Comment by PaulDavisThe1st
9 days ago
There are Linux distros that meet your description (no need for WSL2 either!). I am guessing you're not running towards them with open arms and cheque book in hand ... or maybe you already ran to Linux and are just nostalgic about going back to Microsoft ... ?
Linux UIs can’t even align fonts correctly within the elements.
It is miles away from the original and you can immediately see its Linux because things don’t quite line up. Huge difference in quality, attention to detail, and the entire interface becomes unpleasant to look at.
Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
I do not know what kind of Linux UI you have seen, but the problem mentioned by you is certainly not universal.
I have never seen it, but it may exist, because there are many kinds of Linux UI that I do not use, e.g. Gnome.
That said, I have seen many Linux GUI applications that are ugly, at least by default, but many of them can be reconfigured to be beautiful enough.
I have never been content with the default appearance of any Linux distribution, but the good ones can be customized to look completely different and better than Windows, especially if you replace all default fonts with some high-quality fonts.
I don’t want to spend eons heavily customizing, only for my customizations to break down the line, though.
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Out of curiosity, when was the last time you used Linux on a laptop platform? Anecdotally, it's come a long way since 5 years ago - daily driving Ubuntu 24.04 on my Thinkpad, and I can get 8 hours of use (engineering workload) in a day. It's not ARM level of performance, but far from "useless".
That's "It works on my machine". Especially with ThinkPads, Dell XPS, and other laptops usually used by the Linux folks. Try it on a random cheap HP and you might not even have sound working (I've gone through this a few months ago). You can sometimes easily fix it through the terminal, but then we get into the debate of whether a normal user would be able to do that.
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Anecdotally, it's come a long way since 5 years ago
I hear this trope for two decades now.
my Thinkpad
Are you even surprised that I'm not?
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> Also, Linux power management and lack of hibernation means its useless on laptops
I gotten better battery life under Linux than on Windows on every Thinkpad I've owned in the last 15 years or so.
That's not to say everything is smooth sailing. Audio is a battle I'll still be fighting on my deathbed in ~40 years.
Pulseaudio was not a blessing to Linux.
Overcomplicated and hard to configure, the only way it even got measurably usable is because of distro's putting in the sweat here.
However, pipewire is really great. Audio on Linux has been a lot better since pipewire became increasingly the default.
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Plenty of distros/skins get it 99% of the way there for a similar looking screenshot but only 25% of the way there for the actual user interface experience. ReactOS is probably the closest (in terms of going down a holistic user interface approach) but saying it's 25% the way there to being a finished solution would be generous.
While DEs often emulate the look of macOS or Windows, they always get the feel wrong. You can put a global menu bar, Dock, etc into KDE, but ultimately it still acts like KDE and nothing like macOS.
It's not like macOS or Windows is the pinnacle of UI. I'm on Fedora Silverblue, and it's so relaxing to not deal with the usual ['Yes', 'Not Now'] prompt on notifications. Or have your computer became suddenly unresponsive because of random scans you can't disable.
It's not like kde is either. In windows I have never thought about carefully moving the cursor through start menu. In kde it's one wrong move and you're in a different section, cause in 25 or how many years they didn't figure out hover activation delay.
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The GP is talking about the Windows 2000 UI.