For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become.
I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.
And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.
This has been my experience too, with installing common (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular ones) distros.
The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.
“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!)
But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.
React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.
From the outside looking in one wonders why this is allowed to continue. Microsoft’s old school “developer tools for money” business is slowly dying (because Visual Studio proper is less popular than its ever been since so much is targeting web), you would think they’d reorganize and move .net and GitHub and stuff into their cloud team and yeet whatever toxic leadership is preventing Windows from using Microsoft’s own frameworks.
IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.
It’s a largely dysfunctional org creating largely dysfunctional software, I.e. Conway law. Dysfunctional orgs tend not to be capable of fixing themselves, especially without external threat. Satya Nadella, like many CEOs, seems mostly interested in impressing his peers and these days that means fancy AI, before that it was Quantum chips.
Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible.
Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.
Yeah, .NET is actually an impressive piece of tech. They have F# too which is a really solid programming language. And then they chose React of all things to build core OS UI.
I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.
I stopped writing Windows applications back in the early 00s
my Windows API knowledge (essentially: just Win32) is still exactly as useful as it was then, having missed the 7 or 8 different UI frameworks in the interim
> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.
probably trying to repro the crazy success of vscode, surely electron is the magic sauce and not the dream team of devs. azure data studio should've proved that you can't just sprinkle electron dust and get a winner.
sadly I loved azure data studio despite its being afflicted with electron, but it became so bug infested they had to completely abandon it.
AFAIK the Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML however only the Recommended section is build with React Native [1].
Funnily or rather sadly, they seem to be quite proud of using it as seen in the video.
Microsoft dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.
I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had.
And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.
Truly an underrated phone, this was my wife's phone when we met. Developing for Windows 8 was one of the best imo, I don't know any C# prior to it but it was just so easy, native and fast.
I agree but that's because both iOS and Android are pretty bad in several ways.
MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.
Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
> Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.
Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.
Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS.
I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.
It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.
> It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web.
Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own.
As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.
I remember when people argued that because the time spent running an app was so much greater than the time spent developing it that one should be more conscientious about a user's time than a developer's.
After all, wasting a minute of time from 20 million users is 38 man-years of lost life. Doing that just to save a developer a week or a month is ethically troubling.
Of course, people also upgraded their computers a lot less frequently and you'd publish minimum machine requirements for software which probably made it easier to make such arguments as you'd also lose customers if software was slow or had minimum hardware requirements a lot of people didn't have.
That largely went out the window with web developers where users were just as likely to blame browser makers or their ISP for poor performance. Now with app developers and OS makers doing it, I guess there's just so many users at this point that losing a few with older hardware just doesn't matter.
I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.
If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.
But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.
SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.
and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches
I’ve recently downgraded my 10 year old used-only-for-obscure-firmware-updaters laptop to Windows 7 and enabled the “Classic” design. The snappiness of that GUI is unmatched even with Win 10/11 on much better hardware. Makes you wonder about the rest of Windows when Microsoft can’t even optimise the most basic things in modern Windows anymore.
The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.
Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right..
Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
The windows problem is every other OS release has included new UI libraries. Over the last 10 years they've made something like 5 different new ways to make native windows UIs. And, of course, they support all of them. You can use the classic Win32 API or you can use the newest WinUI 3
Whenever web dev comes up, we got people saying it's fad-driven development where a new framework comes out every week. Those people have never done real native development. React and Angular have been the solid stable bedrock of web frontend for ten years, and the churn is nothing compared to Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS UI dev.
I'm honestly not sure Microsoft even cares about Windows anymore, to me it's felt like they burned everything internally during Windows8 and the ValueAct battles sealed it .. hell they even entirely removed the Taskbar back then
I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot
What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.
I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.
I use both os daily and neither is remotely laggy, looks nice, supports all the hardware and software and I don't have to be surprised or spend hours downloading drivers to make it work.
>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both),
you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.
Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it.
Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.
When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).
Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.
> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.
Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:
- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.
- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.
- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.
This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.
Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.
JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.
> Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.
In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".
So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.
The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.
It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?"
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.
Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.
It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
> Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
I would say that’s absolutely the most normal gamer way of playing PC games. As someone who is mostly given up on playing games on a computer and prefer consoles, I’ve thought of doing the same thing.
I agree it’s really impressive that lots of people have decided to try Linux, far more than I remember ever before.
But I’m worried this is “the moment“. Possibly the best shot that’s gonna happen for a long time. And if people find things aren’t as ready as they think from what they hear they’re going to be burned and they’re not coming back. The next time around not only will they not come, they’ll push other people away from trying.
I don’t know if we’ve reached that magical inflection point or not. I think some people are using rosy glasses again though. The real momentum has never been this strong. But it’s not a done deal.
I hope more companies and MBAs open their eyes to this: that the long term cost of user-hostile changes is negative compared to respecting users and building good products.
Also currently it helps to stand out from the sea of crap products.
Play the long game. Make good products. Bring joy and positive experience to peoples lives. Sleep well at night.
I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows.
That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.
Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.
certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB.
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.
Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux.
My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows).
Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets.
These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.
> These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows.
It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more.
I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
i think its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time
If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.
I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice.
Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc.
And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...
I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..
Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.
“They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them”.
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM.
It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself.
I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave.
Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and installed Linux Mint.
The difference is absolutely unbelievable. Even heavy applications like LibreOffice and Zoom are snappy.
Apple makes such good hardware. I felt really sad about the state of their software compatibility with older machines.
So, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know one more person will be using Linux in 2026!
I've been using a system 76 laptop for the past 3 years. Runs perfectly, no surprises. Unfortunately, I need a mac for work because the laptop service folks do not know what to do with linux and do not have a relationship with a vendor like system76.
Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I've never been a windows person. So I've never missed it. Power and peripherals work on the system76 seamlessly.
Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.
I did run linux on a tower exclusively while I did my PhD. Did everything on it - code, writing my thesis in LaTeX, store data, connect to dropbox for backup, watch netflix, etc.
I guess it works out for you but I’d be inconvenienced for not being able to move around and paranoid that I may jerk the wire powering the machine. Still glad you were able to find a solution for your setup though.
I'm in my 60's and have never run Photoshop. Nor my wife, my kids, none of my relatives I'm aware of for that matter. Come to think of it, of all the people I know, no one runs PhotoShop that I'm aware of.
I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt until macOS 27 (but I'm still on 15.7.4 hehe).
Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.
A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.
Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.
I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.
The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.
I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.
This post does examplefy what we’re seeing, a general indication of some swelling of momentum but I bet it’s still going to be from 2% to maybe 3 or 5% at most until Linux can fix a few things about the community, issues with install difficulty such as dual booting and other issues, and the technical knowledge barrier to entry until more distribution with hardware comes along. Although of course system 76 and steam deck are great moves in this direction they’re still relatively niche for now.
There will never be a “year of the Linux desktop” the same way that there has never been a “year of the Mac desktop”, it’s just a slow building of users over time anyway.
I think it's also maybe worth pointing out that "non-enthusiast desktop OS user" is a segment that is shrinking. A lot of the people that aren't going to Linux are just going to smartphones only rather than buy a new laptop for Win11.
Your describing the impact Steam Deck is having without SteamOS being available to easily install on a custom built machine. The tipping point is going to come this year when people who are building new machines have the option to install Windows or SteamOS. A lot of people are going to pick SteamOS.
Saw a fascinating talk on gui and ui development today, lamenting the stagnation at M$ and apple when it comes to desktop computing (including browsing).
" there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.
I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me.
I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop
There are several reports of people getting 12+ hours out of a Lunar Lake based laptop running Linux. Still a ways away from the 20 Intel claims for them, but likely a more realistic scenario.
Intel claims Panther Lake will be even better, and we should be seeing results within days as there should be Panther Lake desktop released during CES this week.
Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making it harder for Linux by making it so much reverse engineering work to get everything to go into sleep mode!)
I don't think it's that per se, it's just apple has a lot of resources to optimise/test a relatively small amount of configurations.
The big "issue" with Linux on non-server workloads imo is a lack of testing like this - which is completely understandable. Afiak Microsoft runs millions of automated tests on various hardware configurations _a day_.
Intel does something similar for the Linux kernel, which no doubt explains the relative stability of Linux server vs Desktop (servers are running far less "OS level" software in general in day to day use than the desktop).
The desktop experience itself needs more automated testing. There are so many bugs/regressions which I've noticed in eg gnome which should have been caught by e2e testing - I do try to report them when I see them.
Doing a bit more digging there seems to be some basic e2e testing for gnome ran nightly but currently most tests are failing https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/12128.
This isn't a criticism at all btw, it's quite boring and resource intensive work for a project like gnome to do. I hope soon some large corp decides to go all in on realLinux desktop (not ChromeOS) and can devote resources to this.
Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.
I am most familiar with Debian but only headless. What would be a good choice of desktop environment? I’m looking to switch over the only windows computer in my house to Linux, it is primarily used as a home theatre and gaming PC.
Desktop environments are a matter of taste, but since you asked, I like KDE Plasma. I think it would be pretty comfortable for someone coming from Windows.
It's not the default on Debian, but once you install it, you can choose it next time you log in.
I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.
Maybe someone here knows a solution. The ONLY thing keeping me on windows is that my employer uses F5/Big IP edge clients. I cannot find a Linux client that can also handle Web SSO. Does anyone have any Linux experience with this?
I did fight with that a few years ago. Memory is that you can get through some steps running Windows in a VM to get thru MFA checks, and then close it later.
I'll toss in my 2 cents: 1. people that have no business whatsoever now know what linux is ie sales dawgs that only touch a computer for the occasional spreadsheet. 2. 70 year old man fed up with windows, moved to linux.
it looks great, its fast and responsive let's make this happen.
Yeah. I feel the same way. If not for the fact that my gaming PC pulls double duty as a work PC, I'd seriously consider ditching Windows 11 for Bazzite.
I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Liquid Glass fixed…somehow.
Considering how the load at Linux Mint's forums has recently increased to the point that some of it is being re-directed to gitHummed (a minute ago there were "3362 users online :: 35 registered, 3 hidden and 3324 guests" >10 secs to respond, needed to login), it appears that distro at least is seeing a lot of newcomers.
> I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.
Kind of glad to read this, I went into it thinking it will be another person saying "I'll use Linux forever!" the day after installing it, similar to everyone who says their new years resolution is to work out more, then proceeds to go to the gym 2 times total :)
I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.
Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.
It will take few more years before people start abandoning W10 due to security concerns(somehow "hackers" always find some insane backdoors and bugs in old windows, it must be a pure coincidence), hardware upgrade or just need to reinstall. But indeed, it looks like Linux is finally taking over. I'd say that beside Microsoft being so bad at their job, it's Valve and gaming on Linux in general. It's actually doable. What a miracle!
Every year starting back around the year 2000, every year until now there's always at least an article from Slashdot and then HN on the year of the Linux desktop from believers and non-believers alike [1],[2].
[1] Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop (2023):
I've used Fedora on my laptop for over a decade. I switched my main home workstation to Fedora in 2023, and haven't looked back since.
My workstation runs Kinoite[1], an immutable/atomic version of Fedora. I started with Fedora 38, and now am running 43. Flawless major-release upgrades. I develop using distrobox[2] (pet containers) on podman. It "Just Works".
Nearly 99% of my Steam library is playable on Fedora too. Many games even have native Linux support these days - the rest run under Proton. The only games that won't play have windows-only kernel-level anti-cheat. For some of those games, it's a developer choice (there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it).
I use Flatpaks to install many GUI apps, such as FreeCAD, KiCad, Darktable, Steam, Reaper, and a lot more.
> there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it
Because support doesn't mean full features. It's like saying iPad supports Microsoft Excel. At some point it's the same name for different software.
I think especially because it's under Proton, that means it's the Windows version of the game you're weakening to anti-cheat too. Even Valve's own VAC has issues running under Proton.
I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.
> I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I play loads of games; its mainly AAA multiplayers that aren't able to run on linux due to kernel anti-cheat - nearly everything else runs well with minimal effort using proton via steam (either installed via steam or imported as a non-steam game).
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss.
I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.
Consumer Windows for those that care is an almost worthless business. Nobody will pay what was once paid for a windows license anymore. They will squeeze existing users who know no different in ways 2006 adware purveyors could dream of and monetize it that way. For the rest of non enterprise users, they don't care.
> to see if they are in red alert to get users back
I don't think they much care, long gone are the days of consumer Windows being a cash-cow. And if you buy a machine with Windows on and put Linux over the top, they still have that little bit of money from you via the manufacturer. Adverts on the start menu and such, is not an action that would be taken by a company with any real pride in their OS.
Europe has shown themselves to be completely unwilling or unable to regulate the giant. So they stopped caring. They crank out cheap crap and charge top dollar because no one can stop them.
Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure.
Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
Honestly I get the Xbox apathy. There's not that much profit in being what, third or fourth place? After Steam, Playstation and Nintendo? Depends how you define it, I guess, but to me they're in fourth place. Microsoft needs to either cut their losses or invest a ton of money. It looks like they will pick some weird thing in the middle, keeping Xbox on life support. Probably some unhappy compromise internally.
Windows has been my main operating system for the last 35 years (from version 2). I've used Linux and to a lessor extent BSD and Mac as well, but my main desktop has always been Windows, as it ran most of the apps that I needed.
Windows 11 UI and spyware are so bad, that Windows 10 is where my 35 years of using Windows as my main OS has ended.
> then just shat all over them with start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews, and forcing Copilot down everyone's throats
Thank god I've been using Linux long enough to not experience any of that.
At my job in a large non-tech company, almost everyone uses Windows (except for the dev team) purely because of Microsoft Office. As long as that thing exists, they can do all the dumb things they want and still dominate.
I do think Linux is accessible to many more people, but I would not say it is ready for the masses. The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user.
But, with that said, I started seriously using Linux for the first time in 2025. I bounce between Debian, Windows 11, and MacOS, and Debian is probably the most refreshing to use. I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues. I find MacOSs Liquid Glass redesign to be more aggressively bad.
>I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues.
So you debloated your windows but at any update you have to spin your wheels and try to remove any crap they put back in. At any time there’s the possibility you can no longer remove x or y. The vast majority don’t have the energy to play this game or don’t know how to.
I agree, it is bad and I don't like it, but I think it is bad in a way most users won't care about. I have not really considered a version of Windows to be good since...Windows 2000...maybe 3.1.1. They have all had major issues, so I just kind of shrug off the issues when I use Windows. The enshitification of MacOS is relatively new and so still stings a bit.
I think where Microsoft is playing with fire is that while most users will not care about some of these changes power users do. And the 5% of power users ultimately make the decisions and provide the recommendations for the other 95%. With so many apps and SAAS services going web or web app only there will be less and less reason to need to stick with Windows and that is where Microsoft will start to lose control.
Who installed linux and did the initial setup? And then I think there is a class of user that is savvy enough to say, update their graphics drivers but not willing to use a terminal and that is before you get into the mess that is Nvidia on linux.
I agree, under a managed setup scenario where a user is only really going to use a web browser and a few apps. Linux is just fine.
"The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user."
My wife has no idea what a terminal is and does not care - she rocks Arch and has no idea what that means. The people that attend my uncle's PC clinic to have their "Win 10 that won't run Win 11" converted to Linux don't care either.
My Dad's PC will shortly be running Linux after I've taken him through MSOffice -> Libre Office + Scribus + (Evolution||Thunderbird).
I started off my early IT career as a trainer - I once did a day of DTP with Quark Express where I was given the floppies the night before. When I hear that Linux (actually LO etc) is incapable of doing whatever, I soon find that a deep discussion about what constitutes "incapable" generally turns into a training session.
For example I often hear about documents that apparently LO can't handle. That normally ends up with me teaching (proselytizing!) about how to use styles properly or even the real basics such as the four tab forms (L/R/C/decimal). Then we might segue into spreadsheets ... ahh, you'll want a array formula there ... "a what?" and off we go again.
Now, I have wandered off track here somewhat but I'm noting the other "not ready" convo that will often happen after we have covered how to find your mouse pointer or why Windows seems to still have two Control Panels and at least three half arsed IP stacks.
I do actually have a fondness for Windows, having used it since v2.0 at school in 1986ish. That fondness is rapidly going west along with VMware (consultant for 25 years).
I fucking hate being taken for a ride and basically being abused. Today, my company received an email from Broadcom telling us that we are no longer welcome as a reseller/unpaid support org. Luckily we started migrating our customers away from VMware some time ago and only the ones with the deepest pockets and greatest inertia remain. The rest are rocking Proxmox and I'm a much happier consultant too.
One day MS might tell my company that they have decided to dispense with our reseller/unpaid support services too, once they are sure that everyone is tucked up with a subscription.
Well, they can piss off too. I am capable of running email systems on prem (and do) even though I have migrated my firm from on prem Exchange to M365. I still point MX records to our place (Exim + rspamd) and run an imapd for some mailboxes. A calendar app is all that is missing.
What I hope I am getting across is that dumping Windows and co is quite a broad subject.
I think that your choice of Deborah and Ian's (bless!) distro is a really good solid starter for 10 but to be honest after a while you should be able to run any variety of Linux.
You should be able to install multiple Window Managers eg Gnome and KDE Plasma and all the rest at the same time and be able to select which session to use from your Display Manager (eg SDDM).
I have almost certainly overstayed my welcome in this tread but before I go, I will suggest that anyone who calls themself an IT (anything) should at least have a go at all available systems. Nowadays OS/2 Warp on something like 25 floppies is not a barrier to play (spin up a VM).
it's funny because it's Linux (and especially KDE) that has bridged that gap so long ago. I told my dad just open up sftp and edit the files. He's on windows of course. There's some convoluted thing. I totally forgot he cant literally just put in the URL and edit the file in kate!
Welcome...1998 was my year of the Linux desktop. Valve seems to have been dredging all of the "maybe"s over the last few years on a few different fronts. Big ups to them (not that they don't get enough praise...still!)
Linux isn’t perfect but it’s far away from the compromises one needs to make to use Windows. It’s weird frogs are comfortable slowly boiling even when Microsoft turns on the heat to the max.
> At the very least, when something goes wrong on Linux you have log messages that can let you know what went wrong so you can search for it.
It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
This rings true...outside of users that play competitive FPS...the anticheat continues to be a challenge
As a side note - if you're in that venn diagram overlap group of linux and gaming...check out "beyond all reason" RTS if you haven't. High chance it'll tickle you:
As someone who plays competitive FPS at quite a high level (I compete in the Contenders division in Valorant's Premier tournament system, lots of fun!), honestly even that's not the biggest deal. I'll eventually get to a point where the only reason I have a Windows install at all is for Valorant. Everything else will be Linux.
I run Kubuntu on this gaming machine (AlienWare) and I run it on my 16 year old Dell laptop I used for work back then. Runs great and with RAM prices high and people looking to make their older machines useful instead of trashing them, there's a really good chance they can run Linux.
Funnily enough today windows pissed me off with a random breaking bug (no login screen yay) so now only have Ubuntu installed. Only one application I use that's windows only anyways and can use a VM for that, so sayonara...
I'll still be a Windows/Unix dual user. But then again I don't do the Windows "Home version" experience so many here seem eager to humiliate themselves with over and over.
People loudly declaring they are switching to Linux feel to me like people loudly declaring they are leaving Twitter. That's nice? I've had my home machines on Linux since forever and it's fun. I like trying new distros about once a year to see what people are up to. It's been possible to run a basic setup for normies for a solid decade now, it's unfortunate that it took Microsoft waging UX war for some techies to notice.
my 2017 mac air is getting real long in the tooth. I'd definitely considering switching to *nix with it but everything I keep reading is that process is not so easy.
I've been on linux since 2014; I'm an ocassional user of windows, booting into it with much regret to deal with client's issues. I generally dislike working with MacOS... but for someone used to macOS I see no meaningful degradation of the kind there is with windows - your time is better spent earning/buying/setting up an m series mac air.
I am one full page ad away from deleting Windows 11 forever. I will struggle through infinite driver compatibility issues before I sit through a single ad while trying to work. That is my redline.
For me it was the OneDrive ads on the lock screen. And, when I accidentally clicked "enable OneDrive" (a few years ago, this might have changed), IT TOOK OVER MY DOCUMENTS FOLDER AND TOLD ME THERE WAS NO WAY TO REVERT IT!
Yeah onedrive is seriously annoying. It's nice when the free 15GB backup/sync for the desktop, pictures, and documents folder works (for people who put things there) but the way other MS products work with it seems user-hostile to me.
e.g. it took until 2025 for this RFC to be opened on moving PowerShell profiles and modules out of Onedrive: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/pull/388. It should not be taking seconds for my powershell profile to load just because i have onedrive enabled by default.
I also had a non-technical friend recently get burned by a default MS Office setting where edited documents located in the OneDrive folder save directly to onedrive, and it only gets saved on disk when onedrive gets the new copy and uploads it back it to the user's disk. So if the MS office to onedrive integration fails your changes won't save. Apparently users have to enable a setting to first save to a folder on disk? That folder can even be the onedrive folder so onedrive will eventually sync it back up.
I have to use Windows sometimes at work, and of all indignities, this is surely a small one, but it is an indignity. Everyone complains about ads, which is a real issue, but to me the biggest issue is how blatantly suboptimal everything is. Nobody has put any effort into making Windows good for a very very long time. The terminal and/or powershell is incredibly slow - ls should not take perceptible time to execute. The settings menus are made with 3 to 5 different layers of UI frameworks and design guidelines. Forced OneDrive. The pestering about copilot... I even like LLMs, but my user experience is so clearly subordinate to some KPI that it annoys me anyway. I'm sure I could come up with more if I had touched it recently, but I thankfully haven't.
There are still so many issues around Wayland and fragmentation. Gnome is the most popular and has lots of issues and sometimes is downright user hostile. Luckily some of the distributions try to revert some of the insanity sometimes. But there are still many protocols and portals needed and much more standardization.
But more seriously, it's pretty ironic to see all of these posts on HN, a supposed "tech" community, about switching to Linux, especially the comments describing how it defied their low expectations (tacitly revealing their own lack of prior first-hand experience). You never would have seen this on Slashdot 20 years ago, where dual booting Linux (or some BSD, despite it dying) was the minimum "geek cred" to not be seen as a poser.
And this was at a time when distros were far less user-friendly and had far more hardware compatibility issues and far less support for running Windows software.
I love the fact that there are different Linux distros optimized for every person.
I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers.
I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking.
IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kubuntu is the same but more customizable slightly more developer-focused. Omarchy (which is a fork of Arch Linux) is very developer-focused.
I've been using Linux as my desktop since 2020, I switched because I wanted to play games and maintain a development environment I'm familiar with (having run Linux servers for ~15 years at that point) that would be stable. I had long used a Windows machine for gaming and a Mac laptop for development. My Mac was stable enough, but Windows was not-- it wasn't blue screens it was constant unpredictable updates (sometimes erratically running when I didn't want them to). I had an SSD in the machine with Windows, but after installing Pop_OS! (as a happy accident) I never found a compelling reason to use Windows again.
Steam has worked perfectly, clicking install and then hitting play, no futzing with drivers or weird updates. The only games I haven't been able to play are League of Legends and some of the new AAA shooters. I'm okay with that because I don't particularly care at this point, and it's not worth maintaining a Windows install to periodically play for an hour or so.
Linux has been unbelievably stable. This year, I fully upgraded the system and planned on reinstalling but I didn't even need to. On first boot, my old install was picked up and mostly just worked. On Windows I've tried that before, and it was an unrelenting shit show (that resulted in having to nuke the old windows install).
The only hitch I've had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers (open source vs proprietary); which, I was able to fix by booting into the command line then nuking both sets of drivers via apt remove and installing the one I wanted. Took me less than five minutes and my system was working. It also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried being too clever (and Pop_OS! having some quirks).
I recently setup a MiniPC to use while traveling to game on and this time I tried Arch. To my surprise the install was ridiculously easy. The most recent installer makes it a breeze. My only mistake was not noticing I'd installed a few desktop environments and the default wasn't what I wanted so things seemed broken. After selecting KDE from the login menu et volia! It worked perfectly. I'm considering switching my primary rig to Arch, but I'll give the most recent Pop_OS! release a try to see if the newer LTS version gets me access to some new packages first.
Linux is great folks. If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it. It's really low maintenance and just works. 11/10 would recommend to anyone.
> If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it.
Even the smaller ones are unironically pretty fun to work with now-a-days. I'm currently rocking Gentoo on my stuff. After the painful setup, it's actually quiet easy to maintain.
Good luck. I've tried to completely replace Windows with Linux over the last two decades or so, and it's still lacks polish. I really don't enjoy having half-written GUIs for different apps and having to compile my own fixes after searching for 3 hours.
I think I finally gave it up in anger, when it was on a laptop I was using for a few important projects and it cost me days of work.
I now use Windows+WSL and it has the best of both worlds: A fully functional GUI with everything I would ever need with Linux.
MacOS is really the best Nix Desktop OS out there. I would use this instead, but I still require some windows apps.
Very observant of you. The comment you replied to mentioned “non-obtrusive ads at the bottom” so they noticed that too. IMO “non-obtrusive” is a fair description, given that it doesn't seem to be doing excessive tracking (I didn't spot any extra cookies or other storage, so it is presumably logging little, if any, more than web server logs did in the 90s/00s, which is better than the stalking done by most adtech these days).
macOS is particularly annoying and gets in the way more than an OS should. Windows can be tamed and the Linux experience can be perfectly smooth depending on distro and hardware. I assume macOS can be tamed as well, but it seems like much more of an uphill battle.
If you just install MacOS, Windows, or any major Linux distros, all work okay with default settings and drivers, almost all the time. Problems start when you want something else or more.
It’s like when you want Docker on MacOS. Helpful people will say that you should just use colima. Yeah it works perfectly well… until you want to open udp ports (this was the case half a year ago). All 3 OSes are like that, just the flavor is different.
If you know how to find “reject all” on all cookie banners, Windows will be easier for you.
If you know networking and pf, then MacOS will be easier for you.
If you know how to debug driver bugs, Linux will be easier for you (and fun as hell imho)
Anyway, if you don’t want to do much more than internet browsing/video playing/basic gaming/basic coding, it simply doesn’t matter. // I would still say that the default network/firewall settings for MacOS is sketchy as hell however
Personally I can't stand the dock paradigm...no way to tell if a program is running or not at a glance, and it's not easy to switch between one application with multiple windows. A lot can be changed even if it requires third party add-ons, but I'd say it's the least intuitive OS there is.
To me, Windows has been the best experience with gaming (yes, including the stupid bullshit anti-cheat software that shouldn’t exist in the way it does, the devs making it truly only support Windows), the desktop experience has been tolerable, especially with PowerToys and FancyZones in particular and that one registry change to restore classic context menu. Still feels like fighting against the OS but passable.
Linux has been the best experience for regular computing and software development, especially since a lot of the software I deploy runs in Docker containers, so getting more or less the same user land is nicer than subtle Windows incompatibilities (e.g. bind mount permissions, line endings, crap like that). Also package managers are just nice and some desktops out there are really good for daily driving (personally I like Cinnamon, but KDE and XFCE and others all have their place).
Apple stuff has been the best in regards to the hardware integration and coherence (e.g. the experience of using a MacBook or iPhone and everything working without any driver issues on other OSes), having a pretty polished desktop experience, but also super weird things such as no proper AA on generic external monitors (e.g. 1080p), limited hardware ports, oddly locked down ecosystem and odd support choices (e.g. the dance you gotta do to install development apps, the PWA situation) and just weird choices in regards to keyboard layout and how the mouse feels compared to both of the other OSes. Okay development, not great gaming situation, worse than Linux at this point.
I like my iPhone (reduced Liquid Glass transparency) and MacBook Air (great for notes or travel), but daily drive either Windows or Linux. Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
>>Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
Hardware support is plenty wide enough. Just buy the hardware that supports FreeBSD and that's most of it. Same with the desktop and I've run servers and desktops for 25 years using easily found, common, name brand hardware that runs FreeBSD.
This is the biggest pickle for me. Mx Macbook Airs are pretty amazing, but Asahi is just not there, and I don't think it will ever be without Apple playing ball a little bit unfortunately. (I'm currently on a t2/intel macbook and it's got more quirks that I care to deal with...but it was free so gotta do what I gotta do)
I’m going from macOS to linux currently. It was the hardware obsolesence that kicked things off but I definitely wont miss the constant nagging about my iCloud being full
Just turn off iCloud sync for the things you don't use and you won't fill it up. I sync passwords, notes, find my, calendar, contacts, and safari. Currently using 800MB of the free 5GB.
`apt-get update` bricked your system multiple times? How, by filling up your disk? That doesn't install or upgrade any software. It just updates the local cache of the registry. I believe you that there was a real problem I'm just confused about how it happened.
I've been unable to login after filling my disk before, I wouldn't call the system bricked because I was able to fix it by mounting the disk on another computer and freeing up space, but I wouldn't quibble over the term either.
It was apt-get upgrade, then. Whichever command updates all packages on the system. I must have misspoke, I don’t use Debian-based systems all that much anymore.
I remember it had a particular fondness for deleting old kernel versions, failing to install the new kernel, and thus bricking the system on boot. Alternatively, uninstalling the entire WM because one package had a conflict.
Weird! Sounds like maybe `apt-get dist-upgrade` or `apt-get full-upgrade`. `upgrade` shouldn't uninstall anything or update your kernel as far as I know. `dist-upgrade` or `full-upgrade` could do either. If your `/boot` partition was exhausted or you lost power in the middle of a kernel upgrade, that could leave the system in a broken state.
At any rate, sorry you had such a frustrating experience.
My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
> On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.
For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become.
I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative modules built from source (hopefully with a good DKMS script). Everything... just worked. I'd blocked out a few hours to get everything working in a satisfactory state and... I had nothing to do, really.
And when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING, not just the features that were significant to my own use cases. Mind-blowing, if you think about it.
This has been my experience too, with installing common (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular ones) distros.
The only exception is when we got a really new batch of Lenovo P1 laptops for work, and the patches likely were not fully merged yet. So as long as you’re not getting the first batch it is generally pretty good.
“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!)
But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.
React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.
They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.
From the outside looking in one wonders why this is allowed to continue. Microsoft’s old school “developer tools for money” business is slowly dying (because Visual Studio proper is less popular than its ever been since so much is targeting web), you would think they’d reorganize and move .net and GitHub and stuff into their cloud team and yeet whatever toxic leadership is preventing Windows from using Microsoft’s own frameworks.
IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.
It’s a largely dysfunctional org creating largely dysfunctional software, I.e. Conway law. Dysfunctional orgs tend not to be capable of fixing themselves, especially without external threat. Satya Nadella, like many CEOs, seems mostly interested in impressing his peers and these days that means fancy AI, before that it was Quantum chips.
Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible.
Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.
Yeah, .NET is actually an impressive piece of tech. They have F# too which is a really solid programming language. And then they chose React of all things to build core OS UI.
Yeah, as far as I understand it, that politics is: Sinofsky entrenched NIH on every team that he touched.
Just curious what is DevDiv? Tools division?
As I understand it, .NET, developer tools, and VS.
Basically you have tight OS integration vs developer friendly cross platform.
I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.
I stopped writing Windows applications back in the early 00s
my Windows API knowledge (essentially: just Win32) is still exactly as useful as it was then, having missed the 7 or 8 different UI frameworks in the interim
> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.
probably trying to repro the crazy success of vscode, surely electron is the magic sauce and not the dream team of devs. azure data studio should've proved that you can't just sprinkle electron dust and get a winner.
sadly I loved azure data studio despite its being afflicted with electron, but it became so bug infested they had to completely abandon it.
Operating systems should always use C/C++ UI frameworks, and as little costly abstraction as possible, period. Anything else is wasting resources.
It’s not so much about wasting resources as it is about the added latency, jankiness, and inconsistency in look & feel hurting usability.
AFAIK the Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML however only the Recommended section is build with React Native [1]. Funnily or rather sadly, they seem to be quite proud of using it as seen in the video.
1: https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s
Microsoft dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.
I still have my Nokia Lumia around. Best phone I ever had.
And I say this hating everything about Microsoft and Windows. That phone clicked just right with the tile design and overall usability. Of course, MS having pulled the plug, it's basically a DRM brick now.
Truly an underrated phone, this was my wife's phone when we met. Developing for Windows 8 was one of the best imo, I don't know any C# prior to it but it was just so easy, native and fast.
I agree but that's because both iOS and Android are pretty bad in several ways.
MeeGo from Nokia was pretty amazing as well and I'm sure it could have launched Linux phones into actual competitors to iOS and Android - if only Microsoft and Elop didn't manage to kill Linux at Nokia.
Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
One can only imagine what the product managers of like .NET think of all this.
> Pretty standard for Microsoft lately. The old stuff is still there, we're adding a completely new stack adjacent to it so now you can live with the worst of both! The Windows 8 tablet interface and the Win11 wtfever that is still sometimes kick out a dialogue box unchanged since Windows XP.
At least in Windows 10, there was even still the occasional Windows 3.1 file picker hanging around in the really dusty locations
Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.
Objectively it wastes developer time making the OS in a non linear way more expensive for companies. Its like a minthly subscription for ever more minutes.
If your opinion mattered, you would work at Microsoft setting the targets that the Start Menu team need to meet to hit their bonuses/not get fired.
But you don't. So it doesn't.
(I've pinned Visual Studio to the start menu.)
> but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs
But if they don’t use web tech it would be too expensive to build the start menu in a way that works cross platform!
Oh wait
Am I missing something, or hasn't Microsoft done this since Windows 9x with apps like Explorer and Control Panel heavily using web views internally rather than "native" WinAPI GUIs?
But those weren't entirely done with a webview. They were just embedding views where it made sense, like rendering a section that looks like a document (with fancy hyperlinks woooo) or render a preview of the file you selected in the main (native) view of explorer.
Now we are talking about entire apps being built with that stuff, down to the window border (or lack of it). It's impossible to have a consistent looking and working OS with this approach. It's impossible to share code between these things and the actual native apps, and often things have to be written from scratch and end up using 10x memory than the native solution.
Remember when Active Desktop! Was the shiny new thing?
what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS.
I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
For whom?
Every single web or mobile app does his own custom thing nowadays. As a user I couldn't care less how it's implemented, what I want consistency in behavior and style across the board.
It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
I'd take MFC everything over random behavior if I could.
> It feels like this has been completely lost, even on platforms like mac where consistency used to be important.
There are two kinds of consistency: across apps within a platform and across platforms within the same app. As someone who uses multiple platforms regularly, I have forever been annoyed when eg keyboard shortcuts change when I switch to a different computer, especially when I’m using the same app.
Apps like Discord, Spotify and VSCode are consistently the most pleasurable to use because they are largely the same.
For a unique piece of hardware like the old iPod, it made more sense to do your special custom UX as a unified product. But we’re talking about general purpose computers. The ”platform” shouldn’t be special imo, it should simply be predictable and stay out of the way. They mostly provide the same thing, like copy paste and maximizing a window, yet have different controls. This differentiation adds no value, at least to me.
I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web.
Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own.
As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.
Sucks a whole lot less for users though.
I remember when people argued that because the time spent running an app was so much greater than the time spent developing it that one should be more conscientious about a user's time than a developer's.
After all, wasting a minute of time from 20 million users is 38 man-years of lost life. Doing that just to save a developer a week or a month is ethically troubling.
Of course, people also upgraded their computers a lot less frequently and you'd publish minimum machine requirements for software which probably made it easier to make such arguments as you'd also lose customers if software was slow or had minimum hardware requirements a lot of people didn't have.
That largely went out the window with web developers where users were just as likely to blame browser makers or their ISP for poor performance. Now with app developers and OS makers doing it, I guess there's just so many users at this point that losing a few with older hardware just doesn't matter.
I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.
If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.
But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.
SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.
and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches
I’ve recently downgraded my 10 year old used-only-for-obscure-firmware-updaters laptop to Windows 7 and enabled the “Classic” design. The snappiness of that GUI is unmatched even with Win 10/11 on much better hardware. Makes you wonder about the rest of Windows when Microsoft can’t even optimise the most basic things in modern Windows anymore.
macOS has two separate Telegram apps, technically speaking. The one (most) everyone uses is AppKit based.
The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.
Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right..
Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?
the thing you need to trust is that pressing that combination shows the legit OS stuff, that it can't be intercepted (Secure Attention Key).
how the OS implements what is displayed is irrelevant
windows has all kinds of virtualizations today, it can literally run web views in separate (invisible) VMs for security purposes
The windows problem is every other OS release has included new UI libraries. Over the last 10 years they've made something like 5 different new ways to make native windows UIs. And, of course, they support all of them. You can use the classic Win32 API or you can use the newest WinUI 3
Whenever web dev comes up, we got people saying it's fad-driven development where a new framework comes out every week. Those people have never done real native development. React and Angular have been the solid stable bedrock of web frontend for ten years, and the churn is nothing compared to Windows, OSX, Android, and iOS UI dev.
I'm honestly not sure Microsoft even cares about Windows anymore, to me it's felt like they burned everything internally during Windows8 and the ValueAct battles sealed it .. hell they even entirely removed the Taskbar back then
I've always wondered what things would be like the Microsoft break up went though, I really do think personal computing would be better off and the people involved would probably have even more money to boot
It takes over five seconds for task manager to open on my Windows 11 work laptop.
What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.
It takes ~5 seconds for activity monitor on my macbook pro to populate data, although the window for it opens right away.
Yep, Windows performance on my work laptop reminds me of computing in the 90s: waiting and resource management.
Yeah. Crazy when the two most significant desktop OS's (Windows and MacOS) have native UIs where something has gone horribly wrong.
I can’t speak to windows since it’s been at least a decade since I have had to use it, but I really don’t understand the hate on the new Apple OSs. I haven’t found them to be a measurably different user experience than their respective prior versions. So when you say “horribly wrong” it makes me wonder exactly what you mean, specifically.
You can dislike the visual approach of modern macOS but on a framework level the UI ecosystem is generally very powerful and feature rich.
With SwiftUI you’ve been able to pick and choose where to integrate it over the years, it’s not like you had to go whole-hog.
It's almost like the rush to ship new features year after year without ever pausing to fix and optimize things has taken its toll.
Both are absolutely fine. I don't get it.
I use both os daily and neither is remotely laggy, looks nice, supports all the hardware and software and I don't have to be surprised or spend hours downloading drivers to make it work.
>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
Cosmic (from the PopOS folks) is getting rid of the crappy javascript from GNOME Shell. And the CSS in GTK+ themes is just for the sake of syntactic convenience.
Cosmic is quite nice. There's some polishing left to do, but it's already pretty solid. The app store is a bit of a turd, but I bet that's just because it's by nature connected to the internet. More could surely be done with caching and pre-loading, but not sure if I want my computer to pre-load app store content all the time just in case I open it.
Compared to Windows it's of course absolutely unreal.
But the difference is that none of the CSS or Javascript usage in gnome is tied to a webview. They are all binding in some way to GTK and much simpler rendering routines.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
KDE Plasma, which is in my opinion the most advanced desktop environment is written in Qt QML which is JavaScript. There are advantages to that over C++, namely your session won't simply crash.
When I read comments like this, I honestly think that people are only complaining about this because the "bad people" are doing this (in this case Microsoft/Gnome Team).
Neglecting the fact that almost everyone else is doing similar things.
> For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
What GTK is doing isn't really any different than how many UI framework work and have done so for quite a while now.
Almost every desktop UI toolkit/library/framework in the past 15-20 years has the following:
- Markup interface for defining the layout. If they don't have that they have a declarative way of defining the UI.
- Some sort of bindings for popular scripting language that hook into native code.
- Some of styling language that isn't that different from CSS.
This has been the norm for quite some time now. It works reasonably well.
Futhermore there isn't much difference between what desktop developers are doing and what web developers are doing.
> I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Why? I find Gnome works really well on Linux. I have a pretty nice desktop environment after adding two extensions (Dash To Dock and App Indicators). Gnome runs well on relatively ancient hardware I own (2011 Dell E6410) with a garbage GPU (it isn't OpenGL 3.3 compliant). It actually performs a lot better than some other DEs that are 100% native.
JavaScript is indeed a slow language. However in Gnome that isn't the bottleneck. People have been making UIs with JScript (basically JavaScript) using WSH back in the 90s on Windows 98.
> Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
What makes a better end user experience has nothing to do with any of this. There has to be an incentive to create a good end user experience and there simply isn't in the vast majority of cases.
In many cases it doesn't matter really what the tech behind something is. Most popular programmings and associated frameworks all work reasonably well on machines that are over a decade old. I am running Discord on a 15 year machine dual core laptop processor and it works "ok".
So this sort of complaining about "modern devs" I've been hearing about for almost 20 years now. The issues I've faced with doing quality work has been almost always to do with how projects are (mis)-managed.
The last point is very astute.
The software industry has always had more juniors than seniors so this issue of juniors calling the shots is not a new one but it does feel like it's been getting worse and worse... Now it's basically AI slop vibe coders calling the shots about coding best-practices.
How the start menu is programmed is of zero consequence to me.
> is of zero consequence to me
It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.
It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.
Same. 2017 thinkpad, latest KDE, snappier than my 2025 Dell with Win11 and a processor that should be about 60% faster for single thread tasks.
Windows 11 has zero lag on the start menu so I don't care if it is hand coded assembler or some bloated web crap.
I even ran Windows 10 on Thinkpad x240 a couple of years ago, it also ran fine.
If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?"
I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux.
It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it.
And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.
Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.
It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
> Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.
I would say that’s absolutely the most normal gamer way of playing PC games. As someone who is mostly given up on playing games on a computer and prefer consoles, I’ve thought of doing the same thing.
I agree it’s really impressive that lots of people have decided to try Linux, far more than I remember ever before.
But I’m worried this is “the moment“. Possibly the best shot that’s gonna happen for a long time. And if people find things aren’t as ready as they think from what they hear they’re going to be burned and they’re not coming back. The next time around not only will they not come, they’ll push other people away from trying.
I don’t know if we’ve reached that magical inflection point or not. I think some people are using rosy glasses again though. The real momentum has never been this strong. But it’s not a done deal.
> It’s literally the ads and bloatware
I hope more companies and MBAs open their eyes to this: that the long term cost of user-hostile changes is negative compared to respecting users and building good products.
Also currently it helps to stand out from the sea of crap products.
Play the long game. Make good products. Bring joy and positive experience to peoples lives. Sleep well at night.
I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows.
That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays.
Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows.
certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
KDE's income from individual donations has doubled recently, and many of the comments we get with donations are from recent Windows switchers.
As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.
Thank you for reminding me that I should set up some recurring donations to the teams powering my Linux experience
Thank you very much in advance!
Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB.
I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
Hah. Feh, I still use that once in a while. It is one of very few image viewers that can lock in pan and zoom and then look over multiple frames.
Good for checking which photo of a dozen is clearest, while zoomed in 800%.
Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.
Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux.
My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows).
Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets.
These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.
> These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows.
It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more.
I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
Yeah, myself and several friends of mine with EOL Windows 10 PCs are looking to jump ship.
i think its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time
If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.
Avalanches start with small movements ...
I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice.
Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc.
And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...
I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on.
It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL and run find for file name searches. The start menu was laggy, explorer was laggy (open up a folder with a couple dozen OGG files and it won't render for a solid minute). Mystery memory usage from privileged processes I had little control over. Once I realized that the one game I play (Overwatch) ran on Linux I decided to swap back.
I installed Linux Mint earlier this year and I've been extremely happy. The memory consumption is stable and low, and if something is broken I have the control to fix it. It just feels so much less hostile. This is largely possible thanks to the work Steam has done with Proton. The last real barrier is kernel level anti-cheat which prevented me from trying out this years Call of Duty. Oh well!
>It was faster to rg to search files
This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..
Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.
On Windows, just use Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/
“They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them”.
Well said. I wonder what the kernel team thinks about it.
ReFS riffs on reflinks - take a gander at XFS.
For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM.
It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself.
I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave.
Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and installed Linux Mint.
The difference is absolutely unbelievable. Even heavy applications like LibreOffice and Zoom are snappy.
Apple makes such good hardware. I felt really sad about the state of their software compatibility with older machines.
So, I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know one more person will be using Linux in 2026!
Yep, we upgraded an old ~2010 iMac to 8gb and put Mint on it, good as new.
I've been using a system 76 laptop for the past 3 years. Runs perfectly, no surprises. Unfortunately, I need a mac for work because the laptop service folks do not know what to do with linux and do not have a relationship with a vendor like system76.
Pros: The best development experience you can have. Everything is native linux. There is no beating that. This of course will be a problem if hobbies/work use windows. I've never been a windows person. So I've never missed it. Power and peripherals work on the system76 seamlessly.
Cons: Battery life. Runs out in about 2.5 hrs but its an AMD not an ARM.
I did run linux on a tower exclusively while I did my PhD. Did everything on it - code, writing my thesis in LaTeX, store data, connect to dropbox for backup, watch netflix, etc.
You're not missing much by dumping windows.
Really only Photoshop is the big gaping hole I feel as a linux user. Gimp is just atrocious.
There is a desktop webview of PhotoPea, but it's not the same.
Have you tried Photoshop's online version that runs in a Web browser?
(it uses wasm)
I thought the same about Gimp, until I sat down and tried to learn it's workflows. Once you adjust, it's pretty great. imo, ymmv, obviously.
Depending on what you are doing, if you don't fancy Gimp, then maybe one of: Krita, Darktable, Inkscape?
2.5 hours of battery is a serious gaping hole imo.
I removed the batteries in our laptops because we use them like desktops all the time and it's one less fire hazard to worry about.
I guess it works out for you but I’d be inconvenienced for not being able to move around and paranoid that I may jerk the wire powering the machine. Still glad you were able to find a solution for your setup though.
I'm in my 60's and have never run Photoshop. Nor my wife, my kids, none of my relatives I'm aware of for that matter. Come to think of it, of all the people I know, no one runs PhotoShop that I'm aware of.
I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt until macOS 27 (but I'm still on 15.7.4 hehe).
Mac OS X and Aqua wasn't very well received either at launch.
A similar thing happened with the flat design of iOS 7.
Apple's pattern is initially going overboard with a new design and then scaling it back slowly like a sculptor.
I think they're happy with this method, even if things miss at first the big changes usually create a lot of hype and excitement for the masses.
The vast majority of users don't care about the finer things, Apple knows that the nerds can sweat it out until they straighten things out at which point everyone is happy in a hero's journey kind of way.
I just hope this pattern stays true and that this isn't an inflection point.
This post does examplefy what we’re seeing, a general indication of some swelling of momentum but I bet it’s still going to be from 2% to maybe 3 or 5% at most until Linux can fix a few things about the community, issues with install difficulty such as dual booting and other issues, and the technical knowledge barrier to entry until more distribution with hardware comes along. Although of course system 76 and steam deck are great moves in this direction they’re still relatively niche for now.
There will never be a “year of the Linux desktop” the same way that there has never been a “year of the Mac desktop”, it’s just a slow building of users over time anyway.
Ever tried to get answers from "the Windows community?"
https://github.com/hahndorf/Set-Privacy
Still not the year of the Windows desktop.
Regarding the Steam Deck, Linux is _already_ 3% of Steam users: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey, while MacOS is under 2%.
I think it's also maybe worth pointing out that "non-enthusiast desktop OS user" is a segment that is shrinking. A lot of the people that aren't going to Linux are just going to smartphones only rather than buy a new laptop for Win11.
Your describing the impact Steam Deck is having without SteamOS being available to easily install on a custom built machine. The tipping point is going to come this year when people who are building new machines have the option to install Windows or SteamOS. A lot of people are going to pick SteamOS.
Most charts I've seen indicate Linux already passed 5% usage worldwide.
Not quite: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
I can’t distinguish the colors of the Linux and MacOs colors on that chart.
Saw a fascinating talk on gui and ui development today, lamenting the stagnation at M$ and apple when it comes to desktop computing (including browsing).
" there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.
I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me.
I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop
There are several reports of people getting 12+ hours out of a Lunar Lake based laptop running Linux. Still a ways away from the 20 Intel claims for them, but likely a more realistic scenario.
Intel claims Panther Lake will be even better, and we should be seeing results within days as there should be Panther Lake desktop released during CES this week.
Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making it harder for Linux by making it so much reverse engineering work to get everything to go into sleep mode!)
I don't think it's that per se, it's just apple has a lot of resources to optimise/test a relatively small amount of configurations.
The big "issue" with Linux on non-server workloads imo is a lack of testing like this - which is completely understandable. Afiak Microsoft runs millions of automated tests on various hardware configurations _a day_.
Intel does something similar for the Linux kernel, which no doubt explains the relative stability of Linux server vs Desktop (servers are running far less "OS level" software in general in day to day use than the desktop).
The desktop experience itself needs more automated testing. There are so many bugs/regressions which I've noticed in eg gnome which should have been caught by e2e testing - I do try to report them when I see them.
Doing a bit more digging there seems to be some basic e2e testing for gnome ran nightly but currently most tests are failing https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/12128.
This isn't a criticism at all btw, it's quite boring and resource intensive work for a project like gnome to do. I hope soon some large corp decides to go all in on realLinux desktop (not ChromeOS) and can devote resources to this.
Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.
I am most familiar with Debian but only headless. What would be a good choice of desktop environment? I’m looking to switch over the only windows computer in my house to Linux, it is primarily used as a home theatre and gaming PC.
Desktop environments are a matter of taste, but since you asked, I like KDE Plasma. I think it would be pretty comfortable for someone coming from Windows.
It's not the default on Debian, but once you install it, you can choose it next time you log in.
https://wiki.debian.org/KDE#Installation
Best luck! My year of the Linux desktop has been 2006, so it's now 20 years (with a short 5yrs relapse around 2012). I never look back.
(Similarities to smoking cessation are neither coincidental nor intentional, but unavoidable.)
Mine was a few years earlier (YoLotD). Sadly, I kept up with the fags until 2018 ...
FTR to other readers, "fags" in this context refers to cigarettes (per the GP's parenthetical remark about smoking).
Very kind of you to note a potential en_GB => en_US buggeration.
I really don't understand what is different about my installs of Windows 11 compared to what I read in all these types of articles.
I have zero issues with the platform day in and day out with heavy workloads like Pro Tools and Unreal Engine devkit. Games run without stutter and issue, all my features are snappy, Explorer loads instantly, etc. Even search is performant and gives decent results. I have tweaked a few settings but nothing you can't find in settings menus.
I'm not sure a lot of people having issues with pretty damn stable platform are going to have a better experience in something they have zero familiarity with and isn't exactly going to be intuitive when things go sideways, as they most undoubtedly will.
Is your windows 11 home edition or managed by corporate IT?
Maybe someone here knows a solution. The ONLY thing keeping me on windows is that my employer uses F5/Big IP edge clients. I cannot find a Linux client that can also handle Web SSO. Does anyone have any Linux experience with this?
I did fight with that a few years ago. Memory is that you can get through some steps running Windows in a VM to get thru MFA checks, and then close it later.
https://x.com/EnterpriseCPU/status/1972103355012124891?s=20
I'll toss in my 2 cents: 1. people that have no business whatsoever now know what linux is ie sales dawgs that only touch a computer for the occasional spreadsheet. 2. 70 year old man fed up with windows, moved to linux. it looks great, its fast and responsive let's make this happen.
Yeah. I feel the same way. If not for the fact that my gaming PC pulls double duty as a work PC, I'd seriously consider ditching Windows 11 for Bazzite.
I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Liquid Glass fixed…somehow.
I game on standard Kubuntu, not a custom distro but to each their own.
Considering how the load at Linux Mint's forums has recently increased to the point that some of it is being re-directed to gitHummed (a minute ago there were "3362 users online :: 35 registered, 3 hidden and 3324 guests" >10 secs to respond, needed to login), it appears that distro at least is seeing a lot of newcomers.
> I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.
Kind of glad to read this, I went into it thinking it will be another person saying "I'll use Linux forever!" the day after installing it, similar to everyone who says their new years resolution is to work out more, then proceeds to go to the gym 2 times total :)
(oh, and then, I noticed this is Xe!)
I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.
Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.
They’ve done the research and they know x% will never change and that’s enough for them to monetize. So that’s what they’re doing.
Even, I would imagine those who switch are least likely to click on desktop adds anyway.
I recently switched to Linux for all development. I still use my Mac for everything else.
The main reason was to protect my personal data from possible supply chain issues or LLM agent mishaps.
I’m 99% in VSCode, a browser, and a terminal. There’s hardly a difference day-to-day.
It will take few more years before people start abandoning W10 due to security concerns(somehow "hackers" always find some insane backdoors and bugs in old windows, it must be a pure coincidence), hardware upgrade or just need to reinstall. But indeed, it looks like Linux is finally taking over. I'd say that beside Microsoft being so bad at their job, it's Valve and gaming on Linux in general. It's actually doable. What a miracle!
Every year starting back around the year 2000, every year until now there's always at least an article from Slashdot and then HN on the year of the Linux desktop from believers and non-believers alike [1],[2].
[1] Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop (2023):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33213663
[2] Why there should never be a "year of the Linux desktop" (2009):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821673
Things like this don't help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471081
I've used Fedora on my laptop for over a decade. I switched my main home workstation to Fedora in 2023, and haven't looked back since.
My workstation runs Kinoite[1], an immutable/atomic version of Fedora. I started with Fedora 38, and now am running 43. Flawless major-release upgrades. I develop using distrobox[2] (pet containers) on podman. It "Just Works".
Nearly 99% of my Steam library is playable on Fedora too. Many games even have native Linux support these days - the rest run under Proton. The only games that won't play have windows-only kernel-level anti-cheat. For some of those games, it's a developer choice (there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it).
I use Flatpaks to install many GUI apps, such as FreeCAD, KiCad, Darktable, Steam, Reaper, and a lot more.
It's a great, extremely stable system.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
[2] https://distrobox.it/
> there's apparently a checkbox to enable Linux support on EasyAntiCheat - and some don't "check" it
Because support doesn't mean full features. It's like saying iPad supports Microsoft Excel. At some point it's the same name for different software.
I think especially because it's under Proton, that means it's the Windows version of the game you're weakening to anti-cheat too. Even Valve's own VAC has issues running under Proton.
I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.
> I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.
I play loads of games; its mainly AAA multiplayers that aren't able to run on linux due to kernel anti-cheat - nearly everything else runs well with minimal effort using proton via steam (either installed via steam or imported as a non-steam game).
I'd say about less than .00000001 percent of the world is in the same use case as you.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss.
I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.
Consumer Windows for those that care is an almost worthless business. Nobody will pay what was once paid for a windows license anymore. They will squeeze existing users who know no different in ways 2006 adware purveyors could dream of and monetize it that way. For the rest of non enterprise users, they don't care.
> to see if they are in red alert to get users back
I don't think they much care, long gone are the days of consumer Windows being a cash-cow. And if you buy a machine with Windows on and put Linux over the top, they still have that little bit of money from you via the manufacturer. Adverts on the start menu and such, is not an action that would be taken by a company with any real pride in their OS.
Europe has shown themselves to be completely unwilling or unable to regulate the giant. So they stopped caring. They crank out cheap crap and charge top dollar because no one can stop them.
I think they have moved on to other sources of revenue, so I don't think they care that much anymore.
Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure.
Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
Yeah, it's all AI, Azure, and Office 365. Everything else is basically a forgotten product by microsoft. Even xbox is basically dead at this point.
If it were forgotten it’s worked as it did. The problem it’s that it’s nerfed to funnel you through the new AI or Cloud user harvesting.
VS (and vscode) also get some love, though mainly as drivers towards getting things published using Azure infrastructure, SQL Server too.
Honestly I get the Xbox apathy. There's not that much profit in being what, third or fourth place? After Steam, Playstation and Nintendo? Depends how you define it, I guess, but to me they're in fourth place. Microsoft needs to either cut their losses or invest a ton of money. It looks like they will pick some weird thing in the middle, keeping Xbox on life support. Probably some unhappy compromise internally.
Funny, not to oversimplify, but this is basically how IBM exited the consumer market
Windows has been my main operating system for the last 35 years (from version 2). I've used Linux and to a lessor extent BSD and Mac as well, but my main desktop has always been Windows, as it ran most of the apps that I needed.
Windows 11 UI and spyware are so bad, that Windows 10 is where my 35 years of using Windows as my main OS has ended.
> then just shat all over them with start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews, and forcing Copilot down everyone's throats
Thank god I've been using Linux long enough to not experience any of that.
At my job in a large non-tech company, almost everyone uses Windows (except for the dev team) purely because of Microsoft Office. As long as that thing exists, they can do all the dumb things they want and still dominate.
I do think Linux is accessible to many more people, but I would not say it is ready for the masses. The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user.
But, with that said, I started seriously using Linux for the first time in 2025. I bounce between Debian, Windows 11, and MacOS, and Debian is probably the most refreshing to use. I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues. I find MacOSs Liquid Glass redesign to be more aggressively bad.
>I don’t find Windows 11 as oppressive as other seem to, but I have turned off most of what people cite as the issues.
So you debloated your windows but at any update you have to spin your wheels and try to remove any crap they put back in. At any time there’s the possibility you can no longer remove x or y. The vast majority don’t have the energy to play this game or don’t know how to.
I agree, it is bad and I don't like it, but I think it is bad in a way most users won't care about. I have not really considered a version of Windows to be good since...Windows 2000...maybe 3.1.1. They have all had major issues, so I just kind of shrug off the issues when I use Windows. The enshitification of MacOS is relatively new and so still stings a bit.
I think where Microsoft is playing with fire is that while most users will not care about some of these changes power users do. And the 5% of power users ultimately make the decisions and provide the recommendations for the other 95%. With so many apps and SAAS services going web or web app only there will be less and less reason to need to stick with Windows and that is where Microsoft will start to lose control.
I hope they will get burned this time. MS has been playing with fire, I agree.
> The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user.
My wife is the average computer user and has used Linux apps for years and never opened a terminal once.
Who installed linux and did the initial setup? And then I think there is a class of user that is savvy enough to say, update their graphics drivers but not willing to use a terminal and that is before you get into the mess that is Nvidia on linux.
I agree, under a managed setup scenario where a user is only really going to use a web browser and a few apps. Linux is just fine.
I mentioned the same thing somewhere north of your comment.
My wife rocks Arch and could not care less.
"The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user."
My wife has no idea what a terminal is and does not care - she rocks Arch and has no idea what that means. The people that attend my uncle's PC clinic to have their "Win 10 that won't run Win 11" converted to Linux don't care either.
My Dad's PC will shortly be running Linux after I've taken him through MSOffice -> Libre Office + Scribus + (Evolution||Thunderbird).
I started off my early IT career as a trainer - I once did a day of DTP with Quark Express where I was given the floppies the night before. When I hear that Linux (actually LO etc) is incapable of doing whatever, I soon find that a deep discussion about what constitutes "incapable" generally turns into a training session.
For example I often hear about documents that apparently LO can't handle. That normally ends up with me teaching (proselytizing!) about how to use styles properly or even the real basics such as the four tab forms (L/R/C/decimal). Then we might segue into spreadsheets ... ahh, you'll want a array formula there ... "a what?" and off we go again.
Now, I have wandered off track here somewhat but I'm noting the other "not ready" convo that will often happen after we have covered how to find your mouse pointer or why Windows seems to still have two Control Panels and at least three half arsed IP stacks.
I do actually have a fondness for Windows, having used it since v2.0 at school in 1986ish. That fondness is rapidly going west along with VMware (consultant for 25 years).
I fucking hate being taken for a ride and basically being abused. Today, my company received an email from Broadcom telling us that we are no longer welcome as a reseller/unpaid support org. Luckily we started migrating our customers away from VMware some time ago and only the ones with the deepest pockets and greatest inertia remain. The rest are rocking Proxmox and I'm a much happier consultant too.
One day MS might tell my company that they have decided to dispense with our reseller/unpaid support services too, once they are sure that everyone is tucked up with a subscription.
Well, they can piss off too. I am capable of running email systems on prem (and do) even though I have migrated my firm from on prem Exchange to M365. I still point MX records to our place (Exim + rspamd) and run an imapd for some mailboxes. A calendar app is all that is missing.
What I hope I am getting across is that dumping Windows and co is quite a broad subject.
I think that your choice of Deborah and Ian's (bless!) distro is a really good solid starter for 10 but to be honest after a while you should be able to run any variety of Linux.
You should be able to install multiple Window Managers eg Gnome and KDE Plasma and all the rest at the same time and be able to select which session to use from your Display Manager (eg SDDM).
I have almost certainly overstayed my welcome in this tread but before I go, I will suggest that anyone who calls themself an IT (anything) should at least have a go at all available systems. Nowadays OS/2 Warp on something like 25 floppies is not a barrier to play (spin up a VM).
it's funny because it's Linux (and especially KDE) that has bridged that gap so long ago. I told my dad just open up sftp and edit the files. He's on windows of course. There's some convoluted thing. I totally forgot he cant literally just put in the URL and edit the file in kate!
Welcome...1998 was my year of the Linux desktop. Valve seems to have been dredging all of the "maybe"s over the last few years on a few different fronts. Big ups to them (not that they don't get enough praise...still!)
“for me” - this should had been in the title but missed out.
Linux has got better but not yet there.
Linux isn’t perfect but it’s far away from the compromises one needs to make to use Windows. It’s weird frogs are comfortable slowly boiling even when Microsoft turns on the heat to the max.
> At the very least, when something goes wrong on Linux you have log messages that can let you know what went wrong so you can search for it.
It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
This rings true...outside of users that play competitive FPS...the anticheat continues to be a challenge
As a side note - if you're in that venn diagram overlap group of linux and gaming...check out "beyond all reason" RTS if you haven't. High chance it'll tickle you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wxwIxz4PaY
edit: not affiliate to linked yt - organic enthusiastism
As someone who plays competitive FPS at quite a high level (I compete in the Contenders division in Valorant's Premier tournament system, lots of fun!), honestly even that's not the biggest deal. I'll eventually get to a point where the only reason I have a Windows install at all is for Valorant. Everything else will be Linux.
BAR is definitely one of the stars of OSS game dev.
I run Kubuntu on this gaming machine (AlienWare) and I run it on my 16 year old Dell laptop I used for work back then. Runs great and with RAM prices high and people looking to make their older machines useful instead of trashing them, there's a really good chance they can run Linux.
Actually surprised that Xe wasn't already a Linux user.
Have been for a while, had Windows for games, but now Fedora runs them well enough I don't have to care.
Funnily enough today windows pissed me off with a random breaking bug (no login screen yay) so now only have Ubuntu installed. Only one application I use that's windows only anyways and can use a VM for that, so sayonara...
I'll still be a Windows/Unix dual user. But then again I don't do the Windows "Home version" experience so many here seem eager to humiliate themselves with over and over.
If I didnt have a macbook from work I'd use Linux, but I got a macbook
People loudly declaring they are switching to Linux feel to me like people loudly declaring they are leaving Twitter. That's nice? I've had my home machines on Linux since forever and it's fun. I like trying new distros about once a year to see what people are up to. It's been possible to run a basic setup for normies for a solid decade now, it's unfortunate that it took Microsoft waging UX war for some techies to notice.
I wish iPhone users had a new os option. iOS is getting so unbearable with each update.
Why not just use an Android phone?
Google.
This is the perfect iPhone user meme.
yeah ios26 is objectively a piece of shit
2026 will certainly be the year of the 'I'm switching to Linux' thinkpieces
my 2017 mac air is getting real long in the tooth. I'd definitely considering switching to *nix with it but everything I keep reading is that process is not so easy.
I've been on linux since 2014; I'm an ocassional user of windows, booting into it with much regret to deal with client's issues. I generally dislike working with MacOS... but for someone used to macOS I see no meaningful degradation of the kind there is with windows - your time is better spent earning/buying/setting up an m series mac air.
I am holding out for an M5 air!
Write a strongly worded letter to the manager (apple). It's easy on other hardware.
Been following this blog for a while and this is the last person I would have expected to be a Windows user.
I am one full page ad away from deleting Windows 11 forever. I will struggle through infinite driver compatibility issues before I sit through a single ad while trying to work. That is my redline.
For me it was the OneDrive ads on the lock screen. And, when I accidentally clicked "enable OneDrive" (a few years ago, this might have changed), IT TOOK OVER MY DOCUMENTS FOLDER AND TOLD ME THERE WAS NO WAY TO REVERT IT!
Yeah onedrive is seriously annoying. It's nice when the free 15GB backup/sync for the desktop, pictures, and documents folder works (for people who put things there) but the way other MS products work with it seems user-hostile to me.
e.g. it took until 2025 for this RFC to be opened on moving PowerShell profiles and modules out of Onedrive: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/pull/388. It should not be taking seconds for my powershell profile to load just because i have onedrive enabled by default.
I also had a non-technical friend recently get burned by a default MS Office setting where edited documents located in the OneDrive folder save directly to onedrive, and it only gets saved on disk when onedrive gets the new copy and uploads it back it to the user's disk. So if the MS office to onedrive integration fails your changes won't save. Apparently users have to enable a setting to first save to a folder on disk? That folder can even be the onedrive folder so onedrive will eventually sync it back up.
What devices are you expecting driver issues with? Even NVidia is not much of a problem these days
I have to use Windows sometimes at work, and of all indignities, this is surely a small one, but it is an indignity. Everyone complains about ads, which is a real issue, but to me the biggest issue is how blatantly suboptimal everything is. Nobody has put any effort into making Windows good for a very very long time. The terminal and/or powershell is incredibly slow - ls should not take perceptible time to execute. The settings menus are made with 3 to 5 different layers of UI frameworks and design guidelines. Forced OneDrive. The pestering about copilot... I even like LLMs, but my user experience is so clearly subordinate to some KPI that it annoys me anyway. I'm sure I could come up with more if I had touched it recently, but I thankfully haven't.
This headline couldn't be more absurd. Who cares... computing ceased being desktop-centric 12 or 15 years ago.
Been bazzite-only since April and I love it
There are still so many issues around Wayland and fragmentation. Gnome is the most popular and has lots of issues and sometimes is downright user hostile. Luckily some of the distributions try to revert some of the insanity sometimes. But there are still many protocols and portals needed and much more standardization.
Niri + DankMaterialShell is an amazing desktop experience. I've heard great things about the COSMIC DE as well.
Among the average hn reader...I think it'll stick.
Wider man on street, less sure
As for me - having a good time on linux
Wait, does Xe not know about this? https://www.thurrott.com/dev/330980/microsoft-to-replace-all...
But more seriously, it's pretty ironic to see all of these posts on HN, a supposed "tech" community, about switching to Linux, especially the comments describing how it defied their low expectations (tacitly revealing their own lack of prior first-hand experience). You never would have seen this on Slashdot 20 years ago, where dual booting Linux (or some BSD, despite it dying) was the minimum "geek cred" to not be seen as a poser.
And this was at a time when distros were far less user-friendly and had far more hardware compatibility issues and far less support for running Windows software.
I love the fact that there are different Linux distros optimized for every person.
I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers.
I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking.
IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kubuntu is the same but more customizable slightly more developer-focused. Omarchy (which is a fork of Arch Linux) is very developer-focused.
See you in 2027 with the same prediction!
I've been using Linux as my desktop since 2020, I switched because I wanted to play games and maintain a development environment I'm familiar with (having run Linux servers for ~15 years at that point) that would be stable. I had long used a Windows machine for gaming and a Mac laptop for development. My Mac was stable enough, but Windows was not-- it wasn't blue screens it was constant unpredictable updates (sometimes erratically running when I didn't want them to). I had an SSD in the machine with Windows, but after installing Pop_OS! (as a happy accident) I never found a compelling reason to use Windows again.
Steam has worked perfectly, clicking install and then hitting play, no futzing with drivers or weird updates. The only games I haven't been able to play are League of Legends and some of the new AAA shooters. I'm okay with that because I don't particularly care at this point, and it's not worth maintaining a Windows install to periodically play for an hour or so.
Linux has been unbelievably stable. This year, I fully upgraded the system and planned on reinstalling but I didn't even need to. On first boot, my old install was picked up and mostly just worked. On Windows I've tried that before, and it was an unrelenting shit show (that resulted in having to nuke the old windows install).
The only hitch I've had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers (open source vs proprietary); which, I was able to fix by booting into the command line then nuking both sets of drivers via apt remove and installing the one I wanted. Took me less than five minutes and my system was working. It also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried being too clever (and Pop_OS! having some quirks).
I recently setup a MiniPC to use while traveling to game on and this time I tried Arch. To my surprise the install was ridiculously easy. The most recent installer makes it a breeze. My only mistake was not noticing I'd installed a few desktop environments and the default wasn't what I wanted so things seemed broken. After selecting KDE from the login menu et volia! It worked perfectly. I'm considering switching my primary rig to Arch, but I'll give the most recent Pop_OS! release a try to see if the newer LTS version gets me access to some new packages first.
Linux is great folks. If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it. It's really low maintenance and just works. 11/10 would recommend to anyone.
> If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it.
Even the smaller ones are unironically pretty fun to work with now-a-days. I'm currently rocking Gentoo on my stuff. After the painful setup, it's actually quiet easy to maintain.
Good luck. I've tried to completely replace Windows with Linux over the last two decades or so, and it's still lacks polish. I really don't enjoy having half-written GUIs for different apps and having to compile my own fixes after searching for 3 hours.
I think I finally gave it up in anger, when it was on a laptop I was using for a few important projects and it cost me days of work.
I now use Windows+WSL and it has the best of both worlds: A fully functional GUI with everything I would ever need with Linux.
MacOS is really the best Nix Desktop OS out there. I would use this instead, but I still require some windows apps.
See, now this is how a website *should* look: mainly text, with non-obtrusive ads at the bottom. It's really not that hard!
There's a stickied ad at the bottom that says
> The AI Agent that gets your codebase Copilot & Cursor letting you down? Try Augment. Install Now
Very observant of you. The comment you replied to mentioned “non-obtrusive ads at the bottom” so they noticed that too. IMO “non-obtrusive” is a fair description, given that it doesn't seem to be doing excessive tracking (I didn't spot any extra cookies or other storage, so it is presumably logging little, if any, more than web server logs did in the 90s/00s, which is better than the stalking done by most adtech these days).
Hey, gotta pay the bills, somehow! *shrug*
They're going from Microsoft to... Linux. From bad to worse. Just use macOS and get on with your life.
macOS is particularly annoying and gets in the way more than an OS should. Windows can be tamed and the Linux experience can be perfectly smooth depending on distro and hardware. I assume macOS can be tamed as well, but it seems like much more of an uphill battle.
If you just install MacOS, Windows, or any major Linux distros, all work okay with default settings and drivers, almost all the time. Problems start when you want something else or more.
It’s like when you want Docker on MacOS. Helpful people will say that you should just use colima. Yeah it works perfectly well… until you want to open udp ports (this was the case half a year ago). All 3 OSes are like that, just the flavor is different.
If you know how to find “reject all” on all cookie banners, Windows will be easier for you.
If you know networking and pf, then MacOS will be easier for you.
If you know how to debug driver bugs, Linux will be easier for you (and fun as hell imho)
Anyway, if you don’t want to do much more than internet browsing/video playing/basic gaming/basic coding, it simply doesn’t matter. // I would still say that the default network/firewall settings for MacOS is sketchy as hell however
Personally I can't stand the dock paradigm...no way to tell if a program is running or not at a glance, and it's not easy to switch between one application with multiple windows. A lot can be changed even if it requires third party add-ons, but I'd say it's the least intuitive OS there is.
What’s sketchy about it?
I’m not sure about that.
To me, Windows has been the best experience with gaming (yes, including the stupid bullshit anti-cheat software that shouldn’t exist in the way it does, the devs making it truly only support Windows), the desktop experience has been tolerable, especially with PowerToys and FancyZones in particular and that one registry change to restore classic context menu. Still feels like fighting against the OS but passable.
Linux has been the best experience for regular computing and software development, especially since a lot of the software I deploy runs in Docker containers, so getting more or less the same user land is nicer than subtle Windows incompatibilities (e.g. bind mount permissions, line endings, crap like that). Also package managers are just nice and some desktops out there are really good for daily driving (personally I like Cinnamon, but KDE and XFCE and others all have their place).
Apple stuff has been the best in regards to the hardware integration and coherence (e.g. the experience of using a MacBook or iPhone and everything working without any driver issues on other OSes), having a pretty polished desktop experience, but also super weird things such as no proper AA on generic external monitors (e.g. 1080p), limited hardware ports, oddly locked down ecosystem and odd support choices (e.g. the dance you gotta do to install development apps, the PWA situation) and just weird choices in regards to keyboard layout and how the mouse feels compared to both of the other OSes. Okay development, not great gaming situation, worse than Linux at this point.
I like my iPhone (reduced Liquid Glass transparency) and MacBook Air (great for notes or travel), but daily drive either Windows or Linux. Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
>>Tried FreeBSD for one of my servers too but hardware support wasn’t wide enough, not sure what the desktop situation there is like.
Hardware support is plenty wide enough. Just buy the hardware that supports FreeBSD and that's most of it. Same with the desktop and I've run servers and desktops for 25 years using easily found, common, name brand hardware that runs FreeBSD.
Can’t stand the MacOS UI philosophy and built in software. Gotta skip. The hardware is pretty good though.
This is the biggest pickle for me. Mx Macbook Airs are pretty amazing, but Asahi is just not there, and I don't think it will ever be without Apple playing ball a little bit unfortunately. (I'm currently on a t2/intel macbook and it's got more quirks that I care to deal with...but it was free so gotta do what I gotta do)
I’m going from macOS to linux currently. It was the hardware obsolesence that kicked things off but I definitely wont miss the constant nagging about my iCloud being full
Just turn off iCloud sync for the things you don't use and you won't fill it up. I sync passwords, notes, find my, calendar, contacts, and safari. Currently using 800MB of the free 5GB.
yeah. fuck iCloud.
tbf mac is starting to get pretty bad too
The ai and liquid glass rollouts do not inspire confidence in the future of macOS.
Why is Linux worse? Why, for example, is KDE worse that the macOS desktop?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46092464
`apt-get update` bricked your system multiple times? How, by filling up your disk? That doesn't install or upgrade any software. It just updates the local cache of the registry. I believe you that there was a real problem I'm just confused about how it happened.
I've been unable to login after filling my disk before, I wouldn't call the system bricked because I was able to fix it by mounting the disk on another computer and freeing up space, but I wouldn't quibble over the term either.
It was apt-get upgrade, then. Whichever command updates all packages on the system. I must have misspoke, I don’t use Debian-based systems all that much anymore.
I remember it had a particular fondness for deleting old kernel versions, failing to install the new kernel, and thus bricking the system on boot. Alternatively, uninstalling the entire WM because one package had a conflict.
Weird! Sounds like maybe `apt-get dist-upgrade` or `apt-get full-upgrade`. `upgrade` shouldn't uninstall anything or update your kernel as far as I know. `dist-upgrade` or `full-upgrade` could do either. If your `/boot` partition was exhausted or you lost power in the middle of a kernel upgrade, that could leave the system in a broken state.
At any rate, sorry you had such a frustrating experience.
It is?
I've moved from macOS after 15 years to Linux in past year (niri + DankMaterialShell), it's mostly better aside from missing Miller columns in Finder.
The monster that ate Windows have already started eating Mac OS.
My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
[1] https://flatpak.org/
[2] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html#sandb...
[3] https://flathub.org/en
[4] https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
[5] https://distrobox.it/
[6] https://containertoolbx.org/
If you use KDE Plasma (like with Fedora KDE or Kinoite), you do not need Flatseal, as the functionality is integrated into System Settings.
Great tip - I do use KDE but didn't know this. Always just reached for Flatseal - but the functionality being integrated is even better. Very cool.
Flatpak gives you a lot of permission controls for GUI apps and you can similarly sandbox a lot of CLI tools with toolbx or distrobox.
> On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.