I’m a sysadmin. We’re a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.
And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.
The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don’t have to think about.
For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.
But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn’t terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don’t have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.
For UI/UX, you get to choose your DE if you want. Find something you like. KDE is very Windows-like, but with the ability to customize it if there’s things you don’t like.
As for the rest of your issues, literally I have never had an issue with them. Gaming is also perfectly fine without fucking around now, with very few exceptions (like Valorant that wants a rootkit). Also, no all the pieces on Windows weren’t designed to work together. For example, each individual app has to check for its own updates when it runs, which is the worst time to update, and you have to go to a website to download an updater. A package manager just a handles it all for you, because they’re designed to work together unlike Windows.
I don’t know about your actual competency with Linux/computers-in-general. I don’t want to make assumptions, but you really don’t seem to know what you’re doing. If Windows has less cognitive load, then you’re doing something wrong. You should experiment with other options and find what works for you.
And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.
Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.
Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.
Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.
Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.
also jesus christ kde.
And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.
Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.
But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.
Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.
But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.
And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.
I personally find the my cognitive load with Linux is much lower now that I’ve switched over.
First of all, the Windows 11 UI is awful and ugly. The Windows 10 UI was never that great and only looks good as it ended up sandwiched between 8 and 11. I’d have to go to Windows 7 for something that’s decent. Admittedly the polish on a lot of Linux DEs and applications can leave a lot to be desired, but I have a choice between multiple DEs and many of those DEs are highly customizable. I’d have to go back to Windows 7 for something that’s better polished and works as good for me as XFCE does.
Then there’s being in control of my own computer. I control when it does its updates. My computer respects my settings and preferences and doesn’t randomly change or reset them. It doesn’t randomly install unwanted software on it’s own, or reinstall stuff I explicitly removed. It doesn’t place ads in my whisker menu or on my desktop or lock screen. There’s no telemetry being sent home to the mothership. With anything past Windows 8 I’ve never really felt like I’m in complete control and Microsoft can just do whatever the hell they want.
While there are the occasional issues as someone who is familiar with Linux it’s typically not too difficult to track it down and fix it. Though there are exceptions of course. At least if I have to edit some files in /etc they tend to stay that way as opposed to having to edit the registry with regedit.exe only to have Windows randomly undo what I did with the next update. And while PulseAudio is notorious for causing all sorts of havoc, it seems like it’s finally gotten to the point where it finally works and I haven’t had any issues with the volume control for a while now.
As for games it obviously matters what games you like to play, but the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to play any game in my Stream library beyond enabling Proton so far is zero. Which has been a very pleasant surprise and honestly I’ve been pretty impressed with that.
I’m a sysadmin. We’re a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.
And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.
The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don’t have to think about.
For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.
But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn’t terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don’t have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.
Are you using debian woody or something? That list of issues is so weird.
Removed by mod
Preach! If this guy was my sysadmin at work, I’d fire him.
Removed by mod
A censor happy mod thinks they are the greatest… How pathetic :D
For UI/UX, you get to choose your DE if you want. Find something you like. KDE is very Windows-like, but with the ability to customize it if there’s things you don’t like.
As for the rest of your issues, literally I have never had an issue with them. Gaming is also perfectly fine without fucking around now, with very few exceptions (like Valorant that wants a rootkit). Also, no all the pieces on Windows weren’t designed to work together. For example, each individual app has to check for its own updates when it runs, which is the worst time to update, and you have to go to a website to download an updater. A package manager just a handles it all for you, because they’re designed to work together unlike Windows.
I don’t know about your actual competency with Linux/computers-in-general. I don’t want to make assumptions, but you really don’t seem to know what you’re doing. If Windows has less cognitive load, then you’re doing something wrong. You should experiment with other options and find what works for you.
I do know about window managers, thanks.
And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.
Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.
Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.
Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.
Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.
also jesus christ kde.
And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.
Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.
But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.
Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.
But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.
And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.
I personally find the my cognitive load with Linux is much lower now that I’ve switched over.
First of all, the Windows 11 UI is awful and ugly. The Windows 10 UI was never that great and only looks good as it ended up sandwiched between 8 and 11. I’d have to go to Windows 7 for something that’s decent. Admittedly the polish on a lot of Linux DEs and applications can leave a lot to be desired, but I have a choice between multiple DEs and many of those DEs are highly customizable. I’d have to go back to Windows 7 for something that’s better polished and works as good for me as XFCE does.
Then there’s being in control of my own computer. I control when it does its updates. My computer respects my settings and preferences and doesn’t randomly change or reset them. It doesn’t randomly install unwanted software on it’s own, or reinstall stuff I explicitly removed. It doesn’t place ads in my whisker menu or on my desktop or lock screen. There’s no telemetry being sent home to the mothership. With anything past Windows 8 I’ve never really felt like I’m in complete control and Microsoft can just do whatever the hell they want.
While there are the occasional issues as someone who is familiar with Linux it’s typically not too difficult to track it down and fix it. Though there are exceptions of course. At least if I have to edit some files in /etc they tend to stay that way as opposed to having to edit the registry with regedit.exe only to have Windows randomly undo what I did with the next update. And while PulseAudio is notorious for causing all sorts of havoc, it seems like it’s finally gotten to the point where it finally works and I haven’t had any issues with the volume control for a while now.
As for games it obviously matters what games you like to play, but the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to play any game in my Stream library beyond enabling Proton so far is zero. Which has been a very pleasant surprise and honestly I’ve been pretty impressed with that.