from Hacker News

Why I'm sort of leaving Linux

by ChowWi on 10/31/19, 6:32 PM with 34 comments

• by mikece on 10/31/19, 7:06 PM

  I literally laughed out loud when I saw the author's name and now wonder why the headline wasn't: "Apple leaves Linux for Windows"

  Yes, Windows has gotten far better in recent years; then again, there have been great tools available for it for a while, like ConEmu and it's derivative Cmdr, so when it was recently announced that Windows 10 does SSH I smirked because I've been doing that -- and Vim and other things -- from Cmdr for years.

• by mark_l_watson on 10/31/19, 7:16 PM

  I don’t question his decision, people should do what is right for them.

  That said, something caught my eye: he was spending a lot of time tweaking the Linux UI instead of working. This was me fifteen or twenty years ago: wasting tons of time tweaking things. Now, I use Pop Linux as is in my System76 laptop and before that for years I just accepted the default Ubuntu setup. Good enough.

• by jdlyga on 10/31/19, 8:12 PM

  This is the reason I use Gnome. Sure, I could spend time tweaking and theming KDE Plasma's bars or messing around with i3 config files. But Gnome is pretty straightforward. Sure there are extensions and GTK themes. But it's primarily designed with one workflow in mind, kind of like iOS. I find myself doing more work when I'm using a Gnome desktop environment.

  When I use Windows, there's a lot of "update work" to do that ends up distracting me. Updating WSL Ubuntu, updating chocolatey, checking individual apps for updates, checking windows for updates, etc. I end up being more focused when I'm using Linux.

• by gcbw3 on 10/31/19, 7:00 PM

  Using windows/osx will always be more convenient at first. But then you hit a wall and can't patch/write something easily. ...even on this article intro it boast how he prefers a tiling window manager, then move to a platform that makes them a nuisance.

  It's the basic trade off of short term vs long term reward.

  Using closed source is like having a diet of candy. Great in small amounts, but bad if you are past 5 years old. And ridiculous if you are writing articles to defend it.

• by temporallobe on 10/31/19, 7:12 PM

  I use Windows 10 Enterprise for a project I work on. I really like File Explorer, the taskbar, and the window switching system, but for system-level scripting and cli-based development, nothing beats a good ol’ bash terminal, whether on Linux or macOS. However, I detest Windows 10 Home for its extremely bloated menu layout, pre-installed spyware, and forced no-questions-asked-no-matter-how-much-you-protest updates. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of some mission-critical task because it. will. update. For that reason alone, I completely abandoned Windows for home/personal use and now use either Mint or macOS (mostly macOS tbh). I’m no fanboi of any particular OS, and all I care about is an OS that’s stable, easy to use, and that does what I tell it (or tell it not) to do.

  I never had OP’s experiences with Mint, so in that regard he’s generalizing. Like Christianity and its many denominations, it REALLY depends on the distro.

• by twmiller on 10/31/19, 9:28 PM

  In an effort to reinvigorate my computer chops, I've been bouncing between macOS, linux (Manjaro), and Windows 10 on my personal laptop, switching to the next OS in rotation every Sunday night. I'm set up to develop a number of my personal web projects in all three operating systems, with my environment being (more or less) the same across all three (Angular and Python development) using Sublime as my primary text editor, Firefox as my primary browser. I've gone out of my way to NOT rely on the Linux subsystem on Windows, trying to keep my Windows experience more 'vanilla'. I'm only on my second week of using Windows, but I have to say, it is BY FAR my least favorite environment to work in of the three.

• by dhash on 10/31/19, 9:41 PM

  I have a Linux config I wrote for my desktop manager 8? Years ago. It took me about a week to write, and is themed to my hearts consent. I’ve barely touched it since then, once a couple years ago to add more workspaces, and another a couple weeks ago to change the theme

  It gives me the same keybjndings I want everywhere. Linux now feels the same regardless of what distro I’m using, and it’s just the way I like it now.

  It’s easy to get suckered in to ricing you’re environment, but you get tired of it eventually and just copy/paste the config around.

  Windows scares me at this point, it doesn’t have a nice timing window manger and I inevitably lose what I’m working on in a pile of windows.

• by csdreamer7 on 10/31/19, 8:39 PM

  Somewhat related rant.

  I bought a 5700 after my GTX 970 died and I wanted to play games and do some game programming.

  I waited to buy it after it had been out for two months and I could get a good 3rd party cooler.

  I had to wait another two weeks for support to get into Manjaro (Arch). The 5700 series Navi cards had several dependencies. Mesa 19.2.1 (19.2.0 was not a production release), LLVM 9.0, Linux 5.3, anddddd... a linux-firmware pkg update.

  Navi had been out for almost 2.5 months at this point...

  Windows 7 just required an AMD Radeon graphics driver to be installed. And, I could install it, justed booted into VESA mode, download it, install, reboot.

  Nvidia had been having issues with elements flashing on their closed source Linux drivers. An issue my 970 had in abundance. Which is why I went AMD, better value and I can use proper open source drivers.

  Recent AMD hardware support is really pitful for new Linux users. Especially since I usually recommend Ubuntu, which is often using much older mesa and Linux kernels than Arch distros. The 2000 series APU launches were an absolute joke (although Windows users had similar issues).

  Windows 10's rolling updates has it's issues (Orange Screenshots). But I recently installed it to my laptop, wifi worked out of box w/o updated. Windows Update complained about Intel drivers not being properly installed when it tried to install, rebooted, everything worked fine as far I could tell.

  I bought AMD to support their support of open standards (Freesync) and their open source software contributions (Nvidia didn't open source PhysX until AMD released it's open source equivalent). AMD recently open sourced their AI mage anti-aliasing tech for their cards which were ported to all cards by the community.

  AMD needs to do a better job of getting their open source drivers into mesa and the kernel. Intel tries to get their initial support at least a year into the kernel (source Phoronix).

  From what I hear, Ubuntu 19.10 didn't update their linux-firmware pkgs for their ISOs so you can't boot with the 5700 series Navi cards with Ubuntu 19.10... let alone for the rumored 5600 mainstream Navi cards coming out soon.

• by smacktoward on 10/31/19, 7:01 PM

  Enjoy the pervasive telemetry and Candy Crush ads!

• by huherto on 10/31/19, 8:48 PM

  > Tim Apple.

  Isn't this person the CEO of Apple according to you know who.

• by mellowdream on 10/31/19, 8:01 PM

  Windows 10 is honestly really good as a user desktop as long as you run the appropriate optimization and debloat scripts on an LTSC image.

  I'm still using Linux as well, but I've been really impressed by the stability of the LTSC Win10. Even fewer problems than the recent iterations of MacOS, in my experience. It's worth considering especially if you need access to commercial software like Excel or Adobe CC products.

• by gabrielblack on 11/1/19, 9:15 AM

  Starting a job in a "Windows dependant" software house, I was forced to have both WLS and Linux VM. They gave me a brand new HP computer they prepared with company software, security software, etc. I was "Windows free" since 2009, ten year without Windows. The first problem was BSOD, that computer start randomly to crash, even after the software / system / driver upgrades the administrator installed on the machine and it still does, randomly. The same happen to my collegues. For the first time I noticed that now BSODs have a nice QR-Code. My impression about WLS is that's nice but still a toy with lot of limitation: first of all you can't full iteract using WSL tools with what is running in Windows space. It's useful to have access to Linux tools like grep, interpreters, etc to use against object resident on Windows file system. Sometimes Linux programs silently doesn't work well I noticed this using some Linux tool and Python libs, for example. This is the reason of the Linux VM running on my PC. IMHO WLS is far to be a replacement of a native Linux pc / VM, I still prefer to work on a Linux or OSX pc, even if Apple and Systemd are spending big effort to make me hate both, with the result I'm evaluating BSD.

• by mlok on 10/31/19, 7:59 PM

  Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It sounds like an article written to show that Windows is finally understanding and has now embraced Linux, therefore users do not need to run away anymore : "Come back guys, we have all the Linux you love here inside Windows." This article does not seem to be an honnest point of view to me.

• by JohnFen on 10/31/19, 8:58 PM

  I'm halfway with the author. I'm leaving Linux, but I'm not moving to Windows -- I'm moving to BSD.

• by acd on 10/31/19, 8:40 PM

  Use whatever os makes you the most productive.

• by anon4lol on 10/31/19, 6:58 PM

  Some random nobody/front-end developer starts using Windows... this just seems so out of place on HN.