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Comment by Neil44

3 days ago

Not being battered by upsells nobody asked for every time you turn the laptop on is so refreshing.

This reminds me of the situation with online ads.

Most people with ad blockers don't realize how unusable the web is for those that don't have ad blockers. I think most would agree this is a poor state that industry incentives have landed us in, and with the web being distributed, it's hard to know how to fix.

Similarly those who use Linux probably don't realize how bad Windows has got recently.

Microsoft has managed to replicate this awful ux problem on a system that they entirely control...

When your computer does what you tell it and it doesn't actively try to undermine your intentions, computing becomes fun again.

  • Yes. It's a slow boiling frog thing. Kinda like a bad relation ship. You get used to the toxicity. But when you get out of it, it's soooo refreshing. Thank you everybody who made Linux on the desktop possible.

Windows used to be like that too, when MS was more focused on being hostile to the competition than its own customers.

My 5 year old laptop runs a lot faster as well.

Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. The UX isn't terribly worse on fairly old hardware.

  • > Linux was designed to run on potatoes and has very little bloat over the years. I think it's more that it was designed in the 80s-90s for hardware at the time, and hasn't added bloat or "requirements" since then. So as computers have gotten more capable Linux takes less of the overall capacity.

  • Linux has plenty of bloat. But it's your bloat. You get the power to slice through it how you want and nobody will stop you.

    • Well, I'd say it's almost the reverse of how it is with windows.

      In windows, the bloat is built in by default. You don't get to chose how the start menu works, you get the windows default start menu and you better like the ads in it. It takes work to pull that garbage out.

      In linux most stuff is opt in.

      The other part of linux is most stuff isn't simply there running in the background by default. Firefox eats a decent amount of memory, but it's not doing that when I don't have my browser open.

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  • Quote: very little bloat over the years

    You should try Haiku, and read about its package virtual file system, Linux in comparison will forever after that look like a bloated hog.