I struggle with the thesis that our institutions haven't already been fatally wounded. Social media and endless content for passive consumption have already errored the free press, short-circuited decision-making, and isolated people from each other.
> Social media and endless content for passive consumption
neither being able to speak to someone on a computer nor videos on the internet are new, fancy web 10.0 frontend notwithstanding
> and isolated people from each other.
I assume you mean doomscrolling as opposed to the communication social media affords. because social media actually connects us (unless apparently its facebook, then messaging is actually bad)
I'm not sure what you mean. The internet itself is new let alone widespread access to video sharing.
Part of the problem is that social media isn't social media anymore. Its an algorithmic feed that only occassionally shows content from people you're friends with. If Facebook went back to its early days when it was actually a communication tool, then I don't think you would see the same complaints about it.
define social media. because in UK law its defined as app or website with a chat or messaging functionality, and in US law its even more nebulously defined than that. UK law counts FitBit as social media.
> Its an algorithmic feed that only occassionally shows content from people you're friends with
problem how? ill assume you mean the problem is it shows you or other people stuff that will turn them toxic, not that it literally shows you other peoples content.
Most social media isn't about communication, it's about engagement bait. Most usage consists of popular accounts sending messages, then people writing replies that are never read by the original account, and some vapid argument or agreement among the replies. It essentially pretends to connect us while actually capturing our attention away from that connection.
OpenAI is here because Sam Altman is NOT a product guy. He craves Apple style consumer success, but he's terrible at productizing his technology. Remember the marketplace of custom GPTs? Hell even the name ChatGPT. Anthropic had to show them how to build useful workflows for developers using AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI delivered... Sora.
To actually quote Sam Altman: "I think of ads as a last resort for a business model."
It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
"OpenAI is here because Sam Altman is NOT a product guy. He craves Apple style consumer success, but he's terrible at productizing his technology"
Seriously, consider putting more thought and effort into your comments. This is wildly out of touch and I think it is because people lack the creativity to imagine the counterfactual - some one else running OpenAI.
OpenAI is remarkably well run - it is a fairly good product. The best model so far, the best experience, the 2nd best coding experience.
Never thought of ChatGPT as being just one of the GPTs that could exist, but it make a lot of sense. In a world where OpenAI where better managed, more focused on actually delivering actual value, ChatGPT would be the show case AI product, while the value is generated by the custom solutions delivered to other companies to embed in their products.
> It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
AI is a perfect technology for Ads though. Instead of me wasting time reviewing multiple products for my use case, ChatGpt will just give me top 3 recommendations with the pros and cons and then buy it for me.
The one thing it will never recommend is no product at all.
You've ceded even the glimmers of discernment that remain in you and all I feel is pity.
It is not a 'waste of time' to interrogate your own desires.
There's no such thing as a 'top 3' for all things under heaven. You cannot purchase yourself a solution to every 'use case'. Furthermore, even if there were such a ranking, the ad machine would not reveal it to you, as you are not the customer, you are the mark.
You don't even want to be bothered to hit the 'buy it now' button. This is the mental model of an immaculate rube. You deserve better.
> It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
Can it tho? The problem with LLMs right now is that they don't have much useful purposes beyond spam, slop, hallucinated searches, and advertisements. The lack of a product is why there isn't a profit to be made in them
Q: What would prevent them from using git style version control under the hood? User doesn’t have to understand git, Claude can use it for its own purposes.
Didn't actually check out the app, but some aspects of application state are hard to serialize, some operations are not reversible by the application. EG: sending an email. It doesn't seem naively trivial to accomplish this, for all apps.
So maybe on some apps, but "all" is a difficult thing.
Maybe not for very broad definitions of OS state, but for specific files/folders/filesystems, this is trivial with FS-level snapshots and copy-on-write.
Let's assume that you can. For disaster recovery, this is probably acceptable, but it's unacceptable for basically any other purpose. Reverting the whole state of the machine because the AI agent (a single tenant in what is effectively a multi-tenant system) did something thing incorrect is unacceptable. Managing undo/redo in a multiplayer environment is horrific.
I wonder if in the long run this will lead to the ascent of NixOS. They seem perfect for each other: if you have git and/or a snapshotting filesystem, together with the entire system state being downstram of your .nix file, then go ahead and let the LLM make changes willy-nilly, you can always roll back to a known good version.
NixOS still isn't ready for this world, but if it becomes the natural counterpart to LLM OS tooling, maybe that will speed up development.
Well there is cri-u for what its worth on linux which can atleast snapshot the state of an application and I suppose something must be similar available for filesystems as well
Also one can simply run a virtual machine which can do that but then the issue becomes in how apps from outside connect to vm inside
Ok, you can "easily", but how quickly can you revert to a snapshot? I would guess creating a snapshot for each turn change with an LLM become too burdensome to allow you to iterate quickly.
Git only works for text files. Everything else is a binary blob which, among other things, leads to merge conflicts, storage explosion, and slow git operations
Commercial OSes (both Windows and MacOS) now feel so insanely agenda driven, and the agenda no longer feels like anything close to making the user happy and productive. For Mac, it feels like Apple wants to leverage what came out of VisionOS and unify the look and feel of mobile and desktop--two things no one asked for. For Windows, it feels like ads for their partners and ensuring they don't fumble the ai/agent transition the way they did with mobile.
Linux is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be. Modern desktop Linux has a much improved out of the box experience with good support for all the hardware I've thrown at it. And Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate, etc.
Ubuntu also tried this with Unity. They were hoping that Ubuntu would become more popular on tablets if they had a more tablet-friendly UI... They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it and basically nobody used Linux on a tablet. It was kind of a disaster. Ubuntu is a commercial entity though, so yeah, prone to the same kind of bad management decisions. as Microsoft and Apple. At least with Linux you have options. Personally I just want Linux to keep becoming more reliable over time, and have better support for energy-saving features on laptops. It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025. Somehow those problems haven't been fixed in 20 years.
I don't run Gnome now (since I have more fun hacking on Sway), but I really don't think that the characterization of it being a "tablet desktop" is actually very fair. I found Gnome to be very productive, and actually extremely keyboard focused. Outside of a tiling window manager like Sway or i3, I actually have found it more keyboard-centric than any other desktop I've used.
The reason I am harping on keyboard is because to me the keyboard is the signature differentiator between "desktop" and "tablet".
I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
It wasn't until I decided to stick with Gnome for a few weeks (using the Antergos distro of Arch) that I came around, and now I find it to be the most productive of the "normie" desktops on Linux.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
I don't want to learn how to use my computer. I know how I want my computer to work. I just want to adjust my desktop environment to match my vision (which doesn't really match the default of any window manager)
This is where gnome fails for me because it's opinionated software: they have a vision of how it should work and everything is forced that way. Similar to how Apple does it. Choices and configurations are reduced to a minimum.
So for me KDE with its huge configurability is just what I need and gnome is absolutely not. I did actually try to use it on a touch device (surface pro 3) but I needed so many plugins to make it work my way that I started getting issues with plugins interfering with each other and not supporting the latest updates etc. With KDE I could set it all up my way with built in settings. Opinionated software is just the wrong model for me. Unfortunately it's becoming more common because people still look up to Apple.
Ps in similar ways I also mod websites, I have custom stylesheets for a lot of sites I use that remove pics and make it just a plain old list of content similar to hacker news. People who are UX designers probably frown on this but they are designing for everyone (and often not with the user's wishes in mind but ulterior motives like marketing and engagement!), not for me. I know what works best for me. And I don't let others tell me what I should want.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on
Anecdote time.
I was using GNOME for a substantial amount of time, despite all the issues that it was giving me - the regressions, removing functionality, breaking extensions every so often; but the final straw that broke the camel's back was a tablet thing. At some point I think the ability to resize the left panel in Nautilus went away? Or maybe was never there to begin with. In any case, I found a discussion about the exact issue where the outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
At this point I decided that enough is enough and moved to KDE.
You're not the people I have an issue with, sorry for the ambiguous use of the word "everyone" there.
If you gave it the good college try and made an effort to actually learn how to use it and came around not liking it, then that's totally fine. It just didn't gel with you and that's ok.
> outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that; maybe tablets are holding back Gnome a bit, though I still think it's fine as a desktop overall.
I think I just wanted to vent an old personal frustration here. And perhaps to give a bit more substantiated subtle hint about how things are in GNOME. I feel like anyone using it will run into quite bad issues eventually.
Just now I remembered a second straw - the issue where scrolling down in a big folder with thumbnails on would repeatedly scroll you back to the top. I am not confident this has been solved until now either.
I vaguely recall the desperate feeling of "this DE does so little, and yet in the few things it does, it's still borderline unusable".
GNOME’s design philosophy apparently amounts to one developer (with no training or experience in design) saying “I don’t personally consider this feature to be important, and so it’s gone.”
Thanks for formulating this, as I’m too lazy to even start the conversation with the folks who’d like to have a lot of everything on their screens, with myriads of distractions and just ugly little everything. Otherwise ‘that’s tablet,’ and it’s ‘the Gnome team pushing their nonsense,’ not the particular user being used to something completely wrong from the UI/UX perspective. I’m having no issues with teaching Gnome anyone. It’s simple. Yet powerful, I can use it no issues, and it’s my second favourite after Sway. I feel those of us who actually appreciate Gnome should be more vocal about it, otherwise these weirdos with 2 mins of Gnome experience yelling too loud.
As one of these folks who want a lot of everything on my screen, I'm baffled by your declarations that my workflow is somehow objectively "wrong". Go convince Airbus that the cockpit can only have two gauges, and needs a lot of blank space.
It’s wrong because it takes too much of attention, which we don’t have a lot these days. Good for you if it works, and you really need that much at once. But it’s just wrong for a newcomer, people are getting lost among options. That’s not a rocket science, really. I won’t object there are interfaces where the most simple way of doing some work / task is to have everything on one screen, without constant switching. But for an average person using general purpose OS, it’s just not the case. My point of view that those folks who really need everything at once, they have no problems with creating an environment they need. Everyone else would benefit with the simple things being the default. I’m really happy about Gnome, I can recommend it to everyone, regardless of the previous experience, Windows or Mac. It’s simple enough to explain to a parent, by using a tablet metaphor. Here is the dock, here is the settings, upper right corner, here is all apps, etc. I even enjoy the no minimise button, you don’t really need it. I used Gnome for over a year on one of my computers, quite often and for prolonged periods of time, and even I’m a Sway user, I enjoyed it a lot. To the point I thought perhaps I should switch from sway. But I stayed with sway, for the simplicity’s sake. And the ability to design my personal environment as I see it.
I use standard GNOME as my desktop environment and nothing about it feels like it was designed for tablets and/or smartphones. Not that it isn’t capable of being used as such, but my desktop usage doesn’t indicate that tablet/smartphone use-cases were the primary goal. Is GNOME even in wide use for those contexts?
ya i was a GNOME hater for a long time after the GNOME 3 transition, switched between Mate and KDE for years. But gave up on those due to persistent video instability and went to vanilla Ubuntu GNOME and it's actually pretty nice. Not sure if it was good originally but I actually prefer it now.
In a bit of fairness to the haters, Gnome 3 used to have a lot of graphical glitches and was unstable in a lot of its early iterations, but I broadly agree with your characterization.
I think if you actually give modern Gnome a chance (and actually make an attempt to learn it), it's actually a pretty slick desktop.
Years of fighting to restore basic features was funny the first time, but gnome 3 was not the first time; I do not blame anyone for not trusting that gnome won't pull the rug again, and soon.
Vanilla Gnome user here. Gnome may look like it was designed for tablets but it has a keyboard shortcut for basically anything. So you don't do much of point and clicks if you know Gnome. You can but you don't have to. It just gets out of your way as they say.
Since I found with searchable app menus / start menus that I don't ever navigate through menus but just start typing, I ditched the menu entirely and have KRunner bound to the Win key. Not only is it fine with any desktop app GTK or not (that packagers have ensured will install with its FreeDesktop metadata file or some such), it supports all the enabled KDE Search plugins. So I don't ever open a calc app again, either..
It really was! I have never even used a tablet, but I was disappointed when they dropped Unity and went back to the old way.
But I was never a Windows user, either, and I've never held the idea that there is one normal and right way to do a computer interface, so I think I was more open to it than many people are.
I stayed on a workable Unity install on 2020.05 LTS for as long as possible, then switched to 2024.05 LTS, at which point Unity, for some reason, no longer functioned (even though I was using the Ubuntu Unity flavor). Tried Gnome for a while but what ultimately lost me was the notifications. To close out a notification without switching focus I had to, very carefully, click right on the X in the upper right corner. Otherwise it would activate the notification and switch focus.
I've got a workable setup with XFCE4, the whisker menu bound to the super key, a few panel plugins to make a maximized app have the same behavior as they did in Unity, and the Plank docking program (along with a brief shell script bound to the dock that kills and relaunches Plank when it starts moving out of place). The notifications work the same as they did on Unity - clicking on them dismisses them unless you click on the "activate" button to switch focus.
>They imposed this on desktop users even though nobody asked for it
I loved Unity on desktop, and I know many others too. But there was a very loud group of complainers who made them kill it. I still use it on some installations, bit it's obviously breaking more and more.
I was never able to get it working on my Thinkpad. Might be me of course, but after days of reinstalls resulting in always transparent windows, I went with Mint. And stayed.
Agreed. AMD just works for me on linux. My problem is that I am addicted to 6+ monitors and top end gpus... nvidia just seems to hate linux for top end setups. Which is sad, windows just handles my dumb 5060+5090 setup easily. Gaming on linux has gotten way better, but I still can't gigure out how to get some games working. So I'm stuck between using linux + sway / i3 which I looooove... and not being able to get the value out of my $6k gaming rig. Sadly this is a tale that's been going on for 20 years for me.
Linux Mint works great with nvidia cards. It has a great driver manager. It is the only distro I found after getting a laptop with a RTX card that just works.
It has worked flawlessly too after 8 months of use.
I personally like mint too for the past 10 years. They also decided to go against the grain of Ubuntu and not ship things like firefox in a snap, which I prefer.
People tease mint as being a distro for normies and grandmas, but it has worked flawlessly for me and really all I want is an environment which just works.
Is it also doing great with the 58xx driver series that is now mandatory on arch for models a couple years old? I've been having severe issues since then to the point where I had to borrow an AMD GPU from a friend just to get my working station up and running again
It’s the only issue I have on my CachyOS install on an AMD 5900X+9070XT without additional peripherals. It seems like when I hit sleep it doesn’t manage to fully enter sleep (illustrated by the power lights) and then never wakes up anymore until a hard power reset.
I remember them working on a hybrid OS that would run on your phone or tablet and then you could switch it to desktop mode. Actually looks like they're still working on that
seriously guys, can we design product pages so they actually give you a sense of how the product actually works? That page sucks.
I found a video and honestly while I love the idea it seems that the implementation is the worst of both worlds. Who thought that this pull down menu style was a reasonable idea....
Many of the sleep issues these days are actually Microsoft's fault. They tried to impose AlwaysOn AlwaysConnected but did a terrible job of specifying it and quality controlling implementation.
I had a Dell Precision from 2020 that never woke from S3 sleep properly, because Dell didn't care about S3 because they expected AoAc (which Windows now defaults to) to actually work. Except A) people don't want laptops that act like phones, and B) it was terrible and munched so much battery it was way better to just hibernate all the time.
Switched to ThinkPad from 2020 and it has a BIOS setting for "classic sleep" and S3 sleep works perfectly.
And Fedora gets 3-4x the battery life than Windows did for general use on both, with much less heat and fan usage, right out of the box. Not to mention bullshit like Windows taking literal seconds to show a directory's contents in the file manager... I'm completely done with Windows for anything beyond gaming (but Valve is changing that rapidly), and dual-booting to a bare Windows install for corporate remote access apps or such, on everything in my house.
> It's sad that Ubuntu still has issues waking up from sleep mode in 2025.
This has little to do with Ubuntu and probably much more to do with proprietary hardware that makes it difficult to a write a bug-free driver for Linux kernel sleep mode.
What device is giving you the most trouble with sleep mode?
Wait, what sleep mode issues are you talking about? I've been able to wake my ubuntu machine up using my keyboard and mouse. I haven't gotten around to testing steam link wake on lan though, I'd be disappointed if that didn't work.
I'm old enough to remember everyone praising Apple for not following Microsoft and making iOS it's own separate thing.
It's totally mad that they're now trying to converge their two differentiated, successful, and (mostly) well-liked OSes with the new one they just made for a $3000 headset nobody bought and even fewer people use with any regularity.
You can't seriously compare how inappropriate Windows 8 was on desktop to the latest macOS. Bad UI aside, the OS is effectively the same OS X from 2001 with some fresh skin.
Also a lot of people hate on macOS changes, I myself did not upgrade to the latest version.
Windows 8 is fundamentally just Windows 7 with a full screen start menu. This is a dumb usability downgrade, but unless you went out of your way to install Metro apps, it wasn't such a big change. Your apps worked the same way they always had.
I'm still on Sequoia on both my Macs. I updated my iPad Pro to iOS 26, decided it was meh, and am not updating my phone. My iPhone is over 4 years old and figure the new iOS will run like crap on it and then I'll be forced to get a new phone.
> figure the new iOS will run like crap on it and then I'll be forced to get a new phone.
Indeed, it does run like crap on older phones. You made the right choice. I don't feel forced to upgrade my phone but the new OS definitely drains the battery faster and feels slightly sluggish, making me regret the "upgrade."
Honestly, forced to use a macbook for work and I get incredibly strong "windows 8" vibes from macos.
Apple still has pretty incredible hardware, although it's definitely priced with that in mind - but the software has been a constant slog. Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation, without clear goals or direction.
Frankly - the OS apple is producing for their traditional computers feels like garbage. I use Arch/Gnome on my personal hardware and I feel like some time in the last 5ish years my opinion swapped - I used to think Gnome was mostly copying Apple design choices, but slightly worse. Now I think Gnome is just a more clear, more usable DE than what Apple is releasing. I moved my wife to Arch/Gnome on her personal laptop last year, and the sure sign was that she hasn't really had any problems with it.
All that said... I still keep a laptop around with Windows 11 on it, because I have a couple of legacy tools (CNCs, solar inverters) that still want it, and holy shit is modern Windows just absolute trash. I grew up on Windows, from windows 3.1 to windows 10, and it's the worst of the 3 by a good distance right now.
You know something's gone wrong with commercial tech companies when the only OS that actually feels like it's intentionally designed for users is the free product.
In what way does MacOS feels like garbage ? I use it everyday on a +5y MacBook and it’s an absolute blast. Powered on for weeks without reboot, 3x4K 32inch screens, hundred of chrome pages and apps opened and it’s all smooth. Ofc I don’t even hear a fan but the software is amazing for me. It all works, all the time.
I'm someone else, but I also feel like macOS is rubbish.
On linux, if I get a kernel panic, I can dig into the kernel, add debug logs, understand what's going on, and potentially fix it. If I want to swap to a scrolling window manager like niri, I can.
On macOS, it's a black box and any radar I file with apple vanishes in a black hole never to be seen again. There's hardly any customization, and the default UX is horribly undiscoverable and can't easily be driven with just a keyboard.
As a hacker, the above makes macOS garbage, and I'd assume anyone on hacker news would understand that desire to be able to understand and hack on the software you use.
I also like to hack things but you understand that what drive Mac sales are not people who’d like to hack the system but regular people on a massive scale. Linux does not have this problem because there isn’t the same kind of economics involved in year-round salaries. So I won’t consider trash an OS who’s main target by far is not hackers, even though there is still some margin for some customization.
Your point still stands that for you the OS is garbage. But you’re probably not the main user they have in mind when they develop the OS
> Change for change's sake, needless shifting in settings/config menus. Weird "we tried to make this similar to mobile" themes in some places but not others. Overly complex os navigation
That is garbage ? Changing the UI of settings ? MacOS navigation has been the same for a decade. Who uses the settings daily ? I don’t even open settings once a month. Every single piece of UI evolve and must evolve. The ones that don’t are stuck in the past and belongs to a museum. I don’t see what complex and thus garbage.
Functionality that you use once a year or less is _exactly_ the sort of thing that needs to be consistent. It's literally the last place that an innovation should arrive, after that innovation has been fully developed and battle-tested.
So among the hundreds of things that makes an OS garbage, you’ll likely place as top criteria an UI you use once a year. Windows settings has been the worse of the worse of all UI settings ever. That’s my criteria then, macOS is luxury in any kind of form compared to the maze and hidden UI that make windows.
Effectively no one is arguing Apple is “inventing” this, and tons of people—especially the most ardent Apple fans—hate this direction. Adoption of the 26 OSs is lower than others in recent memory. Even the comment you’re replying to is critical of it.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, especially under Tim Cook. Let’s please not do this obvious rage bait where you fabricate that a group has a singular unified hypocritical opinion which is the opposite of what we’re seeing just so you can hate on them.
What even is the point? For the past twenty years, I have never seen an Apple fan being as close to annoying as the haters are. Same thing with other groups like vegans: There are more people loudly proclaiming that vegans are annoying than there are annoying vegans in the world.
Why must we keep defining ourselves by hating on others? As long as they’re not causing harm, let people be. “Why are you so angry?”
Completely agree! Aero was stunningly beautiful, and even the flatter Fluent Design version in Windows 10 was great, but not so much how it was applied in 11.
Except that GNOME Mobile is actually pretty close to achieving that right now, and runs quite well on any reasonably up-to-date mobile hardware if the kernel-level support is there.
The new glass look is just so bad. It feels cheap, like a child’s toy. And performance is worse as a result.
I’ve turned it off on my phone, via the accessibility settings. But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off. Lots of controls are subtly misaligned now. I regret updating.
I have a Linux workstation. On Linux, nobody has the power to foist new ideas - good or bad - onto all users. All the arguing and bike shedding is one of Linux’s big weaknesses. But it’s also a huge strength. The desktop experience hasn’t gotten worse over the last 20 years like it has on windows and macOS. Programs start more or less instantly, as they should on modern hardware.
Yep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop.
edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
As someone who had been in the Apple ecosystem since Windows XP, it was difficult to lose that constant seamless interplay between my phone and computer. But honestly? The trade-off was worth it in the end. I’m 8mo into Linux-only desktop and man…it’s great.
Look into KDE Connect¹ - it provides some of that seamless experience. It even has some basic support for syncing between iOS and Gnome, but it's originally designed for seamless integration between Android and KDE's plasma desktop.
Note that Google Pixel hardware is just fine and not evil, and they're looking at a different vendor for the next version anyway, because Google is making it so the Pixel will only run approved OSes.
The Titan chip does a lot more than sign and store keys. It also has storage (could contain malicious payloads) as well as an RNG and AES/SHA accelerators (which could be weakened/compromised), among other things.
However if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care.
In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
the issue is not about it being american as it is america being in control of it. you don't get access to windows or mac os source code. You can however take the linux source code, fork it and make it yours. that "dictator for life" in portland can't stop you. nor can anyone else in the us government for that matter.
But technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes.
So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.
sure but a nation state that takes digital sovereignty seriously could easily devote some resources towards maintaining their own fork. Thats the point. Hell, north korea has their own special linux distro
I think this is objectively true. The Linux Foundation is also US based. We saw this when Russsian contributors were banned from the kernel to comply with US sanctions.
The big difference of course is that relying on Linux does not have to mean realying on US corporations. At the level of a nation-state, and certainly at the level of a larger political collective like the EU, control can always be taken back if political interests diverge or if risks mount. Linux could be forked and maintained out of Europe, Asia, or elsewhere if needed. And technology could even continue to be pulled from the US version if desired.
Above, I mean the kernel. But the "distro" level offers another level of contorl. A distro maintained outside of the US offers a lot of local control and isolation from the risks of US control. The kernel used in this distro does not have to be fully forked to be audited, to remove anything concerning, or to add in whatever is desired. And the same is true of all other software included in the distro.
While maintaining a distro is a lot of work, it can be done at the scale of an individual or a small team. It can be done with a travial number of resources at the nation state level. In some ways, it is crazy that more countries do not have their own distro even if it does start as much more than a "spin" of some maintstream distro. As political tensions mount, this may become a more normal "national security" step to take. Being ready to pivot and isolate from the US is more important than actually doing it. If all your government and military infrastructure is based on a distro you control, you can then pivot quickly if you need to. And there are customization and standardization benefits of having a regionally focussed distro beyond national security.
Distros cannot realistically work without hardware support. Hardware is designed in America. The licensing for the software to use the hardware is controlled by the United States
I mean I can write a kernel right now with all the computer systems theory implemented, but without the architecture specs, the firmware, etc, this is completely useless.
Licensing can be ignored. Specs can be stolen. You think China cares about enforcing American copyright in the slightest? One way other countries can retaliate against American tariffs and invasions is to start ignoring American copyright and IP laws.
You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is American, because the hardware is American. Even if the company wants to open source it, the US government can block it in whatever country.
> You can but the firmware that is needed to run it is America
This thinking is part of the reason for the momentum behind RISC-V and LoongArch.
RISC-V is a lot like Linux in that it benefits from International cooperation and innovation while offereing the ability to seize control if needed.
But you are correct that even an open ISA does not protect you from a proprietary hardware implementation at the chip or firmware level that you still do not control. This requires additional open standards.
Bigger picture, it means "domestic" chip design and fabrication capabilities. The world is just starting to wrap its mind around this. But again, RISC-V is really helping here. There are emerging RISC-V chip capabilities in Europe and even in places like India for example. It is easy to laugh off these efforts as non-competitive. But not only will many of them find niches where they will be economically pheasible but they offer an important backstop to geopolitical risk and the flexibility to at least of enough domestic capability to keep the lights on if needed. Building and rolling out a RISC-V ecosystem will take years or decades. But once there, it can be pivotied to or maintained on any RISC-V chip. As long as you have the ability to produce some kind of RISC-V chip, this ecosystem can never really be taken away from you.
And RISC-V offers the same kind of international collaboration that allows both pooling of efforts and protection from reliance on any one actor or region that could become a political threat.
RISC-V understands its role in this regard. It too was an "American" technology but Linux International was setup in Switzerland for a reason.
No it's not, it's all made in China. Maybe you mean the IP is American, but the IP can just be ignored. If the USA can ignore trade agreements, and defence pacts, then its newfound adversaries can ignore American IP laws too.
The FreeBSD Foundatioin is based in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
OpenBSD is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
NetBSD is a non-profit based out of Deleware, USA
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "US-focused" though. I do not think the US government has much direct influence in practice. Both governance and engineering contributions in BSD are highly distributed internationally.
That said, FreeBSD in particular has quite a lot of corporate contribution. Netflix is a heavy user of and contributor to FreeBSD for example. And the recent $750,000 laptop push in FreeBSD is being driven by Quantum Leap Research out of Virginia.
The fact that the BSD systems have less coporate reliance does not necessarily offer more protection though. There is less corporate "control" simply because the BSD systems are less important economically.
You could fork Linux anytime you like and your fork would than have as little corporate control as NetBSD. And just like NetBSD, not taking US corporate contributions would mean less engineering investmetn overall and potentially having to do more yourself.
I mean, it would probably be easier for the EU or China to fork Linux than it would be for them to migrate to OpenBSD if they wanted independence from US exposure.
Yeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
To the average person, no. If you ask a regular user, you'll find that there is no alternative what Excel can do, the PowerPoint alternatives are missing loads of features, etc. Additionally, files created in MS Office still cannot reliably be used in the open source alternatives without something breaking. Until a non-technical user can open my PowerPoint presentation in LibreOffice and not have to apologize for the formatting, they aren't equivalent.
A huge part of this is fonts. Users prefer proprietary fonts, and when you open files using them in the alternatives it tends to look like terrible. You will not convince users that this is on them to fix, and to be honest they're right, it's not their problem.
But it doesn't make Signal bad. If Americans blindly process our messages without knowing what's inside, it's worse than not depending on them, but better than showing your private correspondence to somebody.
At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time.
Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw.
Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).
I was saying that non-US office suites are good enough in terms of features, but people don't like to adapt to new things. WhatsApp vs Signal was an example where people don't want to use the better alternative, for no other reason than they can't be bothered to try it.
But even when talking about not depending on US tech, it is relevant: depending on open source US tech is a step towards not depending on US tech. The goal is not racism ("it's made by US people so I don't want it"). The goal is sovereignty ("if I depend on this, the US government can screw me").
There used to be programs that would connect to multiple proprietary systems, like Pidgin. If we had this today we'd have one free-software app for WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram (and some used in other countries, like IIRC Zangi?). However, the social and regulatory environment changed - now whoever made that app could expect to be charged with a crime.
I don't have a definitive opinion on such messaging apps. I like that it bridges between different services, trying to free the users from the lock-in, but...
If I talk to someone on Signal today, I know that they are probably using the official Signal on the other side. With the guarantees that I know from Signal. Now what if half of the users of Signal were using a third-party app? How much can I trust this app?
Say Matrix has a bridge to Signal. I talk to someone over what looks like Signal from my end, but it goes to some third-party server that pretends to be Signal and then relays those messages to my friend on their Matrix client. As a Signal user, I cannot know it, but my conversation is not E2EE anymore. And it kind of defeats the point of using Signal entirely, doesn't it?
I guess my point is that in terms of security, there is value in making it possible to verify that both ends are using the official Signal app, by locking it as much as possible (e.g. with DRM-like technology). But of course it's annoying to be locked in. Even though I don't feel personally super locked into Signal: I could move to another similar app in a minute. But again people tend to be lazy and don't want to switch apps. It's a hard problem, I guess.
That app already exists. It's called TM SGNL. The Department of War used it. It sent all their messages in plain-text to an Israeli server that was leaking memory dumps to the public internet (a la Heartbleed), 600GB of which were collected by hackers and sold on the dark web. Worst case scenario. That's not a fantasy, that literally happened. Do you still trust Signal?
We've been working on our next major release for a long time now to better support modern protocols. But as an unfunded Open Source project it's hard to get things done quickly when it's a "free time" only project.
The European Commission has recently put WhatsApp under scrutiny in terms of the Digital Services Act, and forced them to open up allowing interoperability with other messaging applications.
Perhaps we'll see a return of apps like Pidgin soon.
Mac feels like it is constantly trying to sell you on their cloud services. A few times a day it will tell me that I haven't backed up to the cloud.
Windows is strangely less direct, but will regularly automatically try to save something to onedrive and force a subscription. Plus, it is just full of ads and nonsense.
I’ve noticed on my work machine, it really really really wants me to save my new document to one drive. It was about three clicks in the save dialog to get back to a local drive.
They were sneaky about it, with a switch to “turn on autosave” only working when you save to the cloud.
as a dude who uses all three heavily for work & personal (windows/linux/macos) macos doesnt even come close to windows in the "trying to sell me on the cloud services" front. microsoft ddos's my brain with sign in with an o365 account at every corner of computing now. microsoft products are actually insane now.
i have quite a few mac vms for development things and ive had no issue just disabling all the icloud pieces & my usage in these environments seems to be pretty damn quiet the way i like it. windows has gone completely bonkers damn file explore has network service call stacks summoning bing wtf is going on there.
feel like i have to shower after using windows now it's crazy. reminds me of early 2000s when HP laptops were just filled with bloatware when you bought them, except microsoft has now baked this unforgettable experience into their operating system.
i will remain on macos for my personal device until other hardware manufs make great hardware. i have the pleasure (or displeasure) of using lots of different devices for work so ive got a stack of thinkpads and surfaces and a couple frameworks even and apple is still leading the charge on the bonkers hardware that fits in my backpack. im loyal to no one in the end and have no dog in this fight, but i would really enjoy if someone could catch up to apples chip developments for mobile desktop computing. id love something that is as refined and performant+efficient as my m4max pro but runs linux.
all in all i think device/manuf tribalism is the lamest part of computing and it's always been in my best interests to try them all myself and switch on a whim to whatever feels like it meets my needs. im in a unique position to use a lot of diff devices and os's with what i do and there's undoubtedly frustrations with all of them. there's always going to be a free spirit inside me that champions linux to the ends of the horizons though, but apple is undeniably in a unique position to r&d bankroll tsmc, design their own soc, develop hardware and software and marry all of those things together. it's cool shit, and they'd score a lot of goodwill if they just documented their damn stuff so linux distributions could just work on these devices rather than requiring some crazy reverse engineering effort and all the associated mailing list drama that came with asahi.
The HP ZBook G1a is similar to a Macbook in case(*), touchpad, screen and audio quality, design and performance - just the efficiency and battery life are kind of crap and, uh, I haven't figured out yet how to configure reliable sleep on Linux. It lasts 6-7 hours idle. You can also empty the battery in an hour with heavy compile jobs, but that one Macbooks do as well according to info I've found on the net.
(*) Aluminum is more about perceived than actual quality - I wouldn't mind touching something with lower heat conduction, especially in winter. The only thing that I really like about it, compared to a Thinkpad, is the stiffness of the screen part.
I'm in violent agreement with you! Don't even know what I would have done without OCLP on my older systems, still running circles (in reliability) around other non Apple similar devices. And - for the record - I hate iPhones, as well as what Apple is doing with its OS lately.
Ugh it annoys me so much that the desktop etc is all in one drive without me setting it that way. But then there is still a desktop/documents directory in the usual spot under your profile, just the files don’t appear if you actually look at the desktop.
Even within the range of Linux distros there are some that feel more agenda-driven than others. That's the absolute wonder of it. One can sidestep the flamewars and just use another distro that suits likeminded people.
On the other hand I think this makes it difficult to provide a perfect experience - you have to stay closer to the herd if you want trouble free computing. You have the choice.
I think it's great that there are Linux projects where the people in the project are obviously unhinged fanatical idealists sent on a mission by god to do <whatever> in the One True Way. I wouldn't use any of those projects, but it's great that they exist, and sometimes their good ideas percolate out to projects that I do use.
Like fine, they're gonna make a distro that only uses software under one of the FSF's free as in freedom copy-left open source licenses, not just excluding closed source software, but also binary blob device firmware and software distributed under one of those filthy permissive licenses. That's great. It's fucking unusable, but it's awesome that it exists and it's great that they're doing it.
Curious to hear which good ideas had their origin in a distro run by fanatical idealists. Not asking for evidence to try and disprove you. Genuinely curious!
Framing it as "fanatical" is a way of not understanding people's needs sometimes and that makes it harder for oneself to admit when they got it right - after all you don't want to find that you've turned into "a fanatic."
I like rolling distributions. Fedora was my longtime ship and at the beginning it was a pain because I always wanted to build something that wasn't available - the newest version of something like python. Then you wouldn't be able to build it because it had dependencies that needed to be newer also than what Fedora had.
I spent countless hours sorting out dependencies, clashes with the versions that were already installed that I couldn't remove, building and rebuilding things to keep them working and fixing @#$%@ SELinux permissions issues that made things fail extremely mysteriously. I tried making my own updated RPMs to ease the dependency management but that turned out to be so hard to do that I gave up in frustration - some tiny mistake and you have to go through almost the whole process again to get an updated RPM. One would have mysterious failures in the RPM build process that were extremely difficult to debug.
Then RedHat fixed the problem in an even worse way: by releasing new versions at a crazy rate. The upgrade process never seems to go smoothly for me.
Ubuntu was/is more uptodate generally but it's based on exactly the same strategy. Packaging on Ubuntu seems to me to be an even more incredible mess of confusion with documentation that doesn't help one iota.
I tried various things but the one that stuck with me was Artix. It's rolling and it sometimes breaks e.g. today when the new nvidia 590 drivers installed and they don't work with my old card. The upside is that it's always at the bleeding edge and I rarely need to build things myself - and if I do I usually already have the required dependencies. Packages also install with all the development headers etc and for me that is just a luxurious simplicity. I could also understand the PKGBUILD files and use makepkg without even needing to see the documentation. It just works.
It also doesn't use systemd. That's a preference you might call fanatical but I did after all get off windows to use Linux partly so that "the man" wouldn't tell me what to like so why would I accept that kind of thing on Linux? I use dinit instead and that is what I would have liked systemd to be - a service manager with a simple file format that is a million times easier to write and more reliable than system V init scripts and the ability to use it for running things in a user session as well .... and nothing else.
Anyhow this is all driven by my personality - I like trying out new things. I'm not fantatical, I think?? My computer is a toy for my mind. My work machines can be "reliable."
I turn on my computer, the desktop shows up…and that’s it. No random windows, no popups about some bundled software I don’t use or how my subscription for X service I don’t want isn’t activated. A chime and a blank screen. Bazzite made my computer fun again.
Windows is a bizarre product at this point; it is what the company is famous for, but it is small beans next to Azure, right?
Nobody would get into the Operating System business to make money I think, the going rate is $0, subsidized by something (an ad company, a hardware company, or general kindness and community spirit).
No, Windows still has Windows tax, which is why I always choose "No OS" when buying a machine. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately, so we can't judge the price. Android sure is subsidized though.
Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).
Android does have a cost. While the OS itself is free, any manufacturer that wants to put Play Store, which is almost every company outside China, needs to pay Google a license fee, which effectively pays for Android. Of course there are also ads everywhere in Android and Android apps that helps pay the bill.
There are really any ads in Android itself, even with Google Apps installed. Which, by the way, you don't need to use even if they are installed (except, for example, Chrome to get a different app store or whatnot-, just like a fresh Windows install needing to use Edge to get Firefox or Chrome).
And it's still miles easier to get Android to switch default apps and also respect your choices, than to get Windows to allow you to switch default apps and then shut the fuck about their crap.
Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up.
The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.
What I had with Linux did also worked fine, provided I was happy with randomly dropping wlan sessions when doing heavy downloads, using OpenGL 3.3 instead of the OpenGL 4.1, watching YouTube without hardware decoding, and having to take out the battery when it hang during a reboot.
Other than that, it was a great Linux laptop, 2009 - 2024.
If you want the "Home" version of Windows, you'll get ads and crap, but the cost will be free/low. If you don't want the ads and need a more professional setup, then you can pay for Windows "Pro" version. They also have server versions that cost a lot more, so yes, Microsoft can and does make money from their OS. No, it's probably not as much as they make from Azure now, but in the past it made them a lot of money. It's estimated Windows brings in ~$20 billion for Microsoft, which is nothing to balk at. Azure brings in ~$75 billion. $20 billion isn't "small beans" in this equation, it's substantial.
"It doesn't matter whether you have the $140 Windows Home edition or the $200 Windows Pro edition; you'll see plenty of ads throughout your Windows system. There are ads in File Explorer, and you'll even find them in the Start menu."
Productivity and Cloud have a revenue of about 30B each while personal computing only was 13.5B (that includes windows Xbox and search + advertising) according to ms earnings report q4 25
I would imagine a significant portion of the cloud revenue is derivative of windows though. Whether that’s lift and shift workloads or entra id which is picked over alternatives for its compatibility with existing windows and AD infrastructure.
The only reason Azure is a success though is because of Windows. Maybe now it's so big that it can exist without Windows but Windows is the gateway into Azure. So many other companies would kill for a platform (aka Meta) and here Microsoft has one and is treating it poorly. In pure financial terms it makes sense but, as a business strategy, I think it's severely lacking.
It's because Satya is worried about next quarter's earnings call, not what Windows looks like in ten years.
BillG had that big meeting with everybody at Microsoft awhile back and basically told them they had about 6-12 months to right the ship. Personally I hope they don't. Nothing makes me happier than arrogant jackasses being utterly destroyed by life, which is what will happen if they continue to enshittify Windows.
Satya seems to forget that Azure exists because of Windows. It's the deep integration into Windows that makes it worth anything, otherwise we could all switch to Linux / Mac OS X and run everything in AWS / GCP. You quite literally don't need Azure at all for anything if you don't have Windows-based machines.
I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
> No one wants it to be anything other than what you want it to be
I wish I could agree, but the recent push for Wayland only, or GNOME deciding to deprecate middle-click paste, or further reliance on systemd, comprise a non-exhaustive list of examples of things I don't want, and which may end up pushing me off the platform again on the desktop. There are definitely opinionated agendas in Linux (and open source more broadly), and the relative instability of Linux as a target makes forking and maintaining a project + dependencies often unrealistic for a single person... which is how these big projects are able to exert so much influence.
MS was almost two decades early to the mobile party, and still fumbled it. Because they didn't have the usability insights around touchscreens that others pioneered.
I had a wince device before the iPhone existed 2005 ish.. An o2 XDA 2s ... There was flash for the OS ... All your files were stored in ram... Internet was a 56k dialup speeds... The arm CPU was anemic.... Wince also had issues if left on too long.. I.e. phone stopped giving audio in a call ... All in all was cool, the slidenout keyboard I miss but terrible software ... The lack of durable user files made it a fail.
I've been using macOS since 2020, but for the last year I have seriously considered switching to Linux. macOS Catalina felt really fast, easy to use, and lacked the useless features they kept adding and the ipadOS like interface they began implementing. In 2020, the feature set felt much more intentional.
I’m stuck in a world of AirDrop and expecting my phone to know the Wi-Fi password on my laptop, so I’m not gonna leave MacOS but it absolutely does suck. It used to be that Spotlight file finding was broken, but as of the last today Finder file finding is broken too. This is on multiple new Macs.
If you only need to airdrop between your own devices, try out KDE Connect. It uses the network (WiFi) but I think there's also a Bluetooth mode in beta.
I feel like cli agents are the main benefit of going back to Linux. It’s such a joy to have all the solutions to customizations and fixes I want completely automated, using an agent that can control anything I permit and understands my OS completely.
I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro. The justification for bringing some iOS ideas to macOS made sense, because everyone knows how to use iOS and is familiar with those conventions.
I’m curious if we’ll see another major shift with the new deign lead, or if the higher ups will want to run with Liquid Glass for a while after so much investment, and not wanting to alienate users by radically changing design direction too often. Or if Liquid Glass is here to stay as long as we have Vision Pro, because VR/AR demand that style of UI, so everything else needs to fall in line for consistency’s sake.
I think I’d be more apt to switch to Linux if it wasn’t for all the mobile integration macOS and iOS have. Giving that up is a tough sell. It also means finding new solutions for managing photos, music, notes, and a bunch of other things. I also struggle to find non-Apple hardware I find acceptable. I’ve used Linux on and off for over 20 years, and in the past few years is gotten to the point where I think I could daily drive it with little to no compromise, in a bubble. But mobile really bursts that bubble.
> I find it so odd that Apple put so much weight behind the VisionOS design, rolling it out to all platforms, considering so few people have Vision Pro.
I suspect they began working on Liquid Glass before the Vision Pro was publicly unveiled, so they didn't know what the public response would be.
What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well. It just isn't a good product.
Perhaps they're still banking on a future where the Vision Pro becomes a pair of real glasses. In which case, Liquid Glass is the type of interface you'd want to have.
I thought I saw various comments to the effect that the Vision Pro is just a developer thing to bootstrap the app ecosystem, a prelude to a real consumer product. But if that is the case I’m slightly confused as to why they aren’t sharing more of their roadmap…
> What I honestly find more baffling is that they thought the Vision Pro would sell well.
Those monopolies seem so scared to "miss the next smartphone" that they invest heavily in whatever their competitors do. Everybody was running after VR/AR headsets, now everybody is running after AI.
They see the others run somewhere, they run in that direction. Just in case.
I agree with you. Microsoft really has gotten bad in this regard. In the past, the operating system was kind of semi-useful. Now one has to wonder what the real agenda is. For me the quitting point was the recall-sniffing on everyone; I don't care if this can be disabled. To me it means that the USA wants to monitor me non-stop. That's a no go. (I was already using Linux before, so I don't depend on Microsoft anyway, but it now meant that I also need to stop using secondary computers with a Microsoft-tainted operating system. I can not trust the USA in any regard anymore with the TechBros in charge. They killed all goodwill and reputation.)
Obviously, you can't build something as complex as a modern operating system without intention, and therefore an "agenda" but I have a feeling you know what OP was getting at.
I also know that the impulse to be a pedant is strong because I fight it every day, ha!
By agenda-driven, I think they mean the commercial operating systems are designed with the intention of improving the uptake of other products and services by the companies that sell them.
I think you are referencing something more like a political agenda. And Linux to some extent, GNU even more so are motivated by a political agenda: user empowerment. It is just… a good agenda.
Was going to say, the online help always baits you into using OpenJDK which doesn't work for random stuff, or in older times there was those non-default "non free" repos you needed to add if you wanted wifi to work.
Windows has evolved into the world's highest security risk. MacOS feels like Eye Candy due to its increasingly inaccessible price for people with low resources. So, price and security are the reasons why I switched to Linux.
Getting a macbook is cheaper than it has ever been. You can get a new m4 macbook air for around 750 on amazon. The prices of apple laptops have been dropping every year despite inflation in the rest of the economy....
Yes, prices have gone down over the years, but still unaffordable by people who can afford less.
Don't get me wrong, MacOS graphics, aesthetics, GUI, are awesome and I like its consistency but there are cons, too.
They typically have a higher upfront cost, limited upgrades, fewer ports/software options, repair challenges.
For comparisons, I purchased an Acer Helios 300, three or four years with the following specs:
The Acer Predator Helios 300
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Storage: 512 GB SSD
Display: 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS ComfyView
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 20xx.
I upgraded the machine's drives, to three, run Windows on the 500GB SSD drive, Linux on a 2TB M.2 drive and have a 4TB storage drive.
This is not something that I could do on a MacOS without a significant price upgrade. As such, I would say that MacOS is restrictive as far as hardware upgrade, and price. It's just Eye Candy for most people.
Still lots of cash, versus a 400 euro laptop, which is what many regular people end up buying.
There is a reason so many European operators have contract offers for TV or Internet packages, where customers get Apple gear "for free", naturally with a several years bound contracts.
Ha, I have nothing on my machine that anyone would want. Yes, my life is that boring. So no, I keep nothing of importance in the drives, just old memories.
Out of the box, I've experienced less spyware-related issues with Linux. I have enabled UFW, installed ClamAV, closed or blocked communication with some ports. But for the most part, I've not had the same problems that had caused system and browser infections. If anything, the badly designed hardware of the machines and systems that I've built tend to cause the problems, for the most part, not to mention my own stupidity. If I do begin to experience, spy or adware-related issues, I suppose I could look into something like this:
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
Though if things got to the point where I'd need more protection, I'd think about the following:
-Keep system and software updated.
-Enable firewall (e.g., UFW).
-Use strong passwords and MFA.
-Install from trusted sources only.
-Encrypt disks (e.g., LUKS).
-Use SELinux or AppArmor.
-Sandbox apps with Flatpak/Wayland.
-Install antivirus like ClamAV.
-Disable unnecessary services.
-Monitor logs and use tools like OpenSnitch.
-Switch to CubesOS (qubes-os.org) but I'm not that paranoid, yet :)
I'm just not too tech savvy, but honestly if anyone had enough knowledge, they'd probably could get into my system. That being said, though I consider Linux to be more secure than Windows, no system is 100% secure, in my view.
That unfortunately is true, for the most part. Whether this is due to financial reasons or for lack of engineering best practices, I can't say. All I can say is that, switching to Linux has led to significantly less cost, technical or spyware issues, not counting the issues which I created out of ignorance.
It's typical business logic. It's not enough to focus on making the product better than the user, you must have a "big" product vision and you're only allowed make changes that align with that product vision.
So when that vision is something that users are ambivalent on (3D TV, AI operating system, etc...), well tough, that's still all they're getting until it hurts the company financially or the next executive has a different "big idea". :(
It's a mess of disparate highly inconsistent systems.
The Linux user experience matches what it is - a random bunch of developers developing random software in the way they like with a very thin patina of consistency failing to hide the mess.
It's nowhere near as fabulous as you are making out - it's fanboiism to say otherwise.
As opposed to the highly cohesive and unified way Large corporations with thousands of developers work. A hive mind of likeminded individuals all working towards a single blissful objective with no distractions or competing ambitions. Not a single legacy being kept without reason, only purpose.
Come back when I can run Linux on a laptop that has 12+ hours battery life, runs fast, that’s lightweight, quiet and doesn’t cause infertility from the heat when I put it on my lap….
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone 6 years after the iPhone came out.
Of course if you are a gamer, ignore everything I just wrote.
Given that this is your stance and demands for laptop hardware I have to assume that you have never once participated in the laptop market prior to the M1 releasing?
That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.
Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.
Indeed nothing other than being the only device that dropped connections on some of my routers, no hardware video decoding no matter what tips from Linux forums I tried, OpenGL 3.3 when the card supported OpenGL 4.1....
And when during 2024 I looked for a replacement after it died, I was so lucky that I got one with an UEFI that refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD, while having no issues loading the same, if it was on external box over USB.
"refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD" sounds very much like a feature in AMI InsydeH2O firmware (and possibly others) where-by one has to manually "trust" the boot-loader file the boot menu entry points to. This doesn't seem to apply to Microsoft Windows boot loaders so I've always assumed the signing certificate is checked directly against the MS UEFI CA root rather than the intermediate 3rd party certificate that is used by Microsoft to sign distro shim files.
I have kept a screenshot of the firmware setup for years to remind me where the option can be found; looking at it now:
menu: Security > "Select UEFI file as trusted"
That would bring up a file-chooser where one can navigate the files in the EFI System Partition and select the distro's initial boot-loader file. For example, for a Debian install it would either or both of:
Apple did some OS optimizations. But the next to last x86 laptop generation (the butterfly keyboard era) was really bad. The keyboards were bad and they had poor thermals
I remember battery life on my Late 2015 MBA was great for the time. It easily got through my post-secondary classes, 3-8 hours depending on the day, with leftovers. IIRC Apple claimed 12 hours of battery life. That was a significant improvement over the suggested 5 hours of my previous laptops.
Please be serious, that straw-man is clearly not my point. (I thought you said it was 90# of CRT)
There’s definitely a balance between the newest of the newest bleeding edge hardware that we could only have dreamed of five years ago, and still functional hardware from five years ago.
Just like engineering is a balance between technical optimization and cost.
Seems like your mindset is one that chooses optimization at any cost, which is pitiable.
I bought an M3 when it was brand new but I also have a Dell XPS laptop that’s running an Intel 8th GEN processor. Both have their uses, and the existence of the M3 does not make the Dell worthless or unacceptable.
A 6 year old M1 MacBook Air that is still being sold new for $699 at Walmart is not “bleeding edge” and not expensive. Even the latest MacBook Air with 16GB RAM is $999.
A. ACPI which is a sprawling, overengineered mess created by Microsoft, Intel, and Toshiba, and
B. ACPI-specific things like sleep and power being tested only for Windows
B is a direct result of two things: 1) crappy outsourced firmware developers, and 2) Microsoft's 1990s strategy of disallowing OEMs from offering systems with other operating systems preinstalled.
So, not really Linux's fault. If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
> If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.
> UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.
Arm (and Risc-V and other arches) Linux has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devicetree instead of ACPI, which is better in that it declaratively documents the hardware in a system and how to access it. However, the hardware support which can be found in the Arm ecosystem is in no way better than that for x86 laptops. Many SoC manufacturers still don't put any effort into upstreaming drivers or device trees, many devices are still only supported by tossing a single release of a heavily patched kernel over the corporate wall and then forgetting about them.
It's important to distinguish between the Framework 13 and the Framework 16. The Framework 16 is by far the most ambitious of the two, and so it has had a lot more issues. I use a Framework 13, and I've loved it. It's light, has a solid frame, and runs Linux great. The battery life isn't great, and the speakers aren't either, but I've been able to mitigate the latter with EasyEffects.
If the 16 performs worse in the power efficiency department, that is not great, but it doesnt make my machine run any worse. Calling it heavy is crazy to me, the thing is tiny. If you think it's heavy you'd have trouble using an iPad. The screen thing was a shitty manufacturing issue, they released a kit to fix it, which I luckily didnt need since mine came after they fixed it in production.
I've got a Framework I am not too upset with, but the battery life (especially during sleep) is definitely one of my gripes. I still have yet to try powertop or other tools to optimize, maybe I would be proven wrong.
Sleep just ceased to exist in the last few years and got replaced with an always on, low power mode.
I believe the reasoning was partly that suspend to RAM had serious reliability issues due to the complexity of saving the state, partly that people starting expecting cell phone-like performance where eg, mail is always received.
I think that the ThinkPad X13s Gen1 might meet these requirements. It is my favorite ARM Linux laptop I've ever used. It has great support in Debian 13 (trixie), and it feels pretty smooth and fast. It doesn't have any fans, stays cool, and I regularly get a full day's worth of battery life out of it with margin to spare (10-12 hours). It's better than the newer Snapdragon X1 Elite based ThinkPads, in my opinion, even though it isn't quite as fast because it is passively cooled, is easily fast enough that I've never noticed it feeling "slow", has good driver support in mainline Linux and Mesa (which took a few years to be fully worked out, but is there now), and it's readily available for a good price (on eBay).
I haven't really played around with that much, sorry. I don't typically use sleep on my laptops. I prefer to either hibernate or just shutdown and start up again when I need it.
I'd guess that the X13s hardware support in Ubuntu is likely as good as Debian, and switching probably wouldn't help you much. I have noticed that newer kernel versions (notably 6.12 and later) and the latest firmware (as of sometime last year) really fixed a lot of little issues for the X13s. That probably makes a bigger difference than the distro. I'd check to see which versions you're using.
I'm hoping that the new Snapdragon X2 Elite based laptops coming out this year will beat it. Qualcomm seems to have been trying to upstream driver support for them earlier than the X1. Then it's up to what kinds of laptops OEMs offer with them.
Personally I'd still just get a used ThinkPad X13s Gen 1 on eBay at this point if I were going to buy another one today because they're available for around $400, and I don't see anything better that's passively cooled, with great battery life, and great Linux support available at the moment. I hope there will be a better, faster alternative in the near future. I'd gladly upgrade.
I love my expensive Macbook at work, but at home old my old Thinkpad running Linux is a godsend. The performance is perfectly adequate for all my daily non-work needs, battery lasts several hours, and since the thing has little monetary value, I can be pretty careless with it, in an environment with small kids running around and doing random things. At this rate, I think it will last me well into 2030's.
I'm not going to buy a new Macbook with my own money as long as I can't install Linux on it. I don't want perfectly fine machines to turn into e-waste, or at least become insecure once the original manufacturer decides not to offer OS updates anymore.
Besides the 12+ hour battery life which is only achievable with ARM processors, everything described can be accomplished easily for the typical slightly above average computer user with Kubuntu today.
I installed latest Kubuntu on my old 2015 MacBook Pro and it runs ice cold now when playing YouTube videos with Firefox whereas before it ran hot even with a Mac fan control app
I believe devices based on Lunar Lake (and the upcoming panther lake) can hit 12h battery life. Something with a 268V will be the fastest low power chip you can grab that will likely support linux.
But I do wish there was a viable ARM laptop offering that supports linux.
But here's the thing with Apple ARM processors. Each core in that M3 chip is faster than the corresponding core in an x86 chip. And it has unified memory, meaning that the CPU, GPU, and NPU all get access to the same RAM.
So you can get long battery life, cool thermals, and superior performance all in the same machine, at the same time. It will take the rest of the industry years to catch up to what Apple has wrought.
I think what you're running into is that you have a different attitude than some of us do about technology. I've been using computers for a very long time as well, but I don't feel a sense of entitlement to the latest and greatest features because it often comes with other compromises regarding freedom and control. Because Linux is several years behind Windows and Mac in terms of adopting those technologies, there is an evergreen argument in every thread about Linux which boils down to "Why can't it do this thing from the last four years?"
This is uniformly tiring and uninteresting. I've been using 1920x1080 displays for 25 years and they're just fine. A retina display is not necessary to do anything that I need. Similarly with these requirements about particular thermals and particular battery lifetime. I can buy a battery and I can find a wall outlet.
You're comparing not having those features to having your husband assassinated during a play. But I don't think a lack of those features ruins the computing experience the way having your husband assassinated would ruin the play. The thing that ruins the play for me is when they chain me to my seat and tell me I have to watch the whole thing while they pin my eyelids open. And that's how I feel about using Windows or Mac OS.
So to turn your original comment around, Windows and Mac OS can call me when they allow me to configure my system as I see fit, and not shove ads for their auxiliary services in my face every time I try to start a program or modify a setting.
Come on, buddy, at this point, nobody could take you seriously.
You are attributing to the software and OS a difference that exists because of hardware.
You can’t seriously sit here and say Linux battery life on x86 doesn’t reach your par when you’re comparing it to a completely different computing architecture.
You’re comparing apples to oranges and complaining the oranges are more sour than the apples.
I recently switched to Debian on my laptop (Zephyrus G14) because it was the only way I could get it to NOT run into the problems you described. Went from ~2 hours of battery life to 10, and no more of the constant jet engine level fan activity I experienced with windows.
I have two laptops running linux. One is a MSI gaming laptop with RTX card that no one would recommend for linux.
I had to try about 10 distros before I settled on linux mint. Everything else had some problem but the driver manager on linux mint made setting up the RTX so flawless.
After 8 months of use, it is the best machine I have ever used. If I had just stuck with my old favorite KDE neon though I would have been posting on how not to get MSI if you want to use linux.
Why would anyone come back? Nobody is bothered by you having a device that you like, and nobody cares if you replace it.
People without this particular 12 hour battery life requirement (which is quite niche, most of us live near plugs) are talking about what works for them.
Battery life is the best selling point of MacBooks and the reason these are selling like crazy. I’m a full time Linux user and I’m even considering buying a macbook and running a Linux VM full time because of the battery.
Just to be clear this is entirely a response to what I have in the parentheses, right?
Ok, perhaps it is not niche. I don’t know. I have never had to use a laptop for 12 hours without any ability to recharge but if that’s a common use case I’m happy that folks are finding a way to satisfy.
I am a Linux fanboy and I totally agree that I am almost always near a plug and don't need that kind of battery life.
But when I can go for days on my work Macbook without charging (and I am a developer, so I do compile stuff), I kinda wish I could have that on Linux, too.
And again, I don't need it. Just like I don't need a fast Internet connection, but well... :-).
Bro I don't care how long the battery life is. I use my laptop plugged in 90% of the time. The portability is so I can change what location I'm sitting at, not so I can be unplugged constantly.
It's the same for me. I understand that people do want to use them without plugging in, but I would imagine at least most developers prefer external screens, right?
For me the battery is good enough when it can last two back-to-back meetings without me getting worried, so about 2.5 hours. Otherwise it stays plugged to USB-C.
The monitor is both powered and the video comes from one USB cord. My MacBook Pro can run 5-6 hours while powering the monitor. I couldn’t do that if the laptop by itself only last 3 hours.
Every now and then I use my iPad as a third monitor.
My “work life” involves business travel - consulting.
My personal life involves month long stints of me working outside the home and even at home, I am sometimes working on the patio enjoying 80 degree weather in the middle of winter in Florida…
It’s really nice - I get miles and hotel points I can use for personal travel and I can extend my work trips and bring my wife along and make it a weekend getaway. I pay for my wife out of pocket for the flight.
Linux will run on most platforms, so just pick up a fast, lightweight laptop, and select a conservative power profile for longer battery life and less heat, and don't run 32-thread machine learning jobs on it.
A 12-hour laptop battery life is a little bit of a red herring: yes, you can get it on efficient ultrabooks and MacBooks, with light use like web browsing or office work, on low brightness and minimal background apps. This is true on MacOS, Windows and Linux. The first two may be better at handling low power modes on hardware peripherals, but OTOH on Linux I have a better control over background tasks.
I have an absolute trash travel laptop from last decade, running Fedora Linux, and it lasts for multiple days if I keep it mostly closed and just open it for whatever browsing/editing I need on the road.
And how many laptops running Linux are light, power efficient, fast, quiet with good battery life?
My 16 inch M3 MacBook Pro runs 5 hours at 80% brightness doing development with my USB powered (video and power from one USB cord) portable monitor. The Mac battery is powering the monitor
Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux. Maybe your optics are tinted because you seem to be a Mac person, and Linux support for newer Macs has known issues with low power modes.
I note how your 12+ hour claim was reduced to 5 hours when you actually put it to real work. It's still impressive, of course, but 5 hours aren't out of reach for Ryzen laptops either.
BTW, I have a RISC-V platform with 8 1.6GHz CPUs that uses under 5W under full load; on your 100Wh battery it would last for 20 hours. It's not a complete system, and performance lags behind Apple/Intel CPUs, but I think in few years RISC-V may take a bite out of both.
It’s not “running Linux” that’s the issue. It’s running Linux and getting good battery lifez
And a 1.6Ghz RISC V CPU isn’t exactly “fast” in 2026 or even 2021.
You noted that it was 5 hours when powering a second monitor from its USB port. Not just displaying video from the USB port, the monitor is getting power from the USB port.
How long do you think your 5 hour laptop would last powering an external display - again not just video out, also supplying power?
"Pretty much every laptop on the planet will run Linux."
Well, as long as you buy a Mac laptop that's at least 3 years old you'll be mostly..good. Unfortunately Apple isn't interested in helping Linux and everything has to be painfully reverse engineered and some stuff for M1 is still broken.
I personally don't care about battery life, there are power outlets around everywhere I'll be more than several hours.
Still, no one is getting that kind of battery life outside apple, just the way it is. If your existence revolves around battery life there's no substitute.
But note, this thread is about replacing Windows, and Wintel does not do as well as Apple either. So this thread is off-topic.
It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity.
This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.
I didn't understand this argument, either. I think the argument is that general purpose skills will likely continue to be baked into the LLMs, so we'll see less of the repos of "expert designer" and "python expert" as if you are creating personas. But as a way to teach an LLM bespoke processes or APIs, I think skills make a ton of sense and are a super small footprint.
Cursor if I recall actually started life as a VScode plugin. But the plugin API didn’t allow for the type of integration & experiences they wanted. Hit limits quickly and then decided to make a fork.
Not to mention that VSCode has been creating many "experiemental" APIs that are not formalized for years which become de facto private APIs that only first party extensions have access to.
Good thing that Copilot is not the dominant tool people use these days, which proves that (in some cases) if your product is good enough, you can still win an unfair competition with Microsoft.
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