Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.

If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.

Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?

I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.

Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.

* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.

* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.

* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.

I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...

I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.

Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.

I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.

Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.

You want proprietary programs? Alright, fine, one can argue for that. But the central, core operating system of general purpose computers should be free and fully controllable by the users that own them!

So I installed Fedora on that machine, I learned the process, I went through the hurdles. It wasn’t seamless. But, Fedora never said “I can’t”. When it was over, it was fine.

Only if Microsoft had just let me install Windows 11 and suffer whatever the perf problem my CPU would bring. Then I could consider a hardware upgrade then, maybe.

But, “you can’t install unless you upgrade your CPU” forced me to adopt Linux. More importantly, it gave me a story to tell.

There is a marketing lesson there somewhere, like Torvalds’ famous “you don’t break userspace”, something along the lines of “you don’t break the upgrade path”.

This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.

Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.

For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It's the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you're still at the whims of Apple's design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.

Linux, for all it's issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I've found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don't run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn't upgrade unless I tell it to. Even when it comes to bugs at least you have the power to fix them instead of waiting on an update hoping it will resolve that issue. Granted in reality I wait for updates to fix various small issues but for bigger ones that impact my workflow I will go through the trouble of fixing it.

I don't see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I'm quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows/MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.

> For the remainder of 2026, Microsoft is cooking up a big one: replacing more and more native apps with React Native. But don't let the name fool you, there's nothing "native" about it. These are projects designed to be easily ported across any machine and architecture, because underneath it all, it's just JavaScript. And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gobbling up your RAM so you can enjoy the privilege of opening the Settings app.

I'm a little tired of people junking on react native when they have no clue what they talked about (And I'm not even react native dev but iOS dev). React Native doesn't spawn any chromium process. This is not electron. React Native doesn't even use v8 engine. All UI views and widgets are native. Platform SDK is native, Yoga Layout is native C++ and even faster than UIKit layout. Majority of RN code is Native - go have a look at github at languages section. JS is only 19% of codebase, everything else is C++, Obj-C, Obj-C++, Kotlin, Java.

The problem AFAIK with startup being laggy was making http requests to downloads those ads.

15 minutes to deactivate an entire branch of notification pathways, 20 minutes to (mostly) restore the Right-Ctrl key they hijacked into a CoPilot key. 10 minutes to restore Win10 functionality to the Win11 taskbar with the wonderful ExplorerPatcher. $5 spent on Start11 to sidestep the whole start menu train wreck. And little 3 to 5 minute fixes with WindHawk (an amazing store-like platform to discover, install and manage open source Windows GUI patches).

I'm the stupid frog who didn't leap from the gradually heating pot. I acclimated to the boiling. And it's... okay. At least for now. But I know someday soon, the thousand faceless product managers at MSFT will break something unfixable. Somehow exceed the considerable abilities of the large community finding clever hacks and patches to keep the harsh Win wasteland livable for hardy souls.

While I greatly appreciate Linux philosophically and deeply respect it architecturally, I still really liked what Windows got so close to being - right before MSFT shifted biz models, simultaneously de-investing and turning it into a promotional platform for their other business. When that day comes, it'll suck to leave behind the wonderful third-party tools like Everything search, Ditto clipboard and AHK automation that streamline my day.

The thing I don't understand is why MSFT refuses to just make a version of Windows that's a Product again. I'd gladly pay them $100/yr for an upgraded "Windows Ti Super+" that just wants to be a good operating system for advanced users, instead of a strategic moat or monetization flywheel.

Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center. Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other operating system.

That all changed with Azure.

MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with Azure.

They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn’t kick in unless you’ve sold enough cloud services).

Windows is no longer a profit center. It’s a cost center.

Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.

Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems. As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.

Windows being worse and worse isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Linux should consider paying Microsoft and Apple for new customers. Perhaps the customer acquisition funnel is quite long, at least it took 20 years of using Apple in my case before switching to Debian (Xfce), but it was worth it!

"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.

That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?

(a) gives us back 2000/XP/7/11 options for UI,

(b) gives us a desktop-first experience when we have keyboard/mouse plugged in,

(c) stops turning every OS feature into an ad, and makes it utilitarian again,

(d) and focuses 100% on making a stable OS and high quality dev/office apps?

It would be so nice if they just forked a commit from ~2005 and started from there.

(Maybe Copilot will mess up & erase commits so they have to? One can only dream.)

I still don’t know what was wrong. I have to imagine there was something with my exact hardware configuration that Windows did not like.

I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.

Also the fact that some apps update via 'apt', some by 'snap', and if you don't watch out some might update by 'flatpack'. While I think snap is updating automatically, it's hard to tell; some mornings I wake my PC up and only hours later do I discover that there's an update pop-up hidden behind other windows.

Oh, and every day I get a 'system problem' popup that asks if I want to submit a report, but won't tell me what the alleged problem was. I thought only Microsoft did that sort of thing?

I'm also not happy about the malware protection. Apparently the only anti-virus still available is ClamAV (and Kapersky, but for reasons I won't go into I don't trust that). But the gui for ClamAV has not been supported for several years, and running it from the command line is not so straightforward, never mind keeping it updated. (And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus protection. That's just whistling past the graveyard, particularly if you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.)

I guess there are distros that are better about some of these things, but life is too short to try all of them, and hope that some bug (like the Vivaldi update thing) doesn't show up months later.

So yes, I'm using Linux, and I'm not planning to go back to Windows. But Linux sure could work better.

> Linux is the preferred platform for development

Honestly I'm surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge

Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D

Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.

I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.

One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.

Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.

I'm still on a Windows 11 desktop for the time being, but seriously considering switching there as well. The main thing stopping me is the undeniably better ecosystem on Windows for professional video editing and music production, with no comparable open-source options. I've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on high quality virtual instruments and effects plugins. But if I can manage to run these under emulation on Linux or find equivalent Linux-native versions, I will happily abandon all Microsoft products at this point.

After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).

The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.

Shortcut: https://www.himthe.dev/img/blog/microslop/4.png

But for literally anything else I think it's ready. Just browsing? Office work (writing/spreadsheets/presentations/email)? Development? Media production? You're good.

For Linux-curious I'd advise to get a dedicated hardware, like 5/7 year old business machine (Thinkpad or even smth like Dell Latitude), they'll be under $300. Don't do Arch (unless you do that for the sake of being able to install Arch). Instead, get Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Zorin (the last one specifically for Windows users), or one of many other beginner-friendly distros, and drive it for a bit. Get the software you want, see if it works for you, and if you don't like it, it's all good. If you do, you can gradually move all your stuff to the new machine, or install Linux on your main machine.

That's what I did (quite a) few years ago when I got fed up with Windows 8, took me about a year, but I've been on Mint Mate ever since. My gaming rig is still Windows 11 but all it has is my Steam collection.

Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.

Windows 11 is such a mess that Microsoft thought that they are Apple, so they want to enforce Microsoft Account just like Apple enforces Apple ID to some extent, except this time Microsoft is staking in higher than Apple -- Any active "exploits" that bypasses Microsoft Account got patched not so soon after they are published, and that is what finally intrigued me.

Unfortunately, some of my games runs on Easy Anti-Cheat, and to my knowledge, the Linux switch is opt-in rather than opt-out, most game developers simply didn't put the Linux as a matter on the table even with the introduction of Steam Deck and Steam OS.

I'm planning to wipe my PC after settling some scores, and I still have to go for Windows, but except I will be rolling back to Windows 10 IoT LTSB. Chances are, if I have another drive (which is slowing going into the unobtainium territory, just like RAM)

But, long as I settled that dust, I will bring another PC back to my home. I'm planning to get another CachyOS on that.

I was a big fan of Satya. I thought he had new vision that aligns with the emerging world. I saw some successes he had with cloud, office 365 etc. But when offered to take Altman in, I knew Satya is no longer maintaining the stature of the grand company built by Gates.

Not sure why, I just felt the need to post this.

Oh, and just to make myself look even worse, Copilot in VS Code has been an amazing asset in my development.

MS in general have idea of consent of an average rapist.

Yes/Remind me later is basically norm in their dark UI patterns, it bothered me for months to add copilot button to teams

I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won’t enable the AI cruft so I got somewhat lucky there.

But the copilot business is AAF.

And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I’m pretty much done with visual studio development.

Not sure what’s left.

Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows ecosystem.

I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).

Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).

So after making sure I had everything I wanted to keep copied off that computer, I was going to try out Bazzite, but something made me try out the plain old SteamOS steam deck installer first. To my surprise, it actually worked, but only because I had the exact type of system it expected:

64-bit Intel or AMD CPU. (I have AMD.)

AMD Radeon graphics.

NVMe SSD primary boot drive.

UEFI BIOS support

Even the wifi worked. Well, it didn't work the first time, so I thought it wasn't supported. So I hard wired it with Ethernet, but then I saw the Wifi was working. It's possible it updated something or maybe it just needed a reboot.

If it hadn't worked then Bazzite or something similar would have since it's designed to run Steam but with more driver support.

So my complete Windows history is: 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP (set to the classic GUI mode), 7, and finally 11, skipping all the others. Windows 7 was peak.

But it’s just gonna take off here anyway because it’s a switching to Linux article which is like offering HN users free coke.

Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)

Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year

So I am now very wary of any Windows updates, including a Out of Band Update [1], which it is claimed that it resolves some issue. However, since it's never mention whether the Out of Band Update will solve mine, I'm very hesitant to update.

[0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.

Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.

Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.

I don't think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.

I've moved to Kubuntu and haven't looked back. Proton support is amazing, and Claude Code fixes the doc-diving problem that used to plague Linux. In fact, with Claude, I was able to get such a buttery smooth setup on Kubuntu - Wezterm auto-saving and restorable sessions (even with multiple windows), a working fading background switcher with history, automounting drives and vhdx images on startup - and these are all relatively simple things, but they were near-frictionless to set up and they don't break on a random Tuesday. I love it and would recommend anyone who is on Windows to reconsider.

I use Windows to play some games. I remember dual booting on 2000s -- my grub entry for Windows was called "WOW Client".

Win11 really annoyed many users though. That's actually interesting, since Microsoft committed to it yet it gets harder for Microsoft to retain the people. Linux is unfortunately way too complex to really break the desktop system (and no, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, are not going to change any of that either), but if it were, Microsoft would probably have lost its de-facto monopoly already. Either way it is interesting how much people hate Win11. Microsoft really committed to driving down the cliff here.

That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.

Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.

For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.

The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.

It is true, they could not do this themselves and sometimes my mom can test my patience, but this is the way if you can do it. (Hint: get a remote desktop with shared view working first :).

Really, the stronghold for windows is their office suite (other family require Word/Excel for work), enterprise domain integration (work to home pc familiarity), and, to a weaker extent, gaming. Gaming is why I still keep an install of windows on my pc.

This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.

Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.

Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.

And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.

The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.

When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.

Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.

Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.

If I could get within even 10% of the performance I get on Windows, and know I could safely choose to play some old 2000's game or something that just released just fine, I really wouldn't mind. But it feels like a roulette wheel and some important game I wanted to play just may not work, or may run terribly.

2025 has had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:

- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11

- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux

- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting

- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month

- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months

- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was

- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them

In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.

And then things started snowballing with every version.

Plus, I have elderly clients that got hopelessly lost on any UI after XP, so I had a lot of hacking-and-slashing to do there for not only them, but also myself. Like, just give me the option of a traditional XP-style start menu, goddammit. Thank goodness for StartIsBack.

But what took me about 6-8hrs of directed work with XP is now about 24-48hrs of work with Windows 11. Honestly, I am at the point where I just want to create a highly opinionated one-click configuration app that does everything for me.

And I would, if I still did as many installs as I was doing even half a decade ago.

Hmmm… as a DotNet developer… anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?

Only weird because you were only 6 years old. My first computer was an IBM XT clone, with the full 640k of RAM, a 30 MB harddrive, 5 1/4" floppy drive, Hercules graphics and the amber-colored screen. Also had the turbo button that took it from 4.77 MHz to 10 MHz. Ran DOS v3.3 for a while but eventually upgraded to v5.0.

I was not interested in graphical programs, I only wanted a UNIX shell and standard UNIX utilities

I recently received a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home for personal use so I will be experimenting with it offline^1

I used Windows Services for UNIX ("SFU") on work computers back in the day to compile programs I wrote for UNIX. I am curious about using "WSL" in a similar way

NetBSD is still favorite OS but I use Linux the most

1. I can boot this computer from USB stick so I will also use it to run NetBSD from RAM

I’ve always wanted to try running Linux on one of my Macs, but I never seem to find the time to actually explore it. One of these days...

- xTool Studio - for laser engraver - ProppFrexx ONAIR - professional radio station

In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)

For the first time I feel like there is a real path for me to switch to Linux, and it's about time!

[0] https://github.com/taj-ny/InputActions

I know that some things are not as nice on Linux (ie you need to do MS365 in a browser for example, and MS365 files from a NAS in OnlyOffice is not great, etc). But other than that, I just love living in Gnome. What more do you need that just a clean desktop with some tiling, some virtual desktops, a clock, battery indicator and windows with your stuff? I don't even know. I like that I can set up Linux in 10 min.

I recently set up a Windows 11 machine for a neighbor, it took so long! And it offered dozens of things I didn't want, to the point that I began feeling a bit nervous towards my neighbor (no you don't need that, no not that, no that's just tracking, no why would you want your desktop in the cloud?). Then when finished... it wasn't finished, I need printer drivers, an HP package with drivers and stuff for the BIOS etc etc etc. So much time.

I was already not very impressed when I attempted to okay a video file, and VLC told me I didn't have the right codec installed, and I had to run a shell command to get the codec... I have to open a shell to watch a common video file?

But then while attempting to install some packages to install Steam (which I also needed shell commands for...), I updated some kernel package, as instructed, rebooted my machine, and now Mint just sits there doing nothing right after I get through the bootloader. Can't seem to run any commands to recover either.

Bricking Mint is annoying, but I was much more astonished that I saw so many people hold up Mint as this beacon of user friendly Linux distros, but to do even the most basic things, I had to start running commands on the shell. That is NOT user friendly. I'll probably try again soon, but I'm pretty disappointed in my first experience.

No, my friend. It is not the reason. I have over 50 apps installed, many of which are corporate applications, such as Teams and other Microsoft products. VMwaresing VMWare and WSL foLinux distributionsnux distros. The other things that Linux is missing are ShareX (has flameshot I know), no WhatsApp (PWA might work, but it is a hack). Google Drive that I use to share my KeePass databases (no GDrive on Linux afaik). And gaming is not 100% with linux becuase of anti-cheat (author mentions it).

The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux entirely is that I must find a way to port all of these without compromises. Reinstalling Windows is one thing; changing OS types is another. We all want to be Mr. Robots, but reality is different. It is like moving to a new house. Exciting but sucks.

Also has always been interesting seeing people whine about Linux the whole time I've been using it problem-free, across 4 PCs and 16 years.

The installer also completely broke the Windows partition that came with the workstation even though I was planning on dual booting, but oh well, no great loss there.

Other than that, there are some small conveniences and apps that I miss from MacOS (the mac calendar and mail apps are just so nice!) but the Niri window manager is just so amazing that at this point I don't think there's anything that could make me switch back.

Ooph. It's frustrating to see the community starting (again) to get purchase in public mind share at exactly the moment when it's least prepared to accept new users.

The Linux desktop right now is a wreck. EVERYONE has their own distro, EVERYONE has their own opinions and customizations, and so everyone is being pulled in like 72 different directions when they show up with search terms for "How do I install Linux?"

For a while, 15-ish years ago, the answer was "Just Install Ubuntu". And that was great! No one was shocked. Those of us with nerd proclivities and strong opinions knew how to install what we wanted instead. But everyone else just pulled from Canonical, a reasonably big and reasonably funded organization with the bandwidth to handle that kind of support.

Now? CachyOS. Yikes.

Be cautious with running commands or making package changes based on suggestions from AI tools. Ask clarifying questions and it may realize doing so would either break your system or be attempting to vastly modify it.

My advice is get Docker installed and do most of your stuff in there. If you mess up and expose a Postgres container it will get hacked, but not escape the container, whereas if you install Postgres as a system package and make that same mistake you will be fully owned.

I am so glad that gaming on linux is viable. I wish my music production workflows were too.

Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?

All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.

Only to see this article today. lol

I guess at this point, whatever works for you and your situation is what you should use and ignore all the static. I use Linux for the majority of my dev work, but have the inability to move off Adobe products for the photo and video processing work I do. Something I've found that Linux doesn't compete very well with MS and Apple. I would love to finally get off of one or the other, but I have one foot in each because they both excel in different areas.

Esoteric errors are now resolvable with a simple query. Often with just a few cut and paste commands.

This improves the rough edges to a point that Linux is now a reasonable option for a larger cohort of previously unfeasible users.

Of course, then the ads and other broken-ness got a lot worse. But people might put up with that more if they had upgraded to Windows 11 years ago instead of just looking at doing it now that Windows 10 support has ended.

I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.

I should really do more to evangelize. It's not ok to use an OS monopoly to degrade and squeeze your users' often primary career and creative tool to your own short term ends, making their lives worse and worse. And it's such a delight to get out from under.

Not sure the situation for normies currently, but for power users, definitely dual boot and give it a try.

jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.

You can even download a ready-to-run AppImage (no need to tinker with Wine settings) from here: https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/release...

I just wish Affinity would release a native port, but in the meantime, this works really good.

That said, I threw NetBSD on a P4 tower and it took me half a day just to get a GUI and an internet connection. Was kind of fun,though.

My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.

Lots of people jumped to Mac or Linux at that time. There's article floating around that the Macbook Pro ironically was the best laptop to run Windows XP on via dual boot because it was so intel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

I bounced back and forth for a few years. Now? Not even dual boot, not even a VM. Maybe Linux did not get better than Windows, opinions differ. However, Windows certainly has gotten worse than Linux.

The fact that "opening directories" is something specifically mentioned as a point of difference hints to me that there is something terribly wrong in Microsoft / Windows -land.

If "opening directories" isn't a solved problem in any Operating System that's no longer in beta, never mind one that's been around for 30-odd years, there's something rotten in the foundations.

When Win10 popped up an ad for Win11, I moved fully to Linux the next day.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...

Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.

My kid wants to upgrade their PC from Windows 11 to Linux. They have a recent-ish Nvidia card. I’m very technical: I don’t mind doing whatever arcane thing needs done. They are not, yet.

I haven’t run Linux on my desktop in a decade and I’m completely out of date here. What should I steer my kid toward to run recent games?

I never wanted to switch before because I just wanted an OS that worked, didn't require babysitting, and was compatible with apps. But clearly, Windows has dropped the ball on this.

Off topic, anyone else think Windows 98 is too old for this machine? At a similar era I built an athlon t-bird 1.0GHz, I was mostly using Linux by then but if I did Windows then it would have been Win2k, maybe by the time of Athlon "XP", Windows XP would have been a thing too.

I was running win11 up until three weeks ago. Just a gaming rig, a steam launcher. A used behemoth tower I got for a song via CL. Installed Bazzite and have been incredibly impressed.

Also ty to the author for the link to the nvidia sleep fix. That’s been the only hiccup, and it sounds like I’ll have it sorted before bedtime.

Thankfully unless you're running a few specific applications that only run on Windows, you can use any other operating system. It will do the job, with much less frustrations.

The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.

I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.

But I wanted to build some desktop apps and look at arcGIS so I finally installed Windows 11 on a laptop my first Windows in nearly 2 decades.

This was a month ago and I haven't opened the laptop since. But I'm going to soon maybe!

I ran XP in a VM on Windows 10.

The start menu opens instantly. After one video frame.

Windows explorer opens instantly. One video frame.

If they had literally done nothing for 20 years, it would be like 50x faster now.

Most people overlook that. I only ever see comments complaining about time spent to set up Linux. It's not the only variable, and for Windows it's the constant maintenance that's the issue. You are never just done setting up Windows.

If you see your PC as a tool, not a gimmick to consume, Linux is the only choice. Even MacOS crappifies over time and becomes a Windows copy over time.

** Embracing the Dark Side here **

"And worst of all, you're like a pit bull that has lock-jawed onto OpenAI's ballsack, and you're not letting go, not matter how much we tell you to."

Even Steam games work, I was quite impressed.

Why is there a gap between the menu and the taskbar?

I used to have muscle memory to quickly close windows rightclick taskbar -> leftclick “close” but this stopped working. Why??

I saw the amount of ads they were getting on their laptops and One Drive was even advertising to them on Samsung Android phones.

It's definitely the superior OS for modern development and general system admin, WSL/Docker always felt like an uncanny valley kludge.

The moment your Commodore 64 made you old.

A wonderful writeup.

Made my day! :-D

Its really the only thing on macOS + iOS that I use. Otherwise I am so over the mac lifestyle.

-- Napoleon.

More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait headlines are more important than ever. The title is very immature.

Yes, I am aware there are alternatives that others think are as good or better. No, I have not personally found that to be true.

this sounds like child abuse.

Now if only "Linux" would make a good phone.

Product driven development and too many managers with MBAs led to this problem.

Been using ubuntu + regolith as my daily driver for over a year now and haven't needed to use windows for anything. Almost all games all work well on Linux now too.

Again it's 2026... why is this so hard. Usually paid software is actually better and more feature-ful, but Windows is just not useful at all. The best use of Windows is WSL2

I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative, that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).

Mostly I enjoy how I'm in control of my machine, instead of having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.

Apple, for all its flaws, tends to not have the suckage of either. I don't like using Apple, but it does break a lot less. (One of the reasons is encompassed in this story... while Microsoft and Nvidia yell at each other, Apple makes both the OS and the graphics card, so they just solve the problem internally) Apple with VMs gives you everything without the hardware hassles.

In Linux forums, generally speaking, there is either a way it works or agreement that it hasn't been fixed yet. The main source of spam now is actually StackExchange, that prioritizes discussions from 10 years ago on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, rather than up-to-date questions and answers.

I am currently on 10 so much that I installed the LTSC version that has support until 2032. Keep hammering Microslop, they deserve it. We need to keep bugging them, throw dirt on their face until they actually fix it. Seems that's the way with them nowadays. So I don't feel any shame to call them names at every corner.

But I am still not switching to Linux. Maybe in '32 when LTSC stop being supported and they still didn't fix 11. Oh, and from my experience, Debian will be the way to go. I like a proven distribution even if their repository is not the greatest and the latest.

I’ve gone over the years from Visual Studio fanboy to writing everything in vi, entirely due to software decay.

Our culture and economy can no longer maintain complex GUIs.

I set windows update service to manual, and so far the updates have not reset it, and I have been able to choose to install when I want. I feel safer, but I KNOW microsoft will fuck this over probably on their next update.

Another trick is as a super-super admin you can make executables UNEXECUTABLE by anyone. Things like Edge, etc. They do not let us remove their TRASH, but we still can lock them out, at least for now.

Another thing I had to do with Windows 11 when I had to rebuild my system because of Microsoft's SSD bug they would not cop too... They got rid of the magic trick to disable to OOBE which forces you to login with a microsoft account.... I could not find a way to work around it, but as soon as I was in I created a local admin user and it works well, they only force logged me in when I had to run FUCKING TEAMS for a job interview.

I'm heading down the linux path very soon, I almost did last year. Dual boot for a while, to see if how well my Steam library plays (literally it's the only thing keeping me on Windows 11).... Looking at Bazzite for this but we'll see.

We must UNITE to fight this tryany!

"The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won't run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux."

Fair point though :P

"I'll switch when Linux supports X."

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Okay, but how about my X?"

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Well, X is still missing..."

Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.

Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.

So I have 3 computers: son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows

I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).

I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.

"I installed CachyOS .... It wasn't a painless process. In fact, sleep mode was broken from the start"

This is the problem with newbies into Linux world, they follow hype instead of installing a stable distro.

As it stands in 2026, Linux Mint Cinnamon is by far the best distro to use, no matter if you are into IT field, heavy gaming, video editing and 3D design, it just works.

It follows the well known stability of Debian Linux, while being up-to-date like Ubuntu but without all the bloatware, kernel panic and privacy issues from Ubuntu.

If you are following hype or those distro so called "rolling releases" aka Arch Linux, don't complain that you are having problems. They are everything but stable and "just works" lmao

I can't believe Nadella stole Jobs "bicycles for the mind" metaphor without attribution.

This, a 1,000 times. I hate, hate, hate this "feature". My Macs don't do that. My Linux systems don't do that. The whole, "screw you, we don't care" attitude of Microsoft is quite appalling.

Microsoft now makes it very difficult to disable this feature. After a few registry edits, I thought I was able to put a stop to the madness. But, then it went to rebooting on its own again.

I used to prefer Windows for work. After the absolutely abysmal performance using a SurfaceBook Pro, never again. I’ve never had to deal with such slow performance in my life. I literally cannot get work done. Staff with Windows have constant problems, updates take forever, reboots aren’t very fast, programs crash, and (not OS related) but the new Outlook is universally despised.

I’ve never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot so badly as I’ve seen Microsoft do this of late. More and more staff want MacBooks , and are even ok with using a remote session (ugh) to access the one app that relies on Windows.

The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.

Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.

But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.

There is some serious work needed inside microsoft camp to continue with a 6 month release cycle.

I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.

Windows servers are still pretty good imho.

Anyway... welcome to the party. We saved you a beer. Doesn't matter you came later than other people. It just matters you made it here eventually.

Jovian is a NixOS module that sets up a SteamOS-like experience on top of your existing NixOS config. I was able to build & tweak the config before even building my PC. It booted first try and has since been working without hiccups. Now I am setting up emulators, which is relatively straightforward with nixpkgs :)

Do LLMs like Claude really excel at JavaScript than other programming languages? Similarly does OpenAI prefers Python over other languages?

> DesignVerse

> AI website builder startup.

> - Tech Stack: Next.js, Vercel AI SDK, Mastra AI Framework

> - Role: Full Stack Developer

> - Built core features (full stack) and helped implement the AI-powered editing system.

I seem to have a much lower tolerance for enshitification than most people. I'm off Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Purely because they became annoying.

And Copilot crap being shoved down our throats at every turn.

Don't even get me started on Teams.

Microsoft had a chance make even better OS than XP and 7 and convince millions of users to use Windows.

Okay maybe with Office products the ocean was already red, but still, instead of disgusting its millions of users, they could make them happy.

I am not a firm believer that GNU/Linux distributions are a drop-in replacement for Windows. One can work around compatibility issues, but for non–tech-savvy people, it's just not feasible.

I switched to MacOS since the release of Windows 10 and never looked back, of course I did miss some apps, though using laggy windows was much more painful.

I think the most recent 'production' Windows issue I've had was OneDrive failing to recognize it was syncing my data even though it was syncing. The status symbols for the files and folders wasn't showing up. But that's about it.

My gaming desktop is stable, my PC is rock solid, I run VMs on it (game servers, dev/test environments), and overall just absolutely 0 problems with Windows or my OS at all.

I do, however, have hardware issues semi often. One of my monitors doesn't turn off its backlight, for example. I've had Razer devices just flat out quit on me over the years (multiple Razer mice, at least a couple of Nagas, etc.).

I contend that most people would do better with Windows if they just didn't mess with it (don't run any of those tools proclaiming to "debloat" your OS), and make sure you read the hardware compatibility list of your systems REALLY hard. Incompatible RAM can cause significant problems, a lot of which is completely avoidable if you just read the RAM QVL.

The only thing that I wish vendors would do more is work closer with Microsoft to provide BIOS updates over Windows Update. But, most of these motherboard IHVs are absolutely terrible about doing BIOS updates anyway and require specific mechanisms to keep going correctly. This is in contrast to the Enterprise/Business devices released by HP or Dell which have a usually solid BIOS update track. And again, the only issue I've ever had there was incompatible RAM.

1500+ points for a switch from Windows to Linux :)

It’s the year of the Linux desktop!