I'm no Windows fanboy but there's a lot of misinformation here. In the spirit of bullying the reader with a big list of points, here are some examples of incorrect claims in TFA:
1. It's not hard to disable Cortana and internet-assisted start menu search completion. I assume that's what they mean by "keyboard scanning and voice recording" because I don't think there's anything else like that in the OS. It is possible to disable telemetry. In general Windows 10 does come with a ton of cruft but it can be disabled with e.g. https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
2. Disk fragmentation hasn't been an issue for awhile. Defrag runs as a scheduled task in all versions of Windows 10.
3. I like UAC. The article claims that giving users a dialog box to permit admin access is good for malware, but the alternative is taking admin away from users altogether on their own computers. I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff.
4. Windows has arguably the best plug-and-play driver support of any operating system. It's not hard to find drivers as the article claims.
5. The article claims that it's difficult to figure out why your startup is so slow, but task manager has a "Startup" tab now which tells you which startup items are consuming a lot of CPU at login.
6. The article claims that you can't disable Windows Store apps, Windows tips, and ads in the start menu. That's untrue. I don't even have Windows Store installed as a Windows component, I have no idea what "Windows tips" even is, and my start menu is devoid of ads https://i.imgur.com/xy69BWe.png
I think Windows is pretty bad and most users would probably be better off running Lubuntu or something, but there's no need to resort to exaggeration to make that case.
I actually really like Windows 10, a huge portion of this list could easily apply to any modern operating system that isn't Linux, and even there some of it applies. So OSX, Android, iOS, etc.
The section "Now the second kind of issues is intrinsic to Windows 10 only" is full of things that are literally applicable to all the OSes I listed above. I had some laugh out loud moments reading it. Are people just blinded by rage against Microsoft? I don't see how anyone could type that section in particular out with a straight face while knowing about all the other major modern OSes.
Everything is flat, with no color distinction, that I must scan every single stupid grey icon, and memorize or guess, what the icons mean. Before, some of the icons would have colors, like the defrag program, where I can quickly identify the program, because the icon has a touch of red in it. This slows me down, and it increases my cognitive overhead to look for things in Windows. And often times, the icons no longer have names on it, so it's a total guessing game what this flat abstract icon even means!
The on and off buttons look alike! Often times, I can't figure out which it is. Light switches in the real world, is up and down, so this is easy to remember. But side switches, left or right, are confusing. Was it left to turn on, or the other way. I can't figure it out.
Also, this problem plagues the stupid new iPhone designs too. I miss the skeuomorphisms.
The icons and colors don't matter to me at all. Because it finally has search within control panel. It even seems to index some terms used inside the modules.
Also, these are included in the regular start menu search.
So you can hit windows key and just start typing for 95% of what you need.
For example, hit "windows key" and type "path" to get to the "edit environment variables" menu.
It's worth a mention just how buggy win10 has been for me. I don't spend much time working in windows, but every time I do I encounter one issue or another.
File explorer freezes / crashes.
There is that one empty folder on my desktop that I cannot delete because it is in use, but there is nothing in the folder and no program is conceivably using it.
There are occasional glitches with git. It wouldn't let me clone a git repo somewhere because it said the folder already existed. No such folder existed. Changing the destination name did nothing. Restarting fixed it.
There was a bug which kept rearranging the order of desktop icons, which was actually pretty annoying.
There is a bug that they seem to fix and then break with every other update. Basically, if I go fullscreen with some programs and two monitors set to mirror, the resolution zooms in and it's unusable. This is currently broken in the latest stable release.
Installs from the windows store almost always fail for no obvious reason.
I updated to 1909, or w/e the latest is, hoping that some of the isues I've encountered would be fixed. I've reinstalled the driver and tried fixing it but the USB wifi adapter that I have now no longer works (still works fine in Linux).
I could go on. That is with me going out of my way to not install much at all on the pc, because I know that installing things like tweaks to stop telemetry like the author suggests will lead to even more issues.
Contrast this to the experience I've had with Linux the past few years. It never crashes. Core programs like nemo (file explorer) do not freeze / crash. It updates without issue. I cannot think of a single issue i've had. The computer does exactly what I expect it to do. Stability is vital if you want to be productive.
I'm sure other folks have had the opposite experience. For me though, I am done with Windows.
It's been happening to me too, but it's unclear to me if it's one of my shell extensions or Windows itself. Do you run any shell extensions?
> There are occasional glitches with git. It wouldn't let me clone a git repo somewhere because it said the folder already existed. No such folder existed. Changing the destination name did nothing. Restarting fixed it.
That's mind-boggling. Were you using WSL at all, or just vanilla Windows git? WSL can have these types of issues if you try to mess with its file system (I think due to POSIX deletion semantics), but they shouldn't occur on your desktop...
I've started a list since getting my Win 10 machine at work:
1. Sometimes when I select the titlebar of a maximized window to move it to my second monitor it somehow selects the window under the one with focus.
2. For some applications (including MS Office ones) text is blurry when I move from laptop screen to external monitor.
4. Windows 10 ships with a python.exe in the path that opens the MS Store. Figuring out which part of the path to fix to disable it was non-obvious.
5. VirtualBox is broken because of some Hyper-V settings. I still haven't figured out how to fix this one.
MS somehow shipped an OS with problems I've never seen before in any OS...
The first time I did an upgrade from 7 to 10 and I saw the horrible anti-patterns in the "opt-in" screens, I shut it down and switched to Debian Buster. No looking back.
I've come to accept that there is no good OS (maybe iOS, but not really). You're just picking your poison.
Want to be spied on and have your system slowly accumulate cruft and grind to a halt over the course of a few years? Use Windows.
Want to be constantly fiddling with your system just to keep it running on a day to day basis? Use Linux.
Want to be constantly spied on and probably also hacked? Use Android.
Want to pay a bunch of extra money and still deal with a decent number of bugs¹ and atrocious default settings/annoying user-protection features you have to turn off? Use macOS.
Just because some Linux users do that does not mean it is a requirement. If it were, Linux could never have achieved server the server dominance it has. Fiddling is a side effect of Linux being too flexible, so you always have the nagging feeling you could be better with a different distro/window manager/shell/editor/file manager.
I installed Linux Mint on my parents' computer and it's been running rock solid for three years. And they appreciate not being tricked into updates they don't want.
This is fairly spot on though a bit overly generalizing perhaps (e.g. might be me, but 8 years of Win7 on work machine and it's still running completely ok and depending on what exactly you use Linux for there's only moderate amounts of fiddling, though fiddling there is :) I've used and still use all the major OS. There's no silver bullet and there's bugs everywhere, one more annoying than the other. Learning to use them properly (yes that sometimes means finding ways around annoyances) goes a very long way though.
> Want to be constantly spied on and probably also hacked? Use Android.
Most of the spying is done by phone apps. This affects iOS and Android in the same way in recent versions. The extra bit that gets sent to Google directly seems like a small part of it.
For 95% of people that want to do what they want to do and not worry about malware or other nonsense? Use macOS/iOS. The little bit of extra money is well worth the time saved.
Yes, though I don't fiddle with things much day to day with Linux any more.
But I'll tell you what does happen: CADT and shit just randomly breaking from release to release. Fewer things work than did ten years ago as well.
Right now I have gargantuan indicator icons in my Ubuntu Mate panels. They worked fine for the last ten years previously. But here we go on 19.10. Has something to do with my 4k monitors but as mentioned, worked fine until this release.
If there were a proper framework for doing web development on iPadOS, I'd switch to using my iPad for a big chunk of my development. It's getting very close but still falls a bit short.
Windows 10 is can be infuriating. But I can't find any other OS that is a good alternative. It's the worst OS, except for all the other OSes out there.
1. Best in gaming.
2. Engineering applications (CAD/Matlab/LabView) are usually windows-first
3. Good software development ecosystem. Now with Windows Subsystem for Linux, the need for having another OS is diminishing.
4. User interface is great. A lot of customization options (official and third party). It is not bare-bones like Linux but also not user-proofed like macOS.
#3 Linux is way ahead.
#4 There are quite a few distributions, I think you should look around. I use KDE happily. I frankly find Windows rather bare bones in what you get. It seems everything needs another app, and they're all a pain in the ass.
4. Sadly nowadays it's one of the worst UIs. It was great starting with Windows 95 and ending with 7. It all went downhill starting with Windows 8. Windows 10 isn't much better.
Apple hasn't done a great job of supporting MacOS over the past few years. Catalina in particular has been a bit rocky, but every time I look seriously at Windows as an alternative it falls short.
It's quite sad to me that my choice of OS has essentially boiled down to "Sucks less, costs more".
It's been a few years for me, but maybe time to start seriously looking at Linux on the desktop again.
I don't see how Apple hasn't done the best job in terms of operating systems. macOS hasn't changed significantly in the last decade; it's essentially the same interface, but less skeumorphism. The only bug I've experienced that's close to being serious is the touchbar freezing(seriously wtf).
Windows, on the other hand, has changed significantly. Sure, it runs 32-bit programs, but the interface difference between 7 and 10 is ginormous.
Linux, as much as I love it, is probably the worst offender. At one point we had GNOME and KDE as dominant desktop environments, and then we had Unity, GNOME 3, Cinnamon, MATE, etc. Now after years of forcing Unity on everyone, Ubuntu has switched to GNOME except now GNOME is in a worse state than it was back in GNOME 2. Most distros are still using X11, graphics card support is lousy, and horizontal display tearing is still a problem that every commercial OS has 100% solved.
macOS has at least remained fairly consistent compared to all the other competition.
Try Manjaro Linux. It's fabulous and everything just works! I've been running it on 2 or 3 workstations for over a year now with less hassle than I ever had on Windows or macOS. I also got a few juniors at work running it and none of us has had any problem doing exactly what we need.
I had to write a couple of xdotools shell scripts to do things I need, such as "move active window to next monitor", but just about everything I searched for, I found a solution for. On my laptop which had a "precision touchpad" (one that offered advanced 2/3/4 finger gesture support in Windows) I was able to get all of the gestures working just like they would in macOS. On my desktops where I use a wheel mouse, I had to install a Chrome extension called AutoScroll to get wheel auto-scrolling to work there.
Tweaking the system to make it behave just the way I wanted to was also a fantastically fun experience though and it brought the joy of desktop computing back in a way I never really experienced with Windows. Being in control is great.
When I mentioned this another time on here someone said they liked the sound of that, but they wanted to use Ubuntu for better compatibility with Microsoft .NET Core. So, I thought I'd compare the experience with Manjaro. Honestly, there's no comparison. Manjaro was so much smoother of an experience setting up things because all the software is available from one repo and it's newer so there's not 10 billion articles about old versions that don't apply anymore like Ubuntu. I also hated having to add repos to Ubuntus package manager for every new package. With Manjaro you just run the Add/Remove Software GUI and everything comes from the AUR (Arch User Repository). Also, my Ubuntu experiment ate itself after less than a week when it wouldn't boot one day after an update.
I've been using Linux since the late 90s when I started learning Red Hat to build DMZ and DNS servers for work. I've tried Linux desktops here and there since that time and nothing has ever come close to the stability and ease of running Manjaro. I highly recommend it for switchers.
I use both platforms regularly. Using dual screens, I have noticed many more bugs in MacOS graphics stack than Windows. From out-right freezes, to black screens, inverted colors, wrong colors, fuzzy fonts, screen glitches and more.
The best things about MacOS is its Unix underpinnings and general consistency. The flip-side also happens to be the two worst things about Windows.
LTSC was exactly what I wanted from a Windows OS. No Windows Store, no Candy Crush, and—most importantly by far—only security updates.
It's the Debian model. Your OS stays secure, but the software will never change in a user visible way, unless/until you specifically choose to install a new LTSC release, which comes out around once every two years.
One positive point as the article points out is compatibility. This is the single reason Windows remains the staple of industry software, across almost all industries. It's particularly relevant in light of recent Mac OS X dropping 32-bit support. There are a lot of professionals whose livelihood depends on these older apps that either will never be updated or will take a very long time to do so.
Something small I like about Windows: when I plug in Ethernet, it actually shows an Ethernet connection in the system tray. OSX seems to have a special icon for tethering to iPhone, but not Ethernet of all things. It just show the wifi icon, even when Ethernet is connected. Grr.
I'm perpetually shocked by how slow many of the loading / progress-bar screens are in Windows. Random operations taking 1-5 minutes without any visible change is routine.
Honestly, what the unholy fuck is actually happening behind these screens? The only thing that takes anywhere near that long on Linux is compiling.
I never got into an intractable package issue with windows, where the dependencies were broke in a way where I had to crawl through logs and manually delete things to get them working. That’s happened to me a handful of times with Ubuntu and bad package configs.
I think this is inherently due to Windows registry and no enforced standards for Windows file system. In Linux, packages are generally reviewed to ensure they follow a set of practices to ensure that they use the appropriate directories. Then they simply have to extract the files/folders to install the application, and removing is as simple as deleting those directories/files. In Windows, you really never know what you're going to get when you run an install. You might get 1k registry keys created, and it is near impossible to monitor and replicate. They might install the App in Program Files, or if it is new Appx package it will be somewhere completely different. Some apps may install in AppData. It is completely unpredictable. Running an uninstall may call msiexec, or some other uninstaller.
In order for Windows to have a Linux like package manager, they would have to re-define the install process completely to act like Linux and probably move away from the Windows Registry completely.
> but the truth is that the built-in antimalware protection in Windows is simply horrible (according to various AV comparisons, Microsoft Essentials misses over 20% of in-the-wild malware)
AV comparisons have to be normally taken with a pile of salt. There's rarely an independent one. And even once you start looking at 3rd parties, it turns out they enable attack surface on their own. Then there's a number of 3rd parties which rely on cloud scanning aka "submit it to virustotal".
At this point I'm not sure that a desktop OS with this wide hardware compatibility and backwards compatibility can be written any better than Windows 10.
The thing is, if you are an experienced user with willingness to search for solutions, you can fix most of the problems. Disable updates completely, disable cortana, stop 99% of the telemetry, use alternative utilities instead of the built-in ones, fix security issues with network rules etc.
It takes time and patience, but in the end you get a good work environment that is relatively stable, compatible with literally every hardware and also has the absolutely widest selection of software available. That is all I want from an OS.
The fixes you've listed get overturned by Microsoft. Just because you can hack around windows to make it temporarily do the things you want, doesn't mean it's a resolved problem.
Microsoft only does this because they've been able to reduce consumer expectations. Being a part of that means the next version will be worse.
it's funny to read a rant from a ex-Microsoft and sad that he doesn't know why Microsoft still have a vast market share.
I've been in the IT game for 10+ years. small/mid companies doesn't have the budget or man powers to leave the MS's lala land and they can care less. IT is a money losing dept and they need to make money by focus on what they do best.
Windows is a platform where most of their software work and their employees know.
do you think small/mid or heck the giant corporation have the money, staff and time to move their employees and operation out of Windows.
IT costs money yes, but it's not like there is ZERO ROI. Just because the value isn't immediately obvious doesn't mean it's not helping the business and it's bottom line. I agree that certain aspects of IT you should try to minimize cost because the value add is minimal, or because throwing more money at that aspect of IT does not help the business. But other aspects of IT that improve efficiency of the organization or even multiply the capabilities of the business will give you a significant ROI. Just to put it into perspective, is Marketing your business exclusively lose you money? Obviously not. There is an ROI, but it's not always immediately measurable.
I'm sorry whatever education or experience had failed you in seeing this. The successful business will recognize the value of every department and attempt to maximize the return where it makes sense.
I agree with your other points. The entire business industry is on Windows. Almost all applications work on Windows or integrate with Windows. Most employees are experienced with Windows. the cost of retraining, the loss of potential talent, the cost of not being able to integrate fully with other businesses that are on Windows are some of the reasons why they are entrenched.
I have a finance degree, business degree, comp sci degree, and run my own business plus have worked IN IT at successful multi-million dollar orgs and the most successful focus on IT as well as other departments to push value add investment in those departments.
Windows has been losing mindshare for years. That's why it is finally competing again. Maybe it will recover its super-dominant position but it's more likely to fade out slowly.
[+] [-] brianpgordon|6 years ago|reply
1. It's not hard to disable Cortana and internet-assisted start menu search completion. I assume that's what they mean by "keyboard scanning and voice recording" because I don't think there's anything else like that in the OS. It is possible to disable telemetry. In general Windows 10 does come with a ton of cruft but it can be disabled with e.g. https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
2. Disk fragmentation hasn't been an issue for awhile. Defrag runs as a scheduled task in all versions of Windows 10.
3. I like UAC. The article claims that giving users a dialog box to permit admin access is good for malware, but the alternative is taking admin away from users altogether on their own computers. I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff.
4. Windows has arguably the best plug-and-play driver support of any operating system. It's not hard to find drivers as the article claims.
5. The article claims that it's difficult to figure out why your startup is so slow, but task manager has a "Startup" tab now which tells you which startup items are consuming a lot of CPU at login.
6. The article claims that you can't disable Windows Store apps, Windows tips, and ads in the start menu. That's untrue. I don't even have Windows Store installed as a Windows component, I have no idea what "Windows tips" even is, and my start menu is devoid of ads https://i.imgur.com/xy69BWe.png
I think Windows is pretty bad and most users would probably be better off running Lubuntu or something, but there's no need to resort to exaggeration to make that case.
[+] [-] partiallypro|6 years ago|reply
The section "Now the second kind of issues is intrinsic to Windows 10 only" is full of things that are literally applicable to all the OSes I listed above. I had some laugh out loud moments reading it. Are people just blinded by rage against Microsoft? I don't see how anyone could type that section in particular out with a straight face while knowing about all the other major modern OSes.
[+] [-] blackrock|6 years ago|reply
Everything is flat, with no color distinction, that I must scan every single stupid grey icon, and memorize or guess, what the icons mean. Before, some of the icons would have colors, like the defrag program, where I can quickly identify the program, because the icon has a touch of red in it. This slows me down, and it increases my cognitive overhead to look for things in Windows. And often times, the icons no longer have names on it, so it's a total guessing game what this flat abstract icon even means!
The on and off buttons look alike! Often times, I can't figure out which it is. Light switches in the real world, is up and down, so this is easy to remember. But side switches, left or right, are confusing. Was it left to turn on, or the other way. I can't figure it out.
Also, this problem plagues the stupid new iPhone designs too. I miss the skeuomorphisms.
[+] [-] jjeaff|6 years ago|reply
Also, these are included in the regular start menu search.
So you can hit windows key and just start typing for 95% of what you need.
For example, hit "windows key" and type "path" to get to the "edit environment variables" menu.
[+] [-] MikusR|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jotm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suby|6 years ago|reply
File explorer freezes / crashes.
There is that one empty folder on my desktop that I cannot delete because it is in use, but there is nothing in the folder and no program is conceivably using it.
There are occasional glitches with git. It wouldn't let me clone a git repo somewhere because it said the folder already existed. No such folder existed. Changing the destination name did nothing. Restarting fixed it.
There was a bug which kept rearranging the order of desktop icons, which was actually pretty annoying.
There is a bug that they seem to fix and then break with every other update. Basically, if I go fullscreen with some programs and two monitors set to mirror, the resolution zooms in and it's unusable. This is currently broken in the latest stable release.
Installs from the windows store almost always fail for no obvious reason.
I updated to 1909, or w/e the latest is, hoping that some of the isues I've encountered would be fixed. I've reinstalled the driver and tried fixing it but the USB wifi adapter that I have now no longer works (still works fine in Linux).
I could go on. That is with me going out of my way to not install much at all on the pc, because I know that installing things like tweaks to stop telemetry like the author suggests will lead to even more issues.
Contrast this to the experience I've had with Linux the past few years. It never crashes. Core programs like nemo (file explorer) do not freeze / crash. It updates without issue. I cannot think of a single issue i've had. The computer does exactly what I expect it to do. Stability is vital if you want to be productive.
I'm sure other folks have had the opposite experience. For me though, I am done with Windows.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|6 years ago|reply
It's been happening to me too, but it's unclear to me if it's one of my shell extensions or Windows itself. Do you run any shell extensions?
> There are occasional glitches with git. It wouldn't let me clone a git repo somewhere because it said the folder already existed. No such folder existed. Changing the destination name did nothing. Restarting fixed it.
That's mind-boggling. Were you using WSL at all, or just vanilla Windows git? WSL can have these types of issues if you try to mess with its file system (I think due to POSIX deletion semantics), but they shouldn't occur on your desktop...
[+] [-] wvenable|6 years ago|reply
Is it though? I mean I've had none of these problems. You could literally have a bad RAM stick or a misbehaving piece of hardware.
For every one of these posts, are hundreds of thousands of people will no problems at all and therefore no reason to make a post.
[+] [-] walshemj|6 years ago|reply
Where you using the windows git client that plus atom with the right plugins is great
The only annoying one is the way Dell messed up its recent sound drivers - sound is one are which Microsoft needs good hard kick up the ass.
[+] [-] intrepidhero|6 years ago|reply
1. Sometimes when I select the titlebar of a maximized window to move it to my second monitor it somehow selects the window under the one with focus.
2. For some applications (including MS Office ones) text is blurry when I move from laptop screen to external monitor.
4. Windows 10 ships with a python.exe in the path that opens the MS Store. Figuring out which part of the path to fix to disable it was non-obvious.
5. VirtualBox is broken because of some Hyper-V settings. I still haven't figured out how to fix this one.
MS somehow shipped an OS with problems I've never seen before in any OS...
The first time I did an upgrade from 7 to 10 and I saw the horrible anti-patterns in the "opt-in" screens, I shut it down and switched to Debian Buster. No looking back.
[+] [-] zamadatix|6 years ago|reply
Also you skipped #3 in your list
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|6 years ago|reply
This has been the way I've resolved this for many years with Windows:
https://superuser.com/a/642027
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
Want to be spied on and have your system slowly accumulate cruft and grind to a halt over the course of a few years? Use Windows.
Want to be constantly fiddling with your system just to keep it running on a day to day basis? Use Linux.
Want to be constantly spied on and probably also hacked? Use Android.
Want to pay a bunch of extra money and still deal with a decent number of bugs¹ and atrocious default settings/annoying user-protection features you have to turn off? Use macOS.
¹All of them are riddled with bugs
[+] [-] c2the3rd|6 years ago|reply
I installed Linux Mint on my parents' computer and it's been running rock solid for three years. And they appreciate not being tricked into updates they don't want.
[+] [-] stinos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|6 years ago|reply
Most of the spying is done by phone apps. This affects iOS and Android in the same way in recent versions. The extra bit that gets sent to Google directly seems like a small part of it.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|6 years ago|reply
But I'll tell you what does happen: CADT and shit just randomly breaking from release to release. Fewer things work than did ten years ago as well.
Right now I have gargantuan indicator icons in my Ubuntu Mate panels. They worked fine for the last ten years previously. But here we go on 19.10. Has something to do with my 4k monitors but as mentioned, worked fine until this release.
[+] [-] kardos|6 years ago|reply
This may have been true 10+ years ago; the amount of fiddling required is pretty low these days.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
But nobody has stepped up to the plate.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] itvision|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphachloride|6 years ago|reply
1. Best in gaming.
2. Engineering applications (CAD/Matlab/LabView) are usually windows-first
3. Good software development ecosystem. Now with Windows Subsystem for Linux, the need for having another OS is diminishing.
4. User interface is great. A lot of customization options (official and third party). It is not bare-bones like Linux but also not user-proofed like macOS.
[+] [-] lallysingh|6 years ago|reply
#3 Linux is way ahead. #4 There are quite a few distributions, I think you should look around. I use KDE happily. I frankly find Windows rather bare bones in what you get. It seems everything needs another app, and they're all a pain in the ass.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] itvision|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|6 years ago|reply
It's quite sad to me that my choice of OS has essentially boiled down to "Sucks less, costs more".
It's been a few years for me, but maybe time to start seriously looking at Linux on the desktop again.
[+] [-] ravenstine|6 years ago|reply
Windows, on the other hand, has changed significantly. Sure, it runs 32-bit programs, but the interface difference between 7 and 10 is ginormous.
Linux, as much as I love it, is probably the worst offender. At one point we had GNOME and KDE as dominant desktop environments, and then we had Unity, GNOME 3, Cinnamon, MATE, etc. Now after years of forcing Unity on everyone, Ubuntu has switched to GNOME except now GNOME is in a worse state than it was back in GNOME 2. Most distros are still using X11, graphics card support is lousy, and horizontal display tearing is still a problem that every commercial OS has 100% solved.
macOS has at least remained fairly consistent compared to all the other competition.
[+] [-] wayneftw|6 years ago|reply
I had to write a couple of xdotools shell scripts to do things I need, such as "move active window to next monitor", but just about everything I searched for, I found a solution for. On my laptop which had a "precision touchpad" (one that offered advanced 2/3/4 finger gesture support in Windows) I was able to get all of the gestures working just like they would in macOS. On my desktops where I use a wheel mouse, I had to install a Chrome extension called AutoScroll to get wheel auto-scrolling to work there.
Tweaking the system to make it behave just the way I wanted to was also a fantastically fun experience though and it brought the joy of desktop computing back in a way I never really experienced with Windows. Being in control is great.
When I mentioned this another time on here someone said they liked the sound of that, but they wanted to use Ubuntu for better compatibility with Microsoft .NET Core. So, I thought I'd compare the experience with Manjaro. Honestly, there's no comparison. Manjaro was so much smoother of an experience setting up things because all the software is available from one repo and it's newer so there's not 10 billion articles about old versions that don't apply anymore like Ubuntu. I also hated having to add repos to Ubuntus package manager for every new package. With Manjaro you just run the Add/Remove Software GUI and everything comes from the AUR (Arch User Repository). Also, my Ubuntu experiment ate itself after less than a week when it wouldn't boot one day after an update.
I've been using Linux since the late 90s when I started learning Red Hat to build DMZ and DNS servers for work. I've tried Linux desktops here and there since that time and nothing has ever come close to the stability and ease of running Manjaro. I highly recommend it for switchers.
[+] [-] megaman821|6 years ago|reply
The best things about MacOS is its Unix underpinnings and general consistency. The flip-side also happens to be the two worst things about Windows.
[+] [-] zionic|6 years ago|reply
It's almost 2020. Apple began shipping HiDPI in 2012. It's absolutely shameful that vendors are still shipping 1080p.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
LTSC was exactly what I wanted from a Windows OS. No Windows Store, no Candy Crush, and—most importantly by far—only security updates.
It's the Debian model. Your OS stays secure, but the software will never change in a user visible way, unless/until you specifically choose to install a new LTSC release, which comes out around once every two years.
It's perfect.
[+] [-] nvarsj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] folkhack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] softwaredoug|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pxeboot|6 years ago|reply
Although it has improved, Windows Update is still shockingly bad compared to any decent package manager used on Linux in the past 10+ years.
[+] [-] ohazi|6 years ago|reply
Honestly, what the unholy fuck is actually happening behind these screens? The only thing that takes anywhere near that long on Linux is compiling.
[+] [-] 3fe9a03ccd14ca5|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techntoke|6 years ago|reply
In order for Windows to have a Linux like package manager, they would have to re-define the install process completely to act like Linux and probably move away from the Windows Registry completely.
[+] [-] Neil44|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neurobashing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3fe9a03ccd14ca5|6 years ago|reply
This is an issue for me, and it’s an issue you, but it is emphatically not an issue for the vast majority of windows users.
Do bloggers simply choose to ignore this fact when writing swan song posts about the “end” of this or that?
[+] [-] viraptor|6 years ago|reply
AV comparisons have to be normally taken with a pile of salt. There's rarely an independent one. And even once you start looking at 3rd parties, it turns out they enable attack surface on their own. Then there's a number of 3rd parties which rely on cloud scanning aka "submit it to virustotal".
Here's some more context for why the comparisons are tricky: https://www.mrg-effitas.com/research/stop-using-virustotal-t...
[+] [-] poisonborz|6 years ago|reply
The thing is, if you are an experienced user with willingness to search for solutions, you can fix most of the problems. Disable updates completely, disable cortana, stop 99% of the telemetry, use alternative utilities instead of the built-in ones, fix security issues with network rules etc.
It takes time and patience, but in the end you get a good work environment that is relatively stable, compatible with literally every hardware and also has the absolutely widest selection of software available. That is all I want from an OS.
[+] [-] devwastaken|6 years ago|reply
Microsoft only does this because they've been able to reduce consumer expectations. Being a part of that means the next version will be worse.
[+] [-] dotnetcore|6 years ago|reply
I've been in the IT game for 10+ years. small/mid companies doesn't have the budget or man powers to leave the MS's lala land and they can care less. IT is a money losing dept and they need to make money by focus on what they do best.
Windows is a platform where most of their software work and their employees know.
do you think small/mid or heck the giant corporation have the money, staff and time to move their employees and operation out of Windows.
[+] [-] thisisnico|6 years ago|reply
I'm sorry whatever education or experience had failed you in seeing this. The successful business will recognize the value of every department and attempt to maximize the return where it makes sense.
I agree with your other points. The entire business industry is on Windows. Almost all applications work on Windows or integrate with Windows. Most employees are experienced with Windows. the cost of retraining, the loss of potential talent, the cost of not being able to integrate fully with other businesses that are on Windows are some of the reasons why they are entrenched.
I have a finance degree, business degree, comp sci degree, and run my own business plus have worked IN IT at successful multi-million dollar orgs and the most successful focus on IT as well as other departments to push value add investment in those departments.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|6 years ago|reply