Live data from Hacker News

I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

theverge.com

281–290 of 753 posts

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#281
post #3

Congratulations and welcome to the club! But please, do not push to make Linux into a Windows Clone :)

I can't say I understand the prevalence of Windows-esque UI theming/refits beyond short-lived novelty- are people out there actually trying to make their UIs look like Windows XP and then using them like that on a daily basis?

I configured gnome to look like win 95/98, tried to use it for a while but the novelty wore off quite fast. Weirdly the mouse pointer still looks like win95 randomly in certain applications, guess I didn't clean up thoroughly!

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop Lol, that's what Microsoft tried 10+ years ago and everybody gave them shit for it, especially Apple fans. Now Apple is "inventing" this again.

Lots of Apple fans are giving Apple shit for it now too.

The new glass look is just so bad. It feels cheap, like a child’s toy. And performance is worse as a result.

I’ve turned it off on my phone, via the accessibility settings. But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off. Lots of controls are subtly misaligned now. I regret updating.

I have a Linux workstation. On Linux, nobody has the power to foist new ideas - good or bad - onto all users. All the arguing and bike shedding is one of Linux’s big weaknesses. But it’s also a huge strength. The desktop experience hasn’t gotten worse over the last 20 years like it has on windows and macOS. Programs start more or less instantly, as they should on modern hardware.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#283
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Li…

The thing is, Unity was great as a UI even on desktop. The main issue was poor performance early on.

To me, the killer feature of Unity was the searchable application menus. Wish that was still a thing

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#284
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What desktop OS offers file migration from a different desktop OS during installation on the same machine? Windows and macOS definelty not...

Windows definitely keeps your files right there in your Desktop / Documents folder when you update from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Like it or not, Aunt Clara is going to expect the same when she "upgrades" to Ubuntu.

Can I interest you in some new goal posts right over there?

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#285
It's great that we are already in such a strong spot! I'm also excited for how LLM's can help folks administer & setup systems.

There's still a lot of folks who bounce of setting up this or that thing that requires editing some config file. We're really good now about making most things pretty well UI'ee up, but Linux is such a malleable platform (complementary): LLM's decondtrain what users can do from what UI has been built. That's super exciting.

Step 1 of folks being able to use Linux as a desktop is going pretty well these days. With some AI hope, I hope folks get more and more enticed into setting up some devices. Once you're up with TailScale and have a service or two deployed, it can be very addictive to keep going. LLM's can make setting up & customizing the desktop easier, & they can help operate & admin services too. Strong hopes users will have much more agency, with where we are going.

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#286

Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent tran…

Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.

Getting a macbook is cheaper than it has ever been. You can get a new m4 macbook air for around 750 on amazon. The prices of apple laptops have been dropping every year despite inflation in the rest of the economy....

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#287

>I picked CachyOS rather than a better-known distro like Ubuntu because it’s optimized for modern hardware, >First challenge: My mouse buttons don’t work. I can move the cursor, but can’t click on anything. Maybe should've picked Ubuntu? I suspect this is the Linus (tech tips, not Torvalds) strategy of picking up an obscure distro for content purposes. Can't really have an article if everything just works, right

Ubuntu's UI isn't particulates intuitive for people coming from Windows anymore (it hasn't been for the past 13 years tbf). Mint is the best default to advise to someone switching to Linux (it's mostly Ubuntu under the hood, but without the snap nonsense and with a less imaginative UI).

I really struggle when folks recommend a distro that is only now getting itself unstuck from a decade++ of inaction, starting an advance that other distros have been up to for decades.

Starting people out on a dinosaur has some advantages yes but personally I think it's malpractice, setting users up to have to make major painful shifts in the future to update all the derelict knowledge they gain. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=449033

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#288
post #226

I'm using Linux on the desktop for 15 years and I still sometimes cannot connect to Wifi. This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu... This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes. I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if an…

Also the latest KDE UI that inserts a tiny password input box below the SSID when you click the SSID, and doesn't scroll it into view, so you're left wondering what's going on

Really really bad WiFi connection UI all over

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#289
post #226

I'm using Linux on the desktop for 15 years and I still sometimes cannot connect to Wifi. This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu... This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes. I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if an…

I've been recommending Mint/Cinnamon over Ubuntu for years now. Its wifi widget does not do this, nor does it use snap.

Mint is really polished

Re: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

#290
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25

Yep! That’s what I was thinking of. It is a cloud hosting company that keeps some legacy software around for sentimental reasons.

The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.
Post reply on HN