I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by grvbck » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

MarsIronPI wrote: post #126

bee_rider wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right? Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).

No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.

> MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately

Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history]

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

#402

Post by einr » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #152

gunalx wrote: 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.

I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?

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

#403

Post by coppsilgold » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

nh2 wrote: 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…

It takes skill to make a GUI that integrates dynamic information a good UX. For things like WiFi I discovered that modifying config files is an infinitely better experience than any GUI on Linux.

Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.

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

#404

Post by dummydummy1234 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #277

It's quite interesting to see all these people switching to Linux on the desktop and realizing it works. Some of us are using Linux on the desktop since more than ... a quarter of a century. Everytime I read such an article I'm thinking "duh, of course it works" but apparently people still think it's not the case. I do really, really, really wonder what's going to happen once battery usage is more efficient on Linux…

It is a bit of a pain to set up though, especially for a laptop - I just switched to fedora+ gnome, and going through configuring the power settings to allow for suspend-then-hibernate was annoying.

Figuring out the luks + page file + hibernate resume configuration is non intuitive, and is only viable for me to figure out due to my Linux based day job.

Probably could have gone bazzite and had things just work, but I need a Linux dev box locally and was not sure about dev on bazzite.

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

#405

Post by ajcp » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:21 PM UTC

peanut-walrus wrote: post #7

I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop). I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also…

The only reason I haven't gone over to Linux is gaming with my RTX card. Interested to know your gaming setup and distro. Any stability/compatibility issues?

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

#406

Post by CAP_NET_ADMIN » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #294

rickcarlino wrote: post #260

Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. On desktops and servers, root access is normal, and attempts to take it away do not work because software freedom is well established. On phones, that never happened. There is no real, mainstream “Linux for mobile,” and the result is a world of locked-down platforms where things like “sideloading” are treated as s…

>Linux is one of the last strong defenses for the idea that people should control the computers they own. Please run Kate/Kwrite as root and then we will talk on the topic. Or pipe password to ssh

Kate/Kwrite will ask to escalate to root if permissions are not sufficient. If it's not available to you, that's because your distro patched it out.

For ssh - sshpass.

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

#407

Post by 13415 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:25 PM UTC

0xperke wrote: post #44

For all who switched to Linux: which distro did you choose and why? Fedora: wanted to have the newest kernel and updates due to new hardware - so far i am really satisfied; the only issue i have is that the printer does not work everytime… as a workaround i print with my iphone instead.

Linux Mint because it works and doesn't get in my way.

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

#408

Post by huflungdung » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

nh2 wrote: post #391

forgotaccount22 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only stops refreshing if you are hovering the actual SSID list items which in my opinion is the cleanest way to do it, if you want new data you can reclick/rehover the "available networks". The Other option is putting the refresh on a global timer, but that would add magic which isn't clear to the user. Thanks, I will be awaiting your test result!

I agree that logic is sound, but it is also not discoverable to the user: They might open the list (with the cursor resting on one of the items, or use the keyboard to navigate out of comfort or for accessibility reasons), then notice "oh wait, I haven't actually enabled my phone's Wifi hotspot yet", enable that, and wait forever for it to appear. That's why I'm thinking something should visually (and non-visually) c…

Make it so the list refreshes (shows new entires) every N seconds when it is focused. Easy.

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

#409

Post by ByThyGrace » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:35 PM UTC

rsyring wrote: post #10

peanut-walrus wrote: post #7

I've been a Linux admin for 25 years but up until a few months ago my personal computer has been windows (gaming desktop) or Mac (laptop). I decided to give desktop Linux another shot and I'm glad I did. I was prepared for a lot of jankiness but figured I have enough experience to fix whatever needs fixing. Surprisingly, this has not been the case at all, the PC has been not only as stable as Windows or Mac but also…

I've been running a Linux desktop for about 13 years. There are still "moments" where you have to work on it and it can be more opaque than Windows/Mac. But you have the control to do what you need to do, which is one huge factor for me in Linux's favor. I moved my immediate and mostly non-tech family to all run Linux including an aging relative who needed a locked-down Firefox install to keep her from falling victim…

> Pretty easy to script the entirety of the OS install and lockdown so that it was documented and repeatable.

What distro? It's niche enough of a use case. Have you considered releasing the code?

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

#410

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Sat, Jan 10, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

noAnswer wrote: post #356

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories. I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and…

I don't doubt you had that problem. But it, and the solution you want, sound a bit strange. You want a button that gives your user access to everything despite its access settings... Than login and work as root. I mean it's hard to tell what really happened. But a different user could have created this files with access rights only for himself on purpose. Something one can do with NTFS on Windows too. It also could h…

Yes. Another user could have restricted access rights on purpose, maybe? But I can still apparently seize them for myself by typing an arcane command into the terminal. Why shouldn't the UI give me a way to do this more easily?

If it requires typing in an admin password to solve, so be it, but at least the UI could lead me to the answer while offering a password prompt.

And yes, I wasn't telling you that Windows has no problems. In fact, Windows probably caused this problem -- this drive worked just fine with Linux the night before; then I transferred some files into it from Windows and plugged it back into my Linux computer and suddenly this happened. I have no doubt that Windows was responsible for messing up the drive state and causing the problem. But to a non-technical user, it's not a question of who is to blame; Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.