The last time I maintained my own windows dev and reverse engineering box was Win 98 with the Borland C++ compiler and SoftICE resident debugger. Also did some casual gaming and had a nice 5.1 surround audio setup.
Rebuilds were an absolute trial. I had a specific order of drivers, packages and so on that had to be followed to avoid an unusable system.
I also used to do on call PC engineer work for a medium sized employment agent corporation. Network drivers and printer driver installers world conflict and fuck up systems. Training machines needed hardware dongles which cost 1000s and we’re horribly unreliable. In short it was a massive pain in the dick.
Against this backdrop I started mucking about with a SuSE 5 cd I got off a magazine cover. It was also a pain in many ways (xf86config anyone?), but it was a breath of fresh air compared to Windows because with a little persistence it could always be figured out. Nothing hidden. Nothing proprietary.
I am truly astonished at how windows has continued to be as bad as ever, and equally amazed at how good the Linux desktop experience has become.
Over the years, corporate work helped me understand how quality slips and repairing the culture to improve that is borderline impossible. I see little hope for windows ever getting better. Microsoft have enough money to last for many years, but they long ago traded what technical soul they had for MBA wank.
Linux treads a tightrope - there’s a lot of corporate pressure - both helpful and a hindrance. Keep supporting the fringe - diversity is our best guard against the darkness!
I still have my driver boxes from back then. Hard drive boxes with the name of the machine in marker on the front, and install directions folded inside. 3.5" discs and CDs
Windows now is easier, Linux is easiest, especially for a dev environment
Another pain point is Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It takes longer to load than a file manager should
This drives me bananas anytime I have to interact with Windows. When I open my file manager on my own PCs, it’ll be rendered and ready to go between the clicking of the button and the animation of it opening. It takes under 300ms.
On my Windows 11 work PC, I’ve had it take well over five seconds before I can actually do something. Given how handling files is a hella common task, I’m surprised no one at Microsoft has fixed this just from having to deal with it on a daily basis. I sure as hell couldn’t.
I mean I can’t stand the thing but this is basically paid-for nuthugging - watch me dunk on the team you hate. fluff, bereft of any semblance of standards. you’re allowed to pay for office but not install 7zip and any other utility. haven’t tried in the past decade or so, but I am sure you can make a usable workstation out of any windows - rip out the irritants, fall back on tons of stuff developed over what four decades?
it ain’t GUI inconsistency issue; you got that plenty on the other side of the fence with Qt/GTK/Ayatana heterogeneity. and also not the thing where you can change a setting in three places, that’s also present ova here, in spades.
the issue is MICROS~1 and I have a fundamental disagreement on the concept of “whose shit is my shit”. no other thing can alleviate that clash of interests, this is someone judging the quality of the chopped onions in a shit sandwich - don’t matter how skillful the chopping was or wasn’t, I ain’t having none of the thing.
If you care about consistency there is no need to mix Qt or GTK, you can choose heterogenous design, but in windows you must
a good reminder that a lot of difficulty people have in switching to Linux is because their computer didn’t come with it preinstalled, and they’re just not used to Linux yet
Windows has lots of issues that people just became accustomed to over time and kinda forgot were issues, or aren’t issues when the OEM preconfigures everything
Made my father switch to Linux about a year ago, so far he loves it. He has the tech knowledge of an oyster, but so far it worked.
Sure I had some convincing to do at first, but once he realized KDE is basically Windows wrll done without persky adds, he was sold.
I still have to do some work from time to time (usually through Rustdesk), but globally it works well.
I have to admit my way of doing this was a bit underhanded (steps bellow), but it worked.
- Move his docs outside of the computer to a NAS. Like that no risk of loosing files. He believed for a long time files were bound to the OS (despire using OpenOffice and Libreoffice for decades), so he through that .odt made on Windows wouldn’t be compatible with LibreOffice one Linux.
- Once W10 support had ended, didn’t told him about the extension (I’m a sneaky bastard), and offered to dual boot Linux.
- Fumble the dualboot (oops, my bad, guess you have to use Linux for the time being, I don’t have enough time to reinstall Windows 10). Who knows, maybe intentionally 😆
- Let him marinate about two weeks, forcing him to try Linux, helping him through Rustdesk when needed
- When I came back, he asked me if I could install Linux on his laptop. This time I did not fumble the dual boot, but still let Linux be the default boot option
Fast forward almost a year, he didn’t boot Windows for at least 6 months, and is pretty happy how snappy Linux is (despite how weak is computer is, he has an Athlon 3000G, paid like fifty bucks years ago, new, with 4GB of RAM, recently upgraded to 8GB with old stock I had around).
What flavor of Linux did you install for your dad? I inconsistently have people with older hardware who are less tech savvy
yeah i think this was extremely fair review. if you know what you’re doing windows is not shit. thing is by default for most humans linux will be always better
That was a delightful read. I somehow forgot you had to download every program yourself and update it yourself or put up with a third party update app at all times. I’ve only been away from Windows for like a year but it’s like “I completely forgot about that”.
Tldr for you guys, tons of issues with installing and basic functionality but he did say Edge was fine and so was Outlook after paying the
ransomsubscription and neglecting privacy concerns. Ads though? Yikes. Also they finally got an emoji/character picker, which was news to me. But yeah, massive corporate dumpster fire otherwise.Windows had a character picker as far back as 95 and possibly earlier, actually.
They mention the old character map, but that’s not quite the same. It also looks like it’s from '95, lol. In this case they have a shortcut and everything now.
I do not really understand the attitude towards installing on windows. It’s so much simpler than Linux. Don’t get me wrong. Updating is so much easier on Linux, but installing? No. I went to install digiKam today. Was it on pacman? No. Button for flatpak on their site though, so I’m already at the same point I would have been on windows. Click that. Error. Well wtf. K so I try through Shelly and that works fine.
Linux has sooo many ways to install. That’s not good. It’s the most common refrain I’ve heard “use your package manager!” That is never gonna work 100% of the time. Unlike windows where you always have to search for the application, download it from the website, and run it. On Linux it can be a tar.gz, a flatpak, an AppImage, a Snap, a deb, rpm, etc.
Does anyone ask what format to use to install things on windows? Or is it always “download an exe and run”? While one of the first questions a Linux newb will ask is “how do I install this?” when given twenty different install options on a software install page.
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On a different note, I completely disagree with most of the authors complaints about windows and also disagree with the things he likes about windows lol. The settings menu is horrific, applications (excluding windows three different UI themes) are themed extremely consistently unlike gnome vs kde apps in plasma, the task bar is for showing running things and is a way better solution to see that something is running that I don’t want running rather than opening btop.
The author complains about titlebar actions and says they are “such basic settings virtually every operating system and desktop environment support are unavailable on Windows is indefensible.” which is laughable when Linux is only 5% of the desktop market and Mac doesn’t support them either. I use arch and I literally didn’t know kde even had those. It’s such a niche feature but this is exactly what happens with Linux users. They think something is common when it’s impossibly niche.
Also, windows explorer handles compressed files out of the box, idk how he missed that. I literally helped my wife do so on her work computer last week.
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Windows sucks though. Go Linux. But seriously, being honest about shortcomings is what continues to improve Linux, let’s not pretend like it’s all sunshine and daisies.
digiKam is just in the Debian packages and easily installable via the package manager. YMMV depending on your distro. I guess that’s what your complaint amounts to.
Linux is about having the choice to use what you want to use. If something is too difficult or annoying for you, switch to something else.
You have that option on Linux.
Don’t like using snaps? Don’t use Canonical’s bs. AppImages work on just about everything when they’re available.
Deb/rpm/whatever depends on your package manager, so you should really just use what your package manager supports. Don’t use rpm on Debian, don’t use deb on Fedora.
It’s really not that hard to grasp.
6 paragraphs to explain how it works on Linux vs one sentence for windows. Do you not see the problem here? Claiming that it’s easier on Linux is just plain lying. While you have more choice, sure, but that’s not at all what the author of the article said, nor the user I responded to. The author said it was more confusing on windows, which is just plain false.
It is more confusing on Windows though.
I only have to look at the family members I have who have dozens of versions of .exe and .msi installers for the same program littering their Downloads folder, and then for some reason those unpack to subfolders in C:\ and leave their unpacked installer files there without any good reason for it.
Why not just use the temp folder and remove them afterward?
That’s on top of Windows itself littering the drive with temporary files, installer files or otherwise.
People who have been using Windows since the early days are still trying to figure out how to clean up after it, and every iteration is made more confusing by Microsoft.
Cleaning up installers when pulling things in through your package manager is a cakewalk in comparison.
Considering how appimages are mostly self-contained there’s little to clean other than the single file which you run it through, and the few configurations left in ~/.config or ~/.local/share. Easy peasy.
I have less experience with Flatpak but I’m sure it’s similarily easy to find out. I’m never touching snap again after trying it once because it’s beyond dumb.
Of course if you build from source through git or otherwise, you’re going to have to make sure you remember where you put things.
Everything on Windows is just so much more confusing than it has to be. And that’s without touching on the whole licensing bs or the way you may find some programs in the installed program list in the system configuration window and some aren’t in there for reasons unknown… Where’s the uninstaller in that case? Oh, the uninstaller isn’t there anymore? Try and figure out how to uninstall the program that doesn’t want to uninstall.
Let’s take programs like Avira or Avast or whatever program which embeds itself in your registry and five or six different folders. You try to uninstall it, it claims to have uninstalled, but then Revo still finds thirty different registry entries and whatnot.
It’s easier on Linux. By far.
AppImages don’t have any kind of update method do they?
Debian repo is usually really out of date. Fedora is less so but often I’m still not getting the latest versions.
In my experience AppImages will tell you when a new version is available and you can easily replace the old version with the new one when that happens. It’s just a simple download. You’re in control. Don’t want to update because the new version glitches out or changed something you don’t like? Just keep using the old version.
If you want bleeding edge upgrades, you’re going to have to keep in mind the words used to described it. You’re going to be the canary in the coalmine, dealing with bugs and oddities which users on slower update cycles don’t have anymore because they use your experiences and bug reports to fix what breaks.
It certainly sounds to me like you’re in your own way, and are putting the blame on devs instead of your choice. You want the newest packages but without bugs? That situation simply doesn’t exist.
I agree with you there, installing new software on Linux can often be quite a pain if it’s not available on flatpak. Repos will be out of date, appimages don’t auto update, grabbing a binary has no easy way to add to the start menu or taskbar and also doesn’t generally auto update.
Even if it is on flatpak then I often end up dealing with flatpaks annoying permissions blocking normal features like streaming my screen in a browser, which is even more obnoxious.
I still can’t get hardware acceleration for video working on my laptop after months, videos players and browsers struggle to play back anything, something that works perfectly on windows with zero setup.
I’ve been on Linux desktop for well over 23 years now
For the apst 21 years I’ve used
apt-get install PACKAGE and everything gets downloaded and installed automatically and updated automatically
So hard, much difficult
If the subset of software available in the Debian package repository includes all the software you ever need, or if you are OK with potentially waiting years to have missing software added, and if you are OK with what are likely outdated versions of that software, then yes, all you need is
apt-get install.But, personally, I don’t think I’ve had a Linux install that didn’t include software installed from other sources
Sometimes knowing what the actual package name is without some kind of browser or being told what it is explicitly can be a challenge, but that really is the only hard part.
Well, I’ve mostly only ever needed pacman but I did have to flatpak something once, which on Cachy is a nightmare.
None the less, the updating point is quite valid; I forgot how many auto updaters I had on Windows (that yes, I disable but they come back). I think the main thing is the repository method of installing is just superior when it has what you need and it’s a shame it can’t be done at the scale needed without more Linux adoption.
As for themes… well, I have no idea what he was trying to run that had such inconsistent themes but it sounded like he was using some very old programs. My experience with KDE differs from yours though; I was surprised just how many apps took my customizations. Granted, they won me over with icons for virtually every app I use, which is something I’m not even sure Windows could do legally (e.g. custom icon for Steam, slack, etc).
I agree with you on settings, though. My guess is it’s more aligned with other OS’ settings menus, but I personally like the old control panel more. And task bar? Well, given my system has a tenth as many things running in the background than I used to have on Windows, I haven’t noticed Linux missing anything.
In any case, I also agree there’s still room for improvement. The way I look at it, Linux has better concepts built into it that need larger adoption to fully get to where it wants to be. Microsoft has the resources and scale but wastes it on old broken code and enshittification. It’s a shame, really.
I somehow forgot you had to download every program yourself and update it yourself or put up with a third party update app at all times. I’ve only been away from Windows for like a year but it’s like “I completely forgot about that”.
The author exaggerates how bad it is, to be honest. The built in
wingetpackage manager solved most of my needs for installing and updating software while I was still using Windows, and what it left is no worse than the situation on Linux. There are also alternatives towinget, like Chocolatey.In some ways the situation is actually worse on Linux, since I regularly use 4 different package managers on Linux:
apt, flatpak,pixi/conda, anduv/pip, on top of having to manually download and install software, some of which I have to compile myselfIf you used the GUI app you probably wouldn’t see that your system uses different package standards
The GUI that came with my distro only covers 2 of the 4 package managers I mentioned. And I’d have to use a GUI
It’s the a good reason to use more package managers? When I need packages that aren’t provided by the distro I’m using, I change distro
to get a true ‘microsoft experience’ he should have use a new laptop, one with windows 11 ‘s mode’ on it and only 8gb ram–since microsoft now claims that’s enough.
I had a student who had that, I think. It’s like parental controls for adults. She couldn’t use any of the software we recommend because it wasn’t in the windows store.
Guessing it was in S mode - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/experience/platform-variants/switching-out-of-s-mode-in-windows
I’m guessing the s stands for shit? otherwise they would say security, probably afraid of making the claim it’s actually secure
I’m pretty sure you meant ransom, not random. (My phone autocorrected that one too!)
Dang, hope you don’t mind me fixing that real quick.
Sure, you’re welcome
Good on him for giving it an honest go. I do think that for fresh installs, laptops feel more likely to run into issues unless you are buying very mainstream hardware or using the OEM image with the driver bundles in the installer.
Also, using edge, native tools, and no cleanup or debloat is just painful. But I suppose the point is to highlight what you get out of the box, and if you used Titus Utils to dump all the quality of life things on the system you aren’t really assessing the stock os.
I wish I could get paid to use and then talk shit about Windows 11. 😩
plenty of people get paid to use Windows 11, but not for the shit talking part lol
Installation process seems to be way more complicated than the one I did for Mint in my mum’s computer some time ago. Hard to compare, though; sometimes hardware clicks well with a system but not another.
Dolphin and Nautilus handle compressed files entirely transparently and much faster than Explorer does
Even Thunar does it, through the archive plugin. Thunar. From Xfce, a desktop environment known for avoiding fluff by design. Caja too, even if it’s based on the GNOME 2 version of Nautilus.
Office, email: I guess installing LibreOffice and Thunderbird would be against the spirit of the challenge, right?
Managing applications is also not as nice and effortless as it is on Linux
I’m so bloody glad for package managers.
Windows 11 also has a combined emoji/symbol picker now (Super + .),
Somewhat unrelated question: does anyone know if .XCompose works with Wayland? And if it doesn’t, what do I use as replacement?
I haven’t tried making .XCompose work on wayland. But if you use Plasma as a desktop, it does have an option to set up the compose key. I never checked if it let you create your own compose “recipes”. I also don’t know how it handles it in the background. But if you set it up through Plasma, the default compose behavior works flawlessly both on X11 and Wayland.
Cinnamon.
I need the custom “recipes”; mostly for the International Phonetic Alphabet, I use it a fair bit. Screen keyboards become a chore, once you need to type “[sʌm.θɪn lä͡ɪ̯k ðɪs]” (something like this), so I messed with my .XCompose rather extensively, and this was for years so muscle memory already settled in, e.g. if I need to type ⟨ɛ⟩ I go automatically for RightWin, e, 1.
Since I didn’t pay him, I’m not invested enough to read it.
Since I didn’t pay him, I’m more invested in reading it, because I got it for free.
For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard
Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.
Spoiler
Win11 sucks.
I have a weird situation. I was a Windows user from 3.x to 10. I genuinely like Win9x, XP, and a lot of 7. I switched to Linux as my main machine with Mint because Cinnamon works like Windows. The only hassle I have is external display issues (X11 displayport stuff) - so I’m not looking at Cachy or KDE Neon or anything like that. But my gaming PC is Win11. It all works. Getting back to Windows, while there’s some challenges, everything feels “right” again. 7-Zip, Notepad++, various games, it’s all natural. I have trouble running arbitrary software on Mint, but Windows just runs every exe I throw at it. It works with my trackball and external display painlessly.
Basically, they both work.
Also, I disagree with the article author about the email client in the OS. I think that’s bloatware and the results of Microsoft being monopolistic. Webmail works fine. If you want an email client locally, it’s your choice. Then again I’d love to see what he says is better than Outlook - because it isn’t Thunderbird.
