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Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

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Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#621

Post by emacdona »

fundatus wrote: post #58
petcat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every month more and more people switch to Linux We've been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.

Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though. People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like there is more momentum than ever for this. On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over…

> On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.

I _love_ Linux, but I agree with this as well. I don't think Linux will ever be easy enough that I could recommend it to an elderly neighbor. I hope to be proven wrong, though.

What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#622

Post by estimator7292 »

zeta0134 wrote: post #341
Zambyte wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them. So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.

The giant bugbear in this conversation is always multiplayer. That's because almost all of the big players in that space currently favor rootkits in the form of overly invasive anti-cheat, which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons. If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always favored single playe…

Vote with your wallet, as the saying goes. If you quit paying money for the privilege of installing a rootkit, maybe they'll stop selling rootkits.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#625

Post by tacker2000 »

Why is opening the taskbar right click menu slower on Win11 than on Win95?

Why is there a gap between the menu and the taskbar?

I used to have muscle memory to quickly close windows rightclick taskbar -> leftclick “close” but this stopped working. Why??

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#626

Post by estimator7292 »

wackget wrote: post #493
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…

If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one. Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.

No, it's not about users picking a camp, it's about developers.

It's been a long, long time since I've seen an application utterly fail to load because it's a GTK/QT/etc framework running under a totally different DE.

Gnome apps look ugly as hell under KDE[0], but they still work. As a user, you don't need to know or care in any way. It'll run on your machine.

[0]I don't know if they're ugly because of incompatibility or if that's just How Gnome Is. I suspect the latter

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#627

Post by pamcake »

fsmv wrote: post #105
mrln wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.

I don't understand, yay updates itself. I've never once had this problem.

Assume they mean having to recompile the AUR package they were trying to install using yay.

If users mental model is mostly "yay is like pacman but can also install packages from AUR the same way" wihout thinking deeper about the difference then I think it using it is very risky and that you should just stick to pacman + git/makepkg. Only consider helpers once that's become second nature and routine. Telling people to "just yay install" is doing them a disservice. An upgrade breaking the system isn't even that bad compared to getting infected with malware due to an old package you were using being orphaned and hijacked to spread malware or getting a bad copycat version due to a typo.

I think EndeavourOS is doing users a disservice if they provide sth like yay preinstalled and ready to use out of the box. It isn't installing packages from a shared repo: It's downloading code from arbitrary locations and running it on your machine in order to produce a package. Being able to read and understand shell script (PKGBUILD) is kind of a prerequisite to using it safely.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#628

Post by gregors »

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…

I saw a vid where they installed a recent version of linux on a Pentium 1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DiK5FDpBTg

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#629

Post by manuelabeledo »

senfiaj wrote: post #549

I'm not against someone's preferences, but this looks like an anecdotal story. Windows, as much as it's hated here, still works fine for the vast majority of people. What's more, you have higher risk of having problems when running Linux.

I have to disagree here.

There's an aphorism that I like to use every time someone tells me that Windows is the easy choice: Windows makes accomplishing easy tasks easy, and hard tasks impossible.

To this day and for the past 20 years, every time I go back to my parents' house, it's Windows tech support time. Every time, I have to go through the same routine of cleaning up all sorts of crap that make their computer slow to a crawl, even when I purposely created non privileged accounts for them. Every time, the same ritual: diagnose why the printer stopped working, why apps look pixelated, why some sites stopped working.

So, it works for my parents, and possibly works for the vast majority of people, because it has created this ecosystem where these users either depend on folks like me, or have to pay up at the repair shop. And somehow, something as simple as not breaking a critical component during an update, or prevent users from installing harmful stuff, has not been addressed properly. And that's without mentioning what Microsoft does that's very much anti-consumer, like stuffing the consumer versions of the OS with ads.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#630

Post by yoyohello13 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #554
buckle8017 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear windows is just full of sleeps and it doesn't matter how faster your system is.

It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always h…

The real question is why is my file browser blocking on an http call? Oh right, tracking/telemetry/ads.
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