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Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

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Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#151

I use linux for my personal server, but I still use Windows in my desktop (with WSL). I have Nvidia GPU, multiple monitor, so Wayland don't seem to be ready for my use case. I aware of proton too, but needing tweaks to run games doesn't seem to be ready to me. I expect games to be "just work". Also, there are also non-steam games and anti-cheat. Currently, WSL perfectly fit my needs for development environment. I had…

Its not that "Wayland is not ready" and more "NVidia does not care". Wayland works on all Free drivers.

For people with Nvidia GPUs, not working === not ready

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#152
The list is so convoluted while it doesn't touch on real Windows issues at all. Wow. And it often talks about issues which have been resolved, or haven't been relevant in ages, or are not a concern for most people out there.

https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-10-sucks.html

And some things from it are outright cringe-worthy, e.g. "Ineffectual read-only permissions semantics". Windows ACL for files/directories is 100 more powerful than what Linux offers.

Some Windows advantages are shown as shortcomings, e.g. case-insensitive filenames vs. case-sensitivity in Linux which in absolute most times just leads to confusion. In my 20+ years of using Linux I haven't found a single usecase for case sensitivity.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#153
File extensions are a much better way of determining filetype than "magic"; they mean that the user can actually see what type a file is. It would actually be easier to dupe Linux users into running malware than Windows users if it weren't for the execute bit.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#154
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it's not ubuntu for the first two points

Saying Ubuntu has telemetry like Windows is shaky at best. Ubuntu asks you whether you want it, doesn't mandate it for people who don't buy enterprise licenses, and doesn't sneak in new kinds of telemetry when you already disabled what's there. Saying Ubuntu overrides auto-update settings is just false. If you turn off automatic updates, nothing will automatically update.

This isn't quite true anymore. Snap software will still automatically update even if system updates are off. You have to either edit your hosts file to block the snap domain or disable the snapd.service in a command line to prevent the automatic updates.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#155

>Finally, because Linux is a ubiquitous server operating system, its security is under constant attack, and Linux desktop users benefit from fixes to the vulnerabilities. I think this kind of argument works both ways Attacking servers is harder and probably may give you better "reward" (stolen data), but... Attacking normal people is easier (I think its fair to assume normal user is worse at computers than e.g traine…

Also, with the proliferation of Clouds (and thus Azure), fixes for attacks targeting Windows (Server) also benefit Windows (Client).

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#156
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome apps?

.lnk files. Or on Linux, .desktop files. Can contain an URL. You click it, a browser opens. The tech is decades old at this point.

I believe he meant an icon for the running window, not one on the desktop or menu.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#157
post #109
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the issue of which is better, windows isn't even uniform across the OS in its filesystem case-sensitivity. You can insert identical-other-than-case files with some kernel calls and break everything when you try to modify them later with the more common file interfaces.

>You can insert identical-other-than-case files with some kernel calls and break everything when you try to modify them later with the more common file interfaces. that doesn't seem like a realistic scenario, nor is it comparable to explaining to granny that "Cookie recipe.txt" and "cookie recipe.txt" are two separate files.

You just need to modify a directory with two different programs using different windows files apis (and create case-insensitive duplicates while doing so). How common that is will depend on how often an end user accidentally tries to create duplicate files (if that's infrequent then a completely case-sensitive system would also only cause issues infrequently), and in the proportion of programs using the different windows file apis.

I think you're right that we would expect that to happen only rarely, but it seems implausible to expect that there's an entire windows file api with zero usage.

Side-note: I don't think explaining "Cookie recipe.txt" and "cookie recipe.txt" being different would be thaat hard -- if they look different then they are different. As long as granny doesn't have to worry about zero-width whitespace or other garbage in her file names then that's a good enough rule of thumb.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#158
post #143

I spent roughly 1999-2015 trying mightily to get off Windows and become Linux only. I finally decided that the Linux desktop was never going to solve its feature and compatibility shortcomings to make that possible. I much prefer Linux as a development environment, but for anything related to office productivity, compatibility issues force me to be on Windows so much that it's not worth the effort to switch to Linux…

Office productivity is now in the cloud.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#159

Where is the corresponding document listing objective reasons to prefer Windows over Linux? Without that, this effort cannot be taken seriously.

The GUI.

Linux and other Unices have much better CLI, but the GUI of Windows is far more consistent and complete than the dozen or more variances in UI frameworks/libraries/etc. of the Unix world... that is, until recently, when Electron and other non-native monstrosities took over with their superficially pretty but otherwise horribly unusable dumbed-down mobile-ish UIs.

I say this as a long-time Win32 programmer who actually started writing software for DOS and briefly for Win16 --- the CLI in DOS and Windows is so much less consistent and powerful than the *nixes (and PowersHell is a real abomination of syntax, as powerful as it may be...)

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#160

I am a sample size of 1. For me, the inconveniences of using linux are far greater than the inconveniences of using windows. This article is targeted at the developer community mostly. As a programmer, I cannot recall being hindered by file name conventions, un-resizeable dialog boxes, bug trackers etc., as much I have been inconvenienced on linux by poor driver support, and regularly dropping to command line for con…

"poor driver support"

Please expand on this gem. Bear in mind that all drivers in Linux are delivered by the kernel. I'll grant you that not everything is golden in Linux land but the sheer pain of finding and updating drivers in Windows is an order of magnitude worse than in Linux.

You get them out of the box in Linux, in Windows you don't.

What sort of Window Manager are you having problems with? Why not try another one?

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