> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be.
And this is exactly why Microsoft can get away with a buggy mess of a user hostile operating system.
They only have an incentive to make a good OS if people are willing to leave when it’s a bad one.
> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be.
And this is exactly why Microsoft can get away with a buggy mess of a user hostile operating system.
They only have an incentive to make a good OS if people are willing to leave when it’s a bad one.
I think saying "I'm a _______ guy" with any brand or company filling that blank can be a big problem. Most companies are there to make money and loyalty is often a one way street.
From my view it is more productive to find out what you like about something and always be open to maybe finding someone else who can deliver on that. And sometimes things that we thought were essential are not. You might even find something new to like.
What about "I'm a Linux guy?" I don't pay any company for my Linux OSes. My favorites are nonprofits and mostly interchangeable.
It likely just means they will always prefer certain classic aspects of Windows over how other desktop OSs do things. I’m largely in that boat as well. Of course Windows could get so bad in the future that another OS will be the lesser evil. Or another OS could adopt those preferred Windows things. But it won’t change the mentioned preferences, hence “always”.
"I'm still a _______ guy, and I always will be."
No matter what trademark you put in the blank, this is not a healthy thing to say.
Yeah, not sure how people form almost "relationships" with their tools and refuse sometimes to even explore options. I'm always open to switching almost anything. I never end up doing, because things are usually not better, but maybe 1/100 times something is better, and then I switch. Initially did that around Ubuntu 9.10 before, and I'll switch away from Arch in a heartbeat if anything better comes around.
Edit: I realize now that the article author, the person in the video and the quoted tweet are all the same person, and they seem to work/run windowscentral.com, so I guess that kind of explains the motivation.
Honestly as a deeply antisocial person the Linux cult has always rubbed me the wrong way. Same reason why I don't have an iPhone.
What do you use then?
What about "Linux"? It is also a registered trademark.
For Linux as well. In my opinion you shouldn't remain blind to the benefits of other operating systems
Apple has an even bigger loyalty problem. For them and Microsoft it's arguably good, but it's bad for users, even the loyal ones. It might even be bad for Apple and Microsoft long term.
I'm not saying Apple can't go the way of Microsoft, but if you've used macOS and Windows through the previous 5 years there isn't much of a comparison. Windows has gone from something I tolerated to something I absolutely dislike using. It's so bad that if it wasn't for WSL then I would consider finding a place to work where they didn't force me to use Windows. MacOS on the other hand hasn't really changed.
The moment someone makes a non macbook air, that does the same as a macbook air in terms of being cold to touch, battery life and no-noise I'm leaving for Linux though.
> The moment someone makes a non macbook air, that does the same as a macbook air in terms of being cold to touch, battery life and no-noise I'm leaving for Linux though.
I think a lot of people are waiting for a non-Apple Macbook, but we unfortunately might be waiting for a while. It seems to pain other manufacturers to not cut corners in some critical area or another…
> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be.
There's a semi-common saying that it takes seven attempts for someone to successfully leave an abusive partner. Give him time, I guess.
I’m my experience, unwavering Windows folk are simply power users who find *nix shells burdensome.
More like people who won’t bite the hand the feeds them.
I deploy all my code on linux and have been thinking about switching from windows to linux for my daily driver. But even I dread that. It´s as if linux has tried as hard as possible to make every single little thing as complicated as possible.
imho, user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape. There is very little focus on that. People will tell you try this or that distro. But once you run into a simple problem, it´s often a rabbit hole of a gazilling cli commands to fix it. In the mean time you´re praying to god to not brick something that used to work before.
Lucky now you can just ask an LLM to diagnose and offer ways to fix it. Takes 99% of the trouble away.
If I could wave a wand and ban a single class of comments on HN, it would be this. Rambling, non-specific handwaving useless text.
> user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape.
It's ignorant, and its insulting, and it's stupid. You can read one or two KDE blog posts, look at the roadmap for Cosmic, look at the attention Valve has put into Linux and know that sentence is just rude. It's just so frustrating.
> People will tell you try this or that distro.
Dumbasses on reddit will. No one that has a single clue encourages distro-hopping.
exactly, he's part of a problem
I could also say the Linux desktop creators are the problem as well. It's so buggy, it makes it impossible for me to switch.
This doesn't make any sense as there is not a linux desktop but multiples and the major ones have been less buggy than windows for the most part of the last 20 years.
Hardware support is where Linux used to struggle. Nowadays things aren't perfect but much better. Basically it means you need to figure out which hardware to buy based on available support, before making the purchase.
What desktop and which distro? In the past, there have been times where a bug showed up for me over the years, especially before 2018. Currently tho, Debian 13 + KDE - zero issues.
Honestly, that’s a 2016 argument. I flipped a few contact centers over to Linux desktops and had very few issues. If anything we probably spent 5x the resources getting Windows 11 certified internally.
Microsoft knows it, but they don’t care about windows. When IBM started offering Macs to employees, they figured out that the support burden was very low, significantly lower than windows, even with users having years of windows experience.
Intune was supposed to be the answer to that, making Windows management MDM like. But for their most entrenched enterprise customers, they can’t really switch without co-managing with Configuration Manager. Most of the people behind that product are laid off or otherwise attrited, as there’s no path to a subscription service.
Who are these “creators”? Can you point to them? Is there a legal entity?
Which “the” Linux desktop? GNOME? KDE? xfce? Cinnamon? COSMIC?
This question reinforces the point IMO
Agreed. I had the version of Notepad++ that got popped and was being nagged by Fusion 360, so I decided to burn everything down, get a new SSD, and install a copy of Windows 11.
Holy sh*t! I haven't had this bad a Windows install experience since Windows 95.
The first big obstacle is getting all the Secure Boot/TPM 2.0 BIOS settings right. When you don't, you simply get "Can't install Windows". No debugging information. No clarification. No details. Shades of the day of having to blindly set the I/O interrupts and addresses on Windows. Tweak, Install, Waiiiiiiit, Fail. Tweak, Install, Waiiiiiit, Fail. etc.
Then the second obstacle is getting a local account installed. The solution was obscure, but straightforward. Finding that solution on the glop that has become the Internet? Bleaaaaagh. Everything has to be a bloody video for something that's one stupid command. And all the AI systems aren't useful because their horizon is too old and Microslop keeps changing the command; presumably because too many people are using it (How dare they not make cloud number go up! Brrrrrrrrr!) After all was said and done, I got "lucky" because I actually bought a retail copy of Windows 11 from Best Buy--the image was "old" enough that the "old" way of doing the install still worked (Shift F10 to prompt -> OOBE\BYPASSNRO -> reboot for those who want to know)
At last, after almost 90 minutes of farting around, Windows starts to install. And install. And install. And install ... FOR HOURS! WTF IS IT DOING! The target machine is a smoking AMD desktop with SSD and a gigantic amount of pre-shortage RAM on fibre. How in the name of all that is holy and unholy do you install that slowly on that powerful a machine?
Finally, everything gets installed. And I reboot ... to no video. Oh, no, I bet it scrambled the drivers. Sure enough, I move the HDMI from my AMD card to the AMD integrated video ... yep, there it is. Sigh. Let's go get DDU and uninstall the dumbass driver that Windows Install dumped on there. Download, download, install, reboot to safe mode, clean, install proper driver, reboot. Back on my main card, now.
Finally, let's dump a recovery image because I sure don't want to have to go through this gigantic PITA again if something goes wrong. Plug in the drive, can't find it ... ah, had a Linux image that needs to be wiped out, my fault ... need the Windows partition editor, so launch and erase ... wait, why can't I edit anything? ... oh, right, dumbass, you need to launch it as Administrator ... close ... open the menu, there's the app, right click menu ...
WTF! There's no "Run as Administrator" so I can't edit the partitions! Right click a couple of other programs ... some of them have the "Run as Administrator" but some of them DON'T. And there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which is which. Curse. Swear. FINE! Plug drive into my Linux laptop, kill the partitions there, and eject. Plug into Windows ... which now sees the drive and creates a recovery disk ... happy happy joy joy <rolls eyes>.
4+ hours! Not even exaggerating. <cries>
And because I'm a glutton for punishment, I decided I'd put Linux on the old reformatted SSD. Since I used Windows for gaming about as much as Fusion 360, I figured I'd go for something Linux but gaming-optimized and snag Bazzite which I'd never used before. Download, install, login, connect to Steam, run game.
Total time: no more than 20 minutes.
No fighting about cloud login. No video card problem. Games are running fine.
Anyone still using Windows as an individual nowadays is completely and utterly daft.
Goes the other way around too: Linux will only have a good desktop environment when it's users will be willing to leave it.
Linux desktop environments are developed by its users wanting the best experience possible.
Windows is designed by a committee that tries to do as little as possible and has ulterior motives higher on the priority scale than UX. Like marketing copilot and other Microsoft subscription services. Microsoft software is always aimed to be just good enough for the users to not choose something better. They love just coasting on their marketshare without doing much to improve. Like they did with internet explorer and now do with office.
> Linux desktop environments are developed by its users wanting the best experience possible.
have you used GNOME?
I'm a lifelong KDE person but it's still clear to me that GNOME is crafted with care, and I find it pretty usable.
> Linux will only have a good desktop environment when it's users will be willing to leave it.
Putting aside the debate as to the quality of desktop environments, I honestly hope you're being intentionally nonsensical as a joke. What you describe can only make sense under the grossly misinformed belief that "Linux" is a monolithic entity incentivised to stop its users from "leaving it", and that this mythical "Linux" would have the agency to decide it needed "a good desktop environment" in order to avoid that from happening.
I recently started using COSMIC and I would definitely call it good, even if it has a few rough edges due to just recently coming out of beta.
I mean, from my perspective Linux has multiple good desktop environments. I've used both Cinnamon and KDE for years and have found both perfectly pleasant to use.
Linux has had several good desktop environments for well over 20 years.
When is Windows going to get a good desktop environment?
Who is better?
I think you're missing the point.
If a friend stated that they will stay with their partner regardless of how deceptive or abusive said partner's behaviour becomes, you would rightly question the wisdom of that choice.
Stating that you will remain loyal to a company come what may is even worse. It's an entity with no interest in your wellbeing. It exists to extract as much money or information from you as possible.
Quite apart from everything else, such a statement eliminates the prospect of ever finding something better.
For folks that still like the win32 ecosystem, they should pirate the heck out of LTSC. just as Microsoft don't have interest in them, they shouldn't give a damn about it and enjoy a dramatically polished Windows experience.
Came here to post this, what an asinine thing to say.