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Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

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Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#631

Post by stagger87 »

sedatk wrote: post #382

My story is simpler. Microsoft dropped the support for Windows 10 and gave me no upgrade path to Windows 11 because my CPU was 5 years too old apparently. So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine. Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem…

Why did you want to install windows 11 anyways? I also have a PC stuck on Windows 10 and it makes me happy that it's now stable and not part of the forced rolling releases in Win11. Im going to run it on Win10 as long as I can.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#632

Post by drillsteps5 »

mrks_hy wrote: post #497
drillsteps5 wrote: post #297

I think Linux is not quite there as gaming system. Simply due to games' compatibility (and I don't play latest and hottest titles, more like Cities-Skylines/Transport Fever/Anno/Satisfactory etc). Plus to my knowledge NVidia drivers are still an issue. But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.…

That's not my experience at all. The majority of games, especially on Steam, work out of the box. I would advise the opposite: Don't get an old box. Take your new box, take a new hard disk, and just install Bazzite (and pretend you don't know anything about Linux, just stick with the defaults).

That didn't work for me. I had my email, documents, some software I used on Windows and files it created (think Photoshop and PSDs). I needed time to find out if I could find similar/equivalent software on Linux, set up new workflows for my work and stuff like that. So I had my primary machine still on Windows and used the secondary to see how all this would work. And then gradually moved all the software, data, and workflows to Linux, until I didn't have anything left that could only work on Windows (well, except games I guess).

As for games, I think a lot of them DO work on Linux but it's easier for me to have dedicates gaming rig on Windows instead of guessing if this new game that I like will work on Linux.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#633

Post by Aurornis »

ryukoposting wrote: post #259

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal. Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitti…

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is fast. There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files.

If I have to browse network CIFS shares with a lot of files, Windows does it better than my mac or Linux boxes by a mile. I've switched over just to Windows a time or two just to deal with high file count shares.

> If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else.

I put Windows 11 on an old low powered laptop for a family member. FYI you can easily circumvent some of the Windows 11 requirements and put it on old hardware.

It's fast. It doesn't have any of the problems you're describing.

I do wonder how many of the "Windows 11 is painfully slow" comments are coming from people with corporate laptops with extremely laggy endpoint management overhead.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#634

Post by noisem4ker »

reddalo wrote: post #471
Orygin wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them. At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate…

>many apps now just use CSD If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is). If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.

Linux doesn't mean GNOME.

KDE favors server-side decorations.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#635

Post by roba6 »

I only need Windows for a few programs, mostly licensed EDA programs that [dumb] companies didn't manage to port to Linux. Most engineers who use EDA tools are into linux so having to run a few things on Windows is a pain. The 'A' in EDA stands for automation and Windows is not the OS for that. I installed a standalone WIN10, then enabled the TPM and installed WIN11. Seems pretty solid but I had to guard against MSFT repeatedly trying to lead me into servitude.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#636

Post by ajross »

bobsterlobster wrote: post #302
ajross wrote: post #232

> I installed CachyOS, a performance-focused Arch-based distribution Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users. The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different direction…

I totally get that. But I read about it, and that custom kernel with the BORE scheduler really caught my eye, especially for music & gaming. I know a lot of people suffer from shiny object syndrome, and to some extent I do too (realistically something like Ubuntu or Fedora would have served me well), but it is what it is.

It's not anything about CachyOS in particular, frankly I don't know it and I'm sure it's fine. It's that the culture of "I'll grab this known-good base and tweak it, then advertise it to the world as the next best thing" is just toxic for Regular People wanting to learn about stuff.

Imagine if you were trying to, I dunno, introduce your friend to Minecraft. And instead of the base game someone handed you a menu of crazy modlists. Is that representative of the feature set you think they're looking for in a casual game?

People coming to Linux are coming from a culture of "I've used MacOS or Windows for years and know how it works, where's the browser?". They're very much NOT looking for experimental kernel scheduler implementations!

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#637

Post by cess11 »

"All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises."

This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.

Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.

Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.

And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#639

Post by Almondsetat »

ufmace wrote: post #560
ryandrake wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does this all the time, though, and seems to get a free pass here. I have four Macs in my home, and they are cut off at Ventura (for the 2017 iMac), Monterey (for the 2014 Mac Mini and the 2015 MacBook Air), and El Capitan (for the 2014 iMac). They are all stuck at 3, 4, and 5 major OS versions back. Nobody really seems to complain about this, though.

I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me again later".

Software in much more tied to the OS though. For example, Chrome is still compatible with Windows 10 which is more than 10 years old, while on macOS you cannot install it past Monterey (2021). Not to mention that also system applications are updated with the OS, so forget about using Safari

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#640

Post by zerd »

ryukoposting wrote: post #259

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal. Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitti…

Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure. It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second delay.

I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer.

Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.

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