Linux

It's definitely an abusive relationship.

Yes. I prefer my os to be more passively adversarial. Like Gentoo. It hates everything equally.

In that way it’s become adversarial.

Back in the 2000s, I was able to say that while a fundamental install took only about a half hour to set up, usability tweaks and a full fleshing out of functionality took another 4-8 hours depending on what the user was going to use the machine for.

I just did a Win11 24h2 install. It took nearly 24 working hours before I considered it even minimally functional for my needs. Cycling through Win10Privacy two or three times was particularly frustrating. Registry work alone took me a good 8-10 hours of trying stuff a step at a time and then rebooting to see how it worked.

At this point, the only reason why I am still running with a Windows rig is for those half-dozen programs that don’t have appropriate non-Windows variants. It’s why I’m also running a Mac Mini and an OpenSUSE tower through the same 4-port, 6-head KVM.

That sucks about your friend. I can relate.

Scammers hacked my elderly mother on her windows laptop. They tricked her with an ad saying there was a problem with her computer, and they had her install remote access software. She mentioned seeing the terminal so I assumed they installed (at least) a keylogger. Luckily, they either ran out of time, or their con took two days, but they said they were going to call my mom the next day and have her log in to the bank to make sure her computer was still working.

So, I wiped her computer and installed Linux Mint with auto updates set up. She only had one simple question about logging in to google chrome and that's been it for the last month. She has just been using it no problem.

Side note: The next day the scammers had the nerve to call my mom and ask her why her computer was turned off.

Sending everything users do and type (including passwords) back to Microsoft. It's called spyware when other companies do it.

Do you have any proof that Microsoft keylogs you? That's quite a serious claim.

That's true, never thought about how many times Ive used the registry to do something when the ui doesn't work, eg forcing games into exclusive fullscreen or getting acces to old features in the Nvidia control panel.

Still my gaming pc "needs" to be windows because of the games i play. Either be it kernel level AC or not getting stretched Res + 280hz gsync to work.

Poor comparison, honestly. Only like 5% of Windows users will only have a vague notion about what a registry is and a fraction of that would have messed with it under duress. By comparison, nearly all Linux users are expected to learn a handful of commands with strange abbreviations and arcane symbols to perform otherwise basic tasks. That's not some unsubstantial barrier to be dismissed.

The average user doesn't even know the registry exists.

In windows' defense, the "complication" comes from the fact that there is no constant visual display of the filesystem structure in a terminal window like there is in the Windows registry.

That said, taking an hour to become comfortable with the terminal is not a difficult task. Understanding ~, and constantly using df -h and ls -al (for me anyway) will help a lot of people figure it out.

I think problems that could be solved are generic hardware compatibility. Being able to install Wi-Fi adapters and Digital Tokens easily on Linux would go a long way. I think it will get there, though.

Huh? Only DE thing not being stable for me was xfce Thunar being crashy for a while. There are unstalbe DE?

I wanted to try the gamer windows distro. Aurora or atlas or whatever. Its install wanted me to manually get drivers. I wasn't feeling like doing annoying tech stuff and troubleshooting so i just got fedora instead.

you have to change the init configurations for every single game you download (even if it’s just for enabling gamemode)

I haven't had to do this for a single game I've played. Am I lucky? What does "gamemode" do? (Am I missing out on something?)

The worst I've had to do to get a game to work was change to "Proton Experimental" in the compat settings for one game that had basically just launched. (I also remember the EA launcher being terrible when I played "It Takes Two" with my partner, but I don't remember what was terrible about it and also remember them having problems on Windows so I don't know if it should count or not, lol). My partner is still using Windows, and we game together a lot, and honestly I think they have games crash far more often than I do. Games take longer to launch for me though - "Processing Vulkan Shaders" takes up to a minute or two if it is the first launch since boot of a larger game. No idea what happens if I skip it, so I don't.

It's honestly been such a breath of fresh air, I am so grateful for the talented people making this shit work so well, especially in the last several years.

Mac os is pretty bad with that bullshit too

Yeah on my Linux desktop, it's plugged into the TV for watching shows, so I sometimes switch between the PC Line Out and HDMI audio. The Linux audio logic seems to be "I'll stay at whatever you last set me to, until you set me to something else", which makes perfect sense.

On Windows, it seems to be some combination of whatever device Windows thinks was last plugged in (which is very rarely what was actually plugged in last) whether it's an audio device or not, combined with the phase of the moon in whatever location Windows thinks it's in (which is also rarely correct.)