[inktype]

Windows and its ecosystem have already become a telemetry monster; if you're fine with everything else, you ought to be fine with this. The linked Intel support page shows the simple instructions for opting out of the telemetry.

Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!

[hef19898]

Linux is great! And, thanks to Steam, a lot of games wirk as well. Not all, but most.

Ubuntu, I haven't tried anything else so far, is a charm on Lenovo hardware. Update wise, it is were Windows was a couple of years ago. Meaning there are random updates that just kill and break certain functions. Happened last week, everything was running fine, including steam, as it always did. Until an update managed to delete the GUI, reinstalling the GUI killed nVidia drivers, Steam couldn't be installed under 23.04 for some missing dataset, installing said data (some 32-bit stuff) killed WiFi...

No attack on Linux so, I rember that not too long ago I stopped all Eindows updates because for months the auto-updates had the same effect (save the WiFi bit).

So yes, my dqily, private driver is Linux. And will be, except for games, for the time being. All I uave to do now, well after vacation, is to get Steam running properly again. Feels like a throwback to the pre Win 10 days, when Windows randomly did the same thing with regards to drivers and certain games / programs.

[bee_rider]

It is unfortunate that people recommended Ubuntu as a starting distro for so long.

It does too much. It will update things for you, or give you a pop-up to tell you to update. Updates happen all at once, rather than a little at a time, so you get these big dramatic updates with combinatorial bug explosions. Maybe the repos will be gone if you don’t update in time. Maybe your favorite packages have moved from apt to snap. Good luck!

A rolling release distro like Arch would be a better first experience for most people I think.

Linux is not where Windows was years ago. Software gently rolls in at a nice steady rate. Some distros choose to take that nice steady flow, chop it up, and for some reason emulate the Windows catastrophic update experience. It is… an odd decision.

[erwincoumans]

It would be great if Linux had some automatic checkpoints so you can revert to a working system after an update. So many times updates leave a broken system and re-install Ubuntu from scratch is quicker than fixing the problem.

[o1y32]

> Everything just works

No it doesn't. Every Linux desktop requires me to spend hours tweaking things or finding workarounds to make it usable for myself. Window management is horrible compared to other OS. Fractional scaling mostly doesn't work. The Pomodoro timer in the "Software" store is no longer maintained and doesn't work at all on the latest Gnome. (Windows 11 has it built-in). Even so, I have to live with certain restrictions. I tried to get into Linux desktop every few years, and I never find the situation has improved much.

By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it. And it's still a miserable experience. On the other hand, if I just install a batteries included Linux distro I get something I'm not necessarily thrilled about, but I can go pretty much straight to work. And if I spend a few days, I can set up a system that's exactly tailored the way I want it to be, eats an order of magnitude less RAM than Windows, and doesn't regularly break itself by forcing updates on me, changing settings from under me, etc.

MacOS is somewhat better than Windows(less garbage to hose off), but it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware it runs on.

[mrguyorama]

People are acting like Linus Sebastian and that other guy didn't JUST RECENTLY demonstrate Linux to still be a tough sell to non-linux gurus for daily driving.

[bsder]

> By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.

My wife is constantly taking her laptop into her IT staff.

The main difference between Windows and Linux is that corporate IT staff are willing to futz with Windows but not Linux.

The main difference between macOS and Linux is that macOS users will spend money to futz with macOS but not Linux.

[NoGravitas]

To be fair, fractional scaling on Windows is kind of garbage, at least if you don't have the same scaling set on every display. If I have one screen at 100% and one at 125%, any application will look okay only on the display it was started on, and blurry on any others. I don't think the situation is any better on Linux, but I'm pretty sure that as long as you're using Wayland (only), it's not any worse.

[iraqmtpizza]

meanwhile, .bashrc, .bash_login, .bash_profile, .profile, /etc/profile, and /etc/environment all still exist, are poorly documented, and if you want a GUI for them, you have to build it yourself.

[risho]

you are correct about fractional scaling being suboptimal and there are a few quirks here and there but linux has become largely usable at this point. most of the criticisms you have made about linux are due to inexperience and not being familiar with it rather than being fundamental problems with it. If instead of spending the last x years of your life daily driving windows or macos you had instead spent that time daily driving linux you would have all of the understanding infrastructure built up around linux instead and these would be non problems. I use fedora with gnome and I don't install any extensions or do any tweaking or workarounds as you say.

I know this is true because i'm a non developer, non power user (though still relatively technical) who has been using linux since 2006 and it works just fine. Not only that my dad has been happily setup using linux since around 2014 and he is as non technical as they come.

To really go in on this point I bought a macbook pro when the m1 devices came out and the experience you have with linux I have with macos. It's the worst operating system I have ever used. You complain about linux having bad window management but macos has basically no window management. you double click the top bar and depending on the software sometimes it will maximize, sometimes it will pull the window all the way down the screen and sometimes it will do nothing at all. You drag the window to the top or to the side and nothing happens at all. Window management on macos is so bad that most people say that you need to install external tools to mac it even half way usable. Even when you do its still less performant and buggier than what gnome or windows offers out of the box. You say macos needs no setup, but I spent 10's of hours desperately trying to make the workflow and ux of macos not be a horrible experience for me. Everything from no tools and trying to work within its paradigm, simple window management tools even going so far as to trying yabai and none of them felt right to me.

Now that said I would bet a person who has spent a decade daily driving macos probably has internalized the ins and outs and quirks relating to macos and wouldn't find it nearly as problematic. Most of the issues people have with linux are much less problems with linux and much more a lack of workflow understanding that they haven't built up but have built up around other operating systems instead.

The main exception being that there are some proprietary tools that are pretty explicitly not supported on linux which require windows or macos.

[gambiting]

>> Everything works.

I'm a video games developer. Neither PS5, Xbox nor Switch toolchains work under linux - not to mention that actual proper Visual Studio doesn't and that alone is worth staying on windows for.

For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.

[qwertox]

Also good luck in convincing Native Instruments and other musical instrument developers to also compile their plug-ins for Linux.

[gorjusborg]

There are plenty of niches that use proprietary tools that don't work across platforms.

I don't think that's a fair criticism of the platform 'working'. That's just status quo / profit maximizing on the part of the tool selectors and developers.

Linux works very well with regards to hardware.

Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb. It's a tool that targets windows (mostly) written by the developers that sell windows.

You don't have to look very hard for a world class c/c++ tool chain on linux.

[Dalewyn]

>For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.

The caveat is that this is only true when applied to games on Steam. I play games that aren't on Steam, and I've not even bothered to see if they would run on Linux because it's just not worth my time.

(No, I do not expect something in Japanese that communicates with DMM Game Player for user authentication and DRM shenanigans to work in Linux.)

[account42]

FWIW at least cl.exe and msbuild work just fine under Wine. I never cared for the IDE so no idea how well it runs but if you just need to build VS projects you can do that.

[matheusmoreira]

You should demand Linux software from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

[cornercasechase]

The “year of the desktop” implies a solution for consumers, not professionals. That being said for almost every other kind of development Linux is by far the best platform. I cannot develop on Mac anymore due to Apple making things more difficult in every update.

[devsda]

Switching to linux is a good option but the ideal solution is one where coporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default.

Microsoft has normalized default optout telemetry in the OS, IDE & developer tooling and now others are also following suit even in areas where telemetry doesn't make sense.

I wish there is an easy solution to the pervasive telemetry problem for those who can't switch for any reason.

[musicale]

Microsoft has really poisoned the well with default-always-on-telemetry.

Technical solutions (firewalls, switching to Linux, etc.) aren't necessarily practical for many people.

> the ideal solution is one where corporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default

This is probably the only effective solution, but I don't see it happening without enforceable legislation.

[Zambyte]

Corporations should not be allowed to collect telemetry at all. Information should always be pushed from one party to another, never pulled.

[RajT88]

Companies have not yet woken up to the idea that implementing this kind of telemetry is effectively leaking their private business data to third parties (competitors even).

Nobody's been so obviously burned by it yet that the lawsuits have started flying.

Just imagine the kind of data (say) Microsoft is leaking to Google, via all those users running Chrome. How about all those AMD users who are running Intel/NVIDIA graphics drivers in their laptops?

If I am a big tech company sitting on a pile of that telemetry data, you can bet I'll be tempted to data mine it for such leaked data about what the competition is up to. It'll probably take an email leak to reveal the practice, and cause some sort of consequences for this though.

[raxxorraxor]

Economic espionage is the largest field of espionage. Although I guess if any big tech company would get caught, there will be repercussions for their business.

[royal_ts]

KDE is great but also very, very buggy. I'm using it since 2016 and some bugs just won't go away and good luck with openeing a bug report - nobody will care. Especially multi monitor support just isn't good. Multi window support is also, by default, not as good as Windows does it. Sicne a few updates I'm getting some polciykit errors everytime I'm doing anything session related just because - I have not found a solution since then.

[loeg]

I use KDE daily, including a multi-monitor setup, and it is not buggy in my experience. Like, at all, much less "very, very." I wonder why we have had such different experiences? I'm using Fedora.

[marcosdumay]

Debian (stable) user here. I'm also scratching my head trying to understand what bugs you find on KDE. Or what kind of multi-monitor or window behavior you have a problem with when compared to Windows. (Isn't the default window behavior basically equal to Windows? I have never notice a difference in anything that I didn't change myself.)

I too think you were unlucky on your combination of hardware-distro-setup in some unusual way.

[v3ss0n]

Use Manjaro, KDE focused arch linuxes, they have latest KDE , I am using KDE dedicated Linuxes ( Gentoo, arch) and past 5 years is a blast for KDE. Much stable.for WM I am using QTile because it have best tiling wm that works with KDE application

[v3ss0n]

Use Manjaro, KDE focused arch linuxes, they have latest KDE , I am using KDE dedicated Linuxes ( Gentoo, arch) and past 5 years is a blast for KDE. Much stable.for WM I am using QTile because itis best tiling wm that works with KDE application

[Workaccount2]

The worst thing about linux is that it is made an maintained by people who like linux.

I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI.

People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including right now.

I'm someone who does way more than email and youtube, but has less than zero interest in spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux so I can become a proper user.

[screamingninja]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but is this not a straw man argument?

> spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux

> become a proper user

Care to elaborate? My parents have been using Ubuntu successfully for over a decade now for "email and youtube". They do not even know what a CLI is. What are you trying to accomplish that does not work out of the box?

[postmodest]

There is a FreeBSD fork that does exactly that, but to use it you need to buy a $3000 hardware dongle....

That's the path a lot of Mac Users are on, though we also have a telemetry problem; the only advantage is that it stays "in house".

[pdntspa]

If you didn't have that attitude you could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months and then you wouldnt have to worry about it.

Also, "power user friendly" but hates CLI..... I see. You might have to hand in your power user card over that one

I am a diehard windows user but the OS's affinity for burying settings in nested, labyrinthine setting dialogs gets old super fast.

[femiagbabiaka]

Power users require CLI on every OS. Not just Linux, but also Windows or OSX, to be specific.

[dylan604]

>power user...that never needs to pull up a CLI.

What strange creature is this? Is it a mythical creature like a unicorn or closer to big foot?

[account42]

> a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI

ERROR: Does not compute.

A CLI is the pinacle of power user friendlyness.

[joshspankit]

You might like the ability to use natural language on the CLI, then have AI create and run the command for you.

One example of many: https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT

[rdp36]

It's called a Chromebook.

[sukruh]

FWIW ChatGPT is pretty good in generating the specific Bash incantations you need to perform if you describe what you want to do in plain English and don't forget to add the specific version of the OS you're using. Unless what you're trying to do is pretty advanced and would be cumbersome in any other OS as well.

Learning specific API's are over. Mostly.

[Grom_PE]

Yep. Jumped ship after Windows 7 due to pervasive telemetry. That was a deal breaker for me. It's funny that Windows (and its ecosystem) getting shitty is the major factor of "Linux desktop" happening.

I figured that the effort of decrapifying Windows has outgrown the effort of configuring a Linux system, and furthermore, the former becomes obsolete with every Windows update, but the latter stays with you forever.

In 2022, Linux port of Far Manager, far2l, got a fork with LuaJIT scripting support, far2m, and that was the last thing holding me on Windows.

[bacchusracine]

>KDE gets better every week.

As someone who has tried KDE off and on over the years since its version 2.0 release in SuSE Linux, and through various versions and distros since is there a fork that doesn't have twenty different configuration options in their own apps?

I was most happy with Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x desktop and am currently using Mate Desktop these days to try to hold on to what I consider the best desktop and what I always felt "home" at when using it. But it gets more and more inconsistent release after release due to intentional theme breakages. I'd love to be able to use KDE or Plasma instead and take advantage of the way that desktop leverages its shared libraries for performance if only I could get over the behavior of its shell and configuration.

Is there anything that I can run that re-organizes it into the traditional desktop that I prefer? A script? A combined theme?

I see all sorts of themes for Windows (why?) and themes for OSX (also why? especially without the skeuomorphic looks of the past?) but there seems to be very little that would take someone from Gnome 2.x\Mate to KDE. Am I just missing it? Is there any way off this burning platform?

I keep hearing how great KDE is and can perform but it makes my skin crawl when using it. Is there any way to change it that doesn't leave me lost at sea going between multiple applications with nested options?

Thanks in advance for any advice given.

[iraqmtpizza]

I have yet to use a linux desktop which has working drag-and-drop. When you drag a file or file path from the file explorer and drop into the command prompt, it's supposed to put the file path there. Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another. I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level.

[WillAdams]

I would if I could, but I don't need/use desktops --- my preference has always been for tablets, preferably portable with a stylus (and touch) --- CellWriter is kind of primitive, and driver support is problematic at best.

That said, my next project is connecting my Wacom One screen to a Raspberry Pi 4 (which unfortunately means giving up touch --- I'd be very interested in graphics tablet/screen w/ support for current Wacom styluses _and_ touch). Can't quite justify a Wacom Cintiq since I don't want the complication of a different stylus technology than my other devices (it's really nice to be able to switch between drawing on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 to taking notes on my Kindle Scribe to checking something on my Note 10+).

I suppose I should try an Android tablet, but there's not much software there which is suited to the work I do.

[mcpackieh]

Is it confirmed that Intel's drivers on Linux aren't doing this too?

[boomboomsubban]

Intel drivers are part of the kernel, and I imagine Intel's attempt to put telemetry in them would be shut down fairly quickly by Linus Torvalds.

[anthk]

On libre drivers? No.

[sockaddr]

Agreed. It is the year of the linux desktop. I installed Pop OS and everything works great right out of the box. It's now good enough that I could install it on my mom's computer.

[wood-porch]

Not in my experience. I was using a Dell work laptop recently and decided to use Linux instead of windows. Once I got things working mostly to my liking, I updated the GPU drivers and got a kernel panic. I’m lucky to be tech savvy so I can recuperate from that, but after that I asked for a MacBook and now have a solid daily driver that I can rely on, without having to spend hours looking for workarounds, crashes and kernel panics

[OO000oo]

> Everything works.

...if you're a software engineer. If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count.

[gambiting]

>>...if you're a software engineer.

I'm a software engineer and you'd have to pry Visual Studio out of my cold dead hands, it's the reason why I deal with all the nonsense of using Windows.

[baal80spam]

> If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count.

But you can always use GIMP, right?!

OK, this was a bad joke.

[eukara]

Creative Cloud has a web version of Photoshop[1] supposedly and then there's Office 365, which has been around for a good long while now. I suppose one could use those if need be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Desktop,_...

[godshatter]

"don't count" as far as Adobe and Microsoft are concerned, yes. You can't blame the people that spend a lot of their free time trying to bring free software to a free platform for not coming up with something that can act as well as Photoshop or Word and fit in with their ecosystems well given the way those companies try to lock things down.

[GartzenDeHaes]

You might want to into who makes Linux. Intel wrote 23% of the changes for kernel 6.0 and AMD wrote 32%.

https://lwn.net/Articles/909625/

[darklycan51]

Proceeds to defend this by arguing that Windows already does it anyways then goes and mentions how Linux doesn't do it... but then your whole comment makes no sense, because there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers

[wtallis]

> there is a justifiable annoyance at being tracked on Linux as well even if you quit Windows through Intel drivers

I feel like you may be making some pretty wild assumptions. The Intel GPU drivers for Linux have little to nothing in common with the Intel GPU drivers for Windows.

[slackfan]

KDE has been getting progressively worse and less usable since 3.5.

[72deluxe]

So refreshing to see someone else who revels in the nostalgia of 3.5!

[Aardwolf]

Fully agree, I've been using cinnamon instead for a long time already

[_ugfj]

By everything you mean an extremely narrow slice of hardware and software works -- which admittedly are widely used and can give the false sense of "everything".

But https://xkcd.com/619/ is just as true today in spirit: mainstream multimedia has serious issues. Bluetooth often just doesn't work, forget about any decent resolution from any streaming service.

Heaven forbid you wanted to dock to an eGPU, might as well reboot because you need to restart your apps anyways.

Multifunction printer/scanners are a crapshoot. Strange enterprise VPN and wifi, well, I am wishing you good fortune in the wars to come.

Nah. Life is too short to struggle with this.

O&O ShutUp10++ handles the telemetry. Way easier to deal with that once then constantly struggle with Linux.