Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

himthe.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#901

Post by wraptile »

rafaelmn wrote: post #64
reconnecting wrote: post #5

Apple forced me to switch to Linux! Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian ( Xfce ), but it was worth it!

As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro/max chi…

> Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming

and any contemporary ergonomics. Seriously, macbooks are an environmental hazard at this point: ultra glossy screen, hand twisting keyboard, wrist cutting sharp edges, lack of modern surge protections etc. etc. I genuinely don't understand this sentiment that macbook hardware is good.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#903

Post by josephg »

signal11 wrote: post #835
Aurornis wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed. I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is…

>> 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 > I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed. You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco. It’s not a good look when expensive laptops render their darn File Explorer slowly. Also re endpoint management, corpora…

A few years ago my laptop died while I was travelling. I was going to back to back tech conferences - and not having a computer would be a disaster. So, I went to best buy and picked up a brand new $500 HP laptop. It was running windows 11 or 10 or something - whatever was current at the time. And a recent enough intel CPU and 4gb of ram. It was way faster than my desktop machine from 10 years earlier. I figured it'd be plenty fast enough.

Nope. The experience was just rubbish. Out of the box, the machine was incredibly slow. It would get warm to the touch while sitting idle, and the battery would die in about 45 minutes. I quickly figured out there was some HP audio process running all the time to do noise cancellation on input from the microphone. For some reason it was active all the time, and it needed about 30% of a core to do its thing. So I got rid of that. But windows explorer was still slow... of course, it was some HP antivirus rootkit program preinstalled doing who knows what. I spent hours clearing crap off that machine. Anything with HP in the name, to start. It probably would have been faster to reinstall windows completely, but I didn't want to do that from a hotel room over wifi.

By the time I was done, it was ... ok. The machine still lagged when you opened programs for some reason. But the battery life went up to 3-4 hours, and it was fast enough I could get work done.

I think about that laptop a lot. Imagine all the people who buy those laptops. What % will spend the hours it took to clear the crapware off them? I can easily imagine my mother buying a laptop like that and just assuming that's how fast computers are.

I think this might be the #1 benefit for regular people to buying a mac. When you buy a computer from apple, there's no 3rd party who installed a bunch of crap on the computer before you got your hands on it. The only people who install crap software are Apple. And as much as I hate apple's greedy background processes, they tend to pause while you're running on battery.

> You can repro this on demo Surface laptops at Costco.

Never underestimate how much bloatware is running on that costco laptop. Open up task manager. You'll see.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#904

Post by somenameforme »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #63
snarfy wrote: post #13

It's not going to get any better. Microsoft's problem is tech debt. Copilot doesn't pay tech debt it creates it. It will only get worse faster.

Microsoft probably has a problem with tech debt, yes. That is however not the problem. Instead, the product strategy is. And it was bad even before LLMs.

Nah, they have a good strategy. In fact, they have all the strategies.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#905

Post by bfrog »

It's bad it really is, I got fed up and rolled back to windows 10 when I tried downloading a file and the whole UI locked up until the file finished. On my own personal high performance desktop with tons of memory, cpus, etc etc. Never saw this in Windows 10. Certainly never saw it in modern Linux.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#906

Post by Andrex »

publicdebates wrote: post #193

How likely is a future where Microsoft (a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI, (b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in, (c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again, (d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps? It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there. (Maybe Copilot…

> It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.

I would say 2009. Vista's troubled driver era was necessary, and Windows 7 was pretty awesome.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#907

Post by Andrex »

tambourine_man wrote: post #278

> Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac. Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking. For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along…

> The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.

I've heard of people doing this, do they?

I'm so desperate for Premiere, even 6+ years after switching OSes. Resolve won't install on Fedora (???), our all-Flatpak future cannot get here soon enough...

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#908

Post by ninjagoo »

nsoonhui wrote: post #885

Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device [0], so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again. You might think that in 2026 you shouldn't get BSOD, but here we are. So I am now very wary of any Windows updates, including a Out of Band Update [1], which it is claimed that it resolves some issue. However, since it's never mention whether th…

Windows has always been a bit of a high-maintenance OS. To keep it running well used to consume a lot of time on a weekly/monthly basis. That went down to almost nothing after I switched to Ubuntu LTS a couple of decades ago. Heard it had gotten a bit better in Winland in the recent past but it appears things are going downhill again.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#909

Post by ninjagoo »

twodave wrote: post #892

I understand the frustration when things don’t just work. Also I find it kind of funny when people act like Linux just solved all their problems, despite recurring driver and dependency issues, compatibility problems, etc. These all get hand-waved somehow because it’s not Linux’s “fault” I suppose? Good for the author but the opportunity cost of moving to Linux alone is prohibitive based on the comments I see here, m…

> despite recurring driver and dependency issues, compatibility problems, etc

Citation needed.

Uncited, I would posit that those complaints haven't really been a thing for at least a couple of decades. And any issues have been far less than in Winland :)

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#910

Post by ninjagoo »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #871
flaburgan wrote: post #606

I had the same story but 15 years ago. I was so happy with XP, but Vista was terrible, so I put Ubuntu on my laptop. When 7 came, it became my OS on my desktop. But then it was 8 time. Couldn't bare it. Now it's Linux everywhere, including my sister, parents, grand parents, girlfriend, brother. Linux Mint is perfect for non technical people BTW. I heard good things about Zorin OS as well.

I might be starting down the path of introducing Linux to family members soon. I need to make sure I have enough spare time for the initial 'speed hump' of transition questions...

> I might be starting down the path of introducing Linux to family members soon. I need to make sure I have enough spare time for the initial 'speed hump' of transition questions...

The first couple of months are high touch after the switch. After that it's usually just smooth sailing for years. Much less work support-wise.

Been that way for my family and friends.

Post reply on HN