I realize this is a Linux community, but I was wondering why you still hate Windows. I mean, I love Linux, but I will not argue that it’s more convenient to the average person in most use cases to use Windows, I recently had to switch back to Windows and I realized how convenient it all was and how I was missing so many things because of my love for Linux. But at this point, Linux is a part of my personality and my self-image and I will not leave it, but I gotta be honest, it’s pretty convenient being on Windows. So, why have you guys chosen to still stay on Linux? Some reasons I can appreciate include

  1. The terrible privacy policies of Microsoft. It sometimes makes you feel like your computer is not owned by you but lent to you by Big Tech.
  2. The community and the spirit of sharing
  3. The joy of “figuring it out” and customizing everything you want to the minutest details
  4. FREEDOM!!! sudo su Kinda ties into the previous points, but still one of the best selling points, the freedom to do whatever you want is liberating. You can run a server on it or you can create a script while knowing you have control over almost every FOSS app there is or just destroy your whole system with one command. Idk, feels good man!

These are the big ones, but one must realize you are sacrificing many things while not using windows too, productivity can be much greater there if you are a normie, it’s really convenient! So yeah! Give me your reasons! Also, how many of you dual boot?

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    Honestly, privacy and freedom of choice alone is why I switched back.

    I will give windows credit, it’s definitely better than any other platform out there when it comes to support and it is really nice just having things “just work”. I went relatively 8 years having almost zero issues with gaming with the exception of my graphics driver which was a fault of AMD not necessarily Microsoft. All I would have to do is install a program maybe restart the computer and then run the program the way I went. With my current system I can’t even guarantee if the software I want to use will work because the ecosystem is geared towards Microsoft so every product out there is Microsoft first Unix if we get around to it.

    My only reason for switching was the lack of choice I was getting. While I never had to restart for updates because it automatically updated nightly when I turned it off so it was very non-invasive, the fact that I I wasn’t trusted enough with my computer to be able to turn those updates completely off if I wanted to, on top of the fact that every major update seemed to hard push the office suite, and every update seemed to respect my privacy less and less was already putting me on the edge of switching every time that I had it happened to me.

    But the recent rumor wave that was going through that Windows 10 when it reached end of life wasn’t going to be the same way that every other OS that they’ve had has been where they will release security updates past closing and instead they’re going to open the business only support tier to your Standard customer and offer Windows 10 at a subscription price instead, on top of the fact that Windows 11 wasn’t going to support how I wanted to set my computer up without having to reinstall it anyway, I just took the plunge and went back to Linux. Overall it has been enjoyable, but I really do miss the ease of being able to just install something and have it work that comes with being in the dominant ecosystem. That being said, It is nice not having to worry about what a mega company thinks I should run the computers that I paid for, built, and set up myself.

    • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
      1·
      4 months ago

      better than any other platform out there when it comes to support

      Lol, as a user Windows support is garbage. Every step is “restart, reinstall drivers, scannow”.

      None of those things are going to make windows pass all LR audio to the FLR channels of a 5.1 system, yet I know it’s possible. It can happen if enough settings are fiddled with, but I don’t know which ones, and it gets reset every reboot.

      None of those things are going to stop some system utility maxing out disk writing and freezing the system for 10 minutes every boot.

      None of those things will stop hardware acceleration from crashing my browser.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        Yeah that’s my fault, I wasn’t clear with what type of support I was talking about, I should have put that line at the end of the paragraph that way it was clear I was talking about compatibility as the rest of that paragraph was and not software support.

        But for the sake of responding to that comment, if we are talking about actual user support and not power user support, I think you’ll find it hard to do the exact same things you have listed there under any of the other distributions, especially if it’s using pulse audio or pipe wire as that’s actually one of the issues that I encountered switching off of windows, as my headset has a double Channel mixer on it that separates chat and game and nothing so far has been able to properly identify it as that and I had to actually go in and tell it that it had two channels and even then the current GUI programs available are not able to handle it, so if I change anything it resets it again

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
          1·
          4 months ago

          Pulseaudio can remap channels directly, so you can take a 7.1 input and output two entire stereo outputs to a 7.1 speaker system, which would solve my issue and then some. Making a custom profile is a tad more involved than clicking buttons, but CLI isn’t needed at all.

          I found a solution in under a minute that should work on most modern Linux DEs. I suppose it’s not by an official Linux support channel, but AskUbuntu was literally the first search result.

          Ah, support as in “this program is supported”. I can definitely agree with that

          • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            4 months ago

            I have attempted every solution I have found so far on remapping the channels for my headset including adding specific device profiles for it, none of worked so far. My current solution is patchwork that was supposed to split them by adding a device profile that knows how the device is to separate them(because it uses a dual channel layout, one stereo one mono iirc with one being chat and the other game), but it lacks the ability to handle/process those channels as a whole so I only can use one of the two channels at a time but since I at least have one channel that’s functional I have mostly given up on it. It’s just annoying cause that was the main reason for getting this headset, the ability to have a chat mixer to change voice call volume and game volume separately, it’s one of the few things that worked flawlessly on windows that I have been unable to get to work on the new system. I’m glad that you could find a solution that worked for you though, I have had no luck lol

            that being said, if you know of a non-cli method of setting up pulseaudio custom profiles, I’m down to try that as well, maybe I just screwed my custom profiles up somewhere.