After having used Windows for over 20 years (XP to 10), I decided to switch to Linux a year and a half ago and I'm happy for it. The requirement for a Microsoft Account and nonsensical UI changes requiring more clicks to reach the settings I want was annoying but not a deal breaker at first. Microsoft has also been trying to make Windows more like MacOS, or a mobile tablet, since Windows 8 which I don't like.
What really made me worry about the future of the Windows ecosystem is the increasing amount of telemetry and Microsoft's endless attempts at trying to monetise every part of the system at the expense of my user experience, even if I paid for a license.
Making the base OS usable by disabling telemetry (and Cortana) hidden away in the settings has become a hassle. The UX dark patterns trying to make me switch from Firefox to Edge has become tiring for me. Them experimenting with ads in the file system, even if it was an experimental feature that was "never meant" for public release, made me wonder how far they were willing to push it in future Windows iterations, so I made the switch.
Edit: Worth mentioning that I switched to Fedora XFCE and I stuck with it because it doesn't get in the way of my workflow. I also noticed that it doesn't use as much background resources as W10 which is great.
I don't think it's so much Linux getting better as Windows getting worse. Like even beyond having ads in the start menu and having the default browser open up to a gigantic chumbox, a lot of the things Linux was historically getting crap for like the inconsistent UI elements; that stuff is so much worse on Windows now. Running KDE apps in Gnome or vice versa looks significantly more visually consistent than running Windows apps in Windows.
Go boot up and use a vm with kde3 then kde4 then kde5 then kde6 and i think you will rescind your claim. Its night and day better over time. I suspect even gnome has improved but i dont have the experience with it so i cant authoritatively comment.
When they kill Windows 10 support and the newest Windows is still garbage, I'll switch to Linux. Most apps are compatible with Linux anyway, and these that aren't can be run within a VM, or I can have dual-boot, or whatever. I don't want my computer to be actively fighting against my comfort.
I did the same recently. I never stopped using linux, I used it only for work though.
i saw Windows 11 which is less and less for power users, to the point of going against it.
2 weeks ago I installed Kubuntu on a second nvme SSD in my gaming desktop and I discovered that: working on a desktop is so much more pleasant and working on Kubuntu satisfies all my needs except gaming.
BUT since I got a steam deck, I have been playing mostly there anyway. And yes steam deck is linux too.
I tried and fought enough with macOS, Windows is betraying their own users and not having bash is frustrating.
so here we go, full linux.
My children first OS is going to be Kubuntu, let's see how it goes
Microsoft still haven't implemented a native vertical taskbar after all the years of it being in the top voted[1] request (part of the request to move to any side of the screen) and the fact it's been part of Windows for like 15 years. It's a dealbreaker tbh.
Third-party tools that restored the W10 taskbar in W11 allowed users to continue having a taskbar that's usable for them yet the latest W11 betas show they're removing that legacy code. It'd be fine if they were replacing it with an equivalent but they're not.
Apple and Microsoft are competing on who can make the worst UX in the desktop arena. Window management is so bad in osx and I refuse to pay for add-ons to make things slightly better when Linux and the small galaxy of window managers have been doing it so well, and for free, for literally decades.
Funny, how many GNU/Linux desktop environments allow you to do that easily, while being developed by a handful of people, while MS has probably hordes of people working on the UI of Windows. They just don't seem to get it or have complelety incapable UI/UX designers or something.
It's because Microsoft has OKRs to hit that have nothing to do with UI customizability or even giving users what they want.
I realized this in the 90s. Windows 9x, theoretically, should never have existed. I knew this because a DOS subsystem with great speed and compatibility, DOSEMU, existed for Linux. You could play Doom with sound at full speed in DOSEMU on contemporary Pentium hardware. If the open source community could do that, Microsoft, the developers of DOS, could develop a DOS layer for Windows NT that was much better than the sluggish, feature-incomplete layer they did ship. But they didn't prioritize the effort it would take to do so, especially since dividing the Win32 ecosystem into 9x, NT workstation and NT server allowed binning of different Windows versions at different price points.
This is complete insanity that vertical task bar is still not implemented, pretty much what OS has to do - manage memory, manage processes/threads, manage windows to enable smooth UX with multiple programs. It more and more fails on the last one. Seems the policies have changed to drop support for everything that is used for example less than 1% of users, (just neglecting 10 million users, costing likely billions $ time and sweat for those users, nbd). Even if it would cost MS like tow part time developers time/money.
It is such a neccessary multitasking functionality on work environments that I'm quite lost when Win 10 support ends and the alternative taskbar tools do not work reliably then. Small hope that Windows 12 or whatever comes next would be the better one.
Not being able to customise my environment is a dealbreaker for me. I will be converting my day to day machine to Linux rather than being nagged into a user hostile OS upgrade.
Clearly Microsoft has given up on powerusers, the people who notice and sometimes fix flaws in their monolith. Seems shortsighted.
I am not sure if the apps mentioned here really target power users. It seems that they are actually blocking apps by name (!) that reached some popularity in bringing back the old windows style interface. Those apps are bypassing Microsofts efforts to place ads all over the place and monetize the start menu. Those new featured content and AI stuff seems all very hacked into the interface and breaks easily. My taskbar even gets stuck from time to time (missed meetings because of the stuck clock). So this seems all just collateral damage in using windows to sell cloud stuff.
Annoying how previous abilities are also being removed e.g. docking the windows start bar vertically on the side of the screen is no longer allowed in Windows 11, but is possible on Windows Server and Windows 10
Indeed. I moved to Linux back in the WinXP/Win7 days, and KDE's been my pretty much "go-to" desktop environment of choice since pretty much day one. I've tried and used many others for various purposes over the years, but always end up back on KDE for the most overall "familiar" (most like the Windows I had spent many years on), "integrated" (KDE apps tend to "play nice" together), and customizable interface.
The Steam Deck is actually what's pushed me closer to adopting Linux on my desktop. I usually run Windows just because it's the easiest OS to run games on, but the Steam Deck has really shown that with Proton you can run... basically anything!
Every tool that I use is cross-platform these days, anyway. VS Code, Blender, Inkscape, Godot, etc.
How good is running Windows in a VM with a Linux host nowadays? Does it work well for office users who want to run Office? How about people who want to run Adobe or Autodesk software? These use cases seem to be causing the most friction for the transition in my circles (apart from gaming, which is a different story).
Steam/Valve made a point of running Windows games under Linux as good or better as under.Windows. that is, Wine and Proton are really good these days.
Running genuine MS Windows® in a VM is very possible but much less necessary than, say, 10 years ago, if you want to run some non-esoteric Windows software. It also technically requires a license.
If you have the hardware for it, VFIO setups can be amazing. I've been running graphics accelerated Windows inside a VM for a few months now, and apart for some random crashes, it's perfect.
I've been using Capture One (lightroom alternative) and Affinity Photo 2 inside the VM and it's been great.
Haven't really tried video editing, but it might not be as great.
As a 20 year full-time Linux desktop user doing Enterprise IT consulting, running a windoze VM has never NOT been an entirely functional experience for me.
I've used both QEMU and Virtualbox to run them, mostly Virtuabox (yes, oracle sucks, it was still sun when I started), and probably the most demanding things I do on it is Visio, which I use for some very complex design docs in windows it general struggles with already. I used windoze xp in vm for ages even past its date of expiration, basically until newer Visio's no longer supported it, and all windows versions tried (7 and 10) have worked fine outside their own UI quirks.
I don't even enable 3d drivers, or try to make it do graphics-heavy things. Everything else I can do fully in Linux (including gaming), and this has been in supporting most any and every sort of enterprise across those years in technology.
Anyone that tells you Linux can't/doesn't work is being obstinate, ignorant, or lazy.
Not OP, but in my case it's Visual Studio. It's just the best IDE for me, and I have literally decades of muscle memory using it.
I first tried Linux sometime in the late 90s, and this might finally be the year I switch over. I do everything else in a Linux VM now, may as well run Linux as host and Windows as a VM.
For me it's the hardware support in windows. I've been using Linux on and off for 15 years, but every time I've tried to switch my home desktop I've always run in to issues. I used mint Linux for quite a while and it makes a very good stab at competing with windows.
Recently I got a steam deck and I'm surprised how good it is in desktop mode, and also at running windows games in proton. I'm actually considering getting a dock and ditching my desktop atx tower. The tracking and telemetry in windows has really put me off it.
Judging by replies here should really be a "why are you still on windows" askHN.
Besides other reasons here, when you have decades of experience on how things work, hundreds of little utils and tools... and you want to finally concentrate more on productive work in your life and not start the whole hurdle anew.
Maybe if a perfect, seamless VM environment would exist, but that still leaves the HW problems.
Given the hard time I am having installing Linux on a Gigabyte NUC that was given to me, due to UEFI issues, I am quite close to either get rid of it, or install Windows 11, make use of WSL if needed, and call it a day.
I’m still holding off updating to windows 11 as it still doesn’t have feature parity with windows 10.
The biggest one was the option to not merge apps in the taskbar down to one icon, and the option to show titles. They finally brought that feature to 11, but apparently the smaller taskbar is gone too? The only option was a larger one that always takes up much more space. I like it to show all the time, so I’d prefer a thinner taskbar.
Sure there are these hacky third party apps, but it’s not native. I don’t understand why they took all these power-user features away. As far as I know you can’t put the taskbar on the side or top edges of the screen either.
I don’t know what microsoft is thinking, there is no real reason to use windows 11, it is a downgrade in a lot of ways. At least windows 10 held directx12 hostage as an incentive to upgrade. Its funny, everytime I boot up one of my systems that still has windows 7 installed it feels so nice, even better than 10 much less 11.
I think microsoft is playing a dangerous game with messing around with windows like this, it could lead to a domino effect causing a mass exodus of users.
Google is going through the same thing now, it was the king of search but now search sucks and I and my friends are using other search engines more and moving away from google tools. I don’t even remember the last time I used gmail.
Yes, they are losing users over this. Although I have also heard of technologically capable people running into having their system auto-upgraded somehow and now using 11. Don't ask me how in the world they accept this. If that happened to me, I would reinstall the previous OS, even out of principle alone.
And then MS seems to think they are doing any better with their online office suite. Well no, there are many people, who even want to quit their jobs, because of having to use that shit and how dystopian bad it is. MS losing more reputation there as well.
I feel there is a notion now, that MS is simply no longer able to make any quality software product. They got VSCode, but that will be enshittified before long as well.
They did not take them away. They decided not to add them. Windows 11 is a result of taking Windows 10, adding arbitrary cpu limitation to it, and bolting on a bunch of crap from the cancelled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10X
Maybe I'm too old, but since when is simply using another software as opposed to built-ins considered modding? Most of these seem like replacements to me.
If doing that little is now considered "modding" a desktop OS, we've fucked up somewhere. Even phone OSes like Android let you download replacements of built-ins (such as another launcher, file manager, photo app) right from their app store.
The very reason why those tools exist though is because there's a sizeable enough demand. What's under question is that 'unintention', all the more so when features are being removed, without leaving some settings in for power users. Some user experience changes seem backward steps.
It's worth reminding yourself that there are people at MS actively working to make your lives worse. I'm curious how they feel about implementing such things --- or, when they initially decided to come up with the idea of rewriting the taskbar and removing a bunch of features, was there no opposition from the employees who clearly use Windows themselves? No power users work at MS?
I wonder how long it'll be before someone comes out with a "distro" that combines the Windows 11 kernel with the Windows 2000/XP userland. WinPE 11 exists, and it actually has some bits of UI that still look like Win7.
There are plenty of reasons to skewer Microsoft, but this isn't one of them.
Microsoft isn't blocking all customization apps here, of course. They're blocking known [1][2] unreliable, poorly written, high crash rate software that is extremely sensitive to OS changes, hotfixes, and/or upgrades due to the nature of the software (e.g. hooking functions, patching memory, etc).
The block is geared towards a specific revision of the software. The authors will just need to fix the bugs, rev the executable version, and they're good to go. Again.
If they offered decent in house customisability then people wouldn’t need to resort to unreliable 3rd party solutions.
Why can’t I have a vertical taskbar? Is that really beyond the combined technical ability of a three trillion corp? Obviously not so it’s a conscious choice to not give users options and control
The other alternative to blocking is, of course, to offer good UI with robust customization capabilities so others could change "the nature of " their "software" to something more simple and less crash-prone
> They're blocking known [1][2] unreliable, poorly written, high crash rate software that is extremely sensitive to OS changes, hotfixes, and/or upgrades due to the nature of the software (e.g. hooking functions, patching memory, etc).
That people still somehow prefer over native Windows. Makes you realize how bad Windows actually is.
Is there any evidence that the software is actually poorly written? Isn't the only reason they use undocumented/unstable hacks that Microsoft refuses to provide a documented or stable way of doing what they want to do?
I think Microsoft's long term vision is to turn all personal computing machines into dumb terminals that must slurp from the azure/office cloud. Enterprise focused with the ability to claim that this way there is DLP built in from your security risks (employees).
In a world where decision makers only need to think of the short term (cloud computing as global/general panacea), I absolutely see this strategy mixed with some 'AI' buzz words seeing traction.
For retail customers, turning the Windows 11+ machine into a console-like brings further advantages.
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What really made me worry about the future of the Windows ecosystem is the increasing amount of telemetry and Microsoft's endless attempts at trying to monetise every part of the system at the expense of my user experience, even if I paid for a license.
Making the base OS usable by disabling telemetry (and Cortana) hidden away in the settings has become a hassle. The UX dark patterns trying to make me switch from Firefox to Edge has become tiring for me. Them experimenting with ads in the file system, even if it was an experimental feature that was "never meant" for public release, made me wonder how far they were willing to push it in future Windows iterations, so I made the switch.
Edit: Worth mentioning that I switched to Fedora XFCE and I stuck with it because it doesn't get in the way of my workflow. I also noticed that it doesn't use as much background resources as W10 which is great.
2 weeks ago I installed Kubuntu on a second nvme SSD in my gaming desktop and I discovered that: working on a desktop is so much more pleasant and working on Kubuntu satisfies all my needs except gaming.
BUT since I got a steam deck, I have been playing mostly there anyway. And yes steam deck is linux too.
I tried and fought enough with macOS, Windows is betraying their own users and not having bash is frustrating. so here we go, full linux.
My children first OS is going to be Kubuntu, let's see how it goes
Third-party tools that restored the W10 taskbar in W11 allowed users to continue having a taskbar that's usable for them yet the latest W11 betas show they're removing that legacy code. It'd be fine if they were replacing it with an equivalent but they're not.
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/ability-to-move-the-windows-11-t...
Yes, Microsoft hires employees with zero Windows experience to design their operating system.
That's why the Windows 11 taskbar has the icons centred -- because Apple OSX does too.
That's why there's no way to drag the taskbar around -- because Apple OSX doesn't allow this either.
Etc...
It does though.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp1119/mac
They do research, evaluate multiple variations, get buy in from stakeholders and then AB test the final result.
It’s definitely not as simple as let’s do this because I saw it somewhere before.
I realized this in the 90s. Windows 9x, theoretically, should never have existed. I knew this because a DOS subsystem with great speed and compatibility, DOSEMU, existed for Linux. You could play Doom with sound at full speed in DOSEMU on contemporary Pentium hardware. If the open source community could do that, Microsoft, the developers of DOS, could develop a DOS layer for Windows NT that was much better than the sluggish, feature-incomplete layer they did ship. But they didn't prioritize the effort it would take to do so, especially since dividing the Win32 ecosystem into 9x, NT workstation and NT server allowed binning of different Windows versions at different price points.
It is such a neccessary multitasking functionality on work environments that I'm quite lost when Win 10 support ends and the alternative taskbar tools do not work reliably then. Small hope that Windows 12 or whatever comes next would be the better one.
Clearly Microsoft has given up on powerusers, the people who notice and sometimes fix flaws in their monolith. Seems shortsighted.
The Steam Deck is actually what's pushed me closer to adopting Linux on my desktop. I usually run Windows just because it's the easiest OS to run games on, but the Steam Deck has really shown that with Proton you can run... basically anything!
Every tool that I use is cross-platform these days, anyway. VS Code, Blender, Inkscape, Godot, etc.
EA just simply will not allow it
Running genuine MS Windows® in a VM is very possible but much less necessary than, say, 10 years ago, if you want to run some non-esoteric Windows software. It also technically requires a license.
I've been using Capture One (lightroom alternative) and Affinity Photo 2 inside the VM and it's been great.
Haven't really tried video editing, but it might not be as great.
I've used both QEMU and Virtualbox to run them, mostly Virtuabox (yes, oracle sucks, it was still sun when I started), and probably the most demanding things I do on it is Visio, which I use for some very complex design docs in windows it general struggles with already. I used windoze xp in vm for ages even past its date of expiration, basically until newer Visio's no longer supported it, and all windows versions tried (7 and 10) have worked fine outside their own UI quirks.
I don't even enable 3d drivers, or try to make it do graphics-heavy things. Everything else I can do fully in Linux (including gaming), and this has been in supporting most any and every sort of enterprise across those years in technology.
Anyone that tells you Linux can't/doesn't work is being obstinate, ignorant, or lazy.
I first tried Linux sometime in the late 90s, and this might finally be the year I switch over. I do everything else in a Linux VM now, may as well run Linux as host and Windows as a VM.
Recently I got a steam deck and I'm surprised how good it is in desktop mode, and also at running windows games in proton. I'm actually considering getting a dock and ditching my desktop atx tower. The tracking and telemetry in windows has really put me off it.
also my initial choice for a Linux os that I daily drove back in uni, became infested with snap packages which I've had numerous issues with.
(This is not an invite for anyone to tell me about Arch or "$x distro is clearly best", I've settled with pop_os for trials)
Besides other reasons here, when you have decades of experience on how things work, hundreds of little utils and tools... and you want to finally concentrate more on productive work in your life and not start the whole hurdle anew.
Maybe if a perfect, seamless VM environment would exist, but that still leaves the HW problems.
I have a linux running as my home server, so I have tried out various distros, currently using Mint Xfce.
The biggest one was the option to not merge apps in the taskbar down to one icon, and the option to show titles. They finally brought that feature to 11, but apparently the smaller taskbar is gone too? The only option was a larger one that always takes up much more space. I like it to show all the time, so I’d prefer a thinner taskbar.
Sure there are these hacky third party apps, but it’s not native. I don’t understand why they took all these power-user features away. As far as I know you can’t put the taskbar on the side or top edges of the screen either.
I think microsoft is playing a dangerous game with messing around with windows like this, it could lead to a domino effect causing a mass exodus of users.
Google is going through the same thing now, it was the king of search but now search sucks and I and my friends are using other search engines more and moving away from google tools. I don’t even remember the last time I used gmail.
And then MS seems to think they are doing any better with their online office suite. Well no, there are many people, who even want to quit their jobs, because of having to use that shit and how dystopian bad it is. MS losing more reputation there as well.
I feel there is a notion now, that MS is simply no longer able to make any quality software product. They got VSCode, but that will be enshittified before long as well.
Dead Comment
Were it not for sizeable investments in Windows-specific apps, I would have moved away.
I am currently using:
* ExplorerPatcher (replace taskbar)
* OpenShell (replace start menu)
* ProcessExplorer (replace task manager)
* XYPlorer (replace file manager)
* Utilities like Notepad++, Paint.net
* Winsplit Revolution (Window management)
* BatteryCare (Power management)
* USBSafelyRemove (USB device management)
* Etc.
And hopefully though updates to the tools with regards to the security issues by itself keeps it all good.
If doing that little is now considered "modding" a desktop OS, we've fucked up somewhere. Even phone OSes like Android let you download replacements of built-ins (such as another launcher, file manager, photo app) right from their app store.
The very reason why those tools exist though is because there's a sizeable enough demand. What's under question is that 'unintention', all the more so when features are being removed, without leaving some settings in for power users. Some user experience changes seem backward steps.
I wonder how long it'll be before someone comes out with a "distro" that combines the Windows 11 kernel with the Windows 2000/XP userland. WinPE 11 exists, and it actually has some bits of UI that still look like Win7.
Microsoft isn't blocking all customization apps here, of course. They're blocking known [1][2] unreliable, poorly written, high crash rate software that is extremely sensitive to OS changes, hotfixes, and/or upgrades due to the nature of the software (e.g. hooking functions, patching memory, etc).
The block is geared towards a specific revision of the software. The authors will just need to fix the bugs, rev the executable version, and they're good to go. Again.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/res...
[2] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/issues
Why can’t I have a vertical taskbar? Is that really beyond the combined technical ability of a three trillion corp? Obviously not so it’s a conscious choice to not give users options and control
That people still somehow prefer over native Windows. Makes you realize how bad Windows actually is.
In a world where decision makers only need to think of the short term (cloud computing as global/general panacea), I absolutely see this strategy mixed with some 'AI' buzz words seeing traction.
For retail customers, turning the Windows 11+ machine into a console-like brings further advantages.