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Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux. But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd toget

Lifelong Linux/Unix user here, I love the widespread adoption of Linux. But comments like this one makes me think people don't realize what a MacGyvere'd together hack job a Linux distro truly is. The idea on paper is that a company like Microsoft can offer a more consistent and stable experience, but apparently they're even failing at that these days. But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me. The truth is that any org that chooses to migrate from Microsoft to Open source will face completely new challenges. And the end result will be +-0, if they're lucky.

herbst 10d ago
This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore. Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in
- iinnPP 10d ago
  Have you considered going offline for the music PC? I took an old rig off and stuck it with win10. I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.
  - herbst 10d ago
    I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.
    - card_zero 10d ago
      Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.
- mft_ 10d ago
  None of those issues are a problem for corporate managed Windows installations, which would be the proper comparator in the case given in the article. There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9d ago
    I do see the same kind of ads (and many many other issues) on corporate computers at the Hospitals I work in. And to think we pay immensely for all this...
  - herbst 9d ago
    Is that true? No stock tickers, no ads, no ai nags? No "news"? No weird notifications that ask for my attention? I guess no regular weird update windows would be the case, but the rest?
    - delta_p_delta_x 9d ago
      On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.
      - herbst 9d ago
        I only have this one windows PC and I hate it, so correct me if I am wrong but I can't simply turn these off. First I either need to understand the registry or trust some third party software, and second windows just turns it on again in the next updates where I have to go back and trust random third party software again. Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all. And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications. You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?
        9d ago
- sam345 8d ago
  Not that hard to get rid of windows bloat.
  - herbst 8d ago
    When you have no windows experience? Barely anyone to ask for expertise and only depend on Google, Chatgpt and sketchy third party tools and does feel hard tho. And it doesn't end, it just keeps coming up with new bloat. Imo windows users are just blind for all the bloat
kachnuv_ocasek 10d ago
I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.
- NetMageSCW 9d ago
  These days it is really visible in Windows 11 as well.
- dietr1ch 8d ago
  You mean that the menues that look from 2-5 Windows versions back are hacky and not an Hommage to their older releases?
rich_sasha 10d ago
Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.
- pjmlp 10d ago
  Usually they pay for SuSE or Red Hat Enterprise, with selected hardware providers, not something regular consumers get.
figassis 10d ago
I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store? Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?
- pjmlp 10d ago
  Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience. Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features). I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
- teiferer 10d ago
  That well funded company already happened 20 years ago. Canonical. Their distribution is called Ubuntu, you might have heard of it.
  - figassis 10d ago
    Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
    - Steve16384 10d ago
      You're going to have that problem with any kind of change.
    - teiferer 10d ago
teiferer 10d ago
Windows and a Linux distro are not comparable in the extent of the software that they include/provide.
- dreamcompiler 9d ago
  The average person (e.g. my Mom) only needs office software, email, and a web browser. Linux has all of that out of the box.
bulbar 10d ago
Economics are becoming less and less important when it comes to switch to Linux. The risk of relying on US companies has gone through the roof lately.
andylynch 10d ago
Windows is too at this point; it’s just a little less obvious.
tonyedgecombe 9d ago
The main thing that has changed isn't that Linux has got much better but that most corporations deliver their internal applications through a web browser. The days of companies being anchored to win32 are long gone. Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.
- disgruntledphd2 9d ago
  > Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce. Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it. Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever. And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled. That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.
palata 9d ago
> But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me. I don't understand why. The vast majority of people doesn't have to know about the OS below: they run a handful of apps, that's it. You just need to get them to start those apps and learn to use them. It's not like government employees would have to compile their kernel...
sam345 8d ago
Lifetime Linux user here also. Well said. Agree exactly.

herbst 10d ago

This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore. Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in

iinnPP 10d ago
Have you considered going offline for the music PC? I took an old rig off and stuck it with win10. I have one setup with all my media/games and have removed every piece of Microsoft possible.
- herbst 10d ago
  I've used plenty of sketchy third party tools to get rid of all that weirdness but they keep patching it back somehow. I never get rid of the ads long term, also sticking to win10. Thing is I DJ straight from soundcloud mostly so going offline is not a real option for me.
  - card_zero 10d ago
    Fantasy software: something that uses hooks to intercept internet requests from a specified other program, and sends them through USB to a corresponding phone app using a weird protocol, and the app relays them to the phone's internet connection so it's like a tether, and then your Windows program can be online, but Windows can't.
mft_ 10d ago
None of those issues are a problem for corporate managed Windows installations, which would be the proper comparator in the case given in the article. There are other reasons that Windows sucks, even (or especially?) in a corporate environment, just not those.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9d ago
  I do see the same kind of ads (and many many other issues) on corporate computers at the Hospitals I work in. And to think we pay immensely for all this...
- herbst 9d ago
  Is that true? No stock tickers, no ads, no ai nags? No "news"? No weird notifications that ask for my attention? I guess no regular weird update windows would be the case, but the rest?
  - delta_p_delta_x 9d ago
    On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.
    - herbst 9d ago
      I only have this one windows PC and I hate it, so correct me if I am wrong but I can't simply turn these off. First I either need to understand the registry or trust some third party software, and second windows just turns it on again in the next updates where I have to go back and trust random third party software again. Every other onboard tool or software wastes space to advertise for some AI or office subscription. I wasn't able to disable that at all. And for notifications there is seems barely any control at all. All software is able to constantly nag me with weird notifications. You make it sounds like I could just turn it off, but I googled a lot and turned out I can't. But maybe it's just me?
      - 9d ago
sam345 8d ago
Not that hard to get rid of windows bloat.
- herbst 8d ago
  When you have no windows experience? Barely anyone to ask for expertise and only depend on Google, Chatgpt and sketchy third party tools and does feel hard tho. And it doesn't end, it just keeps coming up with new bloat. Imo windows users are just blind for all the bloat

kachnuv_ocasek 10d ago

I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.

NetMageSCW 9d ago
These days it is really visible in Windows 11 as well.
dietr1ch 8d ago
You mean that the menues that look from 2-5 Windows versions back are hacky and not an Hommage to their older releases?

rich_sasha 10d ago

Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.

pjmlp 10d ago
Usually they pay for SuSE or Red Hat Enterprise, with selected hardware providers, not something regular consumers get.

figassis 10d ago

I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store? Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?

pjmlp 10d ago
Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience. Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features). I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
teiferer 10d ago
That well funded company already happened 20 years ago. Canonical. Their distribution is called Ubuntu, you might have heard of it.
- figassis 10d ago
  Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
  - Steve16384 10d ago
    You're going to have that problem with any kind of change.
  - teiferer 10d ago

teiferer 10d ago

Windows and a Linux distro are not comparable in the extent of the software that they include/provide.

dreamcompiler 9d ago
The average person (e.g. my Mom) only needs office software, email, and a web browser. Linux has all of that out of the box.

bulbar 10d ago

Economics are becoming less and less important when it comes to switch to Linux. The risk of relying on US companies has gone through the roof lately.

andylynch 10d ago

Windows is too at this point; it’s just a little less obvious.

tonyedgecombe 9d ago

The main thing that has changed isn't that Linux has got much better but that most corporations deliver their internal applications through a web browser. The days of companies being anchored to win32 are long gone. Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.

disgruntledphd2 9d ago
> Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce. Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it. Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever. And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled. That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.

palata 9d ago

> But to look at a Linux distro as an alternative to consistency and stability is pretty funny to me. I don't understand why. The vast majority of people doesn't have to know about the OS below: they run a handful of apps, that's it. You just need to get them to start those apps and learn to use them. It's not like government employees would have to compile their kernel...

sam345 8d ago

Lifetime Linux user here also. Well said. Agree exactly.