from their local Git config and hook into native commands for functionality like file grepping? Or why someone would want to be able to use native volume controls to separately control volume in a music player and their overall browser?
You've never wanted to start a long-running process in an application and then alt-tab to a separate program while it completes without that process getting throttled?
You can't imagine why someone would want to clear all local data from normal websites in their browser without also clearing all of the local data stored in every web app that they're using? When you want to clear some old files on your computer or empty your trash, do you prefer to just `rm -rf` your home directory?
I can see how they would be an advantage to some, but a detriment to others. I don't find any of these things to be enough of an advantage to outweigh the advantages of having it in browser.
> You don't use a task bar on your computer?
Nope.
> You would never want to be able to alt-tab to a programming IDE or music player?
Having these in browser means 1 less window to keep on the desktop taking up space so I don't need to alt-tab as much. I can see both my IDE and my browser at the same time.
> [ .. Atom, more interactive app section ...]
I don't use Atom or VSCode (electron-based editors) so this isn't an issue for me. But I can totally see wanting these to be as native as possible, so using them that way makes sense. So I'll 100% concede the point for code editors.
For data I use Firefox containers to keep that things compartmentalized sufficiently so there to no need to worry about polluting local data stores.
What are you even talking about? Any unprivileged process can open a udp socket.
> Why do you need web apps wrapped in their own window, though? Just open a browser.
There is a new filesystem api: https://web.dev/file-system-access/
Electron still provides more freedom but I would argue many of the existing electron apps don't need it.
Also, apple's app store is famously LGPL-incompatible.
If you're shipping a proprietary application that links to LGPL libraries in accordance to the license, that's fine.
It's GPL applications that the App Store bans.
All written in Python, recently moved to Qt5 and PySide2, runs on Windows and when I figure out packaging for Linux (probably AppImage) will release it for Linux as well.
I believe there are Qt bindings for other languages too.
So you're not stuck with C++ :)
I use Qt Designer for the layout. I never could get the hang of the Horizontal & Vertical spacers or the Layout Managers in Qt, so it's a static layout.
There are quite a few "pages" in the application which appear or disappear when required. Those are all QWidgets which have their own static layout.
The doughnut chart showing materials available on a planet is a dynamically created web page shown via a QtWebView widget.
There's an Overlay Widget which is basically a QWidget with transparency, with the main window being hidden then called up via a global hotkey - I use Python ctypes to enable the global hotkey, calling the Windows API to enable that functionality.
And the underlying databases used are sqlite3 via SQLAlchemy.
It all works very nicely.
I dumped GTK a few years back due to - and I have no idea if the same thing happens today - weirdness with GTK themes not working between minor releases of it, and I vaguely remember there were other annoyances but by then I was impressed with Qt and the PySide (noe PySide2) bindings so stuck with it.
I'm finding I keep getting pushed to Jupyter and just am not crazy about it.
I can definitely understand people sticking to Windows though if they need gaming or Office.
RE path limitations. I actively -- and have for many years -- use paths much longer that 25x characters. Including in Windows Explorer. I can't recall the last time I had a issue, though IIRC there is some sort of operation (that I guess I never use?) via Explorer where one can run into issues.
The main issue, and it exists on Linux as well is this in code:
char path[MAX_PATH]; // or equiv
In Linux this generally gives you a 4k buffer so you're MUCH less likely to hit the issue of course.
But to address the list's content, it would be interesting to update it to take into account developments made in more recent versions of Windows 10.
Or don't choose and use both.
But as the GP said : you can always use both, and there are a lot of ways to do so. A few games and softwares I use can't run on Linux so I keep a windows on dual-boot. WLS 2 is a great experience for a lot of folks, etc.
Then the points being made did not resonate with my own reasons for using Linux.
Microsoft loves Linux and Open source, in paper, but the reason you are not using Linux right now is mostly due to Microsoft.
MS Office, the defacto Office suite, runs only on macOS and Windows, and the OOXML standard was created with obfuscation in mind.
Microsoft bought Corel, and shortly after Corel Office dropped its Linux release.
Microsoft lobbies governments so that they adopt MS Office. Some of those goverments are starving impoverished countries that could rather use that money for humanitarian reasons.
OpenGL was the target of a FUD campaign that scared game developers forcing them to adopt DirectX.
Not having to reinstall Windows every 6 months just to keep it running fast
My next computer was a bit more stable - but I still had a few nasty scares. Installed Mint and never looked back ;)
Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure.
Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
Linux is free.
In my opinion it's flawed logic _if_ you wanted to say that "Linux is more secure because windows has more malware"
>Linux user experience is much more customizable.
In what way? desktop? kernel tweaks?
How deep do you want the Rabbit hole to go Alice?
On one end you have Arch Linux:
Arch is largely based on binary packages. Packages target x86-64 microprocessors to assist performance on modern hardware. A ports/ebuild-like system is also provided for automated source compilation, known as the Arch Build System.[28]
Arch Linux focuses on simplicity of design, meaning that the main focus involves creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools — the package manager, for example, does not have an official graphical front-end. This is largely achieved by encouraging the use of succinctly commented, clean configuration files that are arranged for quick access and editing.[29] This has earned it a reputation as a distribution for "advanced users" who are willing to use the command line.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Linux
And then on the other end you have Distro's like Mint, or Ubuntu:
Mint is designed for ease of use and a ready-to-roll out-of-box experience, including multimedia support on desktops. The operating system is easier to install than most Linux distributions. Mint includes software required for e-mail and online functionality as well as support for multimedia content, whether online or from a user's own files and physical media
There are several different desktop editions of Mint, including Cinnamon, GNOME, XFCE and KDE, to best support various hardware. The operating system is also provided in an alternate Linux Mint Debian Edition for those that are more familiar with Linux. That edition is said to be less intuitive and user-friendly but also faster and more responsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint
I started with KDE, then went to Mint, Ubuntu, and some other distros like Manjaro that I've been tinkering with lately.
You can see a good list of all the distro's here (current and upcoming):
https://distrowatch.com/
Some of the Linux alternatives are good, but they still aren't as good as Adobe. I still do quite a bit of JS development and some app development on my older Linux rig, but I just wish at some point Adobe will pull their heads out and support Linux. I remember in several threads on the Adobe forums, the attitude towards Linux users was pretty offensive. Their argument was all the Linux users would want Adobe products to be free and open source and its not something they could do and still support all the Apple and MS people "who actually pay for their products".
It pissed me off enough where I did give it a full go on Linux with Gimp Shop and some other alternative open source alternatives, but it just wasn't the same - which really bummed me out.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that Adobe's Creative Cloud app is a total resource hog as well. Not to mention any of their programs you run will quickly eat up to a gig or more of your resources.
Is Gimp Shop still a thing?
Wikipedia says the stable release is from 2006.
Going to https://www.gimpshop.com/ leads you to the official gimp site when you try to download it.
It kind of looks like maybe it's a marketing site for gimp now?
I was one of those people who moved from Photoshop to gimp and for the longest time I thought gimp was really bad but after customizing a few hotkeys and setting up some pre-made scripts and brushes it's pretty decent. At least for casually making YouTube thumbnails and things like that.
Some design decisions still leave me baffled tho, like not having a default bind to merge a layer down or not being able to easily center things relative to objects in an intuitive and graphical way (ie. dragging something until it snaps in place while seeing some temporary guide lines overlay near where it's snapped and some basic pixel measurements near it).
I originally created Gimpshop, but I'm not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.
….
I don't have a project site for it. I became discouraged after this whole ordeal and I let it slip away into obscurity. …. Gimpshop was a fun little 'prank' that got bigger than I ever expected. Sad what it has become, though.
That said, Krita is incredibly comfortable to use, Inkscape replaced Illustrator for anything I care about.
Unless "hardware" is many laptops or all tablets, which effectively can't run Linux (unless Android etc.)
2. Linux servers are targeted and breached. Linux desktop share is too small to be worth it (yet).
3. Windows updates aren't stealthy for a considerable time.
4. That's a matter of opinion.
5. Some distros do, but it's opt-in. Transparency is better on the Linux side too. I agree on this point.
6. You are tempted to spend time on customization with unclear objective benefits.
7. Developers don't owe you anything.
This can be prevented using earlyoom (which is packaged in most distros):
https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom
It's probably too difficult to fix the underlying design errors, e.g. fork() duplicating the process's entire address space, thus requiring overcommit and copy-on-write, but losing only one process beats losing all of them. earlyoom should be enabled by default.
Why aren't we replacing them with something better then? Why are most servers still running GNU/Linux?
Linux as my desktop OS, not so much. I have to reboot my Linux laptop every few days for various reasons, including complete unresponsiveness to any keyboard input.
Keep in mind I use my laptop for both coding and gaming (if it ever locks up it's because of a game -- which wasn't uncommon years ago when I used Windows, either).
Are you running nvidia drivers?
But I still run Windows because the only really good video editor on Linux (Davinci Resolve) is really unstable there with the hardware I have, the USB audio interface I use has all sorts of issues on Linux and not all games run well on Linux.
Basically what it boils down to is I've been one of those folks who builds their computers from parts for 20+ years with the goal of using 1 computer for everything (dev, video editing, gaming, etc.). I'm afraid Linux isn't ready for such users yet if you don't want to dual boot or set up a Windows 10 guest VM with a GPU pass-through.
If I didn't care about gaming or video editing and only focused on pure software development I would switch in a heart beat.
It is POSSIBLE to do a lot of things on Linux that you can do in Windows? Yes. The question is: how much time will it take you to make it work?
Resolve would be perfect if it worked with my set up. I hope one day it gets there.
[0]: I don't make cinema style movies. Mainly 1080p screencasts. So things like nice looking titles, simple animations, zooming / panning, adding overlays of various shapes and sizes, blurs, etc. are really important to me. Nothing I tried on Linux really comes close to how easy it is to do that stuff with Camtasia and make it look nice. Resolve is pretty close tho, after you put in enough time to build up your own custom libraries.
This is very much debatable. What's true however is that if your HW is not supported by at least Windows 8.1 you're SoL.
> Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
I haven't observed any slow downs in Windows 10 for ages. As for "less memory and CPU cycles" it's just outright false. Windows offers much better hardware acceleration for everything: display rendering, video encoding and decoding, RDP (VNC in X11/Wayland taxes the CPU quite a lot and forget about effectively streaming video via VNC), etc. Linux is quite horrible in this regard.
> Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure.
Unless you're obsessed with downloading software illegally, it's not an issue in Windows either. I don't remember the last time I had to deal with malware for my +20 of friends using it.
> Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Windows updates are very much in your face.
> Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Except there's 100 times more software in Windows.
> Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
No one has ever proven Microsoft accesses or downloads any of your files, or uses telemetry data to find out what applications you're running.
> Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
This one is true however with a lot of choice comes a lot of confusion and doubt.
> Linux is free.
Windows 10 OEM license can be bought for as little as $10. This is 100% irrelevant nowadays.
Except an unactivated Windows, once past its trial window, will shut down after an hour of use, without warning. That's very annoying.
MS absolutely does enforce activation. They likely won't come after you for using cracks (unless you have hundreds of corporate machines using them), but they will make your life awkward remotely, as they are entitled to by the EULA.
You just can't change the wallpaper away from black, and there is a notice displayed on it.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/OEM/Windows/10/UseT...
In all seriousness though, you are wrong on all points. Sorry, yes you are wrong. Rather than write a point by point rebuttal, against my common sense (you know, the thing about arguing with someone one the Internet) I'll just write a few paragraphs, provide some professional anecdotal and maybe quantitative evidence, and allow others to decide what's reasonable.
I build laptops and desktops for students of whom I teach programming and electronics. I build both new and used systems, and I loan and sell a lot of computers. Students get the loaners, buyers fund profits to buy more students computers. That said I experience a wide variety of actual system performance information across a large spectrum of computers.
Linux installs faster than Windows by a lot. When booting it's my experience that Linux can open a task manager (sometimes called system monitor on Linux) quicker than on a Windows system, the same goes for the file manager (explore on Windows). Across the board most programs open faster on Linux. You can disbelieve all you want, but that's just an objective reality.
https://i.imgur.com/UxR30xG.png
Regarding less CPU cycles, yes again it 's true, Linux uses less. Linux has far fewer background services and other tasks running in the background doing a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
https://www.pcerror-fix.com/windows-10-services-to-disable-f...
It's not just the services though. Windows is constantly scanning files for viruses or other malware, it's recording your activity, it's indexing the content of your computer as files are written or change. All this causes guess what? More CPU cycles and more memory being consumed. You may now go back and check my second point.
Moving on, you are wrong again on point number three. You don't need to download illegal Windows software to get malware. You can get it attached as an add on to free legal Windows programs.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-extends-its-adware-bund... https://www.information-age.com/hotbed-malware-another-blow-...
Next, Windows updates are notorious for downloading updates in the background without your knowledge or consent. There are well known stories of people who were working on an important task on their Windows computer, who got up for a break and came back to see updates being applied from an automatic reboot causing their work to be forever lost.
https://www.howtogeek.com/224471/how-to-prevent-windows-10-f... https://www.constellationsolutions.com/informational/tired-o...
Without a doubt Windows has more software, but I said the Linux app store experience is better than Windows. On Linux distributions have app stores that come from a curated list, and those apps are built from source by the distribution maintainer. They are verified to some degree and use the same installation methodology. On Windows this is not the case, a lot of software installs automatically without user consent. I keep getting Espon software each time I install Windows on ...
Opening the task manager or explorer takes less time than I can measure on both Windows and Linux... what kind of metric is this?
As for background services, of course they spend (at that moment unused resources). But you completely forego that they have an actual usefulness. Indexing files makes searching later faster. Prefetching makes loading commonly used programs faster. Virus scanning keeps your computer safe. Telemetry helps developers recognize issues and prioritize bugs, even stop hackers in time. The article you mentioned wants you to disable the firewall (bad advice) but also a lot of services that are not even consuming resources unless you have the necessary policies/hardware, like the bluetooth service or touch screen service.
Not that Windows these days runs from high-end server to low powered ARM devices, while still looking generally the same. This is not the same Windows from 20 years ago where you could easily tweak the system to get some more performance out of it. These days Windows comes out of the box running as fast as it can, while giving a reasonable user experience.
As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.
It's been my experience that Windows search is anything but fast. On Linux on the other hand, the speed of find(1) was never an issue. There is really nothing to speed up (and in so doing increase median load).
I feel like a lot of people here are devs running reasonably modern computers but as someone running dualboots at home (manjaro KDE) and at work from time to time dealing with the kind of desktops most people use in their day to day life.... (As in they're not actually that old but weren't top of the line when bought either) ....this is actually one of my biggest gripes with it.
Windows really is slow as fuck. Sometimes it's really noticeable on the somewhat older hardware but on the other stuff it doesn't really annoy you until you compare because we're talking very short delays, little bits of lags....the thing is...It's there for just about everything. There's not a whole lot that feels instantaneous which makes it all perfectly usable but feel off at the same time.
I didn't even think about it till I switched to Linux at home and noticed just how snappy stuff feels. MacOS has felt similarly snappy the few times i've used it but I don't use it enough to really comment.
>As for software, on Windows you're free to install all the software you want (just as on Linux), some software is not so nice, just as on Linux. I find it hard to blame Windows itself for that. Microsoft does not curate all the software you can install it, and a user is free to install what they want. The only OSes where this is really different are mobile OSes.
Tbh I thought similar (and mostly it'll still be true) until I tried to use a playstation 3 controller (a very common item at least at the time) for a windows only game. It worked out of the box on Linux and I believe an xbox controller would have worked like that and on windows as well but to get the ps3 one I had working on windows i had to jump trough hoops, change some stuff so i could then disable driver signature enforcement and tweak a few other things only to give up in the end when it still didn't work after I had managed. Even if it worked it wouldn't work every time because the ways of getting around permanently disabling signed drivers constantly keep being patched by Windows.
Really? I bet dockerhub alone has more linux-capable software than windows has anywhere. I also expect that a randomly chosen GitHub repo is more likely to support Linux than it is to support Windows.
Maybe these aren't fair comparisons, but I'm not sure what would be. The ecosystems are so different it's hard to know how such a count would go.
You are confusing a subset "developers who use linux-compatible tools" with the set "users".
I'm not saying "I have more tools than you have cars" because I think it makes me win at something. I'm trying to point out that the ecosystems are so different that it's hard to quantify which side has "more".
Yes
> I'm trying to point out that the ecosystems are so different that it's hard to quantify which side has "more".
No. In response to "there's 100 times more software in Windows." you started speaking about dockerhub and git. That does not encompass all software, especially software that is required by non-programmers.
If there is a subset of L that is larger than W, then L itself is also larger than W.
I was proposing that if you count every image, or every repo, then dockerhub-only or the GitHub-only subsets of L might be larger than W because the effort of creating an additional windows project is much greater than the effort of creating an additional Linux project.
Really? Where? When asking Microsoft about it, they say No.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/where-...
And don’t even start with hibernate or even just waking up. I’ve never rebooted a laptop so many times.
And what’s the deal with flatpak? A screen shot app is not 700mb? WTF?
And then the whole story with AMD open source driver, means I am unable to take full advantage of the GPU in Linux.
20 years ago I was convinced Linux would win on the desktop. But we still have the same problems decades later.
Unlike macOS, You can disable ALL telemetry in under 30 seconds on Windows. There is actually even a service named "User Experience and Telemetry" that you can conveniently stop and disable in a number of ways.
Windows is often used as a personal operating system. There is no reason for it to collect analytics, especially after decades of development, I don't think the devs are getting anything actually useful out of knowing how often my grandparents check their email.
They're collecting data, and it doesnt seem to be used to help UX development much.
I think in general, if you check the ArchWiki page on Laptops, there is a wonderful (and extensive) list of most common laptops and their issues (if any). Thinkpads seem to work very well, and, worst case, have good drivers made by the community for anything that doesnt work.
Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier.
Simply untrue. It could be true for some distros, some driver versions and some hardware... but if you consider everything, Windows runs better than Linux. Mostly because most hardware is designed to run well on Windows. The Linux versions are either an afterthought or built and maintained by third-party.
Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates.
Windows updates aren't stealthy and they can be disabled. If you really don't want an update, it is MUCH MORE straightforward to avoid installing the optional update in Windows than it is for Linux distros.
* Linux distros have a better app store experience than Windows, plus most of whatever there is free without much if any risk.
Which Linux distro has a better App Store than Windows? Since Microsoft launched the Windows App Store, it is the best App Store in any non-macOS computers.
Linux doesn't have any phone home telemetry type "features" built into the OS.
Some distros do. Ubuntu has it, for example.
Linux user experience is much more customizable. There are a much greater variety of tools at your disposal to customize how you want your desktop to look and operate.
This is true. However, this has been a problem, which is why something like Ubuntu which has good defaults which they stick to has been so much successful than anything else.
Linux is free.
Sure! Many things are. That's not always a good reason to use it.
You mean drivers instead of hardware right? Typically performance is roughly the same. Sometimes better sometimes worse. The issue is where they don't exist or are an afterthought indeed and then it's quite frustrating.
>Windows updates aren't stealthy and they can be disabled. If you really don't want an update, it is MUCH MORE straightforward to avoid installing the optional update in Windows than it is for Linux distros.
What? What are you on about? I have yet to install an update for Linux that I didn't specifically give my permission for. Automatic updates are turned of by default on any distro I've tried and they don't come as bundled as they do for windows where a recent random update I just checked includes some changes for input devices, office products, basic operations security and the DST start date for the Fiji Islands.
>Which Linux distro has a better App Store than Windows? Since Microsoft launched the Windows App Store, it is the best App Store in any non-macOS computers.
It looks neat but.... For some reason it uses a different language (that I've never selected to be used) in most of it's UI. Is a common problem in Belgium apparently and I guess same in other multilingual countries which is weird because that's not an issue anywhere else in the OS. Why am I looking at some loading ring for 3-4 seconds when i click on an app? Where do I add alternative sources? Can I do stuff like build something differently on install if I want to?
>Some distros do. Ubuntu has it, for example.
An outlier more than anything and one that asks you if you want it on install and later disabling it is a checbox away.
>This is true. However, this has been a problem, which is why something like Ubuntu which has good defaults which they stick to has been so much successful than anything else.
Fully agree it has been a problem and still is for it's adoption. I don't think it's what notably contributed to Ubuntu's success in the past tho.
Wait, Linux doesn't prevent doing stupid things, quite the opposite.
If anyone knows the answer and has a solution, please let me know. I'd love to dual boot this machine.
If the issue is screen tearing, try Sway or another Wayland compositor. That's always better in my experience.
I think this kind of argument works both ways
Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but...
Attacking normal people is easier (I think its fair to assume normal user is worse at computers than e.g trained admin), so you can do it at bigger scale and normal user may not want to sue/find you/call cops meanwhile if you're hacking companies then things are more likely to be very serious.
Thus, both are under constant attacks.
> Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but Attacking normal people is easier so you can do it at bigger scale...
I think that attacking normal people is easier. I disagree that it scales though. Normal people have huge variances in their systems and the version they run, their network connectivity, their IT savvy, etc. and therefore the kinds of exploits required to break into their home systems will vary a lot.
The variance in commercial systems is probably as high, but who cares since you only need to take down one or two, rather than hundreds or thousands, for equivalent payoff.
The pick-pocket will make a million dollars more slowly than the bank robber.
https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
In the end you have strong arguments both ways. I personally use both on a daily basis. Generally that's Linux for work (coding, mostly) and Windows for fun (games and media).
https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-10-sucks.html
The Linux (Gnome) UX is miles ahead of Windows.
I genuinely wish I could have Gnome on Windows.
I'm one of those people who never turns their computer off. I've done no changes to gnome other than installing tweaks to bring back minimize buttons.
Still though, every 1-2 days I need to do Alt + F2 and `r` to restart gnome.
I also just generally have a major issue with the Linux process scheduler (CFS). It definitely doesn't feel like its suited for desktop use.
Does it have filepicker thumbnails yet?
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233
Gnome throws a huge chunk of functionalities away in favor of UX on version 3, which alienates most of their power users but make it easier for new users to jump in with their mac-like ui.
I've had to change some things I do normally, but for me they weren't a big deal.
Games I play that work well on Linux:
- Overwatch
- League of Legends (not so much anymore because URF is gone)
- Hades
- Frostpunk (highly recommend)
I use an Xbox controller for Hades, and I use it in wired mode (one of the things I needed to change about how I use my computer). Bluetooth has some issues I didn't want to bother fixing.
I am using Xanmod because the regular Linux scheduler is just trash in my opinion for desktop use. It doesn't prioritize UI threads which just makes the linux experience so much worse for me.