Comment by d3Xt3r
1 day ago
Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out.
Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday!".
[1] Linux 7.2 Reverts DRM Scheduler Change After Serious GPU Regressions: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-72-reverts-drm-sc...
Ah, didn't know that was reverted. Cheers for the link.
Fedora users got burned. My friend had strange artificing after updating so rolled back to 7.1
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I personally am very excited for the upcoming Windows 11 update which will allow users to move the taskbar to any edge of their screen.
I don't use windows too often, but I remember I was happy with an update a year or two ago which allows changing the volume by scrolling on the tray icon.
Now, of course, it still doesn't work with a touchpad, but baby steps, right?
This feature has been was available on GNOME since forever. I'm still waiting for Microsoft to steal another nice thing: MRU (Most Recently Used) keyboard layout switching. If you have two often used keyboard layouts A and B, and less used layouts C, D, E, then pressing the switch shortcut once will switch between A and B without the need to cycle through C, D, E.
OMG I didn't know about this. It works! Hover over the speaker icon and adjust with the mouse wheel.
Ah it'll be just like 2015 again
Wasn’t this in win 95?
Yep and it will be glorious.
I cant wait for the number one gripe of all my users to finally be catered for.
Wait, when did they take that away?
I haven't touched MS in this decade, but I swear that used to be a thing at least through 7...
such innovation. very wow
Nobody said anything about innovation, the discussion was about whether people look forward to windows updates or not.
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Something that they removed in Windows 11 because yes.
Not to start a flame war, but people who move their taskbar to the left edge of the screen are extremely sinister and should not be trusted, because they probably use tabs instead of spaces, and vi instead of emacs. Putting your taskbar on the right edge is fine though, as is using spaces and emacs. Putting the taskbar on the top or bottom just means you're gay, not that there's anything wrong with that. ;)
Tabs on the other hand (and of the other type) should be able to move freely between all edges of all windows.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432170
I might be in the minority here, but some of the latest Windows updates that dropped in the Insider channel are really cool, and I'm excited to see those coming to main.
Do you have a link for a list of these changes. I am curious.
Sure. The Insider blog tends to be pretty up-to-date: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/
They seem to be focused on performance improvements because of the MacBook Neo pressure and RAM crisis, but right now, I'm mostly excited for the right-click menu and taskbar improvements. You can already do this with third-party software, but it's not the best experience unfortunately.
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The best thing about Win10 reaching EOL is not being at the mercy of Windows Update any more. It was by far the biggest risk to having a functioning system.
Running an unsupported OS is even more risky, especially with the excessive number of security updates needed while AI finds RCE after RCE.
They're bluffing that Win10 is "unsupported"
Eh, pretty much all my network exposure is via Firefox, which is actively supported.
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MS should either fix the RCEs in Windows 10 (it is unsupported but the defects were already there when it was still supported, just undiscovered), or they should refund their customers (since they never managed to release a defect-free version).
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Windows is such a horrible OS to use when you work in a small company that isn't big enough to have IT to shield you from all the horrible stuff, like in a small studio. Normally I work in Linux, sometimes need to boot Windows just to do some export or something, then goal is to boot into Linux again ASAP. But time and time again fucking Windows forces me to prepping updates when shutting down for next boot, with literally no way around it, even weird terminal incantations can't stop this, nor changes in the registry, it just refuses to shut down without prepping to apply updates on the next boot.
Which means next time I have something to do on Windows that in reality takes ~30 seconds once I'm in, it'll instead take 15 minutes because Windows decides that my time is worth nothing to them.
Add in that I use Windows maybe once a month or something, and every single experience with using Windows for me is this fucked up process of time wasting.
This sounds like the perfect use case for a simple, straightforward VM. Dual booting is dangerous, time consuming, and makes it inconvenient to share clipboard, stuff... why don't you use a Windows VM instead? You can freeze a VM (saving state) rather than restarting it. Windows won't bat an eye since it's not being shut down or suspended. No longer unexpected 15 minutes pauses - restart it when you have time to spare, and keep working in your host Linux OS while the Windows VM does its shenanigans.
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Seriously my spare PC became so much less annoying overnight. It used to not only auto-reboot but also add some fresh non-dismissed nags with every update. Now it's just the nag to install Win11, which, I'd rather eat my entire PC.
You can disable the win11 update nagging inside local group policy editor.
Oh god that "OOBE" horror. I almost got locked out when it demanded a Microsoft Account login, which I never use for anything. I'd only just grudgingly acquired a portable telephone at that point; without it, I'd have had severe difficulty getting at my mementos.
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Didn't we eagerly await on updates in the good old days of Windows?
The only Windows update that made me “eagerly await” is the Windows XP SP2.
And what an update it was.
I still remember how Windows ME looked at first, the feeling of something better. That didn't last long
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My Mac ran XP SP2 in Boot Camp for an insanely long time. Best version of Windows that will ever exist.
Windows 7 was pretty neat.
Fair point, the old school service packs and hotfix rollups were cool. But I think that sort of enthusiasm towards updates ended with XP, at least it did for me, because I switched to Linux permanently after Windows 7 came out.
XP was indeed when I stopped caring about Windows updates, SP2 was a huge deal - after that they where either "eh" or actively things I didn't want.
To be honest I think the reason I stopped care was more that I started using Linux as an OS in the 90's and over time more and more of my computing life was on Linux (except gaming) so by 2004 (or a little earlier) Windows was just for games.
We did, and there was some cool stuff coming out of MS now and then. I remember when the first Power Toys came out - there's nothing really magic in current ones though.
I never did. I did wait eagerly for new .NET releases, though.
....No. And those were not good days, unless your definition is fun is reinstalling OS
Back when updates were add on packs like Plus! they were very exciting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!
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Phoronix.com is my go to place for good news. It always gives me a sense of progress and makes me feel humble since so many smart people share their work
just... never delve into their forums.
Any improvements with fractional scaling? Can anyone please link to any material reg the work being done for improving fractional scaling in Linux; it would be great if it could match the rendering quality of macOS.
Fractional scaling is now supported by major toolkits and compositors.
https://wayland.app/protocols/fractional-scale-v1
Also, I wouldn't hold the rendering quality of macOS as a high standard at all, since all it does is render at a multiple and then downsample, wasting energy and introducing blurriness.
Perhaps it's subjective, I have multiple portable displays including a e-paper monitor and I find that for low resolutions the HiDPI in the macOS produces more legible text in those monitors.
What's your setup like? I'm on AMD+Wayland+KDE, no complaints with fractional scaling on my ASUS ProArt PX13 (255 PPI screen).
In my laptop 200% fractional scaling of the built-in QHD+ OLED display on KDE Plasma is great, but when I connect my portable 1080p displays or e-paper monitor (UXGA) the fractional scaling of it is not as good as when compared to when the same monitors are used with macOS (M4) in HiDPI mode under lower resolutions.
As the other comment says, I suspect it to do with GPU as the built-in displays are usually driven by intel and external displays are always driven by my Nvidia 4090.
But surprisingly, when I drive my e-paper monitor using original Jetson Nano (Ubuntu 20.04 ESM / Nvidia Maxwell); the fractional scaling is quite good perhaps even better than macOS.
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IME it works fine on Intel iGPUs, too. I even use multiple ratios with no issue (constant 125% on the laptop, 100% on an external screen and 200% on a different screen at work).
Contrary to Windows, this also works well when hotplugging screens. Menus don't end up a blurry mess, and apps seem to work fine. On Windows, even some 1st-party apps are borked (task manager comes to mind).
KDE has absolutely no issues with it.
Gnome >= 47 is fine, you will need to do:
`gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer', 'xwayland-native-scaling']" ` That stops being necessary as some point around 49/50 I think.
I use arch based linux. This year updates have broken video decoding twice. Font rendering once (still not fixed without manually deleting files.). And broken the whole system due to there not being a mechanism that makes sure all QT libraries upate at the same time once or twice. That is all one system.
Meanwhile 4 separate windows pcs have not had problems with updates for at least 6 years
It's not fair comparing Arch and Windows as they are two very different types of OSes. Arch is bleeding edge and it is completely normal and expected to be prone to breakages. It's not meant for the average PC user, it's meant for experienced users who're comfortable with troubleshooting technical issues, reporting bugs, and know and are happy to downgrade packages/rollback to previous snapshots etc. On the upside, Arch also gets fixes before anyone else.
If you want a stable Linux experience though, pick something like Fedora, or even better, pick an immutable distro like Aurora or Bazzite, if you really, really care about stability.
Do you mean Arch is getting more bleeding edge kernel versions? I don't see what else that's Arch-specific would cause those issues.
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I use Arch exclusively and haven't had any of the issues you describe.
That said, I do occasionally deal with quirks due to the rolling distro nature of Arch. The benefits far outweigh the occasional upgrade pain IMO though.
How would you detect broken video decoding or font rendering? I don't know what those are. I don't think i've had any issues this year (Maybe i had do do some pacman-wrangling once this year, but i'm slow to update, so that was probably my fault...)), that I noticed anyway, but maybe everything's broken and i just can't tell.
That's an arch issue, not a Linux issue.
> Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday!"
Majority of Windows users are not programming enthusiasts and just don't care.
OS works. Programs continue to work. Good. Keep it that way.
I mean, Windows has managed to fix a lot of gaming/GPU stuff like this lately as well. They properly support HDR, VRR and even VRR with bornderless mode on older games - all of which has been very buggy and broken on Linux for a long time. Not to mention actually working eGPU support - trying to use DaVinci on Linux with eGPU still ends up with "Not enough GPU" errors and constant crashes.
This goes especially when used with more powerful GPUs from nVidia - so perhaps arrogance here isn't warranted?
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