Not surprised though, with AMD being able to patch the Linux kernel and scheduler to its liking in order to squeeze out the maximum performance for it's architecture, versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime.
I'd be curious if the businesses buying these $20k+, 96-core, HEDT workstations actually do run Windows on them in order for this to be that big of a problem for Microsoft worth addressing, or if it's Linux all the way anyway for them so Windows isn't even on the radar.
Anyone here in the know?
Also, obligatory: "But can it run Crysis?" (in software render)
ive worked at companies where we buy these types of workstations for fea/cfd/ML
if the company has a overbearing IT, we run windows for "security". at places where we move fast and break things, we run ubuntu and IT says for us to manage it ourselves.
for anyone wondering why we done use the cloud or a server, we do too. but model setup, licensing, and small jobs are easier and quicker to do locally.
> "...depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime."
They don't have to figure it out on their own; everybody maintains close contact. For example, Intel has a field office literally one block away from Microsoft's main campus.
One would assume AMD also has a field office similarly near by. (EDIT: they do, a couple of blocks further.)
Epic Games runs mostly Windows Threadrippers for Unreal Engine development. Compiling Unreal faster, or anything really, even Windows itself is a compelling argument.
Back in the day I used Linux for rendering my Blender animations because my tests had shown it was 10% faster than the same machine running Windows 10. With render times of more than 8 days this quickly paid off.
I noticed that AMD/Xilinx Vivado synthesis runs 20% faster on WSL2 than on Windows. After seeing such differences using it on plain Windows becomes unpleasant.
In the context of Linux adoption on the desktop it is not big news, unfortunately. To my mind, overall end-user experience is already better in Linux compared to Windows where similar tasks are more complicated, even before the raw performance starts to matter.
Better performance would be a prerequisite indeed - no one wants to move a slower OS - but then there must be other convincing reasons to drive the desktop user adoption. And no roadblocks.
Edit: sorry, rephrased a lot, but the core idea is hopefully the same.
I have this suspicion that Windows has basically a layer of analytics tracking over the top of the DE that slows the system for most desktop uses, and that they essentially "tunnel" through that layer when a program actually needs the performance. Like gaming or exporting a video project.
This is why Windows is able to benchmark high for specific tasks, but for overall usage it feels very slow compared to every linux desktop.
I hope the community really gets behind Snap or Flatpak or one of the other systems for bringing a modern permissions and privileges system to the Linux desktop. It would help me be a lot more comfortable recommending Linux to non-technical people.
What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access to my location, microphone, camera, network, etc...?
I hope for a future where we are not trapped between Windows, MacOS, and Linux. They are all very complicated, and have much state. They're great for general-purpose computing, but it would be cool if you could use the same hardware in these GP computers with lightweight firmware that doesn't get in the way, and can be tuned to a specific task better. Simple, responsive GUI, could run your specialty software etc with direct hardware interaction.
I've been playing around with Ubuntu training myself for the day that I have to give up windows 10. My only complaints are that Linux can be tedious, everything is just 43 commands away; it requires greater understanding of not just what the system is doing, but how it is doing it; and the documentation is written like a Wikipedia article on advanced nuclear theory.
Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worked, and it was easier for me to understand what was going on, and how to engage tasks, fix problems, and use the system. With Linux it can feel like I'm fighting with the system at times.
I'm enjoying the experience but it has not been without frustration. Perhaps I should have chosen another flavor?
No worries. I have installed windows 11 lately and i find it tedious. It constantly wants to register me somewhere, it asks me to have this as standard, and it is always updating something and asks me to reboot. And why i cant remove certain things from my taskbar? So, i guess, we both have out difficulties. Like always.
The trick with linux isn't to learn the flavour, it's to learn linux - once you get an overview of how all the bits work then switching distro is (much) more straightforward.
Ubuntu is an excellent first choice because it's one of the major distro's so you'll be able to google stuff more easily.
My personal recommendation would be Fedora (and if you want a familiar windows 10 at least in approach GUI) Cinnamon which is excellent.
Same here but the other way. I find Linux much simpler to grasp than endless hard to navigate menus, windows where each is from different land, registry, shell and what not. I rarely use Windows but when I do, it feels like MS either ruined it or I simply forgot how to do things. I used to think like you so I guess it's just a matter of taking the leap and learning new OS
Bonus points: no ads, no Edge or Drive bullshit, nearly any small quirk that annoys me can be rid of (which admittely can take some effort BUT it can be done)
Example:
- Linux: just type the command vetted by hundreds of people on StackOverflow to edit the config file
- Windows: open app, click this and that... Where is it? Ohhh outside of screen because it uses super duper stylish gaming UI. Let me change system-wide UI scaling just to see thing I want to toggle. No, there was no way to just drag that window.
I'm a Poweruser of Linux since the late 90s and I can tell you that if you're a Windows or Mac poweruser with zero Linux experience, you're not going to have a good time in Linux.
Linux has come amazingly far, but I still wouldn't recommend it for everyone.
It's all about context. You're a power user so you're going to want to do advanced things, which requires total immersion in a completely different ecosystem.
But my 80 year old father on the other hand, he just wants to edit documents, scan images, browse facebook and play solitaire. He can run Fedora Silverblue with no problems.
I have been using using Linux for 16 years in total and 7+ years as my primary OS.
Ubuntu itself is a performance hog due to snaps. And Ubuntu is NOT beginner friendly. As an ex-IT guy and as a linux enthusiast, It was not when I deployed it to developers and tech people in my company. And it is not beginner friendly when I install it to my friends & family.
I used to use Ubuntu for work until last week. Used it because of the worry for Ubuntu compatibility since most work related tools etc supports Ubuntu if you want to use Linux at work. It used to use 7.5-8GB ram and >40% CPU. So I switched to Linux Mint. It is based off Ubuntu but it is faster & is better for UX. And I have been using Linux Mint since monday. Ram usage wend down to only max 6GB RAM and <25% CPU usage. For the same workload. Since it is Ubuntu compatible, Linux Mint will support all those work related stuff for which they need Ubuntu for. And I have a lot of horror stories with Ubuntu.
I recommend Linux Mint if you want point release distro. It literally takes care of you and works OOTB. The only problem is it doesn't have wayland support yet. If you have the time to invest (which I think you don't since you mentioned tedious), and only if you have time, I recommend Arch Linux.
Another green flag is to prefer community led/oriented Linux flavours over corporate funded for long term UX. Way too many cuts and bleeds to trust a corporate run Linux distro. CentOS and Ubuntu being the latest ones. The only exception so far has been OpenSuse IMO. And I have heard good things about POPOS as well. I haven't used it to comment on it though.
I really see FreeBSD as my north star. But it is not yet there for my work and desktop usecases.
It's the complete opposite for me. With Linux I'm in control of the OS and can make it work the way I like. Sure, you need to know what you're doing but the learning curve these days is rather easy. With Windows and macOS I feel like they're treating me like an idiot and I always have to settle for 80-90% of the behaviour I want if I'm lucky.
> Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worked
I bought a System76 machine running their own PopOS distro and everything Just Works as I'd expect, with the added benefit of actually having the ability to muck around with the innards of my system when I want to, unlike Mac or Windows, which are increasingly locked-down, opaque, and user-hostile. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are consumer desktop OS-focused companies these days; the former is a mostly a phone manufacturer and the latter is a confusing mess that might be best described as an enterprise software company. They have no material incentive to care about the quality of Mac or Windows, and it shows; their desktop OSes are afterthoughts.
I switched off of OSX as my primary machine around 2015 and moved to full time Linux. Just decided to commit and fully dove in. I tried several different flavors for months at a time from Fedora to Ubuntu. Eventually I settled on PopOS.
I was really happy with everything up until my work shifted to management and spending > half my day on Zoom calls. For some reason, I periodically would have issues with peripherals. Picking the wrong mic, having to close and reopen Zoom, correct camera not working, etc. None of this is an issue if you're on a laptop but it regularly was a problem since I used my machine as a desktop all day.
I decided I finally need to get a machine with a beefy GPU this year with all of the LLM stuff happening (plus my son is getting into PC gaming) so I bought an Alienware desktop with Windows. First Windows computer I've owned since 2005. Now I have a 3 screen setup where my middle and left screen are the Windows computer, my fully loaded System76 Meerkat is on the right using Barrier and 99% of my development work is remote on that machine.
No issues with the peripherals for meetings on the Windows machine. Still greatly prefer the Linux machine for everything else but the reliability of knowing that my peripherals are going to work for meetings has been important. Plus, I started a tech podcast (Carolina Code Cast) and that's been important for all of the A/V that goes with it.
All that to say, there are tradeoffs. Eventually, I hope that Linux will have first class peripheral support. I'd like nothing more than to install it on this Alienware machine one day.
Ubuntu is mostly fine and a good middle ground for new users between bleeding edge (Arch, Fedora) and outdated software (Debian) IMHO. It's also probably the best place to start simply because of the mountains of documentation that exist for it because of its large userbase.
I would also like to add that often you'll find answers to stuff telling you to use a couple of commands when instead you could use existing gui tools. That might be because commands are faster for people that already know them, but often they're not the only way.
As ex-UNIX zealot, that came back into Windows around Windows 7, and then settled to use GNU/Linux from VMWare, Windows has gotten worse, but still not bad enough for me to use GNU/Linux as main OS.
Just last weekend I have spent a good part of it fixing the way installing clang messed up with Ubuntu's system clang, plugged via LAN cable, because after all these years my little Asus netbook still cannot keep a stable WLAN connection to my router.
I feel the exact opposite. Changing things in Linux is usually just a checkbox in the settings. Whereas changing things in Mac or Windows can be an uphill battle, digging through registry keys, or installing third-party software just to change basic features.
For example, how do you rebind the "switch window" hotkey on a Mac from Cmd+Tab to Alt+Tab? There's no way to do it out of the box. You need to install some third party program called AltTab just to set hotkeys.
How do you disable tracking in Windows 10? Well here's a 50 step plan. And you better pray that none of these settings will be reset the next time there's a forced update.
About 15 years ago I received the advice, "If you want to be hacker, stop using Windows and start using Linux." Today, I am well aware that this is not the only path to enlightenment, but I count it as some of the best professional advice that I have ever received. This is colored by the direction my career has taken me: the technologies I use are open source, and that fits much better into the Linux box than others.
It's also not about writing code. Sure, when using Linux exclusively, sometimes you might have to hack together a little script to make your computer do what you want, but that's really not necessary, especially in the year of our Lord 2023. It's about tooling. So many younger devs that I meet still have irrational fear of the command line. Inability to use built-in documentation (like manpages), and again a fear of trying (because web browsers exist). Worst of all is the lack of understanding that these younger devs have of Unix permissions. We all know the guy who just pastes `chmod -R 777 .` or something from StackExchange. Since most of our production software still lives on Linux, knowing the proper way to configure these environments is valuable (though unfortunately undervalued, in my opinion, since improper configuration can still "work fine").
Using Linux full-time for years will make you more than comfortable. And yes, it probably will take years. You may come to prefer the terminal to most of the GUI wrappers provided in desktop Linux distros. You won't even notice when you come out the other side. You'll realize that everything only seemed like it was 43 commands away because you only knew 2 commands to begin with. Typing the most common commands will be second nature and take less time than moving your hand to the mouse. Anything that does need to be reasoned out and typed slowly you will learn to embed in a script, with comments so you can remember how it works, and that will save you even more time.
Most importantly, in the end you will have the confidence in your abilities to write long, condescending comments on Hacker News. I kid of course, but you will no longer fear tooling (though you may grow weary of it - looking at you nodeJS), and I truly believe that's a more important and difficult skill than reading and writing code of all sorts.
Interesting, my experience is the opposite.. since windows 10 came out it became almost unusable and problematic with random stuff, even after debloating scripts. Ubuntu has been my go to system for a while now, and i basically just want to watch YouTube and edit text.
My biggest gripe with Linux is that it's an incredibly brittle system that you can easily blow up, either through no fault of my own (a grub update once made my system unbootable), issues which were triggered by trying to work around ubuntu's shortcomings (I installed an nvidia driver from a ppa, which broke my system), or through curious experimentation gone wrong.
Combined with the constant weird bugs ranging from annoying to potentially system-breaking, and the lack of resources you have for troubleshooting (because few people use it, and the system changes so fast that existing posts become outdated), it's really hard to fix, too.
I honestly try to never update my Linux box, unless I'm prepared to invest time into potentially having to fix it. And Windows' annoying updates are absolutely nothing compared to the daily barrage of packages, each triggering a restart.
> With Linux it can feel like I'm fighting with the system at times.
All your points are valid, and it's been a meme for a while now that the year of linux on the desktop is always next year.
HOWEVER, consider the following:
When you're on linux you're fighthing the shortcomings of the operating system (and learning stuff as you go) where as when you're on Windows/MacOS you're fighting companies actively trying to screw you over (and over and over again, always in new ways).
The question now becomes: what fight are you willing to fight?
Most of your interaction with your computer is via the Desktop Environment. Which is Gnome in a default Ubuntu installation. If you're not particularly interested in exploring alternate operating system philosophies, I'd recommend looking into other Desktop Environments to use on Ubuntu. In particular, I'd recommend XFCE or Mate since they behave conventionally.
One thing to understand when moving from a proprietary to an open source OS is how much control you have over the system. Just about any part of it can be disabled or upgraded or swapped out for something different. If you learn where the seams are and how the different pieces work together, it gives you far greater control over your computer than any proprietary OS. If you expect everything to just work, you may be setting yourself up for disappointment.
I have been switched for a year now, for the 4th? 5th? time in my life, and it looks like I'm gonna end up back on windows once again.
The perpetual problem with linux is that it is written and maintained by people who love linux. Its great if you just need a machine to check email, and it's great if you are well versed in linux OS structure and know the CLI command set/structure through and through.
But if you are middle of the road power user, linux is just a constant annoying nightmare of reading forum posts and copy+pasting seemingly random strings of characters into the terminal hoping that it will fix the sound issue on the video you're trying to play.
My personal experience has that Windows is easier to get up and running as long as I want to use it as-designed. Getting off that happy path turns into a fiasco for me. I'm sure a lot of my difficulties would be trivial to fix for Windows expert, but I'm not one.
For me, it's way easier to bend Linux to my will.
(I'm typing this on a Mac. I spent my first months on a Mac trying to make it act like my Linux desktop, and hated it. Then I decided to try a month doing everything the Mac way instead, and ended up loving it. Go figure.)
I've been having a reasonably good experience with Pop OS, which is Ubuntu-based but different in a bunch of ways. The makers (System76) put it on the computers they sell so they have a strong incentive to make it "just work", and that seems to have mostly worked out well.
As someone with years of light Linux experience but no patience for pissing about with config all day, my golden rule is to avoid updating anything ahead of the version that the distro bundles. E.g. no I shall not be updating my Nvidia drivers independently!
I like docker for arbitrary command line software I haven't checked the source for, Flatpak (or Snap/AppImage I guess) for big complicated GUI software, and if those aren't options I sometimes run things in a VM if I don't trust them not to screw up the system (hello Tizen Studio!). I ended up installing Blender from Steam, of all places.
I hear you, but windows seems like a black box in a lot of ways. I don’t have any trust that what it tells me about running processes is accurate. Under Linux I feel like I am actually in control of the machine on a much greater scale. And I’m sure you know know what they say about great power..
As also stated by others you should start learning the basic concepts and no specific flavor/distro to understand how everything fits together. You sound like someone who could very well succeed in that, since you didn't give up yet :)
Once I installed arch I never looked back.
I heard good things of the rolling distros of Suse and Fedora as well, but arch feels more vanilla than the others to me.
If you have a lot of time and passion you could also have a run of linux from scratch. You do it once for the learning part and then choose a distro of your liking.
Yeah the control you get over Linux is both good and bad. You can pretty much get it to work exactly how you want, but getting there is very complex, and remembering CLI commands is extremely difficult for me even after many years of doing linux server admin.
It's slowly getting better though, things are starting to have sane defaults more often, and there are more easy to use GUI settings for things, instead of needing to deal with stuff that requires having documentation open on the side.
My benchmark for 'good' is that I shouldn't have to look at documentation or remember CLI commands to set up and use an OS.
I ran an experiment a while ago. My windows work machine takes a good 3 minutes to compile one of my C++ projects, but a Linux VM on that same machine builds the same project in 45 seconds.
Why wouldn’t the first assumption be that the bulk of these differences arise from compiler and runtime library (memcpy, etc.) efficiency distinctions rather than the OS?
I appreciate that to the end user it doesn’t matter which parts of the stack are better tuned, but framing this as “Windows vs. Linux” seems unjustified without more evidence.
I have two rigs here at home. A 12700k gaming box with a high end Nvme disk. Also, a 13900k workstation with Nvme disks as well. The gaming box runs Windows 11, and it feels generally snappy until I’m navigating the filesystem or dealing with compression. On the flip side the other box is running Debian 12 and feels significantly faster. Could be 12th gen vs 13th gen but I don’t think that’s the case.
This alone isn't surprising, but what I really want to know is if this hit is something fundamentally wrong with Windows or is it the overhead of all of the stuff that Windows runs that doesn't need to run, since it mentions "out of the box" windows.
Is the performance difference as large on a LTSC version of Windows 10? If it needs something in Windows 11, would it be as big of a difference on the LTSC version of Windows 11 when that comes out (I know we can't answer this at the moment)?
I would never use Windows on a server, but I am very curious about where the difference really is.
Part of why I am really curious is that on my Steam Deck I run the LTSC version of Windows 10 and got better performance on my games on Windows 10 vs SteamOS. That is just gaming, but it has made me more curious about what the reality is.
Doesn't windows have some limitation where a process will only see up to 64 threads by default and it'll have to opt into some new APIs to use more? Maybe some of the results are an artifact of that.
What about Debian or other linux flavors, is this some Ubuntu proprietary thing or open source stuff? I would love Debian to have this the same as Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is such a turn-off experience for servers. The cloud-init feature is atrocious.
You download a "server-live" iso. 2GB. However this uses the cloud-init to download the required files. Why did I download a 2GB file if your going to download it from the net anyway?
There is no option to not install from the net without removing network adapter.
Boggles me why am I being asked to upgrade my installer while installing, what's the point in that? "There is a new version on GitHub" ...
If your shipping an installer it should install. Not ask me to download a newer version. Why is there a new version, is the bundled version security ridden?
It decided to just pluck a DHCP IPv6 and use that, without any confirmation.
I setup a 50G Luks Encrypted LVM crypt yet discovered that it only allocates 25G leaving the other half to float.
You need to know YAML to configure networking.
Resolv.conf is taken hostage by systemd-resolvd which doesn't work!
The whole process was infuriating. This was an install for an email server yesterday.
Interesting, as a user of Ubuntu for over a decade, I had nearly forgotten that Windows exists. I diddnt know anyone besides gamers used Windows these days.
Pardon my ignorance, but can we then infer that upstream, Debian will have similar or better results? What distinguishes Ubuntu in this case from, let's say, less bloated distros? Just a better PR department, or are there any technical reasons to single it out?
[+] [-] FirmwareBurner|2 years ago|reply
I'd be curious if the businesses buying these $20k+, 96-core, HEDT workstations actually do run Windows on them in order for this to be that big of a problem for Microsoft worth addressing, or if it's Linux all the way anyway for them so Windows isn't even on the radar.
Anyone here in the know?
Also, obligatory: "But can it run Crysis?" (in software render)
[+] [-] chaosbutters314|2 years ago|reply
if the company has a overbearing IT, we run windows for "security". at places where we move fast and break things, we run ubuntu and IT says for us to manage it ourselves.
for anyone wondering why we done use the cloud or a server, we do too. but model setup, licensing, and small jobs are easier and quicker to do locally.
[+] [-] ThrowawayB7|2 years ago|reply
They don't have to figure it out on their own; everybody maintains close contact. For example, Intel has a field office literally one block away from Microsoft's main campus. One would assume AMD also has a field office similarly near by. (EDIT: they do, a couple of blocks further.)
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmott42|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelsolaar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atoav|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alentred|2 years ago|reply
Better performance would be a prerequisite indeed - no one wants to move a slower OS - but then there must be other convincing reasons to drive the desktop user adoption. And no roadblocks.
Edit: sorry, rephrased a lot, but the core idea is hopefully the same.
[+] [-] jklinger410|2 years ago|reply
I have this suspicion that Windows has basically a layer of analytics tracking over the top of the DE that slows the system for most desktop uses, and that they essentially "tunnel" through that layer when a program actually needs the performance. Like gaming or exporting a video project.
This is why Windows is able to benchmark high for specific tasks, but for overall usage it feels very slow compared to every linux desktop.
Am I crazy or is there a nugget of truth there?
[+] [-] criddell|2 years ago|reply
What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access to my location, microphone, camera, network, etc...?
[+] [-] the__alchemist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] underseacables|2 years ago|reply
Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worked, and it was easier for me to understand what was going on, and how to engage tasks, fix problems, and use the system. With Linux it can feel like I'm fighting with the system at times.
I'm enjoying the experience but it has not been without frustration. Perhaps I should have chosen another flavor?
[+] [-] okr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noir_lord|2 years ago|reply
That'll ignite a holy war.
The trick with linux isn't to learn the flavour, it's to learn linux - once you get an overview of how all the bits work then switching distro is (much) more straightforward.
Ubuntu is an excellent first choice because it's one of the major distro's so you'll be able to google stuff more easily.
My personal recommendation would be Fedora (and if you want a familiar windows 10 at least in approach GUI) Cinnamon which is excellent.
[+] [-] pawelduda|2 years ago|reply
Bonus points: no ads, no Edge or Drive bullshit, nearly any small quirk that annoys me can be rid of (which admittely can take some effort BUT it can be done)
Example: - Linux: just type the command vetted by hundreds of people on StackOverflow to edit the config file - Windows: open app, click this and that... Where is it? Ohhh outside of screen because it uses super duper stylish gaming UI. Let me change system-wide UI scaling just to see thing I want to toggle. No, there was no way to just drag that window.
[+] [-] INTPenis|2 years ago|reply
Linux has come amazingly far, but I still wouldn't recommend it for everyone.
It's all about context. You're a power user so you're going to want to do advanced things, which requires total immersion in a completely different ecosystem.
But my 80 year old father on the other hand, he just wants to edit documents, scan images, browse facebook and play solitaire. He can run Fedora Silverblue with no problems.
[+] [-] unsungNovelty|2 years ago|reply
Ubuntu itself is a performance hog due to snaps. And Ubuntu is NOT beginner friendly. As an ex-IT guy and as a linux enthusiast, It was not when I deployed it to developers and tech people in my company. And it is not beginner friendly when I install it to my friends & family.
I used to use Ubuntu for work until last week. Used it because of the worry for Ubuntu compatibility since most work related tools etc supports Ubuntu if you want to use Linux at work. It used to use 7.5-8GB ram and >40% CPU. So I switched to Linux Mint. It is based off Ubuntu but it is faster & is better for UX. And I have been using Linux Mint since monday. Ram usage wend down to only max 6GB RAM and <25% CPU usage. For the same workload. Since it is Ubuntu compatible, Linux Mint will support all those work related stuff for which they need Ubuntu for. And I have a lot of horror stories with Ubuntu.
I recommend Linux Mint if you want point release distro. It literally takes care of you and works OOTB. The only problem is it doesn't have wayland support yet. If you have the time to invest (which I think you don't since you mentioned tedious), and only if you have time, I recommend Arch Linux.
Another green flag is to prefer community led/oriented Linux flavours over corporate funded for long term UX. Way too many cuts and bleeds to trust a corporate run Linux distro. CentOS and Ubuntu being the latest ones. The only exception so far has been OpenSuse IMO. And I have heard good things about POPOS as well. I haven't used it to comment on it though.
I really see FreeBSD as my north star. But it is not yet there for my work and desktop usecases.
[+] [-] totallywrong|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|2 years ago|reply
I bought a System76 machine running their own PopOS distro and everything Just Works as I'd expect, with the added benefit of actually having the ability to muck around with the innards of my system when I want to, unlike Mac or Windows, which are increasingly locked-down, opaque, and user-hostile. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are consumer desktop OS-focused companies these days; the former is a mostly a phone manufacturer and the latter is a confusing mess that might be best described as an enterprise software company. They have no material incentive to care about the quality of Mac or Windows, and it shows; their desktop OSes are afterthoughts.
[+] [-] brightball|2 years ago|reply
I switched off of OSX as my primary machine around 2015 and moved to full time Linux. Just decided to commit and fully dove in. I tried several different flavors for months at a time from Fedora to Ubuntu. Eventually I settled on PopOS.
I was really happy with everything up until my work shifted to management and spending > half my day on Zoom calls. For some reason, I periodically would have issues with peripherals. Picking the wrong mic, having to close and reopen Zoom, correct camera not working, etc. None of this is an issue if you're on a laptop but it regularly was a problem since I used my machine as a desktop all day.
I decided I finally need to get a machine with a beefy GPU this year with all of the LLM stuff happening (plus my son is getting into PC gaming) so I bought an Alienware desktop with Windows. First Windows computer I've owned since 2005. Now I have a 3 screen setup where my middle and left screen are the Windows computer, my fully loaded System76 Meerkat is on the right using Barrier and 99% of my development work is remote on that machine.
No issues with the peripherals for meetings on the Windows machine. Still greatly prefer the Linux machine for everything else but the reliability of knowing that my peripherals are going to work for meetings has been important. Plus, I started a tech podcast (Carolina Code Cast) and that's been important for all of the A/V that goes with it.
All that to say, there are tradeoffs. Eventually, I hope that Linux will have first class peripheral support. I'd like nothing more than to install it on this Alienware machine one day.
[+] [-] bmicraft|2 years ago|reply
I would also like to add that often you'll find answers to stuff telling you to use a couple of commands when instead you could use existing gui tools. That might be because commands are faster for people that already know them, but often they're not the only way.
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
Just last weekend I have spent a good part of it fixing the way installing clang messed up with Ubuntu's system clang, plugged via LAN cable, because after all these years my little Asus netbook still cannot keep a stable WLAN connection to my router.
[+] [-] weberer|2 years ago|reply
For example, how do you rebind the "switch window" hotkey on a Mac from Cmd+Tab to Alt+Tab? There's no way to do it out of the box. You need to install some third party program called AltTab just to set hotkeys.
How do you disable tracking in Windows 10? Well here's a 50 step plan. And you better pray that none of these settings will be reset the next time there's a forced update.
https://nordvpn.com/blog/disable-windows-10-tracking/
[+] [-] trey-jones|2 years ago|reply
It's also not about writing code. Sure, when using Linux exclusively, sometimes you might have to hack together a little script to make your computer do what you want, but that's really not necessary, especially in the year of our Lord 2023. It's about tooling. So many younger devs that I meet still have irrational fear of the command line. Inability to use built-in documentation (like manpages), and again a fear of trying (because web browsers exist). Worst of all is the lack of understanding that these younger devs have of Unix permissions. We all know the guy who just pastes `chmod -R 777 .` or something from StackExchange. Since most of our production software still lives on Linux, knowing the proper way to configure these environments is valuable (though unfortunately undervalued, in my opinion, since improper configuration can still "work fine").
Using Linux full-time for years will make you more than comfortable. And yes, it probably will take years. You may come to prefer the terminal to most of the GUI wrappers provided in desktop Linux distros. You won't even notice when you come out the other side. You'll realize that everything only seemed like it was 43 commands away because you only knew 2 commands to begin with. Typing the most common commands will be second nature and take less time than moving your hand to the mouse. Anything that does need to be reasoned out and typed slowly you will learn to embed in a script, with comments so you can remember how it works, and that will save you even more time.
Most importantly, in the end you will have the confidence in your abilities to write long, condescending comments on Hacker News. I kid of course, but you will no longer fear tooling (though you may grow weary of it - looking at you nodeJS), and I truly believe that's a more important and difficult skill than reading and writing code of all sorts.
[+] [-] asimovfan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoylentYellow|2 years ago|reply
After using Linux daily over 10 years now, this is exactly how I feel about Windows now. I instantly get frustrated any time I have to use Windows.
[+] [-] torginus|2 years ago|reply
Combined with the constant weird bugs ranging from annoying to potentially system-breaking, and the lack of resources you have for troubleshooting (because few people use it, and the system changes so fast that existing posts become outdated), it's really hard to fix, too.
I honestly try to never update my Linux box, unless I'm prepared to invest time into potentially having to fix it. And Windows' annoying updates are absolutely nothing compared to the daily barrage of packages, each triggering a restart.
[+] [-] znpy|2 years ago|reply
All your points are valid, and it's been a meme for a while now that the year of linux on the desktop is always next year.
HOWEVER, consider the following:
When you're on linux you're fighthing the shortcomings of the operating system (and learning stuff as you go) where as when you're on Windows/MacOS you're fighting companies actively trying to screw you over (and over and over again, always in new ways).
The question now becomes: what fight are you willing to fight?
[+] [-] loudmax|2 years ago|reply
One thing to understand when moving from a proprietary to an open source OS is how much control you have over the system. Just about any part of it can be disabled or upgraded or swapped out for something different. If you learn where the seams are and how the different pieces work together, it gives you far greater control over your computer than any proprietary OS. If you expect everything to just work, you may be setting yourself up for disappointment.
[+] [-] Workaccount2|2 years ago|reply
The perpetual problem with linux is that it is written and maintained by people who love linux. Its great if you just need a machine to check email, and it's great if you are well versed in linux OS structure and know the CLI command set/structure through and through.
But if you are middle of the road power user, linux is just a constant annoying nightmare of reading forum posts and copy+pasting seemingly random strings of characters into the terminal hoping that it will fix the sound issue on the video you're trying to play.
[+] [-] kstrauser|2 years ago|reply
For me, it's way easier to bend Linux to my will.
(I'm typing this on a Mac. I spent my first months on a Mac trying to make it act like my Linux desktop, and hated it. Then I decided to try a month doing everything the Mac way instead, and ended up loving it. Go figure.)
[+] [-] sanitycheck|2 years ago|reply
As someone with years of light Linux experience but no patience for pissing about with config all day, my golden rule is to avoid updating anything ahead of the version that the distro bundles. E.g. no I shall not be updating my Nvidia drivers independently!
I like docker for arbitrary command line software I haven't checked the source for, Flatpak (or Snap/AppImage I guess) for big complicated GUI software, and if those aren't options I sometimes run things in a VM if I don't trust them not to screw up the system (hello Tizen Studio!). I ended up installing Blender from Steam, of all places.
[+] [-] bottled_poe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaeckel|2 years ago|reply
I can only recommend starting to read https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
Once I installed arch I never looked back. I heard good things of the rolling distros of Suse and Fedora as well, but arch feels more vanilla than the others to me.
If you have a lot of time and passion you could also have a run of linux from scratch. You do it once for the learning part and then choose a distro of your liking.
[+] [-] Saris|2 years ago|reply
It's slowly getting better though, things are starting to have sane defaults more often, and there are more easy to use GUI settings for things, instead of needing to deal with stuff that requires having documentation open on the side.
My benchmark for 'good' is that I shouldn't have to look at documentation or remember CLI commands to set up and use an OS.
[+] [-] calamari4065|2 years ago|reply
That's really all I need to know about Windows
[+] [-] twoodfin|2 years ago|reply
I appreciate that to the end user it doesn’t matter which parts of the stack are better tuned, but framing this as “Windows vs. Linux” seems unjustified without more evidence.
[+] [-] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdjon|2 years ago|reply
Is the performance difference as large on a LTSC version of Windows 10? If it needs something in Windows 11, would it be as big of a difference on the LTSC version of Windows 11 when that comes out (I know we can't answer this at the moment)?
I would never use Windows on a server, but I am very curious about where the difference really is.
Part of why I am really curious is that on my Steam Deck I run the LTSC version of Windows 10 and got better performance on my games on Windows 10 vs SteamOS. That is just gaming, but it has made me more curious about what the reality is.
[+] [-] the8472|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synergy20|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doublerabbit|2 years ago|reply
You download a "server-live" iso. 2GB. However this uses the cloud-init to download the required files. Why did I download a 2GB file if your going to download it from the net anyway?
There is no option to not install from the net without removing network adapter.
Boggles me why am I being asked to upgrade my installer while installing, what's the point in that? "There is a new version on GitHub" ...
If your shipping an installer it should install. Not ask me to download a newer version. Why is there a new version, is the bundled version security ridden?
It decided to just pluck a DHCP IPv6 and use that, without any confirmation.
I setup a 50G Luks Encrypted LVM crypt yet discovered that it only allocates 25G leaving the other half to float.
You need to know YAML to configure networking.
Resolv.conf is taken hostage by systemd-resolvd which doesn't work!
The whole process was infuriating. This was an install for an email server yesterday.
[+] [-] stratigos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] optimusPrimal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hospitalJail|2 years ago|reply
I thought it was just a fresh install thing, but its been months and still flies.
Highly recommending Fedora Cinnamon.
[+] [-] vondur|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potato|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JVIDEL|2 years ago|reply
Add to that porting copilot to Win10 because there aren't enough Win11 users around.