[ActorNightly]

Windows 11 only sucks if you get the Home version. If you get the Pro version you can disable all the annoyances. New things pop up here and there with each update every few years (recently asking to connect my phone so I can see notifications), but those can be disabled easily.

It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.

For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.

[gosub100]

I agree with this. Couple years ago I splurged on a nice Thinkpad X1 carbon, and decided to give windows a try after abstaining for many years. I really liked the WSL but overall it was a resource hog. It would blast the fan for seemingly no reason, the task manager would slow down, the laptop would overheat. And even playing basic games like freecell would randomly fail to launch, probably because it couldn't reach the ad server.

What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.

[CoolCold]

Interesting - using WSL on Thinkpads (T460 and some Carbon from ~ 2018 till 2020, 2020-2024 on T480 and T16 G2 now) with WSL (WSL2 mostly) and cannot say it was/is resource hog or blasting the fan out of the blue. Working with balanced power mode mostly

[1718627440]

Can you elaborate about the friction you experienced.

[gosub100]

Just in the first week of switching back, I turned off ipv6 DHCP on my router. I left ipv4 unchanged. ( The reason is that I want to switch to ipv6 someday and I want to run my own v6 DHCP and dns). 24 hours later, my fedora Linux host name changed from "fedora" to a uuid!

This somehow wiped my Google chromium profile, lost its sync and dropped all my saved passwords! I know that chromium hasn't had sync since '21 but I swear it worked for a few days and then disappeared. It's like a Mandela effect moment because I don't know how I lost it. I know I didn't import bookmarks, but I did import a passwords csv.

The other thing that made it hard was I tried to simultaneously switch to Wayland and sway. But also wanted to use Nvidia drivers and have cuda ready (for a project I haven't even started). I got sway up and running but it's a PITA and all the fonts and stuff look weird.

I've actually been using Linux almost full time since 2005, but turning 40 and slowing down a bit has made the switch back to Linux way harder than I expected!

[p_j_w]

>New things pop up here and there with each update every few years

In my experience this is every few weeks.

[ActorNightly]

Then you haven't disabled advertisements or product recommendations. You can do that in the Pro version.