I think in your situation I'd use a Mac just because they don't show you a bunch of advertising bullshit all the time, but I do understand the overall point: a lot of software simply doesn't exist on Linux.
Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.
I don’t have a windows computer so I am going with I have seen in Youtube, but people have said that Windows 11 has been adding ads to explorer and start.
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
They don't. They switched over to iPad 10-ish years ago. Most normies I know use phones and/or tablets full-time for their personal computing. Laptops and desktops are either work machines, for games, or for work without wages (studies, excel, other things which are inconvenient or impossible on a phone).
Grandma is on Linux Mint since she still wants to do her banking on a computer and not an iPad. She'd be on Windows 11 if I weren't her tech support, since then she'd have bought whatever idiot at the local shop would have recommended, wasting a lot of money, and probably still have thrown her arms up in despair after a while due to the shit user experience. If the local shop had machines with Mint preinstalled, I'd imagine that would have gone well, if a lot slower than it would have with my help.
No Windows casual out there has ever even installed Windows, never mind another OS, on their computer, even if they theoretically want to. They can't have what they don't know about, and that barrier is probably never going to go away.
Completely agree. Modern computers are basically just web terminals for most people, so a basic Linux distro + browser is all they need.
Windows is actually terrible for non-technical users now. The constant pop-ups, nagging messages, and decision prompts create genuine anxiety. People don't know what they're clicking on half the time. Yet somehow most technical people I talk to haven't caught on to this.
Look at what younger generations are actually using: Chromebooks in schools, Google Drive instead of Microsoft Office. Even people who legitimately need Office aren't on Windows anymore, they're on Macbooks. That's the case at my company anyway.
At this point Windows is really just gamers, engineers who need CAD, and office workers stuck on it from inertia. There's nothing inherently attracting new users to the platform anymore. I honestly don't know who their primary audience even is at this point.
Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook? Also Windows is increasing in its share again. Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not? They're combining it with Android, which honestly seems like a decent bet for what Chromebooks are meant to be. The end result will have a different name, but it will still be a cheap laptop to do school work and simple computing, and that isn't a Windows machine.
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not killing it, they're merging it into Android. Makes sense. Android already does everything ChromeOS does, it just needs better desktop input support. Google said this was to compete with iPads, which only reinforces my point.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Short-term fluctuations don't change the long-term trend. We're talking about where things are headed over the next decade vs where it once was
> Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
My company went all-in on Copilot, but I'm not seeing this translate to more Windows usage. Copilot works fine on Macbooks, and that's what most people here use. When management gets excited about it, they talk about Outlook and Teams integration. Nobody cares about Windows-specific features. What does OS integration even buy you? Access to local files that are already in the cloud anyway? I'm using Copilot on my company-issued Ubuntu laptop right now. And honestly, the fact that IT at a massive, conservative corporation even started offering Ubuntu as an option says a lot about where things are headed.
Microsoft will be fine, but I'd bet on Windows declining over the next 10 years, not growing.
>Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem.
BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
> BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either
That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I have. They are convinced it will be "harder". I have tried to explain to them what seems a lot harder to me is when Windows Update decides to brick their computer [0], and they have to call me in a panic and I have to waste an entire day walking them through diagnosis stuff and eventually walk them through flashing multiple thumb drives of Linux and Windows 11 [2] and then walk them through nuking and reinstalling.
As I've said before, before I get any kind of "live and let live man if they want to run windows let them", I would like to point out that whenever their computers break, they call me to fix it, so I do not think it's unreasonable for me to want them to use an operating system that has recovery tools that actually work, with and with filesystems built after the neolithic age so that system backups are easy and cheap and actually do what they're supposed to.
[0] dig through my comment history if you details.
[1] made more annoying because, as far as I can tell, none of the Microsoft recovery tools have ever worked in any point in history.
[2] Linux because Microsoft doesn't have any kind of LiveCD/LiveUSB support anymore, so I had to boot into a live Linux so I could walk them through installing tmate and then I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the files over to my server for recovery.
You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
Progress in software is supposed to just needing more computing resources by your definition? As in, basically slowing everything down? Well, we got local AI for that I guess.
I'm not saying that things should slow down arbitrarily, but I feel like we should have progressed more to use the resources. A Windows 95 computer would not be expected to run much made in 2006, and that's because we added a lot to the experience that required more resources.
Thank the web for that. We have lost more control of our devices and our privacy; the more we depend on the web and SaaS. We need to get back to writing native software, be it for Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, or Windows. We need to make the local device the priority.
Well said. Vote with your wallet. Use software that doesn't require an internet connection, write software that doesn't use s3 or online dependencies, stop patronizing online gaming communities, no adobe, no QuickBooks cloud, , pirate apps(not because it's free, because they work offline)
I'd argue that pirating apps is actually the wrong direction for this, not for any kind of ethical objection, but since it's kind of a concession that these applications can't be replicated in a non-awful pricing model.
I think the better way is honestly just to make something competitive, preferably FOSS, and I actually do think we're getting there. Blender, for example, is an extremely decent animation tool nowadays, Krita is a very good digital art program, OpenToonz/Tahoma2D are pretty ok 2D animation programs, Godot is a decent-enough game engine, etc.
Yeah there are still gaps and I'm not claiming everything has parity with everything with awful pricing models, but I think we're getting there, and I think that's a more sustainable model than piracy.
I think people should also give Bowler Studio a shot. It has a pretty decent Java-based CAD thing, and it even has built in Clojure support, with physics simulation support and everything. I really like it.
Forgive some ignorance, but we use Graphite at work, and I don't dislike it or anything, but I haven't really been able to see its appeal over just doing a PR within Github, at least if you exclude the AI stuff.
What do you like about the non-AI parts? I mean it's a little convenient to be able to type `gt submit` in order to create the remote branch and the PR in one step, but it doesn't feel like anything that an alias couldn't do.
the stacked changes support, for me, was an absolute game changer. the auto rebasing, etc, is -really- nice.
i found it especially useful for Gitops type stuff where you have to make lots of little PRs
Not the person you're replying to, but it just feels like rent-seeking. Amazon is already a gigantic corporation, pretty much everyone spends lots and lots of money on Amazon, it just felt like a way to try and squeeze more money out of their existing customers.
ETA:
I mean, I'm sure there is some exception to this, but generally speaking everyone hates ads. Part of the reason that the whole "cable cutting" thing happened was because everyone hated paying a lot of money to some cable company just to be bombarded with advertisements. At least that's a big reason as to why I did it.
Now all these media companies realized that they can start shoving ads at us again and people will keep paying.
Obviously I'm not entitled to having media at a specific price indefinitely, but I'm perfectly allowed to not like it when companies engage in rent-seeking bullshit.
It wouldn't bother me as much if you could still buy media, but as far as I can tell most TV shows don't get Blu-ray releases anymore. The media companies realized that it's more profitable for them to make you pay for the same media forever instead of a lump cost, I guess preferably with you watching corporate brainwashing to buy products.
I suspect once the heat on this settles down, every streaming service is going to start forcing ads on us at all times, and then the only way to fight back on this will be bittorrent.
Or just stop watching. I seem to be out of tune with what people want in a TV show nowadays, I don't find much enjoyable. I accept there was never that much, but given how much content is produced now I would have expected more in my sweet spot.
Yeah, ever since that change happened, I haven't logged into Prime Video. I'm paying money for a product, I shouldn't have to put up with ads too.
I understand that it's not free to produce TV shows, no free lunches and whatnot, so I understand why stuff I watch for free has ads, but if I'm paying for something I draw a line that I don't want my shit interrupted by advertisement.
It really annoyed me that Prime decided that they would just impose ads on me unless I pay them an additional $4 a month. I already pay for Prime, I already buy many products on Amazon, I don't want to pay an extra $50 a year just to watch your mediocre shows without you trying to indoctrinate me to buy more shit.
On a fundamental level you're absolutely right. Unfortunately, you're complaining about a model that has existed for decades at this point: the cable model. You pay an arm and a leg for cable, and yet you get ads.
Companies seem incapable of imagining a world where they don't double dip, since they've built the whole house of cards on the cable model and they want nothing else than to recreate it.
Cable still has one thing going for it: it tends to be cheaper for sports. Watching hockey games online requires subscriptions to 3 different streaming services just to follow a single local team, which is ridiculous.
Same for me. I actually don't order much but kept the subscription going for some of the shows I enjoyed. I promptly cancelled because of this. Obviously I'm in the minority, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
I feel like sometimes the actual act of explaining the joke can actually be funnier than the joke itself. Occasionally when I can explain a super dirty joke with a deadpan and matter-of-fact tone people will laugh more than they would have if they had actually gotten the joke in the first place.
I'm not a doctor, but in some fairness, I think there has been a lot of progress in chemotherapy and radiation. "Increasing 5-year-survivability by 0.5%" doesn't make a fun sexy headline, but that's still an achievement that required a lot of hard work and enough of those happening still adds up.
I agree with your overall point though; it's a little annoying that every few weeks we hear about a new experiment that seems to indicate that we'll have a radically new and effective form of treatment for cancer only for it to never materialize.
"Cancer" is a term that covers a lot of diseases. So there is a lot of research going into a lot of different things, and hence lots of announcements.
"Chemotherapy" again is a loaded term covering a lot of different drugs, drug combinations, protocols and so on. So yeah, a lot of cancer treatment us "chemo" - but today's chemo is far removed from 2000 chemo.
5 year survivability has increased tremendously over the last decades. We're not talking 0.5% here, breast cancer for example has gone from 72% to 93%. Early detection of prostrate cancer has near 100% survivability.
But you're right, improving survivability doesn't make for sexy headlines. Yes there's a social media appetite for "breakthroughs", but the underlying "boring" stuff is doing well, and getting better all the time. It's just not "news".
My mom died of cancer and had to suffer through chemo. It was in the early 2000s, so I'm curious to know if you know anything about these new chemos and what makes them different.
My condolences for your loss. Discussing things in general terms,while having a lived experience must be painful.
There are different cancers, different stages different, different chemos, and of course different people.
Ultimately individual experiences of chemo run the whole gauntlet. At one end it can be little more than a bit of fatigue, at the other end a horrendous nightmare.
Yes, chemo has, as it's goal, a poison function. It sets out to poison you, hopefully killing the cancer first. It's never going to be the "fun" part of treatment.
I'm not a Dr, much less a medical historian. I would be ill equipped to quote specific drugs or dosages. Outcomes however are easily Googled, and those don't seem to be controversial.
I get that improved statistics don't make individual loss any easier.
Forgive a bit of ignorance on this as it might be a dumb question, but now that bcachefs is a kernel module and not part of the kernel directly, is it still realistic for people to run bcachefs as their root filesystem? Do you know anyone doing this?
Distros generally build everything they can as modules these days, including filesystems. No reason not too, we've had initramfs since forever; you can't build everything in that anyone might need to boot their machine.
As long as the testing pipelines are in place to make sure the dkms module builds on every distro configuration (a good chunk of that is still manual, but there's a project to improve the test infrastructure) - in practice, no one will notice.
I wouldn't have noticed the DKMS switch on my NixOS laptop if I didn't know it was happening.
bcachefs was always a module. You don’t want it in your kennel if you are not using it. The difference is that it used to ship in the mainline source code and be built as a module that was already built and on your drive.
If you build bcachefs as a module yourself (via DMKS or directly), it works the same as if you got it with your distro.
If you use bcachefs as root, the danger is booting with a kernel that lacks the module.
I hate that bcachefs is not in the kernel, and my primary distro does not use DKMS. But, if you can get a module built, there is no loss of functionality or performance.
Wine is getting better and better, but it's still not perfect yet. I am so wishing that they figure out a way to get modern MS Office working, and then I feel like a lot of people's only reasons for staying on Windows would suddenly disappear.