9 ms·

I just made the switch. I had been developing on Windows for the last couple of years, mostly to get used to the ecosystem. I wanted to be able to write C and C

by TACIXAT 11mo ago

I just made the switch. I had been developing on Windows for the last couple of years, mostly to get used to the ecosystem. I wanted to be able to write C and C++ like I do on Linux, without an IDE and with the native toolchain (i.e. no cygwin). On top of that, I play Overwatch every night. Windows just seems to have zero focus on performance though. React based start menu with visible lag, file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them, mysterious memory leaks not reflected in task manager processes. I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. I can run Overwatch via Steam and pull comparable FPS to Windows (500 FPS on a 3090 with dips into the 400s). Memory usage is stable and at a very low baseline. It is nice to come back to Linux, and with games I don't really have a need to run Windows anymore.

SteveNuts 11mo ago
The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads. I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.
- hamandcheese 11mo ago
  I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.
  - PeaceTed 11mo ago
    One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive? I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it. At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.
    - akho 11mo ago
      The issues people cite all primarily affect consumer desktops. I don't think they see decades of lifetime there; it's a dying market, so they milk it.
    - bee_rider 11mo ago
      I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware. Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.
      - CamperBob2 11mo ago
        I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified version of Windows. They won't take my money.
      - galangalalgol 11mo ago
        None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.
      - sylens 11mo ago
        I think a lot of power users would prefer to pay somewhere between $50-$100 for a Windows license if it meant the enshittifcation wasn't included
      - tpxl 11mo ago
        > I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The price of the windows license has been included in the price of PCs for literally decades now. Every computer you buy with windows preinstalled nets Microsoft a couple dozen dollars.
    - 11mo ago
  - tobyjsullivan 11mo ago
    Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies. I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.
    - SteveNuts 11mo ago
      My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel. I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
      - doublerabbit 11mo ago
        I jumped ship when WSL came to be. I was more a Cygwin user, all the features of linux but done differently. Been using FreeBSD for years now.
      - ThrowawayB7 11mo ago
        > "My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel." There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel. Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?
        11mo ago
  - bee_rider 11mo ago
    I think their earnings are detailed here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3/segment-revenues https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3... IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes: > Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue. But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.
  - nisegami 11mo ago
    Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.
- dm319 11mo ago
  Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.
  - SteveNuts 11mo ago
    And then you still have to wonder if “My Documents” is actually “My Office 364 One Drive Copilot Pro” or something
  - marcodiego 11mo ago
    And people complained that GTK file picker didn't have thumbnails.
    - MiddleEndian 11mo ago
      Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker
  - dangus 11mo ago
    In what application is it like this? I don’t find this true at all. It’s a completely customizable sidebar.
    - gmueckl 11mo ago
      Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive. Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.
      - dangus 11mo ago
- koakuma-chan 11mo ago
  I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I discovered dkms.
- anonymars 11mo ago
  My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster. How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop? So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case. I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.
  - protoster 11mo ago
    Windows struck the iceberg back in 8. It took until 11 for people to finally start to abandon ship in numbers.
    - anonymars 11mo ago
      I wonder if it was losing Jim Allchin that did it. He retired after Vista and I'd say he was in charge of Windows during its golden age. 7 was basically Vista SP3, and then things took a different direction. But, to every coin there are two sides: "I consider this cross-platform idea a disease within Microsoft. We are determined to put a gun to our head and pull the trigger."
- dangus 11mo ago
  While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software. Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS. It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product. The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have. Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line. I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.
  - evilduck 11mo ago
    > I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.
    - dangus 11mo ago
      A lot of this isn't very relevant to my personal use case and/or has not been my experience. - I have had my Microsoft account connected since early in the Windows 10 days so that I can use my Xbox library. For my personal use case it doesn't really bother me that I have to login. Sure, most competing commercial OSes don't straight up force you to login, but as an example I never really used my Mac laptop without the Apple ID logged in because it has some pretty clear benefits and essentially no discernible downsides. It has some downsides that mostly boil down to what-if scenarios and thought experiments. To me, Microsoft forcing you to login with an account is not a big deal in the context of commercial paid software with a paid license. I can certainly understand why it might be a big deal in a different context. I can certainly see why my own Linux laptop is more appealing to not have this requirement. However, I specifically use Windows for a lot of commercial stuff - Steam, Xbox, etc. Being logged in was going to happen anyway, at least for me. - As far as being nagged to pay, use Edge/Bing, or buy cloud stuff from Microsoft, all of that has been extremely easy to dismiss permanently. I have not needed to use any power user tools or scripts. - It's an outdated notion that OneDrive is tossed in the menu bar forever. In Windows 11, OneDrive can be uninstalled entirely like a standard app. When I open my Start Menu and search for "OneDrive," nothing comes up besides an obscure tangentially-related system setting. It's literally not there. - Sure, various new things have been presented to me along with new updates, like Copilot and the like, but I have been forced into none of it. When I visit Settings > Apps > AI Components, nothing is installed. When I type "Copilot" into the Start Menu, nothing comes up besids Windows Store search suggestions (apps I have not installed) and a keyboard key customization setting. Copilot is literally not there. - I think there’s actually a good argument that upsells like OneDrive/Copilot (again, in my experience easy to dismiss once a year and uninstall permanently) that solve complicated problems for the median user (secure backups, document storage, AI assistant) is a decently tasteful way to fund a commercial operating system. All of that stuff is optional, and I can just say no, while paying for annual point releases (e.g. Mac OS X) kinda sucked.
- andyjohnson0 11mo ago
  > but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu. In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows. [1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.
- kbenson 11mo ago
  I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services. For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place. Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king. It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.
- Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
  > The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads. And backwards compatibility. They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.
  - the__alchemist 11mo ago
    Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.
    - hamdingers 11mo ago
      Ironically, you can run almost any vintage Windows or DOS software on any modern GNU/Linux OS too, using compatibility layers.
  - MiddleEndian 11mo ago
    >backwards compatibility They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies. I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.
    - Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
      That's not a lack of backwards compatibility, that's an app purposefully self-destructing itself! What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.
- Krssst 11mo ago
  I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.
- ehnto 11mo ago
  Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business. I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.
  - rewgs 11mo ago
    Perfectly put.
- sgjohnson 11mo ago
  > but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu. Server and LTSC SKUs don’t do that :)
- codingrightnow 11mo ago
  I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.
- deafpolygon 11mo ago
  one thing to remember is that window servers are deployed with GPO pre-configured, so you don’t usually see these unless admins leave them at their defaults. plus enterprise/education can turn off tracking using the same mechanisms
try_the_bass 11mo ago
Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?
- TACIXAT 11mo ago
  I run a 500hz monitor. Generally, you want your FPS to match your refresh rate.
  - try_the_bass 11mo ago
    Huh, I didn't know those existed now. I think the last time I was shopping for a monitor, 144Hz was the new hotness. Things have come a long way since then!
- shric 11mo ago
  I think it was just to show that the performance is comparable to Windows, implying that it also will be fine for games/settings where fps is in the range that does matter.
- rkoten 11mo ago
  Not OP but got quite a bit of experience with this playing competitive FPS for a decade. You're right that refresh rate sets the physical truth of it, e.g. 180 FPS on a 160 Hz monitor won't give you much advantage over 160 FPS if at all. However reaching full multiples of your refresh rate in FPS – 320 in this instance, 480, and so on – will, and not only in theory but you'll feel it subjectively too. I get ~500-600 FPS in counter-strike and I have my FPS capped to 480 to get the most of my current hardware (160 Hz). Getting a 240 Hz monitor would make it smoother. Upgrading the PC to get more multiples would also.
- hamdingers 11mo ago
  If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters. Also, there are 540Hz displays.
dustbunny 11mo ago
I run mint as well and really love it's esthetic. I prefer AMD GPUs on Linux and they have always "just worked". I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.
- yxhuvud 11mo ago
  Uh, AMD drivers have most assuredly not always not just worked. They do now, and they have for something like 10 years, but before that they were a steaming pile of locked in garbage.
  - dijit 11mo ago
    not to split hairs, but I think the parent is justified in saying they “always worked” if they’ve been this good for a decade. If I was 10 years younger than I am today, my perspective would have been that it “always worked” and at some point we have to acknowledge that there has been good work done and things are quite stable in the modern day. 10y is not a small amount of time to prove it out.
PeaceTed 11mo ago
An aside based on what you have mentioned. What the heck happened to Windows file manager? I mean it used to be that Windows was rock solid while Linux variants had various parsing performance/stability issues. Now it feels like it is the complete opposite. In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.
- Zekio 11mo ago
  if you haven't enabled the checkbox starting explorer in a new process which isn't super easy to find, it will basically be one process running most of the windows ui, which means when they write shoddy code, the ui tends to hang
- muststopmyths 11mo ago
  They rewrote Explorer for Windows 11, in the process fucking it up completely. There is a regkey to go back to the Windows 10 explorer, but you'd have to google that.
andoando 11mo ago
I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  I still don't understand how search just can't file files with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or menu items either. Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).
  - 3eb7988a1663 11mo ago
    For a look into a parallel universe of what could be, check out Everything[0]. Super fast search that should be embarrassing for Microsoft. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)
    - 0134340 11mo ago
      It's a must have for me on Windows. Now that I'm on Linux, Fsearch is a pretty good replacement.
- TACIXAT 11mo ago
  It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.
  - Bolwin 11mo ago
    You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell equivalent of find
- abnercoimbre 11mo ago
  And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev blowing the default explorer out of the water: https://filepilot.tech https://filepilot.tech
eek2121 11mo ago
I switched a couple months ago. This is my third time trying to switch to desktop Linux, and things are very different this time. I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net. The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug. Not really missing anything.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
  > No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X. Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?
  - baobun 11mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218 Don't hold your breath... This is configurable in Linux (at least I recall Xfce and KDE having display position config built in for years).
  - andyjohnson0 11mo ago
    > Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard? I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either. What am I missing out on?
    - chrneu 11mo ago
      My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them. did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess. Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.
hoten 11mo ago
> React based start menu with visible lag That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
- accoil 11mo ago
  The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React [1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cluckindan 11mo ago
    I wouldn’t be so sure… https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml
    - accoil 11mo ago
      Oh, interesting.
- monocasa 11mo ago
  Clicking through to their source, it seems true enough despite their protests. Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.
ffsm8 11mo ago
Does HDR work though?
- yxhuvud 11mo ago
  If using a modern variant of Wayland and if the app supports it: yes. Both, especially the latter are pretty big buts.
- formerly_proven 11mo ago
  Barely works on windows too, though
- paulbgd 11mo ago
  On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works
cedws 11mo ago
Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.
- brians 11mo ago
  There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  You can trivially sandbox your Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. Using an app like Flatseal, you can then configure Steam to only have access to a designated drive with next to no further contact to your PC. You can individually disable access to networking, audio, D-Bus, USB devices, Bluetooth, shared memory and even the GPU itself if you're really freaked out. No command line needed. That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.
  - chrneu 11mo ago
    >Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. In reality that isn't true. Flatpak steam runs like poo for a lot of people. Really, flatpak should be avoided if there are other installation methods, in general.
    - WD-42 11mo ago
      Flatpak works fine for me on Arch. I use it mainly to avoid needing 32bit libs installed. Once steam goes 64 I’ll go native.
formerly_proven 11mo ago
> file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.
- TACIXAT 11mo ago
  I have this exact same problem with OGG files. Either their parser has some insane bugs or they are starting an isolation VM per file to run the parse. Either way, unusable.
ok123456 11mo ago
CreateProcessA() on Windows is very slow. A significant portion of the perceived speedup for development tasks is that fork() takes on the order of microseconds, but creating a Windows process takes ~50ms, sometimes several times that if DEP is enabled. This is VERY painful if you try to use fork-based multiprocessing programs directly.
- magicalhippo 11mo ago
  I recently converted a large SVN repository to Git using git-svn. Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy. Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.
  - ok123456 11mo ago
    Some people use WSL as an epicycle to fix this.
- Krssst 11mo ago
  Interesting, I wonder why DEP would degrade process creation performance. My understanding is it's just a flag in page table entries to forbid execution, I am not sure how this could impact performance so much (except that data and code now have to be mapped separately).
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
I did the same, I had jumped into POP OS instead, which is also Ubuntu based, then a year back I got into EndeavourOS an Arch based distro, and have not looked back since. I use it on everything I can put Linux on.
- specproc 11mo ago
  Plus one for an Arch-based system, way better than Ubuntu/Debian for gaming. All these Nvidia driver issues totally disappeared when I switched. Rolling release is a hell of a lot better in this context. SteamOS is Arch, IIRC.
  - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
    For me it wasnt driver issues, moreso “you need glibc to be a version that Debian / Ubuntu cant upgrade without it being potentially problematic” just to run 3D printer slicer software. I said screw this give me bleeding edge and give it to me now. I had been itching to try something slightly more bleeding edge, Fedora was on my mind but it did not work out as I wanted it to.
bogwog 11mo ago
> I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. Mint is seriously going to sabotage the momentum Linux is having right now.
groundzeros2015 11mo ago
You might like XFCE which to me is basically windows XP. It’s available in Debian install or as Xubuntu.
- flanked-evergl 11mo ago
  I used XFCE for years and liked it but it was so buggy and unmaintained. I recently switched to KDE and I am very satisfied with it.
  - groundzeros2015 11mo ago
    Interesting. I haven’t ran into bugs but I also haven’t tried KDE.
    - flanked-evergl 11mo ago
      I had the panels crashing a lot, and the desktop switcher was always bugged with multiple screens.
luxuryballs 11mo ago
me just realizing that React start menu thing I saw last week was not a joke… o.O
BLACKCRAB 11mo ago
[dead]
DanielHB 11mo ago
Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too. How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080. Those are the last 2 issues keeping my home desktop on windows-land
- Saris 11mo ago
  You can also add external games to launch via steam too, so you might be able to do it without transferring.
- dormento 11mo ago
  > Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too. Seems like you can just keep using the Battle.net account on GNU/Linux. You just add the Battle.net installer as a "non-steam game" (bottom left of the games list). Then, you start it, add your account, install the game and it "just works". I used it on the steam deck to play D4 beta and D2R on my CachyOS desktop. > How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080. My battle-hardened 1060GTX served me for years. I recently upgraded my whole rig from Debian + Intel + Nvidia to full AMD and the RX9070XT works very well, with the caveat that I had to switch to a newer kernel on CachyOS to support it. That was 4 months ago and the situation now should be resolved, so you can prob use any old normie distro.
  - DanielHB 11mo ago
    Thanks for the tips! I will try when I have some time. Any chance of triggering anticheat on battlenet if I do this? Like does Blizzard has an official stance on it?
bcrosby95 11mo ago
People oversell how much windows just works. It only does so because it comes pre installed. I regularly reinstall my wife's and it's always more of a pain in the ass than Linux.

by TACIXAT 11mo ago

SteveNuts 11mo ago

The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads. I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

hamandcheese 11mo ago
I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.
- PeaceTed 11mo ago
  One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive? I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it. At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.
  - akho 11mo ago
    The issues people cite all primarily affect consumer desktops. I don't think they see decades of lifetime there; it's a dying market, so they milk it.
  - bee_rider 11mo ago
    I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware. Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.
    - CamperBob2 11mo ago
      I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified version of Windows. They won't take my money.
    - galangalalgol 11mo ago
      None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.
    - sylens 11mo ago
      I think a lot of power users would prefer to pay somewhere between $50-$100 for a Windows license if it meant the enshittifcation wasn't included
    - tpxl 11mo ago
      > I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The price of the windows license has been included in the price of PCs for literally decades now. Every computer you buy with windows preinstalled nets Microsoft a couple dozen dollars.
  - 11mo ago
- tobyjsullivan 11mo ago
  Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies. I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.
  - SteveNuts 11mo ago
    My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel. I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
    - doublerabbit 11mo ago
      I jumped ship when WSL came to be. I was more a Cygwin user, all the features of linux but done differently. Been using FreeBSD for years now.
    - ThrowawayB7 11mo ago
      > "My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel." There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel. Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?
      - 11mo ago
- bee_rider 11mo ago
  I think their earnings are detailed here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3/segment-revenues https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3... IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes: > Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue. But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.
- nisegami 11mo ago
  Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.
dm319 11mo ago
Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.
- SteveNuts 11mo ago
  And then you still have to wonder if “My Documents” is actually “My Office 364 One Drive Copilot Pro” or something
- marcodiego 11mo ago
  And people complained that GTK file picker didn't have thumbnails.
  - MiddleEndian 11mo ago
    Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker
- dangus 11mo ago
  In what application is it like this? I don’t find this true at all. It’s a completely customizable sidebar.
  - gmueckl 11mo ago
    Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive. Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.
    - dangus 11mo ago
koakuma-chan 11mo ago
I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I discovered dkms.
anonymars 11mo ago
My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster. How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop? So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case. I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.
- protoster 11mo ago
  Windows struck the iceberg back in 8. It took until 11 for people to finally start to abandon ship in numbers.
  - anonymars 11mo ago
    I wonder if it was losing Jim Allchin that did it. He retired after Vista and I'd say he was in charge of Windows during its golden age. 7 was basically Vista SP3, and then things took a different direction. But, to every coin there are two sides: "I consider this cross-platform idea a disease within Microsoft. We are determined to put a gun to our head and pull the trigger."
dangus 11mo ago
While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software. Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS. It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product. The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have. Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line. I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.
- evilduck 11mo ago
  > I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.
  - dangus 11mo ago
    A lot of this isn't very relevant to my personal use case and/or has not been my experience. - I have had my Microsoft account connected since early in the Windows 10 days so that I can use my Xbox library. For my personal use case it doesn't really bother me that I have to login. Sure, most competing commercial OSes don't straight up force you to login, but as an example I never really used my Mac laptop without the Apple ID logged in because it has some pretty clear benefits and essentially no discernible downsides. It has some downsides that mostly boil down to what-if scenarios and thought experiments. To me, Microsoft forcing you to login with an account is not a big deal in the context of commercial paid software with a paid license. I can certainly understand why it might be a big deal in a different context. I can certainly see why my own Linux laptop is more appealing to not have this requirement. However, I specifically use Windows for a lot of commercial stuff - Steam, Xbox, etc. Being logged in was going to happen anyway, at least for me. - As far as being nagged to pay, use Edge/Bing, or buy cloud stuff from Microsoft, all of that has been extremely easy to dismiss permanently. I have not needed to use any power user tools or scripts. - It's an outdated notion that OneDrive is tossed in the menu bar forever. In Windows 11, OneDrive can be uninstalled entirely like a standard app. When I open my Start Menu and search for "OneDrive," nothing comes up besides an obscure tangentially-related system setting. It's literally not there. - Sure, various new things have been presented to me along with new updates, like Copilot and the like, but I have been forced into none of it. When I visit Settings > Apps > AI Components, nothing is installed. When I type "Copilot" into the Start Menu, nothing comes up besids Windows Store search suggestions (apps I have not installed) and a keyboard key customization setting. Copilot is literally not there. - I think there’s actually a good argument that upsells like OneDrive/Copilot (again, in my experience easy to dismiss once a year and uninstall permanently) that solve complicated problems for the median user (secure backups, document storage, AI assistant) is a decently tasteful way to fund a commercial operating system. All of that stuff is optional, and I can just say no, while paying for annual point releases (e.g. Mac OS X) kinda sucked.
andyjohnson0 11mo ago
> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu. In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows. [1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.
kbenson 11mo ago
I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services. For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place. Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king. It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.
Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads. And backwards compatibility. They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.
- the__alchemist 11mo ago
  Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.
  - hamdingers 11mo ago
    Ironically, you can run almost any vintage Windows or DOS software on any modern GNU/Linux OS too, using compatibility layers.
- MiddleEndian 11mo ago
  >backwards compatibility They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies. I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.
  - Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
    That's not a lack of backwards compatibility, that's an app purposefully self-destructing itself! What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.
Krssst 11mo ago
I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.
ehnto 11mo ago
Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business. I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.
- rewgs 11mo ago
  Perfectly put.
sgjohnson 11mo ago
> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu. Server and LTSC SKUs don’t do that :)
codingrightnow 11mo ago
I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.
deafpolygon 11mo ago
one thing to remember is that window servers are deployed with GPO pre-configured, so you don’t usually see these unless admins leave them at their defaults. plus enterprise/education can turn off tracking using the same mechanisms

try_the_bass 11mo ago

Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

TACIXAT 11mo ago
I run a 500hz monitor. Generally, you want your FPS to match your refresh rate.
- try_the_bass 11mo ago
  Huh, I didn't know those existed now. I think the last time I was shopping for a monitor, 144Hz was the new hotness. Things have come a long way since then!
shric 11mo ago
I think it was just to show that the performance is comparable to Windows, implying that it also will be fine for games/settings where fps is in the range that does matter.
rkoten 11mo ago
Not OP but got quite a bit of experience with this playing competitive FPS for a decade. You're right that refresh rate sets the physical truth of it, e.g. 180 FPS on a 160 Hz monitor won't give you much advantage over 160 FPS if at all. However reaching full multiples of your refresh rate in FPS – 320 in this instance, 480, and so on – will, and not only in theory but you'll feel it subjectively too. I get ~500-600 FPS in counter-strike and I have my FPS capped to 480 to get the most of my current hardware (160 Hz). Getting a 240 Hz monitor would make it smoother. Upgrading the PC to get more multiples would also.
hamdingers 11mo ago
If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters. Also, there are 540Hz displays.

dustbunny 11mo ago

I run mint as well and really love it's esthetic. I prefer AMD GPUs on Linux and they have always "just worked". I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.

yxhuvud 11mo ago
Uh, AMD drivers have most assuredly not always not just worked. They do now, and they have for something like 10 years, but before that they were a steaming pile of locked in garbage.
- dijit 11mo ago
  not to split hairs, but I think the parent is justified in saying they “always worked” if they’ve been this good for a decade. If I was 10 years younger than I am today, my perspective would have been that it “always worked” and at some point we have to acknowledge that there has been good work done and things are quite stable in the modern day. 10y is not a small amount of time to prove it out.

PeaceTed 11mo ago

An aside based on what you have mentioned. What the heck happened to Windows file manager? I mean it used to be that Windows was rock solid while Linux variants had various parsing performance/stability issues. Now it feels like it is the complete opposite. In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.

Zekio 11mo ago
if you haven't enabled the checkbox starting explorer in a new process which isn't super easy to find, it will basically be one process running most of the windows ui, which means when they write shoddy code, the ui tends to hang
muststopmyths 11mo ago
They rewrote Explorer for Windows 11, in the process fucking it up completely. There is a regkey to go back to the Windows 10 explorer, but you'd have to google that.

andoando 11mo ago

I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory

marcosdumay 11mo ago
I still don't understand how search just can't file files with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or menu items either. Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).
- 3eb7988a1663 11mo ago
  For a look into a parallel universe of what could be, check out Everything[0]. Super fast search that should be embarrassing for Microsoft. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)
  - 0134340 11mo ago
    It's a must have for me on Windows. Now that I'm on Linux, Fsearch is a pretty good replacement.
TACIXAT 11mo ago
It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.
- Bolwin 11mo ago
  You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell equivalent of find
abnercoimbre 11mo ago
And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev blowing the default explorer out of the water: https://filepilot.tech https://filepilot.tech

eek2121 11mo ago

I switched a couple months ago. This is my third time trying to switch to desktop Linux, and things are very different this time. I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net. The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug. Not really missing anything.

ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X. Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?
- baobun 11mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218 Don't hold your breath... This is configurable in Linux (at least I recall Xfce and KDE having display position config built in for years).
- andyjohnson0 11mo ago
  > Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard? I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either. What am I missing out on?
  - chrneu 11mo ago
    My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them. did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess. Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.

hoten 11mo ago

> React based start menu with visible lag That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

accoil 11mo ago
The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React [1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- cluckindan 11mo ago
  I wouldn’t be so sure… https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml
  - accoil 11mo ago
    Oh, interesting.
monocasa 11mo ago
Clicking through to their source, it seems true enough despite their protests. Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.

ffsm8 11mo ago

Does HDR work though?

yxhuvud 11mo ago
If using a modern variant of Wayland and if the app supports it: yes. Both, especially the latter are pretty big buts.
formerly_proven 11mo ago
Barely works on windows too, though
paulbgd 11mo ago
On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works

cedws 11mo ago

Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.

brians 11mo ago
There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!
bigyabai 11mo ago
You can trivially sandbox your Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. Using an app like Flatseal, you can then configure Steam to only have access to a designated drive with next to no further contact to your PC. You can individually disable access to networking, audio, D-Bus, USB devices, Bluetooth, shared memory and even the GPU itself if you're really freaked out. No command line needed. That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.
- chrneu 11mo ago
  >Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. In reality that isn't true. Flatpak steam runs like poo for a lot of people. Really, flatpak should be avoided if there are other installation methods, in general.
  - WD-42 11mo ago
    Flatpak works fine for me on Arch. I use it mainly to avoid needing 32bit libs installed. Once steam goes 64 I’ll go native.

formerly_proven 11mo ago

> file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.

TACIXAT 11mo ago
I have this exact same problem with OGG files. Either their parser has some insane bugs or they are starting an isolation VM per file to run the parse. Either way, unusable.

ok123456 11mo ago

CreateProcessA() on Windows is very slow. A significant portion of the perceived speedup for development tasks is that fork() takes on the order of microseconds, but creating a Windows process takes ~50ms, sometimes several times that if DEP is enabled. This is VERY painful if you try to use fork-based multiprocessing programs directly.

magicalhippo 11mo ago
I recently converted a large SVN repository to Git using git-svn. Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy. Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.
- ok123456 11mo ago
  Some people use WSL as an epicycle to fix this.
Krssst 11mo ago
Interesting, I wonder why DEP would degrade process creation performance. My understanding is it's just a flag in page table entries to forbid execution, I am not sure how this could impact performance so much (except that data and code now have to be mapped separately).

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

I did the same, I had jumped into POP OS instead, which is also Ubuntu based, then a year back I got into EndeavourOS an Arch based distro, and have not looked back since. I use it on everything I can put Linux on.

specproc 11mo ago
Plus one for an Arch-based system, way better than Ubuntu/Debian for gaming. All these Nvidia driver issues totally disappeared when I switched. Rolling release is a hell of a lot better in this context. SteamOS is Arch, IIRC.
- giancarlostoro 11mo ago
  For me it wasnt driver issues, moreso “you need glibc to be a version that Debian / Ubuntu cant upgrade without it being potentially problematic” just to run 3D printer slicer software. I said screw this give me bleeding edge and give it to me now. I had been itching to try something slightly more bleeding edge, Fedora was on my mind but it did not work out as I wanted it to.

bogwog 11mo ago

> I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. Mint is seriously going to sabotage the momentum Linux is having right now.

groundzeros2015 11mo ago

You might like XFCE which to me is basically windows XP. It’s available in Debian install or as Xubuntu.

flanked-evergl 11mo ago
I used XFCE for years and liked it but it was so buggy and unmaintained. I recently switched to KDE and I am very satisfied with it.
- groundzeros2015 11mo ago
  Interesting. I haven’t ran into bugs but I also haven’t tried KDE.
  - flanked-evergl 11mo ago
    I had the panels crashing a lot, and the desktop switcher was always bugged with multiple screens.

luxuryballs 11mo ago

me just realizing that React start menu thing I saw last week was not a joke… o.O

BLACKCRAB 11mo ago

[dead]

DanielHB 11mo ago

Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too. How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080. Those are the last 2 issues keeping my home desktop on windows-land

Saris 11mo ago
You can also add external games to launch via steam too, so you might be able to do it without transferring.
dormento 11mo ago
> Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too. Seems like you can just keep using the Battle.net account on GNU/Linux. You just add the Battle.net installer as a "non-steam game" (bottom left of the games list). Then, you start it, add your account, install the game and it "just works". I used it on the steam deck to play D4 beta and D2R on my CachyOS desktop. > How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080. My battle-hardened 1060GTX served me for years. I recently upgraded my whole rig from Debian + Intel + Nvidia to full AMD and the RX9070XT works very well, with the caveat that I had to switch to a newer kernel on CachyOS to support it. That was 4 months ago and the situation now should be resolved, so you can prob use any old normie distro.
- DanielHB 11mo ago
  Thanks for the tips! I will try when I have some time. Any chance of triggering anticheat on battlenet if I do this? Like does Blizzard has an official stance on it?

bcrosby95 11mo ago

People oversell how much windows just works. It only does so because it comes pre installed. I regularly reinstall my wife's and it's always more of a pain in the ass than Linux.