Comment by vbezhenar
1 day ago
You want Linux.
Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them.
GUI frameworks provide features for applications to draw their UI.
A selection of numerous windows managers and desktop environments allows you to choose the best GUI shell to work in.
It is somewhat of a bazaar, with different components sometimes not fitting perfectly into each other and there's a constant migration to a best new thing, whether it's systemd, pulseaudio, wayland or pipewire, but generally things work OK and it's not like Windows today offers a significantly different experience.
Windows is beyond salvation at this point.
No thanks, I do not want Linux. I use Linux for my home servers and at work, and I'd like to keep it that way, at arm's length.
I don't know why people suggest Linux for desktop use at the first swoop. I dislike it. I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are, I dislike how edge cases that are handled straightforwardly on Windows just aren't on Linux. Things like high pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support, notebook battery life management, and more. The bazaar thing contributes to all of these sharp edges and jank.
And more importantly I dislike the sanctimony of the Linux community, I dislike the distribution and the linking model of most desktop distributions, I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first', unless a giant entity rewrites the entire user mode stack to provide a useful, straightforward, and mostly intuitive platform interface (that is, Android).
An OS is more than the kernel. It is the entire platform including user-mode libraries, toolkits, and applications. For all its faults, I find the Windows platform better than any Linux distro platform, except one.
> Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them.
What I listed aren't only hardware features; they are platform interfaces that can be programmed against to produce user-mode applications without having to muck around with kernel interfaces. In fact the less as a user or user-mode developer I have to work with the kernel, the better, and Windows provides a gigantic surface area for that.
I am happy with how Windows works, I like a Windows workflow, I like developing for and on Windows, I like gaming on Windows. I've used it for 26 years and broadly have no issues with it. It is a pretty superb platform which regressed after Windows 10, and about 99% of the problems with it are user-mode frameworks and applications, thin coats of paint. Windows isn't even close to 'beyond salvation'.
> I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first',
There are user-centric and dev-centric Linux distros. Windows is "Microsoft cloud onboarding" centric, and the experience has been dramatically degrading for years.
If that were not the case, why would senior executives at Microsoft say things like "we've heard you" and "we intend to reverse the suck in the coming year"? Even their management knows users hate the Win11 experience, and have placed it on their backlog....
> I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are...igh pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support
These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux. Out of the box I can output youtube videos to a dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon, which pulls up an interface reminescent of "Windows 7, when the mixer wasn't terrible".
The reasons not to use KDE these days are because you need Windows software (usually: edge, teams, Office), or especially because LibreOffice is terrible. The core desktop experience, however, is notably and demonstrably less jank than the mess that is Windows 11.
> These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux
They are not.
I use a KDE distribution at work. I regularly see GPU texture copy bugs like random lines across the middle of the display, or along the bottom edge. I use a 4K 144 Hz 16:9 display, and the Linux platform absolutely struggles with getting the scaling, resolution, and colour depth on all the dozens of GUI toolkits correct. Subpixel antialiasing doesn't work on many applications. It doesn't matter if I am using Wayland or X; both are bad experiences.
> dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon
Speaking of sound... Linux doesn't even pick up my Audient interface unless I physically reinsert the USB cable. It doesn't have a channel or volume control for audio feedback from my mic to my outputs. If I change the output volume slider down from 100%, the actual volume output is asymmetric—one channel is considerably louder than the other at 50%.
I have experienced issues with wpa_supplicant, iwd/iwctl, and systemd-networkd fighting each other. Why are there even so many network managers? Why does the platform not provide one?
I will disagree until the cows come home that any Linux desktop interface (again, bar Android... but like I said, Android is almost an entirely different platform) is less jank than Windows. People bring up Windows' old UIs, but said UIs still work. gpedit.exe, regedit.exe, msc.exe, services.exe, ncpa.cpl, perfmon.exe, windbg.exe, these are things that haven't changed in nearly 3 decades.
2 replies →
the worst she could say is no
The "constant migration to a new best thing" is a big problem. Once written, a program should be able to run forever, but this is only true on Windows for GUIs and on Linux only for some CLIs. Arch just recently dropped the original vi from its repos because "it no longer compiled" with stricter GCC settings, and if you want to run an older GUI, just forget about it. It's hars to blame people for only targeting the Web or Windows when those two will work forever, but on Linux you have to keep up with the endless treadmill of X11 to Wayland, GTK 2 to 3 to 4, Qt 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, pulseaudio to pipewire, etc., and if you miss just one you may as well give up.
The entire existence of docker is basically because Linux is impossibly bad at maintaining old software while Windows will still run some terribly old things (though the loss of Win16 is a big one).