Reasons to switch from Windows to Linux

But again, I’m not snubbing anything out of hand. If it is controversial to say that regardless of kernel, successful consumer operating systems require billions of dollars of investment, I’ll own that. But that’s being dismissive. That’s being a realist and responding to the nature of the article posted, which in my opinion was a lot of recycled from 2006 talking points that are still getting clicks and discussion like it’s fucking Slashdot or something. OS wars and text editor wars are eternal, I realize. But my response was to the article, not snubbing or even impugning the very hard and very impressive work that has happened over the last 30 years with Linux.

Again, I think there are some really valid reasons to move to Linux. I don’t think this article was a good example.

>AFAIK the steam deck is a handheld gaming device similar to a Nintendo Switch, not a desktop PC

It is essentially a fully fledged desktop PC in a handheld form factor [0]. It is identical architecturally to a desktop PC with integrated controller running Arch-based Steam OS 3.0.

>When I say machine with Arch I mean a desktop/laptop with just the stock Arch on it.

Which is fair, but not what I asked.

[0] https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/steam-deck

I think your responses to it being a very flannely, clickbaity article without much substance are fair, but I find that responding to the article by making sweeping statements isn't refuting the material of the article - it's making an appeal to authority where the authority is just the fact that Linux is bad on desktop.

>Again, I think there are some really valid reasons to move to Linux. I don’t think this article was a good example.

I can agree with that. I definitely wouldn't be sending this article to anyone to convince them...

> public sector, developing countries, lower income groups

there are also people who think that the incessant production of e-waste through planned obsolescence is obscene and a crime against nature (and eventually ourselves). devices should be reparable, long-lived, upgradeable by design. and don't get me started on privacy and the grave risks from normalizing the ubiquitous collection of data.

no need to mention names but you can perfectly well be a "tech titan" and a moral dwarf. each tech company (and each one of their employees) must assume their responsibility for what kind of world they are (literally) engineering

> that frankly, were settled two decades ago

No, it wasn't. Windows didn't have a camera, TPM, TPM 2.0, and mandatory Microsoft online account requirements two decades ago, nor did it come "bundled" with Cortana, Teams, advertisements in your Start menu, Windows Defender, forced/"highly incentivized" OS updates, loads of dark patterns meant to try to get you to use a Microsoft account or switch to Edge, and telemetry that repeatedly re-enables itself after you disable it.

All of that is new in the past two decades, and even before that, Microsoft was pulling anti-competitive shenanigans like the Secure Boot requirements and bundling IE with Windows.

This article is extremely timely given the recent release of Windows 11, and gave me new information that I didn't have before (such as the requirement to have a camera). Poorly-written as it is, it's still both useful and relevant.

> It will never be the year of the Linux desktop (and that's totally OK!) and poorly-written articles like this do nothing to help change that.

Are you able to predict the future? This is such a shallow dismissal, and the logic is both absurd and defeatist. Even if you had good reason to believe that "the year of the Linux desktop" (which is kind of a straw-man to begin with) was never going to happen, it's still useful to encourage people to switch away from a user-hostile operating system, both to preserve their own freedoms, and also to pressure Microsoft to walk back some of their anti-features.

> Plus, the article is wrong.

One point that you can kind-of contrive to not be universally true out of eleven doesn't seem like a good reason to call the whole article "wrong".

> There are plenty of Linux distributions with tons of telemetry and spyware

Telemetry? Sure. Telemetry that's mostly opt-in and doesn't magically (re-)enable itself, and sends data to a source that I trust. Telemetry that doesn't fit those requirements, and has actual spyware, is rare both by user count (except for Deepin, which is kind of irrelevant for non-Chinese users) and absolute number of distros - and, you know, you have a choice as to which distro you use, whereas I believe that all versions of Windows 11 share the same set of anti-features...

> Again, use whatever you want.

Nobody (well, except maybe RMS), including the article, is telling you that you must switch to Windows. The article is a persuasive piece - and there's nothing wrong with that? If anything, I would expect to see persuasive content on HN (although, ideally, better-written than this one), right alongside technical content.

From the guidelines:

> What to Submit - On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Persuasive pieces generally satisfy my intellectual curiosity. Rants without any good arguments made? Not so much.

> just because people want to get territorial about what computing platform other people use

Sure, some people might be getting territorial - but many others (most?) are actually talking about the very real issues that Windows 11 has. If your best friend tells you that they're planning on quitting their job to play video games full-time, you might get worried about them, and try to talk them out of it, right? That's exactly what's going on here.

> I'm disheartened to see it rank so highly on HN

I'm more disappointed to see responses to it that rely on a bunch of emotional manipulation and shallow dismissals that don't stand up to scrutiny.