[29athrowaway]

I hate the Windows desktop (and server). Right now I am using XFCE. Much faster than Windows, lower memory footprint and I got it to look similar to macOS to some extent.

Using Windows compared to using XFCE is like pulling a stubborn donkey. No, I don't want to update, I don't want a voice assistant, I don't want absurd UIs, I don't want telemetry, I just want a goddamn menu and desktop icons.

[oblio]

Well, what can I say, good for you :-)

>No, I don't want to update

Why don't you want to update? You really should.

> I don't want a voice assistant

It takes less than 5 minutes to disable and hide it.

> I don't want absurd UIs

How do you define absurd UIs? Do you think 1 billion people using Windows are all absurd? If so, that's highly arrogant of you.

> I don't want telemetry

It's a bit annoying and philosophically not a great thing, but you can disable 99% of their telemetry in about 15 minutes.

> I just want a goddamn menu and desktop icons

Windows offers this and more.

I've used Xfce for a long time, it's nice. But the whole "it's faster and lower memory footprint" doesn't matter much these days, especially since Windows is really well optimized now. How many people are using Xfce on systems with 1GB of RAM anymore? Plus Windows obviously offers much more than just Xfce and Xfce is also under-resourced, developer-wise, and on the brink of becoming abandonware. Linux desktops really are not in a good place today.

[franga2000]

> Why don't you want to update? You really should.

Yes, tomorrow evening when I have time, not literally right now in the middle of a 2-day 3D render that my computer has been running for a 24 hours now.

> It takes less than 5 minutes to disable and hide it.

Until an update re-enables it or pops an un-hidable fullscreen popup with misleading questions that tricks you into enabling it again.

> [absurd UIs]

You can't possibly be defending the shitshow that is the Win10 setting menu! Everyone hates it, from techies, developers, gamers, grandmas... I could probably write an essay just about the actual bugs and missing features, not even counting stupid design.

> [telemetry]

See the Cortana reply above

> [resources]

Few people are running <1GB of RAM, true, but very many are still running 4GB. That means you can basically open a Word document and two Chrome tabs before your system becomes unusable. This isn't an exaggeration - if the two tabs are heavy (like FB and Gmail, for example), the system will aready start swapping.

For another datapoint, I can no longer play certain games (heavily modded) on Win, because they actually need at least 6GB or RAM and that's enough to crash my 8GB system. On Linux, I can run the game, Spotify and like 3 Firefox tabs on the same machine, and I'm using a DE that notorious for high RAM usage (KDE Plasma).

[wongarsu]

Windows Update is quite accommodating if you configure it a bit in the Pro version. The Home version of Windows is a pain all around, the upgrade to Pro is definitely worth it (especially if you are actually doing serious work)

[oblio]

> You can't possibly be defending the shitshow that is the Win10 setting menu!

It's a humongous engineering project and I can see what they're doing. It's a super painful and long transition, but where they've finished the transition, I like it. Very nicely organized, searchable, it makes a lot of sense, it's consistent. It's a great UI, we're just in the middle of the construction site.

[franga2000]

Yes, I completely agree. But you wouldn't kick a bunch of people out of their apartments and force them to live in the construction site for 3 years because "once it's done, it'll be way nicer than where they were living".

[oblio]

I don't know what their thought process was when they decided it, but they for sure knew it was going to be painful for users.

I imagine they didn't have any other way to do it.

If they don't do it, everyone complains that the Control Panel is getting antiquated, if they do it, people complain why they're changing it like this.

We have to be realistic here.

[franga2000]

It's definitely a tough situation, but they did in the the dumbest way possible. By intentionally hiding old menus before the new ones are fixed, they have effectively broken the OS itself for the vast majority of users.

My favorite example of this is the sound output setting. Windows has two output "streams" - communication and media. The old menu used to have a "set default" button that set a device to default for both, but you could also set each default manually. The new menu doesn't make that distinction at all, but the new default device switcher only switches the playback default. This results in things like Skype, Zoom, Discord... seemingly not respecting the output device setting. The only way to fix this is through the old menu, but they have removed every trace of it, so you have to trick Windows by searching for "sounds" to get to the place where you change things like the error message sound, which pops up a window where you can then switch the tab to the old sound control panel.

I don't think there's been a single month since this change was pushed out where I didn't have to help someone with this. It's clearly broken, clearly

[pmontra]

Those tiny non resizable windows and dialogs coming straight from Windows 95. Are they really getting rid of them?

[oblio]

Yup. I think they're binning everything and replacing it with the new UI. It's just literally taking a decade.

The new UI seems to be very forward facing, I suspect that they're targeting everything with it: desktop, mobile, even AR/VR.

[csande17]

> How do you define absurd UIs? Do you think 1 billion people using Windows are all absurd? If so, that's highly arrogant of you.

Most of those 1 billion people didn't choose Windows 10 because they looked at it and thought, "yeah, this user interface is so much better than Windows 7". Most of those people didn't look at the latest update to Windows 10 and think, "yeah, these changes to the UI are major improvements, my life will be so much easier than on the previous version of Windows 10".

For most of the non-programmers I know, it's more of a boiling-frog situation. Microsoft blackmails them into "upgrading" using security patches, and every "upgrade" makes the UI less intuitive, slower to use, or worse in some other way.

Just last month, for example, I got a call from my parents because the Photos app was no longer allowing them to save an edited copy of a photo to a different folder. Turns out, yeah, you just couldn't do that anymore. It's absurd, but my parents certainly aren't the absurd ones.

[Hammershaft]

> How do you define absurd UIs? Do you think 1 billion people using Windows are all absurd? If so, that's highly arrogant of you.

I think Windows is a probably the least worst desktop (not laptop!) OS right now but I would defend the parent commenter here. Windows has had the slowest and most painful UI transition I've seen in an OS, and it definitely hinders usability. Try to change certain innocuous settings in windows and you will unknowingly embark on a journey through time as you discover layers of settings still preserved in older and older UI frameworks still tucked away in deep corners of the OS.

[1234throwaway]

>Why don't you want to update? You really should. sorry guys i cant export that report for this mornings meeting for another 45 minutes as the copy of that proprietary software we're required to use by regulations in this country is... on the windows computer that has decided to update

>How do you define absurd UIs? have you ever tried using windows 10 control panel?

>It's a bit annoying and philosophically not a great thing, but you can disable 99% of their telemetry in about 15 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxwEwwlDM8Q CIA/NSA leader "We kill people based on metadata"

I grew up on windows and dont know how to program, and even I am dumping windows for ubuntu or osx (+ windows running in a vm for legacy software). windows is just trash. its pure trash. it has the worst user interface, the worst controls, lags, power issues, etc.

I would rather run a windows AWS instance accessed via a 4g ipad pro than continue using my pc workstation. its not good when people that dropped out of business degrees and cant program say that!

[oblio]

Well, is your PC workstation from your company? For various (many of them obsolete) reasons, companies load a ton of management crap on Windows systems. That software is not as available on MacOS, let alone Linux desktop, so they don't because they can't.

[29athrowaway]

The billion people you mentioned use Windows because it was preinstalled on their computer. They also have not, in their majority, heard of Linux. There is almost no company doing marketing for Linux desktops.

Many people use computers for entertainment and Windows has more compatibility with games because game developers target Windows. Even though many of the game engines they use support Linux.

With Wine, Proton, Dxvk, etc... the game compatibility gap is closing rapidly, though.

Now, many occupations require software that won't run on Linux (software from Autodesk, Adobe, etc), but the use case for the vast majority of people is well covered.

If they were given the chance to acquire their computer for cheaper without an OS they would have done so.

[zeusk]

What do you mean I have to use iwconfig to fix my network? No, I just want to connect to a network. I don't want to write scripts for every device to suspend and resume.

[kiwijamo]

It's been years since that was necessary. All major distros do this sort of thing automatically now with GUI configuration tools as a first class option. Even on bare bones distros like Debian.

[petepete]

Setting up my laptop with Fedora is a more straightforward job than doing the same task with Windows 10. Everything worked, including the fingerprint reader - no manual install of anything required.

[franga2000]

I've only had to touch iwconfig once (on a desktop OS) and it was when my network card wasn't even supported on Windows, so it was still a win for Linux. But yes, if something breaks, no shit you have to pull out the command line - it's the same on Windows, only a lot of the time, you can't actually fix it because they don't give you the necessary tools.

As for suspend/resume scripts, I've never had to do that and I use Arch (yes, hahah, but you know what I mean).

[zeusk]

funny you say that, because Arch is what had me learn about those monstrosities (suspend/resume scripts). Granted, it was back around 2011 though so I'm sure things have changed quite a bit since.

Windows has a certification process for most hardware and drivers, things still break but any major or wide breaks are caught quite early. I just have less time to tinker with stuff when random flakiness pops up which happened a lot when I used Arch and Ubuntu.

[29athrowaway]

You don't need iwconfig to fix your network. You can just use the network settings UI. Next.