Microsoft Driving People Away (to GNU/Linux)
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OS News ☛ Is 2024 the year of Windows on the desktop?
Now that everything’s finally sorted, you scrounged up and updated all your drivers, you rebooted a few times, and Windows Update is done hogging the system, you can finally start to take a proper look around your new operating system. At first glance, it actually looks kind of nice – I definitely like the most recent version of Windows’ theme, and some of the blur and animations are quite nice. Sadly, you’ll quickly discover it’s all a massive ruse.
The first thing I noticed is that there’s a lot of lag in the Windows user interface, which, considering the Radeon Pro w5700 and 160Hz 4K display I’m using, really shouldn’t be there. Something as simple as right-clicking the desktop to bring up the context menu takes a few noticeable moments, after which the menu suddenly gains another option and expands; some AMD Software: PRO Edition software shortcut. This entry alone adds like a full second or more to loading the context menu, which is just wild to me. Whether I’m using KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or anything else on Linux or BSD – I’ve never seen a context menu being anything but instant. I eventually figured out you can remove this AMD entry to speed up the context menu (what a sentence…), but only by modifying the registry.
Or take something like opening the file manager, Explorer. For some reason, the bottom two-thirds of the window renders instantly, but the top third, where the titlebar, toolbar, and tab bar are, renders a full second later. These are just two examples, but you’ll find similar stutters all over the operating system. KDE or GNOME, running on this very same machine, show no stutters whatsoever, and even on something like my mini-laptop with a paltry Intel N100 do I never experience stutters in KDE.
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HowTo Geek ☛ My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore
An operating system is the most personal part of a "personal" computer, and it used to be that as a Windows user I didn't feel like I was renting my computer from Microsoft, but in recent years that feeling has all but evaporated. To me, Windows feels cheaper and more commercial than ever, and that's not a recipe for a good user experience.
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Linux Respects Its Users
The other major player here is of course Linux in all its varied distributions. Here you are literally getting the operating system for free. The closest that a distro of Linux has come to punting ads was when plugs for software showed up in the Ubuntu Message of the Day and more recently a sort-of "ad" for Ubuntu Pro in the terminal. If anyone knows of other examples of native ads in a Linux distro, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
I've had an on-again-off-again relationship with Linux over the years, and daily drove it during seven years of university, and never did I feel that I was being exploited or not in control. In fact, I was probably in too much control, which is why you can break Linux in so many creative ways just by being a dummy.