But it is a suitable replacement in a lot of scenarios. Most scenarios. The only time it isn’t is in niche specialty situations.

What are some of these scenarios?

It is in far more situations that it isn’t

Nothing productive mentioning the situations it can’t do while ignoring the massive amount of situations it can do far better

PopOS’s COSMIC menu is like that I think (you can search files, the web, even stuff like turning volume up and down)? But I’ve never tried to run it outside of PopOS.

Albert maybe?

Yeah, KRunner, and it’s been around longer than Powertoys.

I never really used it on Windows so I don’t know if it has all the same features, but there’s probably some way to make whatever you need from it work.

The whole point of PowerToys was essentially to implement the features Windows was missing that the Linux DEs had already.

No.

Explain what you mean by bloat please

There is nothing you can’t uninstall on Linux. Linux distros, let alone desktop environments, really can’t qualify as bloat

There are even enough mainstream distros to let you choose one that meets your needs with little or nothing you need to trim

Tbh it’s pretty easy. Install Linux, install Steam.

Piracy is not a real solution to the problem. Microsoft allows these sorts of things to exist in the background because they would rather lose out on some sales than lose market share.

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I mean, even desktop excel isn’t great for that. Doubley so if you have to use dates/times and timezones

“Can’t really buy a computer without Windows pre-installed”? Weird, that’s not my experience. The stores allow filtering by “no OS” and you can see quite a lot of options.

lost revenue

You can be sure this is retail only.

Enterprise Windows won’t have this feature and now appears to have added value for corporate customers.

Their way to screw customers with W2K was very persuasive. Such a clean UI, everything looking so relaxed and, eh, not commercialized. That startup sound. Those wallpapers.

Later I learned that that’s also when they released those Unix services for Windows (may have swapped words), with which you really could have something practical with an X server and POSIX-compatible applications and so on.

And compared to W9x it was very stable.

I feel like they go through cycles of “hey, we just remembered we have de-facto monopolistic power, what are we doing with that? Let’s do stuff with that” And “everyone got mad at us for anticompetitive practices again… Let’s lay low and play nice until governments stop threatening to break us up”

Do you know the term “trust thermocline”?

Basically it described a problem with the boiling the frog technique. There’s a point for every user at which they’re fed up with the bullshit, lose all trust in you(r company) and are hard to impossible to get back as a customer. Every customer leaving has a little unnoticeable effect on you, but with time there will be so many people that you lost that all your tactics to lock your users in will fail.

Look up “boiling a frog”

You mean the myth?

Yeeeeah, but this isn't a dark pattern, though. That's what I'm saying.

The article really wants it to be, but... well, it's not. The option to log out remains in the same place as the rest of your account info, and the account info they are surfacing is actually useful and relevant to how much money you're spending. They are making it easier to subscribe, for sure, but also to cancel, which used to be pretty hidden away.

I get that this fits into a wider pattern for both MS and other major software companies, but if they inch towards the boiled frog at this pace we're probably fine.

Now, if they ever try (again) to make MS accounts mandatory for Windows or to move Windows to a sub, we can have this conversation. As others said below, when you try to inch people towards dealbreakers you can find yourself losing ground very quickly. Especially if a new comparable alternative surfaces at the same time.

You don’t need an apple account to use a Mac. If you just want to enter a username and set a password, that’s all you need to do. If you want everything synced between another Mac or iPhone and so on, sign into iCloud. But you don’t HAVE to, just skip it.

Not exactly. When the webmaster you knew put a banner in the corner of their site with ads from one and the same source, in one and the same place, not popping up and not bothering you, it really felt fine. I even felt the urge to click that and see where it leads.

Remember also Opera free version with that ad banner.

Netscape?

What was your favorite browser?

MS has done shady things but Netscape’s own top employees have written about how Netscape destroyed itself with the version 4 rewrite. Joel Spolsky has also written about how complete rewrites are always a mistake.

Their corporate side failed too. If you weren’t fortune 500, Netscape wouldn’t talk to you. I was spending $50k a year with Netscape and they wouldn’t fix a bug unless I paid for an additional $75k a year support tier. ( The bug was Netscape 4 didn’t support dialing with area codes! )

Meanwhile during the late 90’s Microsoft devs put their personal emails in the readme.txts and would quickly patch any bugs or add features if you emailed them.

All the small isp’s (which were over 50% of the market) gave up on Netscape because of this.

Desktop Linux requires buying a USB / DVD, inserting it into your machine, and hitting OK several times. If you can’t do that, you also can’t install Windows.

That was the status quo when I tried Linux ~5 years ago. Nowadays, Linux is much more plug and play (and I’m specifically referring to Pop OS).

I feel like you’re describing Windows here lol

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Linux mint user here.

Sound works even better then windows, Printers needed terminal work to install, but forums were very helpful. safereddit.com/…/my_grandma_called_and_thanked_me…

Open the File Manager (Dolphin)
Click on Network in the left sidebar
Click on Add Network Folder
Select the type of network share (e.g., SMB/CIFS, NFS, etc.)
Enter the network drive's address (e.g., smb://username@server_ip_address/share_name)
Authenticate with your username and password (if required)
Click Add to mount the network drive

My dad is 60 and uses Mint for years now. That enough “grandma” for you?

I know I'm talking into the void. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm too tired of trying to do that. Just trying to get people to realize they made the choices they have to live with.

Dual boot if you’re up for it.

Yep,dual boot.

Those will not run under/with emulation?

Again it might be that I pretty much don’t play competitive online games because if there’s anything that ruins gaming it’s random strangers, but I have had practically no problem playing games over the last ten years.

Proton really did marvelous shit.

Made it so easy that even an idiot (like me) could get games running on linux without much headache. Especially nowadays, even big game titles working almost flawlessly on release day.

Alt+F4

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Win+R, logoff, enter.

That’s what I do every time, because I’m often working on a remote system and don’t want to mis-click and shut it down.

Yeah auto “correct” is the bane of my existence.

Its been years since Ive seen ads on my PC, the first windows ad I see I’m installing Linux

I think subscription would go against gog and its DRM policy (how would they enforce a subscription period without DRM), specially because gog is like the last place where we can have something that resembles owning a game nowadays.

i had gamepass working via browser on my computer.

my controller, on the other hand, never worked in the browser, so it kinda made it pointless thatn gamepass worked

If not for Easy Anti-cheat

Linux, through Steam, has EAC.

Just search the Steam store (it’s free).

It means that this year, Linux on desktop will make big strides (again)!

And why is it different than last year?

When I declared it last year, I was a year early, because this year will be bigger.

it has that? You can use the nvidia utility to enable that on most any distro, or just use Pop_OS! 24.04 when it releases.

Bazzite has an image that includes integrated chip swapping on my nitro 5

The only reason I have windows is to play games and not all games will work on linux

Pop OS has great Nvidia support out of the gate. Latest mint seems to handle Nvidia well also.

Check out NVK and Nova.

I've been using Nvidia under Linux for the last 3 years and it has been massive pita.

Getting CUDA to work consistently is a feat, and one that must be repeated for most driver updates.

Wayland support is still shoddy.

Hardware acceleration on the web (at least with Firefox) is very inconsistent.

It is very much a second-class experience compared to Windows, and it shouldn't be.

My old HP printer won’t even install on Win10 anymore. The have also removed the driver from the HP website. I’m sure you can still find it on some sketchy website, but I’d rather just use Mint on a laptop for printing all the 3 documents I print each year. Not to mention that windows updates take FOREVER on this low powered dual core laptop. On Mint it’s seconds.

any unwritten data would be lost, perhaps some file system updates get out of sync, but it shouldn’t be a big problem.

Alpha move right there

KDE Plasma uses largely all the same shortcuts as windows. The most important ones in my opinion being super+arrow keys to move and tile windows.

Everything could be operated by ads. Run a program? Watch an ad. Open the start menu? Watch an ad.

Are you sure you want to run an untrusted executable? Microsoft Store contains lots of safe, curated apps that are 100% definitely not crappy ad-filled spyware.

It does nudge you…but it’s not full screen ads that take multiple clicks to get through every week. I was a Windows zealot through W7…W10 got bad…W11 got me to start using Apple and Linux.

Linux ain’t as mainstream as MacOS and Windows are.

I wanted to say this, but I mean, people can choose to consume garbage if they want

Like I wrote, Steam games were generally good, other storefronts, not so much.

I used to keep my steam games on a separate windows 10 partition and it worked exactly as you describe after a reinstall, it was all there. It’s still incredibly cool that this works on Linux and we get to use it as daily driver without being forced to dual boot for games. A windows installation still lingers on my desktop but it’s been years since I booted into it.

If you have games in a separate partition, then you will have no need to reinstall it even in case with reinstalling Windows, though.

You haven’t really highlighted any of the linux advantages here.

I want able to get it to work unfortunately. This was a few years ago though.

Heroic is amazing. Rather than running the crappy Epic client via Wine, you just install this native piece of software that then launches each game via Wine/Proton/whatever else and pretty much just works every time, complete with things like EAC

It didn’t work before, maybe I’ll try it again when I have the time.

Can confirm, I run enterprise at home and have yet to see some of these shenanigans I’ve seen posted.

But there’s still enough I hate about Windows 11 that I’m slowly transitioning to Linux and then just running windows in a VM for things there aren’t good alternatives for.

So same strategy as Apple?

They’re researching how to make a calculator great andndo it the apple way…

I’ve certainly considered that, but have a hard time imagining a comparable performance with large assemblies. Any hands-on experiences?

FreeCAD is of course the tool of choice for my hobby projects. All of our workgroup’s students get an introduction. But while its a great tool, you’ll notice the lack of … management (?) in the background. I’m not bashing or even judging. I very much appreciate all the work put into it. But it’s simply … not there yet to be considered a serious alternative to one of the big players.

Yeah, the start menu ads were / are ‘only’ in the beta build.