441–450 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently saw this comment. You made it a few weeks ago, copy and paste identical.
Not OP, but I've got a friend of a friend in the Windows org that backs this up. Most engineers are teamed up by manufacturers. HP team, Lenovo team, etc. These are the primary drivers of feature development. If it won't sell grandma another $500 HP laptop, they're not interested.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows is not technically inferior to Linux. To the extent it has problems, it is mainly because of top-down anti-user behaviour mandated from corporate. But anyone capable of using Linux is capable of hacking out that BS and getting a generally superior experience. I use both literally side-by-side, two laptops with a KVM switch, and I still greatly prefer Windows for many reasons. Some reasons: Even as a low-level…
+1 on the UI thing. I don't know what it is, but UI on Linux always feels too disjoint from the rest of the system. It's a bit like how Windows 3.11 was just UI-on-DOS. I get the same feeling. Don't get me wrong - I love Linux for all its CLI use but for some reason I've never been able to primary drive it without going insane after a week. Windows just seems to feel more put-together and I guess that's because the k…
I felt the same as you, up until quite recently, although I was using Xbuntu which uses a very barebones desktop environment. Since changed to CachyOS + KDE Plasma late last year and haven't booted up Windows for 3 months other than to extract a few files. I"m a MacOS laptop user, Windows desktop user, but these days I much prefer CachyOS for speed, responsiveness, easy customisation. You may still find you prefer Windows but it's worth a revisit I think and easy to try via a USB Boot as you know (although running it off USB is way more sluggish I find).
I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. But then, since Linux adoption didn't meaningfully change in the last 20 years, I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to…
It's the easiest route. On non-Apple computers, Windows is already installed. (It takes a bit of effort to buy a computer without an OS.) Microsoft makes it easy for a user to get Microsoft 365. With that, users have the computer they have at the office and are familiar with. Most are just surfing the web and writing an occasional letter, anyway. That doesn't include people who are perfectly fine with a Chromebook or just their phone.
Finding a Linux distribution, downloading it, putting it on a USB stick (or burning a disc), then installing it is not simple for most people. (Don't even ask them to verify the checksum.)
> fewer automatic restarts No automatic restarts! I understand that in our security patching world that patching and restarting automatically is the default, fine, but there absolutely should be a dead simple way of disabling auto restarts in settings. I'm fine if it pesters me to restart or whatever, perhaps with growing alarm the longer I wait, but it should always be optional in the end. There are just no words fo…
I disagree, at least on end-user devices as opposed to servers. If you make it possible to defer updates indefinitely, users will. Guaranteed. Doesn't matter how urgent or critical the update is, how bad the bug or vulnerability it patches is, how disastrous the consequences may be: they'll never, ever voluntarily apply them. If you're running a server, and willing to accept the risk of deferral because 1) you're in…
Most security-only updates have a low risk of interfering with with the user or causing instability. Most feature updates have a high risk of doing so.
(1) Although I think there should be some way of disabling even those, even if that way is hard to find and/or cumbersome to keep the regular users away.
RHEL is mostly what you will see @ Corpo, with some occasional SUSE for Europeans. Given that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL (and no snapd), it is quite well supported. AFAIK, it's also what Linus Torvalds has ran for a long while now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 on the UI thing. I don't know what it is, but UI on Linux always feels too disjoint from the rest of the system. It's a bit like how Windows 3.11 was just UI-on-DOS. I get the same feeling. Don't get me wrong - I love Linux for all its CLI use but for some reason I've never been able to primary drive it without going insane after a week. Windows just seems to feel more put-together and I guess that's because the k…
Windows UI is the most disjoint though, with designs accumulated over the past 20 years still kicking in various places. You really should, yeah. I've given up Linux as a daily driver in favor of a MacBook but I do have a work mandated Windows machine and I hate that thing with a passion. I cannot think of a single thing that's better on it than on my MacBook or any Linux distro I've ran as a daily driver. In fact, m…
But every Linux distro has its own UI, and pretty much every distro makes it easy to configure it to look how you want, with tens of thousands of themes out there developed over the past 20 years by people wanting their os to look a certain way.
The most glaring inconsistencies are going to be user-inflicted. If I spend a weekend tweaking defaults to look just right I need to be ok with possibly tweaking any new software I download to fit my theme.
But even from a non-power-user perspective, if my mom runs into problems with her computer it's much easier to walk her through a fix over the phone if she's on Windows or a Mac.
My dad, who is very tech-literate, once tried Linux and all the trouble shooting guides required him to open a command prompt (because there isn't a consistent GUI you can use to fix things across distros). He never forgave it.
I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. But then, since Linux adoption didn't meaningfully change in the last 20 years, I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to…
I’m not seeing any brick and mortar stores selling Linux laptops or any mindshare for any Linux brand. Maybe if Ubuntu started selling hardware in supermarkets Linux would have a chance of capturing people’s consciousness outside of the power user / professional circles. But they’re years too late now.
I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. But then, since Linux adoption didn't meaningfully change in the last 20 years, I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to…
Windows is not technically inferior to Linux. To the extent it has problems, it is mainly because of top-down anti-user behaviour mandated from corporate. But anyone capable of using Linux is capable of hacking out that BS and getting a generally superior experience. I use both literally side-by-side, two laptops with a KVM switch, and I still greatly prefer Windows for many reasons. Some reasons: Even as a low-level…
No, you mean reintroducing a capability that was standard in Windows for 20+ years? Stop acting like this is some new innovation being introduced in Windows 11.
Just a handful of things that all were taken for granted in Windows previously, doesn't even scratch the surface of issues with Windows 10/11, which removed tons of useful stuff and added garbage nobody wants.
Forced to use Windows 11 at work (well, or a Mac, but Windows 11 is just barely the lesser of two evils) and I hate it. I continue to use Windows 7 at home, which remains the best workstation OS and likely will forever.
MMC snapins haven't been touched in years and still can't even sort those columns properly, search and filtering is terrible
Control panel is still not migrated over to settings after 12 years nor you can open two settings apps.
Error messages in modern apps are just the worst, how about printing valuable error messages than "something is wrong"?
Fixing dark patterns like taking over your screen with popups and taking over the application header so you can't close windows unless you go to the task manager. First time opening edge shows a really annoying splash screen + home page is filled with ads.
Also where are 5 second boot times on NVMe SSDs? Anything more is just sloppy.
Just to list a few pet peeves
But let's see if they can even fix things they've mentioned in the post, though that's like 1/4 of the issues that should be fixed.