> Microsoft says that entering the command "shutdown /s /t 0" at the command prompt will, in fact, force your PC to turn off, whether it wants to or not.
Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.
My biggest fear when getting a new laptop is that I won't figure out the BIOS fast enough to get it to recognize the usb drive I have plugged in and it might actually boot to windows. Now I will be extra freaked out because it might not even let me turn it off to try again!
The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft. Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now.
As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.
It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it. What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.
> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does
And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.
"where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling"
They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.
It looks a lot like the recent record-breaking enshittification of Windows may be a subtle ploy to deprecate it and shift everything over to Linux.
Consider that this "Linus Poettering" turned out to be a Microsoft mole as the conspiracy theorists always maintained that he was. Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.
[dead]
> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.
If a corporate customer is running their stuff in the cloud they don't care if people are using Chromebooks/MacBooks/Linux to develop the software with. They just care that you are using Azure. Ultimately they want you to do everything through a web browser (just like google), even some dev environments are going that way.
Outside of corporations when interacting with non-tech people, none of them use a laptop. It is phone or tablet. A laptop running Windows is a work machine. I wonder what the stats are for home usage of Windows vs other things and honestly I don't believe a lot people are using a laptop/desktop running Windows.
> It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow.
I have a stripped down Windows 11 on my second disk (I will be removing it at some point). The OS is reasonably fast. I've removed most of the telemetry and other rubbish like the web search on desktop. So I can only assume it is that. I don't really care though anymore. I am running Debian on pretty much everything except for the work machine which I don't own.
I agree with you to some extent, but if Microsoft loses Windows here permanently then its desktop-centric control will also come to an end. So it would lose tons of opportunities here. I don't see Microsoft wanting to go that route really. It would basically commit suicide.
They don't need it if everything is in the cloud running oh their servers. They won't care if you are running Windows, Linux, Chrome, A tablet with a keyboard and mouse hooked up.
The vast majority of people that don't work in IT don't ever use a laptop or a desktop computer unless it is for work. They are using a phone and/or tablet.
Instead of putting Copilot everywhere, Microsoft could hire some proper devs and qa to avoid such problems, But no, MS employs vibe-coders only and fired the entire qa team.
Cynical viewpoint: Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line? If the market is AI-everything, any resources that you devote to non-AI is a bad signal. Incentives are everything.
It's circular logic. The market is "AI everything" because they (and Google, OpenAI, and Facebook) are shoving it down people's throats so they can desperately try to recoup their investment in GPUs.
Because there being a stable desktop OS brings indirect profits and enables efforts like AI to work. AI isn't going to help you if you no longer have a computer to run it on.
This is my general concern with the decline of tech quality. It’s one thing if it’s just consumer products, but it’s now affecting actual tools people including us use to do their jobs.
Yeah. It's really important that you have a platform with your users, because that's how you introduce them to features (not always a bad thing). It becomes a touch point with your customers. Google and Apple have their phones, Meta is desperately trying to get their smart glasses working, Amazon is also desperately trying to get something together with Alexa, and Microsoft is... Throwing theirs away?
> Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line?
Their entire ecosystem is built on top of Windows. It will only "not affect the bottom line" until it becomes bad enough that people has to abandon it with all the other MS products that depend on it.
Also, no LLM product is profitable right now. "The market is AI-everything" is complete and absolute bullshit.
Sure, but if your customers can't even use the AI products because your OS is dysfunctional, then you're still losing out.
Oh I dunno. Maybe people should give a fuck about something other than making nothing but maximum profit. It's the core problem with our whole culture. Fuck you, make money. It's unethical trash.
Don't forget virtual participation trophies for "Windows Insiders" to act as unpaid QA as the replacement system.
It was nice in 2015-2017 when I got a free Windows 10 license for my Dell Ubuntu Linux Notebook (much cheaper to buy in Brazil). Back then most of the games only was on Windows. Nowadays I have a Lenovo with Windows 10/11 license but I do not used Windows since 2024.
Microslop
It seems to me that MS has started to vibe code Windows. It's so surreal that they managed to kill the shutdown program. I mean: this 1 simple program worked for 30 years no probs doctors hated this trick but idk
Just to point, but there's nothing simple about shutdown.
From what I understand, the shutdown command is actually what is still working.
> MS has started to vibe code Windows
Started ? The chances of Shutdown (from the menu) working in Windows are about 90%.
And then there is the computer who won't stay asleep. I find my PC running about once a week after having it sleep the night before.
Slightly off-topic: my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue?
My Mac Mini M4 is on its way. Can't wait to stop dealing with this mess.
(Just this morning, I noticed that the login dialog for network drives, which has worked fine for decades, has misaligned text fields. I don't want to think how this could possibly happen.)
> my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue?
Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
This can be one cause, but sometimes the computer wakes up for no reason at all, even when not touching anything.
This happens regularly for me too, and Luke Lafreniere (from Linus Media Group) reported this too during WAN Show. He said that he sometimes has to hit sleep 3–4 times before his PC actually stays in sleep mode.
My mind immediately jumped to the "pull out the plug!" moment in a movie.
You pull out the plug, but nothing happens. A shape resembling a human face appears on the screen. It has an evil grin.
Exits: N W
As you keep watching, you see from the human face growing a silvery-looking tentacle that curves in on itself.
"> Dennis"
they will just start shipping windows with a thermonuclear core to generate power.
Laptops with batteries will shrug
Microsoft really wants people to use other operating systems. This is quite amazing.
It does not affect me as I moved to Linux in late 2004 already, but I can't help but feel I would have to be constantly annoyed at Microsoft for abusing me and my computer.
-omg, I always disable windows update -more harm than good unless you're in some more sensitive position
I’ve killed a laptop by placing it in a backpack which failed to suspend. Based on the heat I assume parts of it cooked despite any thermal throttling. It’ll be interesting to see the damage a bug like this might cause.
I've had a laptop in a bag that decided it should wake from modern standby to run updates. Except the update failed at the laptop froze during boot. It didn't kill the laptop fortunately.
Then two months later, it did it again. And again three months after that.
Sorry, Microsoft, you've lost your S3 privileges. I changed it to S0. Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
This was a constant problem with late Intel Macs where I was working at the time, to the point that people started explicitly using shut down enough to the point that security complained it was slowing down their patch rollouts.
Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
Yeah, the problem is that on Windows 10/11, if you have modern standby enabled and have fast boot enabled, then shutdown puts the system into standby.
Look up 'Fast Startup'. It's a thing since Windows 8. It's a curse onto humanity.
> Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
How did this part go down? I'm just curious because it reeks of entitlement and security theatre on their part.
It reminds me of an incident I had once at an old job, surprise surprise security related, where a moronic decision had been made by the combined DevOps and security team (putting aside how a separate DevOps team is a bad idea).
They had decided to use some "dependency security scanner" and if it found ANY, it would immediately disable the CI/CD build pipeline for that repository.
1) This could happen at any point within minutes/hours of some CVE being published. It would frequently block deployments.
2) It could not/would not take into account developer tooling vulnerabilities. Oh, your CSS library has a string DDOS vulnerability, where if someone makes a ginormous CSS file, the library will crash?
3) The CSS library does not reach a users machine, and is run once, at build time. Either it passes and deploys, or it fails and does not deploy. Therefore, it was probably not even justifiably a CVE to begin with, but more importantly, we now cannot deploy. https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1622xia/cve2...
4) The build pipeline would be disabled for ANY type of vulnerability regardless of impact. Even low ratings.
5) Because this security ~~scam~~software did not care about nuance like that, we could not even deploy hotfixes, critical production fixes, bug fixes, or anything.
6) Because it would disable the pipeline within minutes of a CVE, there was never a fix or a newer version to upgrade a dependency to. We had to wait days or sometimes weeks for a new version to be released.
This lasted a couple of months before they were forced to remove all this crap.
Did this software happen to rhyme with Veracode?
I won’t make the claim that it can’t be set up and configured in a way that’s useful, but I will make the claim that I’ve never run into an instance where it was and have wasted more time than I want to remember dealing with similar issues to what you described
My work laptop -- a ThinkPad issued 3 years ago -- has seen multiple blue screens with modern standby. (It is almost always plugged in.). So IT disabled it, and now my machine always hibernates, which means that it usually takes 2 minutes to boot.
Thanks Microsoft!
Did you mix up S0, S0ix, and S3? S0 is running, S3 is traditional standby (the one you want?), S0ix is modern standby (the one that gave you trouble).
I'm sure they meant S5 - shutdown. I had to Google it as I also guessed S0 = shutdown.
Classic. My last Windows laptop cooked its screen like that.
Meanwhile my work Windows laptop would just go full throttle during "sleep".
I had identical scenario that killed ssd drive. since then I always place laptop with vents on the top
I did too, it ran Linux.
"suspend" was always fragile, and "hibernation" a liability at times.
Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
With Debian 13 on ThinkPad X1 the hibernation is very reliable. Resuming from it while not instant still takes like 40 seconds. So I configured my laptop on lid close to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate. This way if I just to another room the wake-up is instant while longer pauses shuts the laptop down removing any security keys from the memory.
Maybe they could ask CrowdStrike to issue a software update to "fix" this.
In recent months, with any computer that runs into Windows issues, I just take it as sign that its time for me to format it and install linux.
They're probably just testing the waters. They already took away proper standby, because reasons.
It sounds like introducing minor issues today is the best way for Microsoft and Apple to push OS updates that nobody is asking for.
My two cents...
They already have the ability to unilaterally force any software onto any machine at literally any time. They do not need an excuse or a clever scheme to achieve more updates. We are a long way past that.
The health dashboard says it only affects Enterprise and IoT. The KB note says “all editions”. Which is it? I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick.
Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
It affects Win11 23H2. Support for Home and Pro for 23H2 ended in November. Almost everyone should be on 24H2 or 25H2 except the dedicated longer support term editions.
> I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick
El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting.
Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since.
> Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)
I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
> End users don't care, companies don't care
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!
At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.
But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
Do they really "teach Windows" in schools? I see way more people treat the browser as the OS, if they even use a non-mobile device.
Your comment is full of phrases that answer why consumers and enterprise won't switch: "pretty stable", "good enough", "a pretty good option". This are true for the Windows default; why switch?
Sadly, schools don't have real computers any more, it's all chromebooks. Gen Alpha is going to be completely computer illiterate.
Windows would be 'taught' as a byproduct of another activity involving Windows software, usually starting with Office/365.
AD/Group Policies should have been killed long ago with remote RDP/VNC and VM's with 3D support. Once you can rollback your settings trivially with disk images, AD/GP's are dead since cheap firewalls and virtual network segmentations are everywhere.
That's a KVM role. The idea in the 21th century it's to spawn a personal VM per user. Network boundaries would be defined in hypervisor devel, (VLANs, network share accesses and so on), you would need nearly no GPO's but different WMI setups with options prebaked.
The old NT based ACL's/GPO's and such are obsolete as I said when a cheap Linux KVM server can do tons of stuff by itself and firewalls (even professional ones) are dirt cheap. The old world died long ago.
You shouldn't be backing up profiles, accounts or settings from an AD domain. We should already have instant VM booting (from the network) with everything snapshotted to a working state since long ago.
Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right?
Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.
The whole model of Big Tech is very gangsterish — steal and store private property, and eliminate the competition by excluding them. You can't even download a lot of programmes now without going through Google Play or the Apple store, which is an issue going beyond mere security.
End users mostly don't know what Windows is. You can see this when someone picks up a tablet and opens Google Docs.
Do people actually use Word? I can’t remember the last time I saw a docx file at a job. At least five years ago…
They do but the mode has changed from Word.exe to https://www.o365.com/word or sharepoint -> word doc.
That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.
This is a moot point, but line chefs wouldn’t be the ones writing menus or signing catering contracts.
Otherwise I think we’re in completely agreement.
What do you see instead? Aside from a smaller startup that used google-everything every enterprise I've worked with uses MS Office extensively, with a big push to the subscription web version from local installs.
Yes, but tech is special. And even in tech I presume you're only talking about computer tech, or even more specifically software tech? There's the entire rest of the business world which uses Word because what else would they use? Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft [sic]. Every single OEM computer aimed at businesses is likely to have Office preinstalled, except these days it's the 365 version.
I am encountering it almost not at all. I work in a org that basically doesn't know that Linux exist and outside of top management nobody uses Word. Excel is still massively useful.
> Do people actually use Word?
I mean, for starters just walk into any law firm.
Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.
And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.
Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.
This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.
Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.
I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.
Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
PDF is THE choice for cross-platform presentation and printing, but a real PITA for collaboration, funny enough one of the places where the web version of Word is pretty decent. A lot of industries live in Word/Office, and "generate PDF" is a pretty small part of their workflow. Also remember that printing to PDF without an expensive purchase was not a thing for many decades; I've only stopped using the Win2PDF license I bought 25 years ago on my most recent computers!
Not that I don't believe you, but something feels off...
> conversion to Word 2003 format
That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format. Why would you do that instead of .docx? Or just a PDF.
> They opened the file and they said the formatting was off.
Who cares about formatting on a work summary? Did it have something more interesting than you can put in .rtf?
> not until office for Mac reached feature parity
It hasn't. There's still a difference in feature support.
People often will use .doc rather than .docx when they’re trying to convert to a format that non-Word apps are more likely to be able to parse.
And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.
None of this seems off to me.
> That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format.
I assume its an old story as recent version of MS Office can read ODF formats.
.odt mostly works fine. Its the standard for editable files on gov.uk and it goes entirely unnoticed by most people so MS Word users presumably are able to open them.
I remember looking into the spec of the... I think it was the DWARF debug info format, mostly just out of curiosity. Also out of curiosity, I checked the PDF metadata. Creator: Microsoft Word. Curious.
Linux is great for people that are on HN etc because they're techies, but in my experience most normies struggle to cope with Linux.
There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux. Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home. As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked. Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
>> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows.
I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium.
I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things to get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
The dinosaurs are going to die off.
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
None of that reasonably characterizes the reality at all, only what some might fear. In practice, any distribution is suitable for any ordinary purpose, and only relatively uncommon hardware lacks drivers out of box. Linux supports a wide variety of applications just fine.
Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.
Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
You might have to give up the applications you are used to, and switch to new ones. This might be easy, or it might be impossible. If all you use is the browser, easy.
I have switched from Windows completely to Linux more than 20 years ago, after a few years of dual-booting.
The moment when I could ditch Windows was when I got on Linux several video-related programs, e.g. a DVD player and a program that could use my TV tuner. For all other applications I had already switched to Linux earlier. Those other applications included MS Office, which at that time I continued to use, but I was using it on Linux under CrossOver, where it worked much better than on the contemporaneous Windows XP (!!). The switch to Linux was not free as in beer, because I was using some programs that I had purchased, e.g. MS Office Professional and CrossOver (which is an improved version of Wine, guaranteed to work with certain commercial programs). I did the switch not to save money, but to be able to do things that are awkward or impossible on Windows.
I do all the things that you mention, and many others, on various desktops and laptops with Linux. I do not doubt that there may be Linux distributions where you may have difficulties in combining very different kinds of applications. However, there certainly also exist distributions without such problems.
For instance, I am using Gentoo Linux, precisely because it allows an extreme customization, I really can combine any kinds of applications with minimal problems, even in most cases when they stupidly insist to use dynamic libraries of a certain version, with each application wanting a different version.
As another example, I am using XFCE as a graphic desktop environment, because it provides only the strictly necessary functions and it allows me to easily combine otherwise conflicting applications, e.g. Gnome applications with KDE applications.
XFCE is actually a great example of the problem with Linux
It's wayland support is utterly broken right now and getting very little attention. The major distros are about to put X11 in the grave and then XFCE will die (or more likely it'll live on in some weird offshoot distro).
That's not really an acceptable situation for a consumer product.
now obviously xfce is not one of the main DEs pushed by the distros, but it's plight is a symptom of a couple of problems that plague linux
Compatibility is important. MSFT, for all their faults, puts a shitload of effort into making sure that even old ass software keeps working. They're not perfect (especially in the last few years) but they're miles ahead of linux here. As a user, I shouldn't ever have to know or care about wayland or pipewire or whatever other nonsense, but that's not the case. I have to know just so I can find software that works with my system.
> Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository
Or my old favourite "trust me, just run `curl foo | bash` to install..."
I don't want to be little your experience, but your self professed difficulties are not universal. Especially calling Linux hostile to users (as opposed to friendly Windows??) just seems like you don't like pepperoni pizza so you're going to tell us how horrible pepperoni pizza is for everyone.
Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc.
All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software.
> I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer.
I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
> MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
I do believe distribution matters somewhat. For example, Fedora requires a lot of messing around to get video playback to work. A non-techie is gonna have a hard time installing gstreamer non-free plugins and non-free ffmpeg from RPM Fusion (not to mention figuring out that that's what they have to do in the first place...).
Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.
And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.
Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.
Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
Use Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS , do not upgrade every 6 m0onths to get the latest bugs from upstream just because they GNOME/KDE made some small improvements for some feature you probably do not use. There are PPAs with latest kernels and NVIDIA driver if you really need to upgrade for your work or gaming. This shit on upgrade happens on cool distros too, just Google Arch broke on update and you will see that there were cases where the efi partition was deleted and the user data was lost or some font customization a dude done to GNOME broke the login after an update.
If you want to install Linux to a less tech person you install an LTS distro and enable only the security updates, you can install Firefox from upsteeam and it has auto update and install ad blockers on it but teach the user how to stop it for specific websites in the case the blocker breaks stuff.
I mainly use various Linux distributions since 90s, also while working in systems administration for most of that time, but to say that "all Linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software" and suggest that's all is a vast...... understatement to say the least.
Different kernels, different system libraries, GPU drivers either no free or open source, kernel patches available or not (because there's a conflict no one has time to fix), security patches' availability (with distinct difference between RHEL-adjacent distributions and the others), different init, even filesystems and window managers with their quirks.
It's bordering on false to suggest all the tasks can be easily replicated in all the distributions, which is also the sentiment among the users. Oh well, perhaps, if you spend infinite amount of time preparing a very specific ansible playbook which will bend and coerce this specific flavour to install all the necessary libraries and patches, kick the kernel just right, and backport the Improvements from the incompatible distribution to the chosen one.
Then yeah.
Perhaps. But you're basically saying MacOS is FreeBSD.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
You perfectly captured in a single sentence the attitude of Linux maintainers and why it will never ever be a mainstream OS.
> > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
> There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
You got me wrong, I'm not saying that you should go for either of those options, but that if you search online a little bit as a layman, you will be confused because some distributions (popular ones at that) advertise themselves as the right choice to do X.
It's all about confusion for the end user. Just search for "linux gaming distro" and see for yourself the slurry of stupid ass distributions recommended when none of them should exist in the first place.
Well from my experience on a Mac or in iOS you either adapt to their workflow or you leave the platform, I don't think there's a middle ground there. From my experience Linux is actually on the total opposite side, which might be even more confusing: it will allow you to create any workflow you want, if you are willing to sacrifice your sanity to get there. Btw Linux user here who already lost part of their mental health.
Essentially your argument boils down to "linux is bad because you have choice".
The slop articles you get are the result of the natural SEO competition.
The real problem is that anyone is propagandizing the concept of a "gaming distro" in the first place.
Ah yes, famous "you're holding it wrong" :)
(My current gripe is with KDE on Wayland - i decided to move from Gnome on X11 for $reasons and it's so hard to get a thing as simple as clipboard, multiple monitors to work consistently. Apparently devs have very strong opinions on workflows...)
TBH some gaming bound distros enable RT based optizations for gaming not seen in any OS. Also, with Flatpak, there's no excuses, you will get the same software everywhere.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
I recently started a new job, and was given a choice of Windows or Linux for my desktop. Picked Linux, specifically Ubuntu, since others there use Ubuntu. (I've been using Macs primarily for decades, but can operate in any OS.)
I have my workflow set up mostly fine now, but...there isn't really any alternative to BBEdit. Anywhere but the Mac. And believe me, I've looked. (I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong, though!)
The combination of
- a programmer's text editor
- that's not focused around "workspaces" (like VSCode—which I also use)
- that can do robust regexp search & replace, both within and across files
- that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
- that can transparently open & save files requiring privilege elevation (just provide the password when needed)
- that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
- for free (there's a paid upgrade that unlocks more advanced features that are very neat, but that I have never yet needed)
...appears, from what I can tell, to be unique.
So I'm using...I forget, I think it's kate? and it's fine, I can operate...but between that and a variety of other little things, it's just a constant friction. Fortunately, I should be able to get a Mac laptop; it just needs to be quoted, approved, and ordered.
So, should we assume that they vibe-coded this patch? Sad...
They had plenty of bad patches before this. Microsoft products just aren’t great quality.
It’s insane how many bad patches they’ve had recently though. I swear it didn’t used to happen this often
Microsoft has been issuing fixes like this with alarmingly increasing frequency.
It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
Now that GNOME wants to abandon it.
It's still a change. GNOME dictates onto users what the developers think the users should use or have. I find that not acceptable.
defaults matter a lot!
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
PC mice haven't had three buttons for decades!
You'll be surprised to know that there are still some mice that don't support that. Admittedly, I've only had that happen once in the last 15 yrs in a budget "gamer" mouse I instantly returned and replaced with a Logitech g903 at the time (though I've switched mice twice since, and both supported it)
And most Linuxes have option for dual click (right and left mouse button) to simulate middle mouse button.
Useful, as the wheel button is usually first to die in cheap mice.
Not useful, because it made it impossible to play Death Stranding on Linux :(
Ironically, Microsoft pioneered the scroll wheel.
Remember Xerox PARC, the people that developed the first computer GUI?
https://archive.is/sKLL
> The three button Alto mouse enabled the first bitmapped and overlapping windows display, known as a graphical user interface (GUI). The Alto dates to March of 1973
Because all of Microsoft's people secretly use linux on thier machines.
(No joke. This is a thing. It means when something goes catastrophically wrong with windows, the people in position to fix the problem will still be able to function.)
I can't really add to that one but I do know that many at Cisco turn old Cisco gear into Linux workstations.
Yeah, sure this is a thing. All of Microsoft's people secretly use Linux...
That and forced LLM adoption means they solve problems in text.
Year of the linux desktop
Year of the windows cli
You can always just pull the power cord too, or long-press the power button on a laptop.
Don't PSUs have a physical rocker switch for on/off?
Most but not all.
[dead]
>the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue
This always annoys me because you're really handicapping yourself by ignoring the CLI on any OS. Sure I use it more heavily on GNU/Linux than I did on Windows as a kid, but that's because it's so good. If I'm ever in front of a Windows machine now I still like to have a terminal handy (and it's even better/more-familiar on macOS, of course), and I've learned things like "type is like cat", "robocopy is like rsync", "tasklist is kinda like ps and taskkill like kill/pkill" which help me to do things better on Windows than when I used it fulltime. I'm glad Microsoft invested more in the CLI with Windows Terminal, OpenSSH in the default install, winget, PowerShell, etc. I think it's better for everyone. I fear the CLI hate is spreading anti-intellectualism. Some people seem annoyed when they even have to use their keyboard instead of their mouse for something.
Except its not a hard power off, it only tells windows to shut down... I've seen instances of windows hanging on both startup and shutdown, leaving me no other option but to hard power off the machine (because nobody uses a reset button anymore).
Does this bring the old Halt and Catch Fire command back as an option?
I understand the sarcasm but copy pasting a bash or powershell command is faster and less error prone than following the instructions to open menus, dialogs, tabs and clicking buttons, especially in deeply nested UIs.
I don't see how a command line tool with 10 different flags is necessarily less "error prone" than UI. In fact, I have used many tools where a flag is confusing or has conflicts with another flag in an unexpected way, not to mention subtle issues like escaping.
It is easier to copy/paste. If the GUI has more than one step people might be confused. Also some GUIs are hard to see or read for people with vision handicaps.
I once had to pass along to the support team a command for one of our customers to run. It ultimately didn't work because someone along the chain A) autocorrected the spelling of the command name, B) converted the quotation marks to fancy “”, and C) converted the hyphen into some fancy dash.
You’re preaching to the choir, I’m a heavy terminal user and I agree completely.
I think you are being premature, I'll wait until HN updates the site and someone posts their counter point in dance notation before deciding which medium supports actions that are easiest to communicate about.
Windows always had a command line. I remember I used to do remote stuff via CLI even back on NT 4.0