Windows 10 Enterprise ignores various privacy settings

Canonical did some stuff that upset a lot of people with sending search results through Amazon but that could be opted out of much easier than all this windows 10 stuff. I have also read that they don't contribute to the kernel as much as some think they ought to. And they have a tendency to fiddle with their UIs endlessly (I use xubuntu which is based on XFCE and avoids a lot that bikeshed renovation). Are there other reasons not to trust canonical?

I don't mean to pry with either question just generally curious.

True. Support has gotten significantly better. It's not perfect, and the failure cases are much worse than Windows (and somewhat worse than OS X), but it's gotten better.

> you should not buy hardware that is incompatible with the operating system you plan to use

This is where you start going off the rails.

People did buy hardware that was compatible with the operating system they do use. It is super presumptuous and weird to try this sleight-of-hand in your argument.

> LibreOffice supports the formats and works great

You are now off the rails and airborne.

Nontrivial Excel spreadsheets break in LibreOffice Calc on the regular and it's significantly slower (!) than Excel besides; anything using VBA, which is still a pretty big chunk of serious Office users especially in enterprises, is a nonstarter for obvious reasons. The UI is also, IMO, a huge step backwards from Office and now that the Ribbon "but but it's different" is far enough in the past that pretty much everybody has switched, another UI switch is probably not worth it.

> with Steam and Wine combined your potential gaming library is HUGE

Sailing through the air with the mountain approaching.

Your potential gaming library is huge--and either indie (which is fine, but limited) or largely broken. Suggesting WINE to somebody who doesn't already know what they're in for is dirty; even gold-flagged games in WINE that aren't a decade old are often broken in ways your average mortal can't fix. If you enjoy being elbow-deep in a computer, this may be fine for you. Most people aren't. Your preaching ignores this. It shouldn't.

> Proprietary operating systems work against your interests. Stop using them.

You've hit the cliffside. There are no survivors.

People will stop using them when open-source ones are good at the things they want. Right now, they're still not, and exhorting people to use an inferior good (for the things they care about) is kinda just doing people dirty.

Don't get me wrong: I would like Linux and other open-source operating systems to be better desktop OSes for normal people (and some of my own projects are intended to help facilitate that) but still, in 2017, it is a raw effing deal for the majority of people to switch to it. This should change. I know you work on stuff to make that happen, and that's awesome. But it's still not something I think can be recommended in good conscience to most folks, even around here.

It barely works for me, and I've been using it on the desktop for fifteen years and have grown accustomed to the need to cultivate tragically low expectations around the whole stack.

Make new purchases more intelligently.

>You are now off the rails and airborne. Excel is still largely unsupported and breaks nontrivial spreadsheets. The UI is also, IMO, a huge step backwards from Office and now that the Ribbon "but but it's different" is far enough in the past that pretty much everybody has switched, another UI switch is probably not worth it.

Which is why I mentioned MS Office in Wine.

>Still sailing through the air with the mountain approaching. Your potential gaming library is huge--and either indie or largely broken. Suggesting WINE to somebody who doesn't already know what they're in for is dirty; even gold-flagged games in WINE don't work particularly well a whole lot.

I suggested it to the HN crowd, who I expect to have a higher bar of troubleshooting capability.

>People will stop using them when open-source ones are good at the things they want. Right now, they're still not, and exhorting people to use an inferior good (for the things they care about) is kinda just doing people dirty.

You and people like you are the reason that it's not as good as it could be. I use Linux as my daily driver and it works extremely well. But if you continue to let it languish with a small market share because you can't be bothered to troubleshoot it for 10 minutes or maybe live without that piece of software you need so much, then it won't even go anywhere. Yours is a self defeating attitude.