Nah, I think it&#x27;s awesome. Great computer by the way.
With all that raw power I bet you were doing tons of computering.

Interestingly I can&#x27;t remember any specs since about 22 years ago.First modern PC (dos&#x2F;win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486&#x2F;sx33&#x2F;4m&#x2F;170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it&#x27;s just &quot;whatever&quot;.

22 years back is still this century, nothing weird about.
As for remembering stuff 6502&#x2F;48KB RAM (along with call -151) seems boring, I guess.

&gt;an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.32MB ram &lt;-- no way. 4 and 8MB were the standard (8MB being grand), you could find 16MB on some Pentiums. So 40MB drive and 32MB RAM is an exceptionally unlikely combo.32MB become norm around Pentium MMX and K6(-2).

TigerDirect? Wow. How did I forget the first place I used and instantly maxxed a credit card?
I would look through that catalog right now if I had it.

They stick with you. I remember our first family computer well (an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.)Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they should be somewhat indelible memories.

Mine was an Intel 386 DX 40MHZ with 2MB RAM and 80MB HD, bought in late 1993.

The 5150 was just an &quot;IBM PC&quot; not an XT, but still... I think we&#x27;re talking about the same thing.I still have mine! 4.77 MHz 8088, 8087 math coprocessor, CGA graphics card, 5.25&quot; floppy (360K, double-sided, double-density), 20 MB Seagate hard drive (I believe the motherboard has newer ROM chips to support that), AST SixPakPlus expansion card to bring it up to 640 KB RAM and a Parallel Port, a Serial Port, a Game Port, and a Real Time Clock (so you don&#x27;t have to type in the date and time every bootup.) At one point I had a Sound Blaster as well, which was nice. The floppy drive and the hard drive each have their own controller cards so there&#x27;s almost no more room for expansion! The motherboard also has the keyboard and cassette (!!!) port. I get an error code about the cassette port so I doubt it would work but I never had the equipment to try it out anyway.

IBM PC XT 5150 4.77MHz, 640KB, no, not weird at all :)

There is no reason you would have forgotten.

Radio Shack PC-1 w&#x2F; the printer and cassette tape player --- really should have waited until the Model 100 was available....

I documented all of my early computers throughout early college, and I&#x27;m glad I did. I remember the first computers well, but without those notes, I wouldn&#x27;t remember the first ten in so much detail. My first computer that was not a family computer was: UMAX 233mhz Pentium 2, 64Mb Ram, 8Gb HDD (was crushed when sat on by sibling)

My Dad had one of them. The first machine I actually purchased myself was a Dragon 32 (6809 processor, 32k RAM) sometime around 1981 - i can  remember everything about it, including all the terrible cassette games I bought for it and the money I spent on ROM cartridges (word processor, assembler&#x2F;debugger). These days I can&#x27;t even remember what&#x27;s in my Steam library.

First family PC was a used IBM PC XT, 8088 w&#x2F; 640kb ram and a cga card with an amber monochrome monitor attached. I remember getting a 14.4 modem on it, and it would freeze, had to force it to 9600bps. Then managed to wranle a 486sx w&#x2F; 4mb ram and an EGA card and display.First decent computer I built was an AMD 5x86 133mhz with the larger cache module and a whopping 64mb ram that I&#x27;d traded for some ANSi work. The irony is for some things it ran circles around the Pentiums that friends had, for others it just slogged. Ran OS&#x2F;2 warp like a beast though. Ever since then, I&#x27;ve mostly maxed out the ram in my systems... I wend from 128gb down to 96GB for my AM5 build though since the most I&#x27;ve ever used is around 75gb, and I wanted to stick to a single pair at a higher speed.

First PC: 8088 with 640K, then a 286 with 2MB! The memory!First own &quot;PC&quot;: Atari ST 1040e, 1MB, with supercharger to run DOS and a 30MB hard disk the size of a regular PC. Donation from a family member.

36 years ago: A Wyse branded AT clone 12.5MHz 286 with 1MB of ram, a 10MB hard drive and a Hercules graphics card (it was a decommissioned CAD machine from my dad&#x27;s work).

I was late to the party with an Apple IIe.  I&#x27;ve never managed to catch up since.

Amstrad 2286 PC, 4Mb RAM, 40Mb hard drive, 3.5&quot; floppy.40 Megabytes. I have photos that size these days.

I still have my Mac 128k with external disk drive and printer. Bought new in Jan 1985 or late Dec 1984. I paid the exorbitant price to upgrade it to 512k during the first year I owned it. I think the RAM needed to be desoldered and new chips soldered in place so it needed to be returned to the store where I bought it.Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.

Still reading the article, but early on it says:&quot;Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?&quot;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?

It&#x27;s only fair that Linux should pay 10% of the license fee for their software to Microsoft in exchange

If Linux had a revenue stream and model, this would make sense. But the style of open-source is to make good software, and let others gravitate to you as a result.

HP Zbook Ultra G1a, 128GB RAM. Add SSD to taste. HP supported (Canonical OEM) Ubuntu with KDE. Works great as a daily driver with a UGreen GAN charger.

I&#x27;m on frame.work with AMD, 96GB RAM.
Using it with fedora+KDE
Absolutely love it

I can also recommend HP Zbook Ultra G1a. It&#x27;s probably the closest thing to Macbooks at the moment. It has lower battery life and latest M chips are still faster but it&#x27;s fast enough for me. The hardware is solid and sw support is great.

I am good laptop hardware away from making the move.

There is Asahi Linux project for Apple Silicon Macs.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asahi_Linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asahi_Linux</a>

So whatever resources you have, Apple will use them mostly to render 3D glass effects. With Debian (Xfce), I can&#x27;t speak for other desktop environments, you need roughly three times fewer resources to run the OS itself.

I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.I&#x27;m not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.

&gt; Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gamingand any contemporary ergonomics. Seriously, macbooks are an environmental hazard at this point: ultra glossy screen, hand twisting keyboard, wrist cutting sharp edges, lack of modern surge protections etc. etc. I genuinely don&#x27;t understand this sentiment that macbook hardware is good.

As much as I love the idea of moving to Linux - Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming. I keep looking for an iteration where it makes sense to switch but currently the intel core 3 stuff is at best comparable to M5 base. Strix Halo is much more power hungry and also not that impressive other than having a bunch of cores. Nothing comes close to the pro&#x2F;max chips in M4 series. And with RAM&#x2F;storage pricing Apple upgrades are looking reasonably priced (TBD when M5 Pro devices launch).So I can either get a top tier tool when I upgrade this year or I can buy a subpar device, and the power management is going to likely be even worse on Linux.

Man, we didn&#x27;t have this all along.Six years ago everything was stable and solid, but Apple&#x27;s board of directors seems to have decided that new Mac users can&#x27;t handle a computer interface anymore and started merging it with mobile OS interfaces. And the result is absolutely terrible.

&gt; and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use Mac.Not sure about other people, but in my case I spend 99% of the time using software made by 3rd parties so my exposure to the OS is very limited.Latest OS is making life miserable though, compared to all the previous releases.

Anything in particular?  I get that it takes some tweaking but so does Linux.  The biggest thing that you&#x27;ll probably never get the way you want is window tiling - it&#x27;s my personal bugaboo with MacOS.  Maybe there&#x27;s a way to get what I want ...

&gt; mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.I hear this from a lot of people when they get their first Mac. When they get specific about what their issues are, it tends to be that macOS doesn&#x27;t do a thing how they are used to doing it, which is more of a learning curve issue, or rigid thinking. Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.

Windows is such garbage, I can&#x27;t understand how you think MacOS is worse lol. It&#x27;s just Unix. Linux is definitely better than both though

&gt; I have no idea how people use mac.Meh, it has a terminal. Good enough for me. It&#x27;s worth putting up with MacOS for the hardware.

Interesting. My experience over a decade was that (expensive) Apple hardware was unreliable or poorly designed ... from the IIsi to the iMac. One exception: the murdered Power clone was great. The iMac vertical screen-stripe fiasco (affected hundreds of users within the warranty period, before they shut down the forum, then took years to respond to) was capped with a hard-drive fail after a year. My &#x27;never again&#x27; still in effect 15 years later.My home-made AMD tower is in its 6th year (running Linux) with no, zero, fails.

As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple there were three things that stood out: The M processors are amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.

Also who is paying &quot;Linux&quot; and for what?Maybe the answer ends up being Valve.

Joking aside, I often hear people say &quot;they should&quot; when talking about GNU&#x2F;Linux (for example: &quot;they should just standardize on one audio stack&quot;), as if there were a central authority making those decisions. What many don&#x27;t realize is that with FOSS comes freedom of choice... and inevitably, an abundance of choice. That diversity isn&#x27;t a flaw, it&#x27;s a consequence of how the ecosystem works.

I guess Linus Torvalds and co? First they&#x27;d need to standardize a Linux desktop OS.

&gt; Linux should consider paying Microsoft and AppleWho or what is the &quot;Linux&quot; entity in this context?

If there was an easy and supported way to put linux on a macbook I&#x27;d be back on linux but I can&#x27;t give up the hardware.

For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front (multimedia), work in back (dev).And then:<pre><code> - Butterfly keyboard
 - Touchbar
 - M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.
</code></pre>
So I switched to System76&#x2F;Linux (Pop OS) and that has been wonderful, not to mention, much cheaper.

Apple forced me to switch to Linux!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!

I mean, this is literally false? Desktop Linux userbase is growing, it&#x27;s bigger than it has ever been even without including ChromeOS, and more OEMs are shipping devices with desktop linux than ever before (Valve&#x27;s suite of devices, multiple laptop vendors including major ones like Lenovo, a few SteamDeck competitors)

I mean - steam deck was a pretty significant inflection point quite recently. Making gaming viable on linux via a popular consumer product is a huge deal and starts to kill one of desktop linux&#x27;s single biggest barriers to adoption.

Calling 4-5% marketshare microscopic is not fair. I get it if it was still stuck at 1%, but it&#x27;s growing, and the rate of growth has been increasing too.

Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though. People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like there is more momentum than ever for this.On the other hand I am also a realist and I don&#x27;t think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.

Go and download the archives of Reddit, there are plenty of torrents out there. Filter to a sub like r&#x2F;gaming. Relative frequency graph of Linux mentions. You&#x27;ll see a magnitude increase over the last 12 months compared to years before. It&#x27;s real.Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are
uptodate now that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.

According to the Steam Hardware Survey (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;Steam-Hardware-Softw...</a>) only ~3.6% Steam users use Linux and these statistics include the Steam Deck users. SteamOS accounts for ~26% of Linux users, which in turn brings down the count to ~2.6%. For comparision, MacOS is ~2.1% of the market share at the moment. Wake me up when Linux gets to 10%.

More and more desktop apps are just becoming websites. More and more desktop apps are using Electron rather than some native app. Windows is slowly becoming a dumpster fire in terms of usability and issues. Most games these days Just Work on Linux without any tinkering.While I hardly think that this year will be &quot;the year of the Linux desktop&quot; or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year, until it&#x27;s not so microscopic anymore.

As phones replace desktop computers for non-technical users, leaving a concentration of &quot;skilled&quot; users, my suspicion is that the pattern will resemble the quote &quot;Slowly, then all at once.&quot;

Have a look at the Steam Hardware [and software] Survey [0] results. Linux has been trending upwards whist Windows has been trending down for a wee while. And the population this looks at is primarily interested in gaming, which means that this is despite a compatibility layer being needed for a large amount of the software used. I imagine in other communities (software, old people) it&#x27;s trending much faster.E.g. I recently installed Linux Mint for my grandma so she could use email and an up-to-date web browser on her old laptop that can&#x27;t run (secure) Windows anymore. The UI differences are marginal for her, and she can do everything she needs to much better than she could before (which was not at all).[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Every month more and more people switch to LinuxWe&#x27;ve been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we&#x27;re going to count Google&#x27;s Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.

This might have some merit for some people.But the talk of abuse is also heavy-handed.I&#x27;ve spent months testing and trying out RAW photo editors, and months trying out Linux gaming.Linux is incredible, but my experience with Windows is still better. As many that still use it can attest, you can disable almost any annoyance. It&#x27;s extremely stable. Things just work including brightness controls, fractional scaling, high refresh rates and high FPS gaming, and my favorite RAW photo editing. I could switch to a less enjoyable experience with Linux but I choose not to after extensive evaluation. I don&#x27;t spend any money on Microsoft services, no Office or OneDrive subscription.But my decision isn&#x27;t permanent. My hobbies, software use, gaming selection, etc. can change over time, and Linux is getting better while Windows is getting worse. If it&#x27;s ever &quot;abuse&quot; and I can have a better experience with Linux, I won&#x27;t hesitate to change. But it&#x27;s also a lot of effort to try out alternatives, and dual booting is slow and annoying. Plus when I dual boot to Linux Mint the kernel fails to boot every other time and I have to select an older one, reboot, select a newer one, reboot. It&#x27;s a huge waste of time. A bad experience and I have chosen to avoid it and try again in another year or two.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s Stockholm Syndrome, rather it&#x27;s a classic case of sunken cost fallacy.
For me at least, that&#x27;s what it was. I had invested so much time in Ableton (~14 years) and didn&#x27;t feel like starting from scratch with another DAW. And let&#x27;s be real, no one likes that kind of friction.It had to get worse to finally break the inertia and also make me realize that it&#x27;s only going downhill.

I&#x27;ve dual booted for over a decade at this point and I still need to switch back and forth for different things.

It&#x27;s a form of Stockholm Syndrome for most people. They&#x27;ll have some bit of software they imagine is irreplaceable because they have some special use case that means that they just have to tolerate the relentless abuse. Or some other excuse. Whatever. It all boils down to people being afraid of change.Most of that fear is not all that rational. It&#x27;s not unlike kidnap victims falling in love with their captors. Your mind just tries to make the most of what fundamentally is a really messed up situation. You&#x27;ll tell yourself it isn&#x27;t that bad or that the next update will fix it or that you can get some magic software thingy that makes it go faster. Whatever.Once you realize you are being abused, you can make some choices and do something about it. Most tools can be replaced if you look around a bit and do a bit of research. And virtual machines on Linux can run Windows just fine if you have one or two things that just really need it (been there done that). There&#x27;s also wine and proton which aren&#x27;t half bad these days. And they work for lots of things other than games. You can dual boot. Etc. Try it and find out. The absolute worst case is that you have to go back to being a lame abuse victim here. You&#x27;ll feel extra bad because now you know. The best case gets you out of that abusive relation ship for the rest of your life. Life is too short to get subjected to this kind of abuse.

Every month more and more people switch to Linux and I just love it. I&#x27;m tired of one company controlling the core operating system of 85% of desktop computers and users being at their whim.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!

Yep, Ableton is why I have a Mac Mini on my KVM.

Ableton Live works fine on Wine, at least for me. Every once in a while I boot it up to bounce stems from an older project to Bitwig.

Gentoo forced me to switch to Apple.jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it&#x27;s been 15 years.

Microsoft forced me to switch to Apple AND Linux.

Haven&#x27;t really ever had much issues with nvidia drivers on Linux tbh, and I&#x27;ve been using it since the early 2000s.

Drivers are generally fine, but there&#x27;s more to it than just switching. If you&#x27;re not bothered by the Win11 stuff, switching is probably not for you. Perhaps you can look into Linux for your current use cases and see if it&#x27;s at all attractive.

Depends on why they are bad.If they&#x27;re bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is. If they&#x27;re bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor boogeyman problem are just around the corner.

Yeah the main reason to dislike Nvidia drivers on Linux these days from a regular user point of view (I am not a Wayland developer so I don’t have to deal with whatever technical annoyance there is there) is just the philosophical&#x2F;potential-privacy annoyance of running closed source code on my open source system. This doesn’t give the entirely closed source OS any points.

&gt; Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.That&#x27;s a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD GPU but it isn&#x27;t a good reason not switch to linux from a closed source OS. I&#x27;m in the process of switching to linux full time (it shouldn&#x27;t really take that long but I haven&#x27;t had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed source linux drivers.You&#x27;re the top comment that addresses this so I&#x27;m putting this here but not exactly replying to you.

One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance&#x2F;features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for &quot;PC&quot; game development and hardware&#x2F;drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what&#x27;s missing and how to implement.Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn&#x27;t aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if&#x2F;when focus does come back to gaming, when there&#x27;s a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren&#x27;t second class citizens. I&#x27;d also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.

What do you mean by bad?Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.Is this a performance question? If you&#x27;re a normie they&#x27;re good. If you&#x27;re demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.

&gt; Are nvidia drivers still bad?Depends a ton hardware. Newer hardware has been playing well with the kernel but still not fully oss.You’ll still have less trouble over all with amd though.

The nvidia gods smile upon me, zero issues except the one I mentioned in the article.
They do have to fix VKD3D performance though, 10-30% perf loss on Intel&#x2F;Nvidia hardware when playing DX12 games.

nvidia drivers are pretty easy to install now that all of AI is trained on nvidia drivers on linux

The driver situation on Linux is still pretty hit-or-miss, but thanks to Microsoft&#x27;s recent efforts, Windows has reached the same level of reliability as well.

Maybe it&#x27;s stockholm syndrome but I still have no interest in Linux. Are nvidia drivers still bad?

For what it&#x27;s worth, personally I thought your writing style and sense of humor was excellent, and my favorite part of the post.I also appreciate you giving me an updated copy of the &quot;Microsoft is a corporation&quot; meme, as the one I have downloaded seems to become outdated each time a new Windows update comes out.

lol! Sorry about the clickbait.
Everyone&#x27;s doing it nowadays, and I wanted to follow.
Gonna think of a better title next time

Wow gun to head and everything. Glad he survived the transition.More seriously, editing is either a lost art or click bait headlines are more important than ever. The title is very immature.

I made the decision to just play a different game when I switched back in 2022 or so. Thankfully, the game in question supported Linux shortly after the switch even though I got used to not playing it and just don&#x27;t anymore :) I still try any anti-cheat games I come across to see if they work and it&#x27;s surprising how many actually do.Nothing wrong with staying on Windows if compatibility is an issue, though.

This sort of anticheat exists because cheat developers ruin the experience for players, and for games that intend to be competitive in a real sense, the integrity of the game. Cheat developers keep getting smarter, so anticheat developers need to do the same. I guess the kernel is sorta as deep as you can go, at least with software.I don&#x27;t like it personally but I do understand why they do it. It just means I can&#x27;t play those games on Linux, and some studios just don&#x27;t care.It&#x27;s a shame that they don&#x27;t care, though supporting such a minuscule percentage of the gaming market doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense unless out of principle&#x2F;just do to it.

A few years ago, I would have said that any game that uses such a level of anticheat that makes wine&#x2F;proton unable to play it (ie: kernel level anticheat) is basically malware and you _shouldn&#x27;t_ play it anyway, out of both principle, and also because if they had a bug in their code, you&#x27;re just opening up your device to an unnecessary privilege escalation vector that other malware can abuse to escalate their privileges. (This is not theoretical, this has happened before, eg: with Genshin. Though I believe just the mere existence of a signed driver was enough, since malware can just &quot;Bring your own Driver&quot; (BYOD) and download the driver, at least before it was revoked)Now, I still hold this belief in most regards. But I do see the appeal, especially if your friends and peers are gamers and actively play these sorts of games, and you feel that you&#x27;re missing out on socialising or making new friends in that aspect. But there are plenty of other games and consoles, if you could just convince them to switch...

That quote is from the article rather than myself, though turning chat off does help

It&#x27;s probably the toxicity that bothers you, so if you just switch chat to private mode you&#x27;ll be golden.Ever since I did that, League of Legends is great honestly, and able to be played daily with no toxicity or rage.

I&#x27;d switch if it weren&#x27;t for anticheat breaking the games I play. I really, really hate Windows, and Windows 11 even more than normal levels of Windows hate. I had to do some really weird shit to get it to a place that feels sane.&quot;The only real limitation is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won&#x27;t run. But honestly I think not being able to launch League of Legends is actually a feature - one final reason to install Linux.&quot;Fair point though :P

Windows is under 10% of their revenue these days. It’s simply not important to leadership. Just like Xbox - just let it slowly die as you squeeze any last remaining cents out

Nah, they have a good strategy. In fact, they have all the strategies.

This is true. The constantly changing strategy is what left the wave of debt behind it.

Microsoft probably has a problem with tech debt, yes. That is however not the problem. Instead, the product strategy is. And it was bad even before LLMs.

It&#x27;s not going to get any better.  Microsoft&#x27;s problem is tech debt.  Copilot doesn&#x27;t pay tech debt it creates it.  It will only get worse faster.

Oh, you can try them all. That&#x27;s pretty much an entire hobby itself.

Gnome comes with built in virtual machine support with the Boxes app, just download an ISO and try as many as you want.

I&#x27;ve never heard of CachyOS. I&#x27;m amazed at how many Linux versions there are and how good they seem and it makes me wish I could try them all.

This depends entirely on your stack and preferred workflow. MacOS is increasingly hostile to powerusers.  If you don&#x27;t mind following their golden path, all is fine, otherwise... I wonder how long before you have to enable a scary &quot;developer mode&quot; to install software outside the app store.

I guess I&#x27;d argue that &quot;it depends on lot on what you mean by development&quot;.For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It&#x27;s where your product is going to run in production.For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I&#x27;ll note this is starting to change, but it&#x27;s not yet over the hump.The only place I&#x27;d consider macOS as a &quot;perfectly fine&quot; linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy&#x2F;terms). Otherwise it&#x27;s just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It&#x27;s not really even &quot;prettier&quot; anymore.

I find a Linux host with a development guest OS the best to work in. It allows for snapshots, backups, and sharing development environments. Solution A might need a different environment than Solution B.Funny enough, the bluetooth stack works better on a bare metal Linux box than a Windows one. Audio starts being played sooner.

I would have to agree with this. I don&#x27;t understand people how say developing on Linux is somehow better. I have built C++ software across Windows, macOS and Linux and I can&#x27;t say one is easier than the other at all. Perhaps it is because of the package management system that makes installing a compiler &quot;easier&quot; than downloading Xcode or downloading&#x2F;running the Visual Studio installer??I certainly don&#x27;t find development tools better on Linux, particularly for C++ debugging. Windows&#x2F;Visual Studio is the leader in that regard.I have also done C#, PHP, Java, JS + web development across all 3 and don&#x27;t see the difference.

and iTerm on Mac is better than any of the Linux terminals

Both MacOS and Windows with wsl are perfectly fine for development. Especially MacOS.There&#x27;s literally nothing special about Linux when it comes to development. And there are quite a few downsides especially when it comes to some specialized tooling because many vendors often only have Windows tools for their devices.

That seems to be the preferred path for many devs on Windows - unless you can get your hands on a Mac at work WSL is much better&#x2F;easier. Most non-software companies may not even offer a Linux laptop.

&gt; somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui landHu... use Dolphin?

I&#x27;m basically developing on Linux despite running windows. I just set the terminal emulator to open wsl by default, and have VSCode connect to the WSL instance. This also gives you the &quot;native docker&quot; the author mentions, just ignore Docker for Windows exists and install docker in your wsl.This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently

Did you have a particularly bad experience? Things have changed _a little_ since 1992.I switched from Windows in 2018 because I was trying to install some Python packages, and it was hours of work to find the specific visual C++ runtimes that were needed to get them working.On Linux: pip install, done.

Citation needed. It&#x27;s not. Linux is only good for hosting. Only very very few large companies gives laptops with Linux to developers.Linux for desktop is a joke, always have been since at least Slackware 7.1 running at my 486

Before MS really started mucking things up the past few years, I was referring to WSL as my favorite Linux distro...  MS took a LOT of the rough edges off in terms of development.

Like the author says:&gt; Linux is the preferred platform for developmentHonestly I&#x27;m surprised he was using a non unix system this long, I guess it kinda proves his point that switching costs can seem huge

I also think LLMs are well suited to find niche strange bugs way quicker. User posts esoteric error on the issues page. LLM with proper context may converge quickly, allowing the programmer to implement a fix.

My feeling is that I consistently find on-point solutions for my Linux problems with a quick search. However if my Windows install gets in trouble my search will yield some DISM.exe invocation which doesn&#x27;t help at all. A bit anecdotal, but this is my experience. I&#x27;ve always been able to fix my Linux installs.

1. It is. It makes me more likely to use Linux, and I&#x27;m not that far from the average. On Reddit r&#x2F;gaming I&#x27;ve seen people who literally made the step and say exactly this &quot;I installed Linux and when I can&#x27;t figure something out I ask an LLM and it has done a great job so far&quot;.It&#x27;s happening right now. Maybe you&#x27;re so opposed to the concept that you hate to imagine it, but it&#x27;s the reality.&gt; or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmaresYour concept of people installing Linux is behind because even just over the last 12 months things have changed a lot.

1. This is not a likely effect of LLM adoption.2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.People don&#x27;t switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don&#x27;t want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.

I think Linux adoption will rapidly grow with the adoption of LLMs.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.

The one thing holding me to M$ Windows is visual studio.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.

I don&#x27;t understand how it got so bad. On Windows 95 or 98, you knew that pressing Windows &gt; P &gt; across right &gt; N would open Notepad in about 22 milliseconds of interaction. Things just worked and responded.Today it&#x27;s utter garbage.

Windows 11 was bad before AI. Press the Start menu? Wait. That much latency was never acceptable and Windows should die like desktop Java did.

They&#x27;re pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn&#x27;t too bad once I got it working... I&#x27;d also wanted a dnat for &quot;internal&quot; services, and that&#x27;s where it got tricky.I need to refresh myself as I&#x27;m wanting to move from a &#x2F;29 to a &#x2F;28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I&#x27;m not quite at a &quot;vibe code&quot; level of trust, so it&#x27;s still a bit of a slog.

KDE &amp; Gnome are both guilty of the same.

Pair-programming Nix with Gemini has taught me a lot about the assistive power of LLMs.They&#x27;re still slow and annoying at languages I&#x27;m good at. But it&#x27;s really handy to be able to take one I&#x27;m not (like Nix or even C++) and say &quot;write me a patch that does …&quot; Applying a lot of the same thinking&#x2F;structuring skills, but not tripping on the syntax.

&gt; UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise.&gt; It&#x27;ll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn&#x27;t. Hoo boy.LLMs are actually very useful for Linux configuration problems. They might even be the reason so many users made the switch recently.

It would help if Gnome wasn&#x27;t so hostile towards proper cross-DE interop. A famous quote by a Gnome dev goes, &quot;I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an Xfce app unfortunately&quot;They seem to genuinely believe that their way is the right way and everyone else is &quot;holding it wrong&quot; so there&#x27;s no need for things that would make cross-DE apps easier (or even possible).

- Yes. I think big players in Linux should start supporting core functionalities in GNOME and KDE, and make it polished for laptops and desktops and that would be very cool. For a long time, KDE had a problem of having too many things under its umbrella. Now, with separation of Plasma Desktop and Applications, focusing on Plasma Desktop and KDE PIM should be a good step.- Kind of ties to the old point: KDE on Wayland does this extremely well.- You&#x27;re back to 20 years because problems are exactly from 20 years ago. Vendors refusing to support linux with d rivers.- Audio filtering? Interesting. I know people who use Pipewire + Jack quite reasonably. But may be you have usecase I am now aware of? Would be happy to hear some.

&gt;poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.I&#x27;d blame Linux as a very small percentage of the problem here. This is on NVIDIA ensuring their hardware doesn&#x27;t last to long and forcing you to throw it away eventually. Open source can make the monitor &#x27;work&#x27; but really aren&#x27;t efficient, and really can never be efficient because NVIDIA doesn&#x27;t release the needed information and directly competes with their proprietary driver.

Couldn&#x27;t you swap out for a now lower level AMD GPU?  An RX 6600 should be under $200 and likely at least as good as what you were running... unless you were doing specific CUDA workloads.  Even on PCIe 2&#x2F;3, it should be fine.

I had to dump a perfectly fine c.2012 workstation recently because of video driver limitations. Could no longer stay current on my flavor of Linux (OpenSUSE) and have better than hideous display resolution limited to just one monitor. NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers are great, but the limited support lifecycle plus poor open source coverage is actually making Linux turn fine systems into trash just the way Windows used to do.

Hardware support for esoteric things such as the new generation of Wacom EMR is still awkward --- I was able to get the previous gen working on a ThinkPad X61T using Lubuntu --- wish that there was such an easy way to try out Linux on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360....

This is not a driver issue I&#x27;m talking about.  It&#x27;s a &quot;best way to adjust the white balance is with this GTK+-2.0 app that hasn&#x27;t seen maintenance since the Bush administration&quot; issue.

&gt; I&#x27;d take balkanization over the &quot;we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works&quot;.The UI framework for macOS has not changed in any substantial design-update-requiring ways since OS X was first released. They did add stuff (animations as a core concept, most notably).The UI framework for Windows has changed even less, though it&#x27;s more of a mess because there are several different ones, with an unclear relationship to each other. win32 won&#x27;t hurt though, and it hasn&#x27;t changed in any significant ways since dinosaurs roamed the silicon savannahs.The UI framework for Linux ... oh wait, there isn&#x27;t one.

&gt; * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous meI&#x27;d take balkanization over the &quot;we force-migrate everyone to the hot new thing where nothing works&quot;.&gt; It&#x27;ll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn&#x27;t.Drivers are a pain point and will probably stay so until the market share is too large for the hardware vendors to ignore. Which probably aren&#x27;t happening any time soon, sadly.

&gt; I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properlyWindows is the only one that does this properly.Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application, per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It&#x27;s pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1]Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE&#x2F;Qt handles this OK; GNOME&#x2F;GTK break when the scaling factor is not an integer multiple of 96 and cause raster scaling.Linux + Wayland has per-display scaling factors, but Chromium, GNOME, and GTK break the same way as the Xorg setup. KDE&#x2F;Qt are a bit better, but I&#x27;m quite certain the taskbar icons are sharper on Xorg than they are on Wayland. I think this boils down to subpixel rendering not being enabled.And of course, every application on Linux in theory can handle high pixel density, but there is a zoo of environment variables and command-line arguments that need to be passed for the ideal result.On macOS, if the pixel density of the target display is at least some Apple-blessed number that they consider &#x27;Retina&#x27;, then the &#x27;Retina&#x27; resolutions are enabled. At resolutions that are not integer multiples of the physical resolution, the framebuffer is four times the resolution of the displayed values (twice in each dimension), and then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc&#x2F;Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.On non-retina resolutions, there is zero concept of &#x27;scaling factor&#x27; whatsoever; you can choose another resolution, but it will be raster-scaled (usually up) with some bi&#x2F;trilinear filtering, and the entire screen is blurry. The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;windows&#x2F;win32&#x2F;hidpi&#x2F;setting-the-default-dpi-awareness-for-a-process" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;windows&#x2F;win32&#x2F;hidpi&#x2F;settin...</a>

That&#x27;s roughly what I did for my ANSI console&#x2F;viewer... I started with EGA resolution, and each ega pixel renders 3x4 in its&#x27; buffer then a minor blur, then scaled to fit the render area.  The effect is really good down to about 960px wide, which is a bit bigger in terms of real pixels than the original... at 640px wide, it&#x27;s a little hard to make out the actual pixels... but it&#x27;s the best way I could think of to handle the non-square pixels of original EGA or VGA... I went with EGA because the ratio is slightly cleaner IMO.  It&#x27;s also what OG RIPterm used.

I have precisely one Windows thing I use regularly, and it has a giant window that needs lots of pixels, and I use it over Remote Desktop. The results are erratic and frequently awful.

&gt; 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.I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.

&gt; * 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.This sounds like you&#x27;re using some old software. GNOME and sway have clean fractional scaling without blurring, though that hasn&#x27;t always been the case (it used to be terrible).

Mint&#x2F;cinnamon here at 150%, X11, not blurry.  It’s FUD.

FWIW, I can do the same with KDE on Xorg with Gentoo Linux.Since the introduction of the XSETTINGS protocol in like 2003 or 2005 or so to provide a common cross-toolkit mechanism to communicate system settings, the absence of &quot;non-integer&quot; scaling support has always been the fault of the GUI toolkits.&gt; I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.When doesn&#x27;t GNOME lag behind? Honestly, most of Wayland&#x27;s problems have been because a project that expects protocol implementers and extenders to cooperate in order to make the project work set those expectations while knowing that GNOME was going to be one of those parties whose cooperation was required.

I&#x27;m using KDE with Wayland and 2 non-standard DPI monitors (one at 100% the other at 150% scale). No workarounds needed, nothing is blurry. I think your experience comes from GNOME which lacks behind in this regard.

On UI frameworks... mostly agree, I say this as a COSMIC user even... so many apps still don&#x27;t show up right in the tray, but it&#x27;s getting a bit better, I always found KDE to be noisy, and don&#x27;t like how overtly political the Gnome guys are. So far Wayland hasn&#x27;t been bad, X apps pretty much just work, even if they don&#x27;t scale right.I&#x27;m on a very large OLED 3440x1440 display and haven&#x27;t had too many issues... some apps seem to just drop out, I&#x27;m not sure if they are on a different workspace or something as I tend to just stick to single screen, single display. I need to take the time to tweak my hotkeys for window pinning. I&#x27;ll usually have my browser to half the screen and my editor and terminal on the other half... sometimes stretching the editor to 2&#x2F;3 covering part of the browser. I&#x27;m usually zoomed in 25-30% in my editor and browser... I&#x27;d scale the UI 25% directly, like on windows or mac, but you&#x27;re right it&#x27;s worse.For webcams, I don&#x27;t use anything too advanced, but the Nexigo cams I&#x27;ve been using lately have been working very well... they&#x27;re the least painful part of my setup, and even though I tend to use a BT headset, I use the webcam mic as switching in and out of stereo&#x2F;mono mode for the headset mic doesn&#x27;t always work right in Linux.On audio filtering, I can only imagine... though would assume it&#x27;s finally starting to get better with whatever the current standard is (pipewire?), which from what I understand is closer to what mac&#x27;s interfaces are. I know a few audio guys and they hate Windows and mostly are shy to even consider Linux.

KDE Plasma 6 might be the only desktop that does this right on Linux.

I&#x27;ve also been running fractional scaling on Sway for many years now and native wayland applications are not blurry. X11 apps run through XWayland will be blurry, but I don&#x27;t have any legacy X11 apps remaining on my system.

&gt; Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurryNot blurry for me on KDE and I wouldn&#x27;t tolerate blurry, I&#x27;d prefer the imperfect solution of using bigger fonts.

&gt;many apps now just use CSDIf there&#x27;s something I hate about Linux, it&#x27;s CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don&#x27;t know what it is).If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I&#x27;d use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.

If we&#x27;re talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even &quot;picking a camp&quot;. The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one.Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.

&gt; UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous messI thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.At least on Linux, with GTK&#x2F;KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it&#x27;s hopeless to have every window styling be consistent.I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.

macOS and Windows have a much smaller set of variants, and tend to ship a single UI with everything included with OS. Even the best single desktop Linux distros will ship divergent KDE and Gnome apps.If you want essentially perfect high-DPI support out of the box and can afford higher end displays, use macOS. It just works. I see the comments above about scaling, and to that, I say: most people will never notice. However, a Win32 app being the wrong scale? They&#x27;ll notice that.But the real display weak point of Linux right now vs Windows is HDR for gaming. That&#x27;s a real shitshow and it tends to just work on Windows.

&gt; UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess.Amen.But, which OS doesn&#x27;t have this problem? I&#x27;m currently running windows on a work laptop and even freaking first-party apps have a different look and behave differently from one another. Teams can&#x27;t even be assed to use standard windows notifications! And don&#x27;t get me started on electron apps, of which most apps are nowadays, each coming with their own look and feel.Also, have you tried switching from light to dark mode, say at night? The task manager changes only partially. The explorer copy info window doesn&#x27;t even have a dark mode! On outlook the window controls don&#x27;t change colour, so you end up with black on black or white on white. You can&#x27;t possibly hold up windows as a model of uniform UI.So while I agree that this situation is terrible, I wouldn&#x27;t pin it on the linux ecosystem(s).&gt; Every other major OS can deal with [high dpi].Don&#x27;t know about mac os, but on Windows it&#x27;s a shitshow. We use some very high DPI displays at work which I have to run at 200%, every other screen I use is 100%. Even the freaking start menu is blurry! It only works well if I boot the machine with the high-dpi display attached. If I plug it in after a while (think going to work with the laptop asleep), the thing&#x27;s blurry! Some taskbar icons don&#x27;t adapt, so I sometimes have tiny icons, or huge cropped ones if I unplug the external monitor. Plasma doesn&#x27;t do this.IME KDE&#x2F;Plasma 6 works perfectly with mixed DPI (but I admit I haven&#x27;t tried &quot;fractional&quot; scales). The only app which doesn&#x27;t play ball 100% is IntelliJ (scaling works, it&#x27;s sharp, but the mouse cursor is the wrong size).&gt; Audio filtering is a pain to set up.What do you mean? I&#x27;ve been using easyeffects for more than five years now to apply either a parametric EQ to my speakers or a convolver to my headphones. Works perfectly for all the apps, or I can choose which apps it should alter. The PEQ adds a bit of a latency, but applications seem to be aware of it, so if I play videos (even youtube on firefox with gpu decoding!) it stays in sync. It detects the output and loads presets accordingly. I also don&#x27;t have to reboot when I connect some new audio device, like BT headphones (well, technically, on Windows I don&#x27;t anymore, either, since for some reason it can&#x27;t connect to either of my headphones at all). I would love to have something similar on windows, but the best I found isn&#x27;t as polished. It also doesn&#x27;t support dark mode, so it burns my eyes at night.

Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more blurriness.

the scaling and UI framework issues are by far my biggest pain point. I will inevitably end up with an app with tiny and&#x2F;or blurry UI elements every few weeks and have to spend a ton of time figuring out the correct incantation to make it better.This is on a pretty clean&#x2F;fresh install of current ubuntu desktop

&gt; Audio filtering is a pain to set up.Like noise filtering for your microphone? It was pretty trivial to set up: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;werman&#x2F;noise-suppression-for-voice" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;werman&#x2F;noise-suppression-for-voice</a>

I use Linux as my daily driver, with a Mac laptop. I only use Windows when I absolutely have to (i.e., testing), and usually through a VM.Some other rough edges in Linux I&#x27;ve encountered:- a&#x2F;v support in various apps. We use Slack for everything (I can&#x27;t just use something else) and a&#x2F;v support is pretty bad to where my video frame rate is now ~1Hz and screen share shows a black rectangle. I think that&#x27;s mostly Slack&#x27;s fault as Google Hangouts works fine, but it&#x27;s probably low on their priority list.- sleep &#x2F; hibernation is still sometimes flakey. occasionally it won&#x27;t wake up after hibernating overnight, and I have to hard reboot (losing any open files though that&#x27;s not an issue)- power management on laptops (and therefore battery life) is still worse than Windows, and way worse than Mac. I tried Framework + Linux for a while and really wanted to love it, but switched to a Mac and am not going back (still run Linux on desktop). There is nothing out there that compares to the M-series MacBooks.- occasional X&#x2F;Wayland issues, as mentioned

I&#x27;m a lifelong Mac user, but a gaming handheld has gotten me into some of these topics. I dual-boot SteamOS and Windows.On SteamOS, my 5.1 stereo just works.On Windows, apparently there was some software package called DTS Live (and&#x2F;or Dolby Live) needed to wrap the audio stream in a container that the stereo understands. There was a time when there was a patent pool on the AC-3 codec (or something like that - I&#x27;m handwaving because I don&#x27;t know all the details). So Microsoft stopped licensing the patent, and now you just can&#x27;t use AC-3 on Windows. I spent an evening installing something called Virtual CABLE and trying to use it to juryrig my own Dolby Live encoder with ffmpeg… Never got it to work.It&#x27;s easy to fall deep into the tinkerhole on Linux, which has kept me away for a long time, but as mainstream platforms get more locked down, or stop supporting things they decide should be obsolete, it&#x27;s nice to have a refuge where you&#x27;re still in control, and things still work.(Insert meme about the Windows API in Proton being a more stable target than actual Windows.)

As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these:* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don&#x27;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&#x27;re suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It&#x27;ll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn&#x27;t. Hoo boy.* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.

&quot;Like digital herpes, I just couldn&#x27;t get rid of it.&quot;Made my day! :-D

Possibly. If the installer happy path fails (which has happened to me), Arch is &quot;here&#x27;s root shell, figure it out&quot;, Ubuntu is slightly more user-friendly :)I will say Arch wiki is amazing, even if you&#x27;re not using it. I&#x27;m on Debian nowadays and still often refer it for random obscure hardware setup details.

Ok so Arch apparently has an install script that does everything[0]. I tried it the other day and it&#x27;s pretty flawless, albeit terminal-based so not for everyone I guess.Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months &amp; a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you&#x27;ll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;title&#x2F;Archinstall" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&#x2F;title&#x2F;Archinstall</a>

Everyone says this but I have only ever used arch. Wiped windows and started with Manjaro. No VM to test straight to bare metal. I learned how Linux worked and then installed the base arch distro. If you can read a wiki, you can use arch. It&#x27;s not rocket science. All the available arch flavored distros make it even easier today. I tried debian once and found it even more cumbersome. Is it apt or apt-get? is it install or update? Never stuck around to find out.

Or ... like me, switch to Fedora full time 20 years ago and still use it (ok, I use AlmaLinux on my workstation and servers)...

Yeah agree completely. Started with Slack at around 2.x, took a long time to switch to Debian and occasionally Ubuntu.That was when you compiled your own kernel and installed software by running .&#x2F;configure &amp;&amp; make &amp;&amp; make installNormies fleeing Windows dumpster fire today won&#x27;t do that.

Ah yes, Slackware.  I remember downloading something like 15 floppy disks over the 56k modem for my first install.  Maybe a v1.1 kernel?

I started with Slackware Linux—something arguably even more “hard-core” than Arch.What mattered most at the beginning was good installation documentation, and both Arch and Slackware delivered on that front. Slackware, however, had an additional appeal: it was intentionally simple, largely because it was created and maintained by a single person at the time. That simplicity made it feel conceivable that the system could be fundamentally understood by a single human mind.Whether a newcomer appreciates the Slackware&#x2F;Arch approach depends heavily on learning style and goals. You can click through a GUI installer and end up with a working distro, but then what? From a beginner’s perspective, you’ve just installed something somehow—and it looks like a crippled Windows machine with fewer buttons.Starting with Slackware gave me a completely different starting reference point. Installing the system piece by piece was genuinely exciting, because every step involved learning what each component was and how it fit into the whole. The realization that Linux is essentially a set of Lego bricks—and that I might actually master the entire structure, or even build my own pieces—was deeply motivating.That mindset was strongly shaped by how Slackware and similar distros present themselves. Even the lack of automatic dependency management acted as an early nudge toward thinking seriously about complexity, trade-offs, and minimalism, which stayed with me forever.

Arch is great. However, I would never recommend Arch (or an Arch derivative) to a first-comer to Linux.Ease in gently, with Ubuntu or Fedora. Get familiar. Then go crazy.

You didn&#x27;t use a non Nvidia driver then. Sounds exactly like you were always using beta drivers.

Uninstalled with DDU, switched to multiple versions back.
But it wasn&#x27;t the nvidia driver, and I proved that when I switched to an insider build and the flickers were gone :D

The author tried everything except switching graphics drivers?! That&#x27;s like listening to the top 10 hits on broken speakers and declaring all new music is terrible.

I&#x27;d be happy to switch to Linux, but my Macbook with M processor is a real work horse. First of all, everything works (bluetooth, headphones, camera, etc). Second of all, ARM based processor is a beast. Until someone release an ARM based laptop, I don&#x27;t see myself switching to Linux.

FSF is trying! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librephone.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librephone.org&#x2F;</a>

Android.Now if only there was a good phone that runs GNU.

Ubuntu since 2011Now if only &quot;Linux&quot; would make a good phone.

Thank you for your service. :D Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version. I got a free copy as a university student and it was just awesome. XP was the era where things changed for the sake of change. In Windows 2000 you could learn where absolutely everything was and it was always there for you.I still have my install CD, though it has suffered from bit-rot and can&#x27;t be read properly. :(

I think the UI was reasonable and easily understood in 2000. After that it seems links and buttons became interchangeable, and now we end up in the mess where scrollbars may or may not be visible until you try fiddling with the UI etc.

Yeah Windows 2000 had countless software test engineers, I was one of them and on my team there were 5000 of us. I stared in tech support in 97 and moved into QA and always filed bugs on behalf of the customer, sadly everyone must code and customers must test. It&#x27;s just not working out but Microsoft really only cares about Corporate America and Windows running on all the main languages. It&#x27;s great to have alternatives and I&#x27;ve moved to MacOS after using Windows since 1.0.

My Windows 11 installation broke down after one of the updates. Now I get &quot;Please reinstall Windows&quot; warning in Windows Update settings. And some error hex code which doesn&#x27;t really help. I&#x27;ve installed like 5 different apps on this machine and never ran any &quot;tweaking&quot; scripts or apps.I don&#x27;t think I ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 but here we are.

I agree with the sentiment but I keep Snap disabled because I like Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) for its rock solid stability.

&gt; Do they still do that?Yes. I know its more than firefox, but I don&#x27;t have the full list. On 24.04:<pre><code> me@comp:~$ apt info firefox | head -n 5
 
 WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
 
 Package: firefox
 Version: 1:1snap1-0ubuntu7
 Priority: optional
 Section: web
 Origin: Ubuntu
 me@comp:~$</code></pre>

I remember when Ubuntu decided to reroute apt installations into SNAP installs. So you install a package via apt and there was logic to see if they should disregard your command and install a SNAP instead. Do they still do that?It annoyed me so much that I switched to mint.

This is literally Linux Mint, Zorin, and several other distros. I haven&#x27;t had to &quot;go under the hood&quot; on my daily driver machines that run either of these distros for over 7 years.I think at this point people are just (reasonably) making excuses not to change.

There&#x27;s several distros that are fully usable without ever touching a terminal. The control is a gradient, some distros give you all the control and others (eg. SteamOS) lock down your root filesystem and sandbox everything from the internet.

&gt; It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired.&#x27;Similar to Windows&#x27; System Restore and macOS&#x27;s Time Machine&#x27;, the Linux &#x27;Timeshift&#x27; tool can be used to do make periodic saves of your OS files &amp; settings. (They can be saved elsewhere.) Restoration is a cinch.Mint program &#x27;Backup Tool&#x27; allows users to save and restore files within their home directory (incl. config folder and separately installed apps).

You do have to know what you&#x27;re doing. A complete OS has a bunch of components that work together. But an out of the box distro hides all that do you end up fiddling with incomplete knowledge.Gentoo is great for learning what all the individual components are. You install it by booting a kernel from a USB stick then chrooting into your newly installed system to start installing and configuring everything. Just knowing the existence of individual components helps a lot. Plus Gentoo gives you more control than almost any other distro (much more than Arch, for example).

The control is both a blessing and a curse. It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired. It also may not be of any help if the issue you’re facing is too esoteric for anybody else to have posted about it online (or for LLMs to be of any assistance).It would help a lot if there were a distro that was polished and complete enough that most people – even those of us who are more technical and are more demanding – rarely if ever have any need to dive under the hood. Then the control becomes purely an asset.

Meh, I don&#x27;t care much about control, I care more about getting my work done with the least amount of friction. Macs do that for me. Linux and Windows have too many barriers to make them a daily GUI driver.

I&#x27;m curious, can you elaborate on why you believe that changing to Gnome meant they were giving up on being the best desktop distro?

Let me recommend Fedora to you Timbit.Debian family is outdated and builds with bugs upon release.I too was corrupted by Ubuntu&#x27;s marketing strategy of being popular and using the misleading word &#x27;Stable&#x27;.

&gt; switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro.Mint is also based on GNOME.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;</a>

&gt; I&#x27;ve been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now...Linux still has it&#x27;s fair share of bugs...&gt; I don&#x27;t see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon...I can see why you think the second statement is true based on the first statements. When Ubuntu switched their desktop to Gnome, they gave up on being the best Linux desktop distro. I&#x27;d recommend you to try Linux Mint.

&gt;Linux still has it&#x27;s fair share of bugs&gt;Linux, for all it&#x27;s issuesYou are confusing debian-family with Linux. Debian family is designed to be outdated upon release. When they say &quot;Stable&quot; it doesn&#x27;t mean &#x27;Stable like a table&#x27;. It means version fixed. You get outdated software that has bugs baked into it.Fedora is modern and those bugs are fixed already.Reminder Fedora is not Arch. Don&#x27;t confuse the two.

I&#x27;ve been running Ubuntu Linux for a long time now (over a decade, started with 8.04). Linux still has it&#x27;s fair share of bugs but I&#x27;ll take having to deal with those over running Windows or MacOS any day.For me the biggest thing is control, with Windows there are some things like updates that you have zero control over. It&#x27;s the same issue with MacOS, you have more control than Windows but you&#x27;re still at the whims of Apple&#x27;s design choices every year when they decide to release a new OS update.Linux, for all it&#x27;s issues, give you absolute control over your system and as a developer I&#x27;ve found this one feature outweighs pretty much all the issues and negatives about the OS. Updates don&#x27;t run unless I tell them to run, OS doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t see regular users adopting Linux anytime soon but I&#x27;m quickly seeing adoption pickup among the more technical community. Previously only a subset of technical folks actually ran Linux because Windows&#x2F;MacOS just worked but I see more and more of them jumping ship with how awful Windows and MacOS have become.

The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.

&#x27;&#x27;By the way, I use Arch&#x27;&#x27;

Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running Linux don&#x27;t stay on Ubuntu, etc.

There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008, and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing PPA&#x27;s and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn&#x27;t even boot (I don&#x27;t like to waste any time with command line incantations anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don&#x27;t remember how I found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot.I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you&#x27;re doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs &#x2F; uninstalls what you do and don&#x27;t need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.

Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That&#x27;s why the community leans so heavily towards arch.

What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around with&#x2F;learn from.

You can run Linux on Apple Silicon with Asahi Linux

What do you mean by that? As a long term windows user I&#x27;ve never had any issues running my laptops and PCs for years and years.

I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It&#x27;s gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS).Suspend: works always.
Battery life: great, the whole day.
Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn&#x27;t feel so cold&#x2F;hot to touch.

Dell, HP and Lenovo have been phenomenally resilient for us, going back more than 2 decades.

If you have older Mac (based on the Intel CPUs), then it may actually already work out of the box for you to run linux. I&#x27;m running Debian on Macbook Pro 2015, fully replaced the original system and I haven&#x27;t looked back.

I would love to switch from Mac. But Mac hardware is so resilient &amp; haven&#x27;t seen that in PC world.

I don&#x27;t understand, yay updates itself. I&#x27;ve never once had this problem.

You can download a precompiled yay&#x2F;paru from their Github pages btw.

Yeah, yay works until it doesn&#x27;t anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I&#x27;ll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it&#x27;s very annoying, when it happens every few months.

This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an &quot;offline&quot; account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn&#x27;t add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus now.I know its a &quot;meme&quot; 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&#x27;t invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use &quot;yay&quot; you don&#x27;t run into Pacman woes.Alternatively, I&#x27;m only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don&#x27;t sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux