At work, my employer is still running Microsoft products for the desktop environment. At home, assuming I'm using Microsoft products at all (rare), it's from inside the Chromium web browser on Linux or BSD.
Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
821–830 of 1001 posts
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#822I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal. Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitti…
More a reply to few fellow comments:
I have few Win 11 hosts that I use. No management software other than just antivirus.
90% of them are super slow, on every hardware. The latest super-feature on one of them is empty Task Manager. It just doesn’t display a single process.
Of course Process Explorer works, open faster and show all data without thinking how to display table with 500 rows for dozens of seconds.
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#823It's still disappointing how few folks know about gpedit and how much you can reclaim your own machine just by running through the local policies and setting them to "no, I call the shots".
need to pay for a pro license for gpedit - normies still get forced updates
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#824Its was a good read until at the end ... > For the remainder of 2026, Microsoft is cooking up a big one: replacing more and more native apps with React Native. But don't let the name fool you, there's nothing "native" about it. These are projects designed to be easily ported across any machine and architecture, because underneath it all, it's just JavaScript. And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gobbling up…
I'm a little tired of "hey I installed Linux!" posts. Ok, you installed Linux. Great. Wow! Now what, wanna show a screenshot of your desktop with an anime girl as the baackground and neofetch in a terminal window?
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#825No to mention that the cloud-based user system that they are forcing on us instead of local accounts. So much trouble.
And Copilot crap being shoved down our throats at every turn.
Don't even get me started on Teams.
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#826As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these: * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers. * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of th…
I use Linux as my daily driver, with a Mac laptop. I only use Windows when I absolutely have to (i.e., testing), and usually through a VM.
Some other rough edges in Linux I've encountered:
- a/v support in various apps. We use Slack for everything (I can't just use something else) and a/v support is pretty bad to where my video frame rate is now ~1Hz and screen share shows a black rectangle. I think that's mostly Slack's fault as Google Hangouts works fine, but it's probably low on their priority list.
- sleep / hibernation is still sometimes flakey. occasionally it won't wake up after hibernating overnight, and I have to hard reboot (losing any open files though that's not an issue)
- power management on laptops (and therefore battery life) is still worse than Windows, and way worse than Mac. I tried Framework + Linux for a while and really wanted to love it, but switched to a Mac and am not going back (still run Linux on desktop). There is nothing out there that compares to the M-series MacBooks.
- occasional X/Wayland issues, as mentioned
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#827I'll switch to emacs if things go on like this.
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#828If only the streaming giants would let us stream in decent quality..
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#829> You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent. This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update. Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.
The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part.
Huh?
I use a mac and a linux box. I'd never cross my mind that I cant leave some unsaved changes overnight. I leave unsaved changes for weeks across the many things I am working on.
Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
#830Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love it. I'm tired of one company controlling the core operating system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim. You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!
It's a form of Stockholm Syndrome for most people. They'll have some bit of software they imagine is irreplaceable because they have some special use case that means that they just have to tolerate the relentless abuse. Or some other excuse. Whatever. It all boils down to people being afraid of change. Most of that fear is not all that rational. It's not unlike kidnap victims falling in love with their captors. Your…
I don't think it's Stockholm Syndrome, rather it's a classic case of sunken cost fallacy.
For me at least, that's what it was. I had invested so much time in Ableton (~14 years) and didn't feel like starting from scratch with another DAW. And let's be real, no one likes that kind of friction.
It had to get worse to finally break the inertia and also make me realize that it's only going downhill.