[isolatedsystem]

Easy answer to your last point: Work machine and Non-work machine. If I'm working for a company and the company needs MS Office, they will give me a machine with MS Office. I will treat that machine like a radioactive zone. Full Hazmat suit. Not a shred of personal interaction with that machine. It exists only to do work on and that's that. The company can take care of keeping it up to date, and the company's IT department can do the bending over the table on my behest as MS approaches with dildos marked "Copilot" or "Recall" or "Cortana" or "React Native Start Menu" or "OneDrive" or whatever.

Meanwhile, my personal machine continues to be Linux.

This is what I'm doing at my work now. I'm lucky enough to have two computers, a desktop PC that runs Linux, and a laptop with Windows 11. I do not use that laptop unless I have to deal with xlsx, pptx or docx files. Life is so much better.

[neilv]

Apt username, for a pragmatic strategy.

A variation I've done occasionally is to run the Microsoft Windows software in a VM on my Linux laptop.

When I last had the MS office suite inflicted upon me, a couple years ago, I was able to run it in a Web browser on Linux.

It's important to remember, though, that these measures probably won't work long-term.

Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame. (It's usually not originating bottom-up from the ICs, and I know some nice people from there, but upper corporate is totally like that, demonstrating it again and again, for decades.)

Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

[alsetmusic]

> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

My current employer is so great that I have casually mentioned that I might stay until I retire a bunch of times since joining. I've never said that about any other job. We have Word because there are industry requirements that it meets in terms of formatting legal documents. Can other apps supplant it? Possibly, but no one is spending the time and money to find out and it's not my decision to make.

I understand the motivation of the statement, but it's a fallacy.

[vee-kay]

> Historically, MS will tend to shamelessly do whatever underhanded things they can get away with at that point in time. The only exception being when they are playing a long con, in which case they will pretend to play nice, until some threshold of lock-in (or re-lock-in) is achieved, and only then mask-off, with no sense of shame.

The Windows 10 bait n switch to Windows 11.

Hundreds of millions of PC users worldwide on old hardware using old Windows OSes were offered Win10 as free upgrade, with the promise that Win10 is the final Windows edition.

Later though, M$ announced Win11 and it would work only on new hardware (BIOS TPM 2.0 constraint), and Win10 is no longer being supported for personal use (except via some complicated ways to get an extension for the Win10 updates). And not only is Win11 buggy and full of ads, its performance is also bad.

Well, the good thing is that such shenanigans are pushing PC users to migrate to Linux.

[lp0_on_fire]

> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

Microsoft being shitty notwithstanding…I think you don’t really grasp just how prevalent Microsoft is in the business world - it is not the indicator you think it is.

[jjkaczor]

Have a new laptop arriving shortly with enough RAM and storage, that - me being a historically "Windows as primary OS" kind-of-person, with the enshitification of their adding CoPilot to everything and turning Windows 11 into an "agentic" OS, my installation will be Linux-first, and then run Windows via LKVM (hopefully with proper pass-through for TPM + GPU).

Yes - I have "noodled" with Linux in VM's and Raspberry Pi's - but it has never been my primary OS.

Thanks to Microsoft, that is about to change...

[thewebguyd]

> Also, a company requiring to run Microsoft software is probably also a bad place to work in other regards.

This seems like an over generalization, though I agree with your other points. Microsoft is not a good company, but are any of the big tech behemoths?

I could buy an argument that requiring Windows for devs might be a red flag, unless said company is making Windows software or games, but there are plenty of valid reasons to standardize on Windows & Microsoft 365 across the office, especially in very large companies. Even if a company issues macs, they are still probably on M365 unless they are in silicon valley or a startup using Google Workspace.

Consumers aren't Microsoft's customer, and to be honest, I get the vibe that Microsoft would just prefer to stop selling to and catering to consumers/personal users entirely for Windows. Windows in an enterprise, properly reined in by a competent IT department, isn't too bad. Windows gives a lot of tools to IT and the business that you would otherwise have to build yourself, which for non-tech company or a company where software isn't their revenue generating product, has a lot of appeal.

The distaste everyone feels for it is because Windows isn't built for the end user anymore, it's built for the person signing the checks at the company, who usually has different needs. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (although, it's not great), just that you, the user, isn't who its designed for.

[xarope]

some companies don't have a choice; in a previous AEC job (architecture/engineering/construction), we had to deploy windows to use Autodeck Revit.

Now servers and other backend stuff, on the other hand, linux and illumos.

[apatheticonion]

I like this in theory but as someone who travels often with my work laptop, it's nice to be able to use the same hardware for personal use as carrying a second computer is impractical regarding carry weight and packing.

Apple used to allow installing a second copy of MacOS without it being subject to the work profile - completely isolated from the work partition (because you could ignore the "set up work profile" prompts after installation).

I would simply restart my MacBook into the personal install after work & on weekends.

Apple have recently updated the MacOS installer to be always online so I can no longer install a seperate MacOS partition without a work profile.

I ended up buying an ROG Ally but it's honestly not that portable. The power brick is almost the same size as the handheld and it occupies about as much space as a laptop in my carry on.

[QuiEgo]

When I travel for work, I take my work laptop and an iPad in a keyboard case. It’s under 2lbs (0.9kg), it can charge off the same brick as my phone or even pass through charge off my work laptop itself, and keeps me connected to my personal digital life without having to put anything personal on the work machine. It also never raises an eye with security if you have a laptop + iPad.

Usually, the iPad apps are "good enough" (in some ways, they are actually better for travel, as they are designed with features like offline downloads), but if they are not a "real" computer is only a tailscale connection to my home network away over VNC.

Edit: specifically, the iPad + Laptop combo never raises an eye at customs houses. Inside the USA, I've taken as many as 3 laptops for a work trip before, and I can not express how much the TSA does not care. On the other hand, when you go through customs in another country, they can be bit ornery (i.e. suspect you of trying to avoid import tax), so I never want to take more than one laptop through a customs barrier.

p.s. if you want to game in your downtime, such trips are an awesome time to break out the emulator and retro game, an iPad has more than enough power for this, and SNES / d-pad type games work great with a keyboard case as a controller (or, you can just bring a real controller).

[vablings]

All of these gaming laptops really do suck. I feel like these days your better off having a small form factor pc or just remote into your machine from far away.

[cbdevidal]

Two laptops is easier than you’d think if you have the right bag.

My work lap is so locked down I cannot do anything personal on it, so when I go into the office I always carry two laptops, and the personal one is an old thick heavy dinosaur; it’s got to be at least five pounds. However, with a good bag that has a (non-padded) belt and sternum strap, it is not difficult. The belt carries most of the load and my shoulders don’t hurt; they hardly feel anything.

I deliberately park in the farthest spot at the other side of campus (about a half mile, and up four flights in the garage) to get in exercise steps with the heavy pack.

It’s good exercise but I absolutely need a belt and sternum pack to do it. Wouldn’t dream of trying that with only shoulder straps.

[tracker1]

If you aren't into gaming at all, you might consider a smaller Macbook Air for personal use... mine is mostly relegated to occasional use unless I'm traveling, where it's mostly email/web use. Small, light, fits my needs and can charge via the same USB adapter I carry for my phone anyway. I have a rather heavy laptop bag so the difference between 1 or two laptops and the portable display isn't that big a difference.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Been using this strategy since Windows XP

I can do work on the computer running BSD/Linux, save it in a text-only format, transfer it to the work computer then import into Excel, PowerPoint or Word

It's been over 20 years since I had a home computer running Windows (and well over 30 since I've used a mouse)

I think the GP comment is evidence that Microsoft can get away with what it is doing. Even people who can use Linux or BSD will not stop using Windows at home no matter how obnoxious it becomes

There is a substantial difference between complaining and actually taking action and the company seems to recognise that

[spacecadet]

Same. Work provides the idiot box. I give it its own segmented network too, cause work spyware and all... then run a personal workstation with linux next door to it.

[incrudible]

The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

[Uupis]

I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.

[cgio]

You could argue that, with Windows there is a legitimate place to direct your rage at, but the action of directing your rage does not actually have any effect on improving your experience. With Win and Mac, no one cares, because they already have their customers locked in and tight, they will accept any experience degradation. With Linux, you are not a customer so no customer complaints, but still arguably much better support.

[devsda]

> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

There are also people who often claim that their installation of Linux always crashes after every single update, their favourite commodity hardware that's a decade old still doesnt work out of the box on Linux etc etc.

The truth is somewhere in between and its a lot closer to the positive experience these days compared to the old days.

[dweinus]

When Windows is awful, everyone is sympathetic except for their support. They are beyond useless.

Ubuntu with support is totally a thing, not sure if it is good or not.

Windows 11 Home: $139/license Ubuntu with support: $150/yr

[Telaneo]

> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

On the one hand, yes, this is not a nice thing to have happen. The frustrations shouldn't happen to begin with, and then people shouldn't be using the reverse Uno card on you just for that.

On the other hand, Linux has a lot fewer of these frustrations (in my experience), and a lot of frustrations are being fixed with time, since you're likely not the only one who is frustrated by it.

On the third hand, the situation being shit for obvious human reasons, not enough dev time, disagreements about the way forward, as is the case with Linux development, is a much, much nicer thing to have your problems caused by, rather than the source of Windows being shit, that is, someone wasn't happy with their dashboard this morning and decided to make that your problem today.

[thewebguyd]

You can always buy someone to direct your rage at if you are a business and wanting to deploy Linux though. Red Hat, Suse, Canonical will all happily sell you support contracts and guarantees.

[atoav]

Idk. My main frustration with Linux has nothing to do with the OS itself. Linux is pretty good actually. My main frustration has to do with software that doesn't run on Linux that I have to use occasionally. So things that force me not to use Linux. But that has gotten much better over the years.

And meanwhile my Windows and MacOS experience has gotten much worse. So I feel pretty good with using Linux as my daily driver for the past 6 years.

[tempsaasexample]

I installed Linux Mint Mate on my parents home computer and they have less issues than they ever had with windows 10-11

[anjel]

Whats to rage about w/ Linux?

Like Apple used to warrant, it just works.

[johnnyanmac]

No full time job, so as a freelancer those machines need to combine. And my work uses similar software that simply doesn't work well on Linux.

But yes, ideally I'd have two machines to separate my career from my personal life.

[lhaussknecht]

I'm using Debian an when working for a client that requires Windows, I'm working in a VirtualBox with Windows Server 2022 as my desktop OS. It works really well (running mainly Visual Studio) and licenses are pretty cheap. But the best part is, that there are no ads and other Windows 11 Copilot nonsense.

[le-mark]

If you’re implying separating work work on two machines; beware the corporate spyware on the windows machine will show a lot of idle time!