[wing-_-nuts]

>As an American, my next OS will not be Windows.

I've used linux as my OS of choice for the past ~ 25 years. I recently installed windows 11 after building an AI/ML/gaming workstation because I wanted to run some of the more complex bethesda mods that required you to run windows executables (i.e. downgraders, etc).

The only thing that's made it tolerable is the fact that I mostly live in the WSL shell, but I cannot get past the sneaking worry that I simply don't know what my OS is doing behind the scenes. For all I know, it's logging every keystroke or snapshotting my desktop back to MS hq.

As I get older I've gotten more and more concerned about privacy and data retention. IMHO the question you have to ask yourself is not 'do I trust $megaCorp or $currentAdministratioin' it's 'do I trust every possible future permutation of corporation or government indefinitely in the future'. In my case, absolutely not. There's no way we don't someday reach the point where an authoritarian administration turns AI lose on the absolute mountain of data corporations and governments have quietly squirreled away on each and every one of us to identify 'undesirables'. At least back before the computer age this took manpower and effort. Now and in the future it just takes a little electricity and compute.

[AnthonyMouse]

> do I trust every possible future permutation of corporation or government indefinitely in the future

People need to learn to do this in government. The party in power switches every 4-8 years. When the other guys get in, you wish you'd done something to limit executive power. Then when you get in again and actually have the power to add some new limits, well, you're the ones in office now, so why would you limit your own power?

Think ahead by more than the end of the quarter. You want subsidiarity and checks and balances to protect yourself from them tomorrow. Is it really so bad that it would also protect them from you today?

[wang_li]

>I've used linux as my OS of choice for the past ~ 25 years.

This is kind of a useless statement. You might as well say "I use an operating system." Someone will say "how have you solved problem X or feature Y?" And someone else will say "Oh, that's available in Ubuntu." And then "What about Z?" And the answer is "OpenSUSE has that." And so on. Ultimately, all the Linux advocates will say that Linux is parity with Windows, but the reality is that there is no distro that has 80%+ coverage of Windows features.

[wing-_-nuts]

That's ...quite an odd statement. Linux is linux. The big distinguishing feature between most distros these days is the number and freshness of packages available to install, and how user friendly the default desktop environment is. Especially with recent advances in running windows games / apps via proton, there's never been an easier time to adopt it. I grant you, some people do not really have the skills to use linux, but my ~ 70 year old mother gets by perfectly fine with linux mint. I would expect anyone on hacker news to be able to do the same unless you had windows specific specialty apps (autocad, etc) that you needed to run.

[pmontra]

Well, does Windows have 80%+ coverage of Linux features? Windows is Windows and Linux is Linux. I've been using Linux as my desktop OS since 2009 because I need some of its features and Windows doesn't have them. It improved with WSL but it became much worse on everything these threads are about.

[johnb231]

No, all of the major Linux distros have practically 100% feature parity with each other. The differences are mainly in the default packages and settings, package management tools, release schedule, release QA process, enterprise support contracts, etc.

[lexa1979]

...do I read you on some shaarli river ?