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Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

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Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#11

Post by esseph »

svrtknst wrote: post #8

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.…

It's a GUI designed to run from a CLI, not a GUI with a CLI bolted on.

I think you'll always pay the tax on Linux, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing from certain perspectives.

As far as app installations, system things come in from dnf on fedora 43. Everything else I install is usually a flatpak from flathub.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#12

Post by anonymars »

lousken wrote: post #7

Hate is a weak word, basic stuff like notepad, snipping tool or terminal don't even work today https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

My most recent astonishment was they've shoved copilot into notepad. Why did they get rid of Wordpad and ruin notepad again? It's like they've forgotten the entire purpose of Task Manager, Notepad, etc. Then again (gestures at World Economic Forum today)...feels like I'm mainlining crazy pills these days.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#13

Post by baby_souffle »

svrtknst wrote: post #8

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.…

> Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?

That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc.

> or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.

To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#14

Post by veqz »

svrtknst wrote: post #8

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.…

Feels like we do these rather often? Tons of people can comment with whatever they're using which they feel are great, and others can tell of their experiences with using the same and not being impressed. It's a rather endless list...

But to answer seriously: Have you tried KDE Plasma as a desktop environment? I think Fedora's KDE spin is among the better options for a distro: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/download

I personally think it's the best desktop experience, and always miss it when having to use Windows at work. I've never really worked with Macs.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#15

Post by Rohansi »

stronglikedan wrote: post #3

hate is the perfect word. you can't even drag anything onto the taskbar icons yet, and maybe never will be able to. just one small example of many, of why hate is the perfect word

You can drag files etc. onto taskbar icons and it will bring that window to the foreground for you to choose where to drop it. What else do you expect dragging things onto the taskbar icons to do?

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#16

Post by clickety_clack »

In addition to the title’s “hate is a strong word”, in the comments we have “hate is a weak word”, “hate might be a strong word”, and “hate is the perfect word”, averaging out to something like hate being ever-so-slightly on the strong side of perfect.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#17

Post by snailmailman »

svrtknst wrote: post #8

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.…

The KDE plasma UI feels like all the best parts of windows 10 to me. The default taskbar+clock+system tray+start menu UI feels exactly like windows 10 to me. But you can also customize it very easily. The settings menu feels a bit more like MacOS than windows’ control panel though.

Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#18

Post by tapoxi »

svrtknst wrote: post #8

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.…

I've been running Bazzite exclusively for two years and, honestly, it works fine. It does work better than Windows for me, which refused to install on the same hardware.

I install everything from Flathub, I don't think I've ever installed an APK (is that a thing?)

I don't think the Linux distributions can really do anything better by themselves at this point. Most of the issues you run into are because you're trying to run Windows software (via Wine/Proton) that may have issues, the hardware support is subpar (Nvidia) or the Linux version of the app is poor.

It did finally cross the line for me where using Linux is more enjoyable than Windows or Linux, which I honestly never thought would happen when I started using it on and off ~20 years ago.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#19

Post by sergiotapia »

Windows 11 is so bad that I finally made the permanent jump to Linux. At the end of my time with Windows, it would HARD freeze about twice a week. I thought I was having hardware failures and got really scared.

When I switched to Omarchy, I've had zero crashes. Omarchy gave me a great OS that I spend no time tweaking and fiddling with. Steam works out of the box, and all the games I play work out of the box. Control, Duke Nukem 3D, Blade Chimera, Elden Ring, Ender Lilies, Lorn's Lure, Pragamata, RE 4 Remake, it just works. If you're a gamer don't be scared and give it a try, you will not want to go back to windows.

Re: Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

#20

Post by reorder9695 »

svrtknst wrote: post #8

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications.…

Once you get it set up (which can be a pain) arch with KDE plasma is very good. KDE is very windows 10 like and intuitive. Arch gets rid of that issue of a mix of different installation methods, other than installing yay, I've never had to manually install something beyond "yay -S pkg", the aur and PKGBUILD files do really solve this issue of painful installations.
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