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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

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Re: The day Windows died

#851

Post by dralley »

znpy wrote: post #809
red-iron-pine wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switched over ~10 years ago. Was rough then -- pretty dang easy now. Fedora 36 is pretty smooth. Only issue was a nvidia driver update a couple of years ago, but was easy enough to unwind. Otherwise no issues. It's like that Neil Stephenson passage where he compares BeOS to the Batmobile, MacOS to a Lexus, Windows to a station wagon, and Linux to a tank, with the problem being that people are scared to learn how to d…

I switched from ubuntu to debian and from debian to fedora (37). Fedora is just great. And being a red hat certified sysadmin, I'm liking it even more.

My primary dislike is that gnome continually focuses on touch-centric UI over desktop UI and occasionally makes changes just for the hell of it which bother me and break extensions and themes. The recent changes to buttons just feel like they're chasing Android.

Despite all of that, when combined with a few extensions and customizations it remains my favorite despite experience, despite the vanilla experience being sub par. But not when it's broken obviously.

It's a love hate relationship.

Re: The day Windows died

#852

Post by dralley »

piyush_soni wrote: post #380
safety1st wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is basically about the author's nostalgia for his early days of computing with Windows 95 and how he wanted his son to have the same experience. This post is screaming out for Linux. Linux is the solution to his dilemma. If he reformats that drive and puts say Kubuntu on it - the kid's first PC experience is going to be a vaguely retro 90's style shell with a start menu, the start menu is going to have a Ga…

> And of course it's Linux, so there's infinite opportunity to get under the hood and tinker. - Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not do the actual work/study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I'm 40 and still horrified to deal with…

> Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird.

X is dead or very nearly so, this problem doesn't really exist.

Re: The day Windows died

#854

Post by thealienthing »

piyush_soni wrote: post #622
jai_ wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like of bleak to discourage childish computer tinkering on a website named "Hacker News". Not entirely sure what this says about the direction of this website.

I'm totally for computer tinkering, but at the age of learning something like 'MIT Scratch' or even C/C++/Python, if they have to deal with all these problems, a lot of potential computer scientists might actually get discouraged and end up giving it all up thinking 'Computers' are very difficult.

This is a valid concern, but one thing I find is that using the more modern walled garden OSS like Mac and windows can be prohibitively abstract and difficult for getting into programming. On Mac, you need Xcode installed before you can even run GCC. And I believe you have to jump through similar hoops for windows. They try to rail you into using a complicated IDE like Xcode of Visual Studio when all you need is a text editor and GCC on Linux. It’s got a learning curve as a daily OS, but give a kid a raspberry pi and everything they need to write and run some python or C++ is pretty much there. You can sit down with them for the setup but they won’t need you after it’s set up and they will have a lot to look at before it comes time to get into the weeds with IDEs, make files, system dependencies etc. no solution is perfect (Linux included) but I find the ready to rock state of a fresh Linux distro to be pretty helpful to getting a developer going.

Re: The day Windows died

#855

Post by mike50 »

chupasaurus wrote: post #794
kofejnik wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, to get a bootable Windows USB key, you don't need any special tools or DD. Fresh format it with NTFS, and simply copy the contents of ISO onto it. Somehow it works pretty reliably.

> you don't need any special tools or DD. Fresh format it with NTFS Is kinda special tool in non-MS world.

5 years ago it was.

Re: The day Windows died

#856

Post by another_story »

majkinetor wrote: post #594
another_story wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this, but in the last half decade I've put Linux (ubuntu varieties) on multiple desktops with near 0 additional effort needed. At most I needed to install a proprietary Nvidia driver which was easily done without using terminal. I've spent far more time trying to decrapify Windows than getting Linux to work. Now laptops are a different matter.

That's because _people have different usecases for OS_, not hard to imagine, right?

This doesn't really make sense as you have no idea what my use cases are.

Re: The day Windows died

#857

Post by not_enoch_wise »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #489
elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

> I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future. Apple makes laptops, TV streamers, and tablets. Is there some reason you're avoiding them?

This is the FUNNIEST comment I have ever read on Hacker News! Next level sarcasm.

Re: The day Windows died

#858

Post by kjellsbells »

WorldMaker wrote: post #844
benrutter wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. There's genuinely no economic incentive for them not to sell their own OS down the river at this point. Mac has established itself as a only-on-mac-hardware market, which rules it out as an option for the majority of corporate and educational settings, and while I wish the year-of-the-linux-desktop was actually coming, most coorporations just are…

> I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share. I think it has a lot more to do with nostalgia goggles. Windows 95 still had a lot of the same cruft on install. It really wanted you to sign up for an MSN dial-up account to use the bundled IE to browse MSN.co…

One difference is that in the late 90s, Microsoft themselves offered a non-crufty alternative. NT4 was pretty solid and feee of distractions and fluff, but at the cost of requiring better hardware and not always playing nicely with others (eg drivers). Tbh, it reminds me of Linux: when Win11 finally drives professional users crazy, it seems to be linux that they turn to, and linux on the desktop is about the level of (relative) maturity that NT4 was to 95.

Re: The day Windows died

#859

Post by Schwolop »

I just set up a computer for my own kids and used Ubuntu from the get-go. About the only two things that have led to a bit of frustration from the kids have been that we can't play my collection of 1990s games on CDs (KOTOR, Deus Ex, etc) because they're all for Windows only, and that Roblox doesn't have a linux version.

I'm OK with them not thinking Roblox is a good way to learn to make games. Also, Steam on Linux with its custom version of Wine is awesome. And most 1990s games seem to cost about $5 to purchase again and not have to faff around with CD-keys...

Re: The day Windows died

#860

Post by CharlesW »

fsflover wrote: post #837
CharlesW wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both of those are super anti-consumer. That’s like saying air bags are anti-consumer. Two differences between air bags and SIP: Consumers don’t know SIP exists, and anyone savvy enough to understand the esoteric reasons for needing to disable SIP can do that.

This is a false dichotomy. Security in software can be achieved without destroying user rights.

How is SIP not a stellar example of how to achieve security in software without destroying user rights?
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