Comment by mrcsharp
3 hours ago
Using React in core parts of the Windows Shell, Microsof's inability to design and release an application using non-web technologies, and the sluggishness and lagginess and bloat of Windows in general has finally pushed me to dual boot Fedora on a separate drive.
It is very nice having an Operating system that respects the Hardware I own and makes efficient use of it. My experience has been very good so far. Every device in my custom built desktop PC worked immediately. The only driver I had to build and install was for my XBOX Wireless dongle.
Gaming has been really damn good. I installed Steam and my games just worked. No fiddling around with configs or anything. Even installing a custom Proton version to try it out is very simple.
I've been on Fedora now for nearly a month and only boot into Windows for work. Eventually, I might get rid of Windows entirely. It'll take a massive U-turn from Microsoft on the philosophy for Windows for me to change my opinion now.
> I've been on Fedora now
I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
If you are not on KDE, I strongly recommend it.
Source: daily driving Linux for 25+ years.
KDE is useable now that I can use AI to deal with the thousand cuts.
TBH I was rather shocked at how bad Kubuntu is out of the box:
* Hibernate is flaky
* The OS freezes from time to time requiring a hard reset
* Snaps completely bork the system - better to just uninstall snap
* Keyring is flaky. Often you get stuck into an "enter your password" endless loop.
The list goes on - and this is on a desktop PC! But fortunately an AI can sift through the arcane workaround lore in the various forums.
The bugs are annoying, but a helluva lot better than using Gnome!
Do not underestimate the importance of the distribution. Debian 13 is great, fedora too. Ubuntu snaps are a plague.
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I agree. KDE is pretty good these days.
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This is the result of letting “devs” that only use JavaScript, that think JavaScript is an good language, and now only use AI to code, to do anything at all.
Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.
Remember the times when Windows still had assembly language in its components?
My experience has been somewhat different. I've had a linux server for a long time so I'm not new to the OS but my main computer which I use for development and gaming and everything else has always been Windows. I recently added a dual-boot Ubuntu for some performance-heavy development where the better docker integration made sense for me to use.
I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
The window manager crashed multiple times when I tried to unlock it.
Whenever I woke up my screen the whole system froze, apparently because of the USB hub in the monitor which registered. So far the only solution has been to disconnect the USB hub.
Fan control doesn't work properly because the chipset isn't supported.
I see rendering issues with window decorations all the time.
That's just after two weeks. I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors. Whenever I'm in the console or do IO heavy stuff I feel right at home but as a desktop OS it's still inferior to me. I don't have fewer problems on Linux, just different ones.
I stopped recommending Ubuntu years ago. I've daily driven fedora, pop_os! and a few arch derivatives with few or zero issues for years, switching it up when I get new hardware just out of curiosity.
> I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors.
This is my new daily life with Windows 11. I've got a client that requires some software that can't run under Linux (even with wine) and picked up a fairly spendy new laptop with windows on it. Not a day has gone by in the last three months I haven't regretted being forced to use it. Hangs and glitches every day for a minute or two, occasionally to the point that I give up and force restart it.
I was just helping my dad with a brand new Lenovo laptop with Windows 11. It felt unbelievable slow and sluggish. Just opening file manager to create a new folder lagged so much it felt like this would have been a 15 years old computer.
While I personally use Ubuntu on my laptop for several years now, when I helped my relative with a brand new laptop (huawei) with Windows 11 I was suprised how fast it was despite being very cheap, I don't remember any version of Windows that had such a performance, at least visually. Out of curiosity, what model does your father have?
It's a Lenovo Yoga 9i with an Intel EVO i5 CPU. Not sure how much memory it has.
There’s no way they’re using react in windows shell. Tell me they’re not.
I’d also recommend people try Arch. The install process has been made waaaay easier in the latest versions. Mostly select what you want et voila you’re good to go. I installed it on a mini pc I took with me over the holidays to game on and it was great. The only thing I’d seriously suggest against is installing a bunch of packages from the installer itself.
Doing so caused me headaches because it installed Gnome (again my fault for selecting a bunch of packages) alongside KDE and I didn’t realize it. Causing me a bunch of “issues” until I selected KDE as the desktop environment on login.
I’ll probably move to Arch on my primary workstation sometime in the next few weeks (from PopOS which has treated me well for the last five years but Cosmic has been frustrating). My biggest reason is Arch has much more up to date packages than what I’ve had access to via Pop and it’s what SteamOS is based on so imagine it’ll be easier to keep up to date (along with little tweaks that Valve incorporates). Not to mention the Arch docs are great, I’ve had them help me even on PopOS for years now.
Addendum: Gnome + Wayland has more or less jumped the shark for me, with its highly opinionated design. KDE has thus far been plenty acceptable. For folks wanting to try both it’s easy enough to just install, pretty much all login managers (screens) let you choose which one you want. My only regret about KDE is losing Kinto.sh for MacOS style keybindings but I lost those with the move to Wayland anyway (still trying alternatives but they’ve been slow or quirky by comparison).
If only people knew how much of Microsoft Windows has been secretly powered by HTML pages for 20 years…
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
Windows XP/2000 still had Internet Explorer as a core component. Web tech was involved every time you opened a folder.
Windows Shell using web tech is as on-brand Microsoft as it gets.
There's a HUGE difference between "you can use HTML" and "JS all the things, because we can".
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
"Active desktop"? Most people turned that off, and the explorer was pure native code otherwise.
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98. Windows 95 would let you do this if you installed Internet Explorer 4.0 but there was no HTML anywhere in the OS in vanilla Win95.
Non-technical home users in my circles are fed up with Windows 11's changes from Windows 10 without a suitable transition that eases them into the changes. They are nowhere near good candidates to migrate to any flavor of Linux, though. There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.
CachyOS has been smooth sailing for me! It is an arch derivative and it is blazing fast and stable.
> There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
I wouldn't be so assertive about that. No OS is perfect, and as we see here, windows is no exception. It's mostly a matter of being used to living with those imperfections. At least on Linux, nobody is making those worse for you for "fun" (actually for their own profit at the detriment of yours), and many more nontechnical users sense that just fine (just the way copilot was forced is baffling).
> There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS
KDE Connect solved that, and much more, many many years ago. I don't know the situation in the Apple walled garden, only that any hurdle there is the result of Apple abusive, user-hostile and anticompetitive practices that should (and will eventually) be illegal outside of the US.
Please don’t blame react for this, and not because I like react. The real problem is bad development caused by processes, procedures and most likely pressures to cut corners.
Microsoft code is bad. This is not a react issue, and is probably not caused by lead developers. But the problem is now that things have regressed to 98 era technology, it’s going to take a long time for the problem to get better.