Looking Back at My Transition From Windows to Linux
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The author shares their experience transitioning from Windows to Linux, sparking a discussion on the challenges and benefits of switching to Linux, with many commenters sharing their own experiences and concerns.
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If I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.
What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.
I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
If you are thinking of permanently online games that effectively put malware on your system, I am ok with that not being solved ( but even for those there are ways to go around those restrictions -- which should not be surprise given the nature of cat and mouse game ).
> I am ok with that not being solved
Great, good for you? You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
It is a fair point in that sense so you get full points for argument counter. That said, I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'.
It is not that I don't care exactly. It is that I care too much to allow this crap on my computer.
Well you don't play online games. Personally I care a great deal more about cheaters than I do about whether a company (who I already trust to install stuff on my computer) installs stuff on my computer. Cheaters absolutely ruin games.
Believe me I would love to drop Windows.
I'm sure there are users with specialized needs who need something more complex, but i dont think microsoft office is quite the moat it used to be.
I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.
So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.
This isn’t even getting to the next devil… Adobe.
The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!
I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.
Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.
Let's just compare what people do when they need a tool like Excel. That's when the 90 or maybe more % of people will do. That is what I do. Everything I do in Excel can be done on LibreCalc.
So it is true that LibreCalc can replace 90% or more, because not everybody needs those advanced topics.
Same for the other LibreOffice apps, Writer is good for almost everybody. As LibreDraw and others.
Few days ago wife opened an excel file on the browser and something was right away wrong, she noticed, can't remember what it was. Had to download and execute local.
And that’s the issue with every alternative, it lacks 1:1 features/bugs so what’s usable for one isn’t for another.
This is also why they fought so hard against the XML standardization of docs formats, and still to this day docs created by their own apps don't even validate against the schemas they created.
I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
As if most linux users who enable bluetooth want it to connect slowly and not work.
Being a bit hyperbolic intentionally but the point still stands
Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies. You're just used to them. Bluetooth hardware is terrible, often proprietary and vendors write drivers only for Windows and macOS. What is Linux supposed to do about that?
EDIT: By the way, JustWorks and FastConnect are the official names of two Bluetooth connection techniques. The name is stupid because that's what the marketing people decided to call it, Linux is being consistent so you know what's going on when they're active, and I assume they have their downsides.
It reminds me of an argument I had with a friend. I was saying <FAANG Company> should add an option to change some (very minor) attributes. My ask was literally about text size and location. He just came back and said that I like to fiddle with things and am out of touch because most people want things to "just work." He's not wrong, I like to fiddle. But the problem was that something was broken. Things weren't "just working". I was asking for that feature because the options were "clicking 3 buttons worth of fiddling" and "not using the product." If it is broken it is broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If people are willing to fiddle to repair, great! They'll continue using the product. People that won't? Well it's broken so they weren't going to anyways. At least with the capacity for fiddling you maintain some.
These days, I find myself having fewer problems on Linux than either Windows or OSX. I expect most people to be surprised by that comment because I am too. A decade ago it was the exact opposite situation. But things change.
"2 hard things in Computer Science" but it isn't a off-by-one error! Though these names are just objectively stupid and confusing. At least an incomprehensible name wouldn't be misleading.Over in Windows-land, you frequently hear "oh yeah you gotta reinstall Windows every couple of years, or whenever you do xyz operation (say, disk cloning)". Troubleshooting Windows is a huge pain in the ass. There's no good centralized documentation, SEO sucks, registry hacks are common, etc. I've spent much more of my computing life on Windows machines, and I still have no idea how they truly work. I have no idea why sometimes the only way to fix an hardware/driver issue is by running the built-in troubleshooters, etc.
My solution? Type my strong password at every reboot and move to using the Yubi key they offered me. Great, I like Yubi keys. Oh, I can't set a security key as my primary means of 2 factor? My options were Hello or using the Microsoft authenticator phone app (couldn't use my other OTP app...). So every single login always started with "Sign in with Hello or use a security key". If using Hello I could just tap my finger and move on (and Outlook might crash silently). If security key I had to go through this dumb process of clicking: "use another device", "security key", "next", "type credentials", "tap security key", "ok". I think that needless "next" button was what really got under my skin. It was already a manufactured problem but an extra dialogue screen that is just doing nothing. Quite Kafkaesque.
That advantage has been lost with Win10, which jumped on the constant-update bandwagon and took control away from the user. For me that's what tipped the scales to Linux.
I've used Bluetooth for a number of devices for about ten years, and I didn't even know there's a config file until now! Thus far, it's been mostly a "just works" experience except for the battery level on by BOOM 3 speaker, but that's their fault for doing some proprietary bollocks.
I think the issue might be something else and that these names are just not great names. Personally I think "Just Works" is a terrible name and I don't understand how something so non-descriptive and confusing was allowed... but that's a different conversation... (2 jokes in CS?)
A little note on "Just Works". It probably doesn't matter for your use case but understanding that
I fight for the average user for respect of privacy and security, because, go figure, the average user only knows what there is a browser or an app, and they can logon and use it.
They have no clue of what is really going on.
So how we fix this? Give the average user the power. And show them what is going on and what are the options.
GNU/Linux desktop is not an alternative to Windows or mac. It is the only one who respects you.
If should be the only option you learn in school and learn about open source.
I thought it was very poor, myself.
Myself I’ve moved away from this. Now, I frame it all as just people with the same fundamental nature, that I understand through little rules. Like ‘In the absence of a better more personal and mutually rewarding relationship we end up commoditizing each other which becomes more and more exploitative over time’. Or ‘We choose comfortable, pandering stories that make us feel better about ourselves, avoid situations to better understand others if they challenge our aspirational truths’.
(I only game on the weekends so I just cable swap, because my KVM is Mac <--> Gaming PC/SER8.)
Hypocrite because my daily driver is a uATX where I mostly just browser the internet and watch movies.
Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).
But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
Not going back anytime soon either way.
disable swap. Programs will crash instead, which may be more useful.
Anything what would request memory would just outright die, including even the most basic services.
Source: actually had a system without swap what would just die running `dnf update`. Or quietly die in a week or so if left unattended.
A guy with a decade old 64Gb SSD as the only drive in the system?
> and makes everything slow while doing it
It was so when the OS was on a HDD. Nowadays it's a PCIe device with 1 million IOPS.
And five years ago fans of some fruit company run around singing praises on how good their brand new laptops worked with a mere 8Gb of RAM.
Even if it was some sort of safety-related process that had to keep running no matter what, I would probably try to define/control the memory usage better so it wouldn't unexpectedly run orders of magnitude slower.
I use a program called earlyoom. It will monitor RAM and if you cross a level of utilization (default 95%?) it will kill the worst offenders before the system becomes unresponsive. You can layer on sophistication like protecting certain programs or preferring killing others. I find it invaluable when I am doing data science work and do something stupid which explodes in memory. Annoying that something was killed, but usually better than hosing the entire system -if it crossed 95% it was almost certainly going to hit 100%.
For my purposes it works perfectly - only the Python process will be killed, my IDE or notebook will survive.
You have to set swappiness to something like 1 or maybe 10, reduce cache pressure to like 50ish and set dirty ratios/bytes to something reasonable (say around 1GB, half of that for background).
If you keep defaults the system will have too much in caches and they may not be able to flush under memory and swap pressure => hang.
It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior. Other OSes do a much better job at good defaults.
If somebody told me they were running into issues with swap on linux I would ask them why they don't just get more RAM. I'm currently running 32GB and have never used swap on this machine. That includes gaming and local LLM usage (which my GPU does not have enough VRAM for, so normal RAM gets involved).
If your speeds matter, you, and I cannot stress this enough BUY MORE RAM[0]. It's called "swap" not "RAM" so anyone trying to tell you it is "more RAM" is lying to you or woefully naive. It would be as idiotic as having no swap space.
Swap is a cache. Swap will actually help your RAM be even faster! Go look at your RAM usage in a bit more detail. You get a little from using a tool like `htop` but you'll get more from just `cat /proc/meminfo` or `free -wh`. You RAM has tiers of memory inside of it, all RAM is not equal. You should see that some is compressed and a lot is cached. (`/proc/meminfo` will show you there's a whole lot more to this than just "RAM and swap")
I'll put it this way. My machine has 64G of RAM on it and ~9G of swap. Currently the system (rebooted yesterday) is using about 8G of RAM and 200M of swap. Except that's actually a lie, that's what htop tells us. In fact, we need to check from `free`. Of my 62Gi of RAM: 8Gi is used, 7Gi is free, 1Gi is shared, 3Gi is in buffers, 45Gi is cached and 54Gi is available. (Swap is identical: 200M) When my system is running longer, that swap isn't so minimal anymore. Things get paged into it despite having tons of RAM available. This isn't because the OS is dumb, it is because the OS is smart.
The only reason to not have swap is because you really really care about a trivial amount of disk space. But man, disk is cheaper than RAM and these days you're probably using NVMe or at least an SSD.
What you should do:
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008336[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
[2] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness
Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms. If you NEED 10GB of memory to have open everything you want on your machine, but you only have 8GB of RAM, swap will make that happen for you. Now ideally the OS is using this for inactive pages (those programs you have open but you aren't actually using), and the nuance to how swap can be used to make the RAM you do have more effective is an interesting attribute of swap (another commenter mentioned swap being used as temporary storage to defrag the physical memory), but every single reference you linked says the same thing - swap is for when you need more memory than you have physical memory for.
From your links:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq: "Swap space is used when your operating system decides that it needs physical memory for active processes and the amount of available (unused) physical memory is insufficient." -> More RAM for your memory heavy usage. In this case if you buy more physical RAM your programs will run faster.
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...: "The swap space acts as an extension to the physical memory and allows the system to continue running smoothly even when physical memory is exhausted." and "Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full, inactive pages in memory are moved to the swap space." -> More RAM. Slow RAM, but more.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness: "Swapping is the process whereby a page of memory is copied to the preconfigured space on the hard disk, called swap space, to free up that page of memory. The combined sizes of the physical memory and the swap space is the amount of virtual memory available." -> Do I need to repeat myself here?
Did you seriously write and link all of that without reading any of it?
You always want some swap, even if it's 1GB for a 96GB machine.
[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/606185/how-does-vm-overcom...
[1] https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
[2] https://cutefish-ubuntu.github.io/
I read that as “playing computer games feels like work” rather than “getting games running feels like work”.
I'm not sure why your quotes got mangled. Maybe it was because when I quote I use two leading spaces? I do that because it makes text verbatim but I think the indentation just helps distinguish the quote better than the > alone. There's also this one that I always forget <https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>
All Electron apps are.
The funny part being, you might still want the web version to apply extensions on it. Youtube for instance is a lot better with the auto-dub features and title translations off, but it won't be possible in the native app as Google is actively forcing those on us. I don't use Spotify, but would advise looking it it.
Extensions aren't as accessible if you use them a lot, and of course you're stuck with Chrome though.
well, Firefox did, until Mozilla (of course) removed it
Chrome still supports it
Seems like a perfectly reasonable dealbreaker to me. Terminal commands are a raw UI that is neither intuitive nor discoverable -- someone must either read documentation (man pages, tutorials, blog posts, etc) to learn the behavior and syntax or they must blindly copy strings from a trusted source.
There's a reason most stories of nontechnical people using software like Linux always seem to include an expert friend, family member, or IT person in the background.
Agreed. If your operating system requires that you occasionally search for instructions and copy-and-paste executable strings from the internet, that seems less efficient, less learnable, and less secure than any GUI I know of.
Perhaps at some point terminals will bake in an LLM as an intermediary to convert between human-readable instructions and terminal commands, and then we just have to worry about the alignment of those LLMs...
* Most distros offer multiple desktops. This is true of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, etc.
Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop. Shell instructions work on all of them.
* GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted. They must be performed by the user. But most people do not know the difference between buttons and spinners and input boxes. It's very very hard to write specific instructions for people who lack the vocabulary for GUI controls.
I speak as a former docs writer.
If a consumer product (computer, phone, TV, microwave, printer, radio, oven, washing machine, etc) requires reading through more than a quick start guide to access the advertised functionality, then it has failed as a consumer product.
> GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted
Training my nontechnical friends and relatives to copy, paste, and execute terminal commands they found on the internet does not strike me as a very good alternative.
As such I can answer in several different ways which try to approach the point you're making, but they can only do it by trying to nudge your comment slightly back in the direction of "how things really are".
Point 1:
Why what you're saying does not address the real situation.
The thing is that about 99% of Linux distributions are not products.
They are the collaborative efforts of many small teams of volunteers. In rare instances, a few of them are collaborative efforts of large teams of paid engineers. However most of those are server OSes where UI is not a factor.
(The real competitive criteria of paid server distros are things like "what certifications do you have?" and "how long will you provide patches for?" They're nothing to do with its technical capabilities. That's why the paid enterprise distros are much smaller, much simpler, and technologically far inferior to free ones.)
They are not products, and they are definitely not CONSUMER products.
Point 2:
How to do easy end user 3rd party apps on Linux: prohibit them.
There is an easy answer to the question of "software installation on a consumer Linux desktop." There's only one consumer Linux desktop. It's ChromeOS. And you can't install native software. There is no native software.
(Some ChromeBooks can run Android apps but they are not native.)
Note, this product outsells all free distros by, conservatively, 10-20x over.
So this is clearly not a handicap.
Point 3:
Docs are really hard and don't pay.
I've written product documentation as my paid full-time job for 4-5 years.
Nobody reads it by choice, and it's expensive to produce, which is why consumer products mostly don't come with any now. You may get a quick-start guide and most customers ignore that.
This is why the only desktop Linux with users in the hundreds of millions is so stripped-down you can't install apps on it.
Point 4:
The real context here.
Given these aren't products and aren't for consumers, what we get is sub-optimal but it really is not bad these days.
You're right, I was mixing up threads, I apologize. Your original point seems to be that it's less effort for a Linux distribution to write documentation for shell commands than for them to create a GUI and write the same level of documentation for that GUI, right? If so, I agree, and I understand why a volunteer-driven project would take this route.
However, two points:
First, a properly-designed GUI should require less documentation in the first place.
More importantly, I don't see how this refutes my original point that running shell commands copied from the internet is less efficient, learnable, and secure for end-users than using comparable functionality through a GUI.
Again, I understand why distros take this route, I'm merely pointing out that it is less efficient, learnable, and secure. With respect to the four points in your last post I agree so I'm not sure there's much worth discussing there.
> Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?
Our experiences with home PC users must be qualitatively different.
I have trouble getting the PC users I help to remember the name of their web browser or to understand the difference between a webpage and an application. And of the few people I know who might be able to learn how to use the terminal, none have the slightest interest in devoting time to doing so -- they would prefer to use their computer time doing actual work or playing computer games than wasting it learning how to do computer admin tasks more efficiently.
The prospect of teaching anyone but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of PC users to successfully run terminal commands seems so removed from the realm of possibility I have trouble imagining it. Maybe I could see it catching on with an LLM as an intermediary to actually structure the commands?
For most, it would be:
1. Open the app or software store
2. Type "spotify"
3. Click "install"
If it doesn't, then it's not a distro for non-techie end-users.
Linux is just much easier to use than it was a decade ago. Much simpler than ever 5 years ago.
A decade ago I'd have to fret over updating a nvidia driver and wonder if I'm going to spend a few hours or more recovering my display. God, there were so many pains. They helped me learn a lot and helped me gain mastery, but that's not for everyone.
But now, projects like SteamOS, System76, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, PopOS, and others have really moved the space in usability. Things have just changed. There's more effort than ever being put into linux and with that comes a lot of people willing to put effort into design. I think it is easy to lose sight of design when resources are scarce, but it is also important for drawing people into the cause.
Now the biggest problem of getting people to switch is actually with the nerdy/techy friends. They have heard too much about how linux is difficult and all that stuff. They are judging by the state of where things were than where things are now. Whereas for the most part a normal person switching to linux will have a similar experience as if they were switching from Windows to Mac or vise versa. There's pain points and a lot of "why is this here and not there" stuff, but things are very doable. But this initial learning curve can also put many people off (just like switching between Windows and Mac or Android and iPhone). But it is harder to make that transition when you have confirmation bias on your side.
Windows has changed too, their bad practices are increasing and the public perception is suffering by that.
I really never thought I'd see this day. I can't decide if this is a great win for OSS, or an incredible loss for the common folk. Either way, the world will be a far better place without Windows 11 or Microsoft in general.
[0] I consider a lack of kernel malware 'anti-cheat' a feature, not a bug. Adobe as well.
Adobe, I can't comment on
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980064
Fundamentally the problem with any anti cheat system is that it is indistinguishable from a root kit. You're giving software full privileges to your machine with the ability to edit your kernel, inspect running processes, and inject code into running processes. I'm not saying there's no situations where you don't want a program to be able to do this but you should be extremely cautious about doing so because that program essentially owns your machine.
Put it this way. Suppose you trust those game companies and their anti cheat software. Do you trust that this software will never be hacked? I mean we're talking about an extremely high profile target with wide adoption. Sounds like you're adding a pretty valuable target that's worth far more to hackers than it is to the game studios. I mean we're talking about the same game studios that let easily solvable but game breaking bugs persist for years. Even ones where the community has provided patches for...
[0] <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/battlefield-6-and-valorant...>
I think the problem is really down to monopoly abuse, or green. The Apple lawsuit is a good example of this. They want 30% of in app purchases but... why? An iPhone only has value because of its apps. (Just like how a computer's real value is its ability to run programs) Specifically, apps that Apple didn't also create. You could pay people for those apps and Apple would still benefit. Seems like a lot of these big companies are making categorically similar mistakes. They only can do this because users don't (meaningfully) have other choices.
I'd love to see OSS win, but not because CSS has abused their customers. I wish the fight was over the value of the product. I guess that means I wish profits were more dependent on product value. Shame we conflate market value with product value.
I'm pretty sure it trounces Linux (for some value of whatever you think "Linux" actually is) on Accessibility. This is an area that could be vastly improved.
For people who have been using Linux for decades, it is not so shocking.
Definitely frustrating it has taken so lone.
"Windows 11 is a hate crime."
(I know, the fanboys and penguin Taliban will rage that ChromeOS is not the True Linux, etc., but ignore them.)
Two things are non-obvious about this info.
1. The numbers are by value not by units. An average Mac is about 5x the cost of the average Chromebook.
2. This is long pre-COVID. The pandemic was very good for Chromebook sales and they've slackened off since, but the boom began well before.
To anyone doubting it - Google supports installing Debian apps on Chromebooks, via crostini. That's how I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and a number of other things on a Chromebook. The integration is pretty good - when you install a Debian desktop app, it's ICON appears in the list of apps you can run from the Chromebooks launch button.
It's a very good setup for my wife. The Chromebook is cheap, the UI is simple, the Google ecosystem just works when you need it, and all the desktop apps are still available.
It's not perfect, and it needs at lease 8G of RAM which is a high end Chromebook. This years crostini release was a big leap in stability. It went from the occasional Debian application crash (requiring a restart of the VM) to not stopping as far as I can tell. It's a pity the upgrade destroyed the VM, losing every file in there. Not nice, Google. There are still paper cuts, but a future were I choose "Chromebook" as my window manager for a 16GB Snapdragon X looked possible.
Or it did, until Google announced they were replacing ChromeOS with Android. But now, maybe, using Android as a Windows Manager for Debian on Snapdragon X might be in my future.
Yep, I have given my wife an old (but high-spec: i7, 16GB) Dell Latitude with ChromeOS Flex as her desktop. She seems to like it more than the MacBook Pro she had before, because it's simpler.
I discovered ChromeOS Flex can't play movie files. So I installed VLC in the Debian session. Now, when she clicks on any movie file, VLC opens automatically and it just plays. I didn't have to do any configuration; ChromeOS just knows that there's an app installed that can play filetypes including .MOV, .MP4, .AVI etc and it Just Works™.
I also agree re the Android move. I wrote about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/android_replacing_chr...
I like the current ChromeOS. I am concerned by the change.
Besides drivers for some weird hardware, the only daily application might be an office suite, which OSS still can't quite match the MS offering. However, I've found many are willing to deal with the differences given the licensing cost of Office.
She has been using windows since 3.1 days (and dos before that), but recently has been having so many issues with windows changing interfaces and dark patterns. The cognitive load has gotten all too much, and with so many of her friends being scammed online, her and her group are now scared of using computers.
Anyway, Popos is a breath of fresh air for her. The interface is predictable and constant, nothing pesters for her attention, and background stuff stays in the background. She can just use it when she wants for what she wants and it doesn't need constant attention and learning.
But with the end of life for windows 10 in October, I switched back to Linux and I'm quite happy.
I'm running Manjaro with Xfce on my 4 year old LG Gram and it's really snappy while only using 900MB idle memory.
Do any other companies do the same?
Then there are more bespoke vendors that cater specifically to Linux. System76 is probably the most well known, but there are many others.
I'm speaking mainly for laptops/desktops. For servers it's always been you just put whatever on.
Linux gets the most time on servers and containers but the desktop base continues to grow, so expect most problems to be there (bluetooth, wifi, etc.). Accessibility is getting much better.
Important relevant note:
Some companies offer "DOS" or "FreeDOS" computers. This is notably common in poorer countries.
These commonly do not really run DOS. They run a very old version of FreeDOS in a VM under Linux. HP uses Debian.
https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...
1. When you look for Linux machines, look in other countries than your own.
2. Include machines described as DOS machines. They are really Linux machines and will run Linux fine because they in fact ship with it.
There could be incentives for hobbyists and off-hours professionals to contribute to it for fun. However, there are huge missing gaps of usability for the wider population. Windows, macOS, iOS and Android guarantees good support for internationalized, proprietary-first, out-of-the box working OSes which disappear under apps.
Making Linux popular means commonizing things. It requires finding economic incentives to people to maintain unwanted parts not for fun but for money. It'll bring all the things that make the technical people avoid. It has to drive zealots and strong open-source people away. It happened with Android, it will happen to Linux, if somebody finds a way to monetize it for the consumer market.
Ultimately, I don't believe we can solve a socioeconomic problem surfacing on technical devices with technical solutions. Whatever fight against big tech has to be won on the streets, parliaments and courtrooms.
The main problem is that Windows comes on laptops.
So how can we fight this? It might be hard to make this illegal as also Apple creates hardware and put's the software on it.
So the only way is to teach people about their options.
Adtech, IT infrastructure, operating system development, office software and browser development should never belong to the same business. It is not Windows on the laptops that makes Microsoft at the center of IT, it is all the software ecosystem around it which Microsoft also owns a huge slice of it. Throughout the 90s and 00s they were let to buy all of their competition that released software on various platforms. Everything from finance software, reporting software, Microsoft Office suite, Azure Active Directory all belongs to Microsoft. There is no competing with such behemoths. They are guaranteed to be abusive.
Breaking this kind of monopoly first requires encouraging open standards. Got a government contract? You have to release every single detail of the output formats with all the features you support on them. Delivery of all sorts of software to public institutions can only be made with the full copyright assignment to public as well.
This doesn't absolve Linux or any other third party OS developers from being competitive. Linux currently isn't competitive. It is 2 decades behind in many areas. However, a fair market economy will actively break behemoths like Microsoft and let other developers to compete with them. It should encourage actual competition and prevent cheap buyouts of competitive products.
Similarly enforcing ownership rights is critical. If you cannot change software on a device you have, you don't own it. In a properly competitive environment you don't need the knowledge to install OSes. A competitive business would handle that for you or other smaller businesses providing such IT support would also pop up.
In fact I was able to open some huge Excel files more easily in WPS than in MS Office (I have a work laptop that runs Windows 11).
But, I think you have a point, and that point is that the most stable Linux API to release software is actually the Win32 API provided by Wine. Native libraries treat backwards compatibility like a liability.
That sounds like skill issue (i.e the company developing the software doesn't have engineers experienced in developing apps for Linux). There are many proprietary software available for Linux.
Underrated point.
Most Linux distros have historically catered to an ecosystem of open source software with the distro repository model, and cross-distro software distribution is probably the biggest papercut still remaining with Linux today.
Thank goodness things are so much better these days with Electron, Steam, Docker, FlatPak and WINE. But there are still gaps that need filling.
True, but mostly because they see software as a binary number on a disc.
If they saw software as an artefact to build, as Free Software does, this would not be a problem.
A pox on all their (propitiatory) houses. All they are all beneath contempt. They want money, above all. They love money, above all. They care not for their users
Timothy 6:10
The thing that stuck me about windows (windows 11) was how slow the right mouse button click feels. On the main screen, between right clicking and seeing the modal pop up, there is a ~150-200 ms delay that wasn't there on Windows XP and Windows 7. Those were the last major version of Windows I used as my daily drivers.
In windows 11, I was also annoyed by all the bloat on my home screen that I had to turn off manually, like the news feed or the weather or the stock market tracker. Oh -- and here is a good one -- my system clock resets every time I restart. I easily spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out why, and I eventually I gave up. Yes, there is a setting for "synchronize time automatically", but it doesn't work for me. Every time I log into windows, I have to go into the clock settings and manually force a resync with the correct time zone. To me this is just wild.
I transitioned to using Linux full time around 2018-ish, when I stopped playing MMOs. I still keep a version of Windows on my PC, but single-player gaming is a first-class citizen on Linux now, so I haven't logged into windows for some time.
Windows sets the hardware clock to local time.
Every time one or the other updates the clock, it's now in the wrong format for the other OS. The fix is to tell Linux to use local time. There are no side effects as far as I can tell
On Linux with one command you can switch between UTC or local RTC time to match Windows. On Windows you need to change a bit in the registry if you want it to adapt to the Linux way - i.e. the correct one.
Using local time for the RTC theoretically makes it simpler to schedule wakeups at user friendly times, but that seems less impactful.
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
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