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Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

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Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#231

Post by arrakeen »

nyolfen wrote: post #217
jbirer wrote: post #178

I started my journey with linux at the age of 12 when Canonical was sending out free CD's of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. After nearly 13 years of usage I am a happy user of Windows 10 now. My reasons are: * Horrible font rendering that makes me not even want to code * Terrible application support * Audio and touchpad support is noticeably superior on Windows * Small things that you have to tinker with in order to get ev…

i don't expect this to win you back, but i can't recommend this highly enough: http://www.webupd8.org/2013/06/better-font-rendering-in-linu... you can choose between different system font rendering styles, including macos and windows

infinality is long dead and its rendering engine has been upstreamed to freetype. here's a more up-to-date guide to font rendering on linux: https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#232

Post by sergeykish »

snazz wrote: post #174
jleahy wrote: post #5

Does it have to be better, or even preferable? Is "it's sufficiently good for my needs but it's free" not enough? Whole industries have died because a free product has emerged that's "good enough" for 90+% of people. When was the last time anybody bought the electronic Encyclopedia Brittanica now we have Wikipedia?

Linux would have to be extremely good for most people to take the effort to switch. Switching to Wikipedia doesn't require reformatting your hard drive and installing a new operating system—a completely foreign concept for 98% of the computer-using population.

You can run Linux from USB stick. That still requires BIOS/UEFI setup, though I do not expect non-technical population switching.

It would be great if Steam had non game applications.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#233

Post by zepearl »

fartcannon wrote: post #191
alphachloride wrote: post #132

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…

Have you ever tried to disable something that windows insists you use? Like all the telemetry? Just try to stay on top of that. Impossible because you're not in charge of your machine, Microsoft is. You change it, they just change it back. Frustrating. On Linux? Its yours. Change anything you want. All arguments of convenience go out the window when you are not in control.

I have to confirm this (in general).

I have a secondary Win10 OS and, throughout months, after each update it kept losing more and more of the preferences which I initially set -> too frustrating -> I gave up trying to have it be set the way I want.

The same can happen of course as well on Linux, but it happens definitely less frequently.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#234

Post by scarygliders »

Subsentient wrote: post #59
1986 wrote: post #20

I know quite a lot of folks here are fed up with moves away from native apps and towards Electron-wrapped web apps (and often for totally valid reasons) but it's been a godsend for making Linux a usable daily driver OS. IMO if you're doing eg web dev work in a GSuite / Slack / Figma / etc organization, it's never been a better time to try desktop Linux!

Honestly I'd suggest they just use Qt then. Our company is writing a portable replacement to our Electron client right now. The electron option was absolute garbage, very limited, and caused us untold pain. We got tired of telling customers "we can't really do that". The Qt version is already working on Linux and Windows, and on whatever CPUs we compile it for. There's no excuse for Electron, because there are good,…

+1 for Qt.

I dumped GTK a few years back due to - and I have no idea if the same thing happens today - weirdness with GTK themes not working between minor releases of it, and I vaguely remember there were other annoyances but by then I was impressed with Qt and the PySide (noe PySide2) bindings so stuck with it.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#235

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

sysrpl wrote: post #44

Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier. Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure. Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates. Linux dist…

Dell XPS 17 from 2020. Sound doesn’t work. Thee we drivers exist. For the first time in over a decade I had to install drivers manually.

And don’t even start with hibernate or even just waking up. I’ve never rebooted a laptop so many times.

And what’s the deal with flatpak? A screen shot app is not 700mb? WTF?

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#236

Post by est31 »

berkut wrote: post #130
est31 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt is nice but costs money for developers of proprietary software. Electron has its own costs but most of them are externalized to the user. So it wins out.

? It's LGPL, so as long as you link dynamically, it's fine for proprietary software to use it. A lot of commercial proprietary software in the VFX industry does this (Nuke, Katana, Mari, Maya, Houdini, etc).

IDK a lot of proprietary developers don't understand the LGPL and are scared by its copyleft. They like how simple the MIT license is.

Also, apple's app store is famously LGPL-incompatible.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#237

Post by duxup »

sergeykish wrote: post #220
alphachloride wrote: post #132

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…

As Linux user the article does not resonate with me. The actual points are discarded points # Linux is more stable and reliable. I've reinstalled Windows so many times, never reinstalled Linux. System is separate from the user, I can remove all user configurations and it would work like new. # Linux is more secure and private. I have so many packages, they are free and safe. I've tried Windows recently, have to insta…

It has been ages since I had to reinstall windows.

I was a thing I just did once in a while more than a decade ago but I haven't had to on multiple systems for a long time now.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#238

Post by heavyset_go »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #214

I just moved to Linux as my primary OS; been fucking great. 11/10 Overall, everything seems to "just work" at least as well as on MacOS and is not quite (for me) as endlessly frustrating as Windows. Gaming has also been effortless and honestly just the most delightful surprise about the whole thing. I can write code AND play games... on the same machine... and it's running Linux?! I would've lost that bet ten years a…

> Really, most modern Linux distros are pretty god damn nice.

I agree, and what really sold me was Plasma Desktop, as someone that couldn't stand KDE 3 & 4. It used to be that GNOME was the desktop environment you could turn into a Windows or macOS clone, but it looks like that switched with GNOME 3 and KDE 5.

I have Plasma Desktop set up[1] to take advantage of my macOS muscle memory when it comes to the GUI and keyboard short cuts, and I couldn't imagine going back.

> Linux is rocking the desktop hard, if you haven't tried it in a few years or just maintain a Windows installation to play games-- seriously give it a try. It's wonderful.

It's not just developers or power users that Linux shines for, either. I'm of the opinion that if ChromeOS would suit a person's needs, so would a polished distribution like Ubuntu along with a browser like Firefox or Chrome. Ubuntu has an app store-like interface to install Zoom, Slack, and other work apps.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23607374

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#239

Post by redvenom »

nickjj wrote: post #112
sysrpl wrote: post #44

Linux runs better on both new and older hardware. Better as in programs open faster, the file manager opens faster, the task manager opens faster. Everything uses less memory and less CPU cycles. Everything is snappier. Linux users don't have to worry nearly as much about malware, trojans, viruses, exploits. It's more secure. Linux distros generally don't annoy users with stealthy automatic forced updates. Linux dist…

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. But I still run Windows because the only really good video editor on Linux (Davinci Resolve) is really unstable there with the hardware I have, the USB audio interface I use has all sorts of issues on Linux and not all games run well on Linux. Basically what it boils down to is I've been one of those folks who builds their computers from parts for 20+ years with the goal…

Lightworks is also a really nice commercial editor that works on Linux. The free version supports 720p output. It is not as fully featured as Davinci Resolve, but then it also requires much more modest system resources.

Re: Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

#240

Post by danShumway »

eikenberry wrote: post #138
im3w1l wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron app: works offline has more permissions can use udp separate alt-tab, tray display is not throttled because it's in the background (on desktop) unaffected by browser settings unaffected by clear cookies unaffected by extensions less confusion over who handles keybinds

Are these supposed to be advantages over using the browser for these "apps"? As someone who uses the browser for most of these things, I was looking for some reason why the electron app would be better and I don't see any (and see some definite negative aspects).

Do you really not see any of these as advantages, at all?

You don't use a task bar on your computer? You would never want to be able to alt-tab to a programming IDE or music player?

You can't imagine why someone would want to be have a programming IDE like Atom that didn't need to pop up a dialog box literally every time you wanted to save a file to disk?

You can't imagine why someone would want an IDE like Atom to automatically read from their local Git config and hook into native commands for functionality like file grepping? Or why someone would want to be able to use native volume controls to separately control volume in a music player and their overall browser?

You've never wanted to start a long-running process in an application and then alt-tab to a separate program while it completes without that process getting throttled?

You can't imagine why someone would want to clear all local data from normal websites in their browser without also clearing all of the local data stored in every web app that they're using? When you want to clear some old files on your computer or empty your trash, do you prefer to just `rm -rf` your home directory?

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