Someone clearly hasn't heard of dependency hell.
I'll say it once, I'll say it forever: Windows has better backward compatibility, period. Even compared to linux. Rebuilding an old open source linux app to work on a modern distro can be done, but it's a process that could take hours or days. And if you don't have the source code you're shit out of luck. Have fun getting that binary built against a 1 year old version of glibc to work. This, incidentally is what things like flatpak, docker and ubuntu's nonsense competitor to both (of which our hatred is entirely rational no really stop laughing) are trying to solve.
Meanwhile microsoft office still handles leap years wrong because it might break backwards compatibility with old documents. Binaries built for windows xp will usually just work on windows 11. Packages built for ubuntu 22.0 often won't run on ubuntu 23.0. You never notice this because linux are a culture of recompilers. Rebuilding every last package once a month is just how some distros roll. But that's not backwards compatibility, that's ongoing maintenance.
I think this is because Windows developers are bored to remove old code and as a result Windows 11 is an added layer on top of Windows 10, 8, 7 and even XP.
But is that desirable? I'd rather break things in favor of something better, and provide a way to make the old thing run, than be stuck with ancient baggage
Also, while that's true for software, compatibility for old hardware is horrible under Windows
I'd rather break things in favor of something better, and provide a way to make the old thing run, than be stuck with ancient baggage
Windows is office software first and foremost, designed to be used by people who neither know nor care what an "operating system" is. Every last one of these people is entirely incapacitated by even the most lovingly-crafted and descriptive error message. If Microsoft ever considered a policy like this, the city of Redmond would be razed to the ground inside twelve hours
Rebuilding the app for the newer version is an objectively better solution, because it allows you to take advantage to new features. 64-bit migrations are a game changer for example. But its an ungodly amount of effort. Every single sodding package has a person responsible for building it for every distro that supports it. Its only because its on the distros to make a given program work on their distro that the system works at all. I agree that I'd rather it be rebuilt to fit into the new system. But that's a lot of work. Never forget that.
Windows 11 isn't even backwards-compatible with 7-year-old CPUs! Run a 32-bit or 16-bit (dos) exe on Win11/x64? Think again. Windows drivers are always a pain in the butt. Load up an old driver for your favorite peripheral? Probably won't work.
Ah yes, because linux drivers never break!
You might not understand the pain if you don't own a tv tuner card but trust me, it's ROUGH!
I heard this concept somewhere once of "Technical Debt" wherein a thing gets made and it works really well but then it gets updated or new features are added and something breaks, but rather than tear the whole thing apart to fix the issue, a patch or bandaid gets slapped on to ship the thing. Then the next update comes along and this time it takes two bandaids, one to 'fix' the new problem and one to keep the old bandaid on. The next update takes three bandaids, then four . . . and so on. The accumulation of all these bandaids is known as the Technical Debt, and it must always be repaid, somehow, someday.
Microsoft stubbornly refuses to repay their technical debt at all costs, Apple is terrified of letting anyone ever get even a glimpse of their mountain of technical debt, and Linux bathes in a weird soup of refusing to let technical debt even happen and dispensing bandaids so fast they make the RedCross look like a joke.
Linux has technical debt. The kernel only just stopped supporting the i386. I can't imagine what patches upon patches were required to make the same code run on even 2 processors released 40 years apart, let alone every processor released in between.
"I can't delete bloatware" - all 3 of them
Do android system apps count as bloatware? Cause on GrapheneOS you quite literally start out with the bare minimum on a fresh install.
I haven't done too much in terms of messing around with system apps besides allowing/denying some permissions with Permission Manager X
I would say you can on do that on Windows and Android, but it is not intended by the OS and you have to work around certain measures. Linux just lets you do everything, even if it is a really bad idea
you could do that on windows. no longer.
linux is fine, just don't sudo under the influence.
My favourite thing about updates on my work Mac is when you say 'try in one hour' thinking it'll ask you then an hour later it aggressively closes your programs. I use Linux, Mac and Windows regularly and Mac has by far the worst update experience out of all of them imo.
Major update? 1 hour. Minor update? 1 hour.
Yes but it also reopens everything exactly as you left it, meaning you can update and not loose anything mission critical; ymmv ofc but in my personal experience MacOS has the best update experience from mainstream OS
Definitely. I've used macos for work for 10+ years now and never had an issue with updates. Windows updates on the other hand...
I've clicked the "install updates tonight" button a bunch of times, it consistently fails to update and then I have to force it to update the next morning. Incredibly poor experience.
You can also remove the fr*nch language pack via
rm -fr /But in all seriosity, i tried to install Linux dual-boot with Windows on my dad's computer last weekend, and it broke the windows install because it doesn't support bitlocker (apparently). Maybe i could have gotten it to work, but i abandoned the project after the first failed attempt. Still a bit salty about that. Especially since it was meant to be a demonstration how "quick and easy" installing Linux nowadays supposedly is.
I was installing Linux on sb else's PC, to skip the Bitlocker warning I had to boot Windows, use cmd to assign drive letters to recovery partitions and disable bitlocker on them, again from cmd. The owner was confused because they had disabled bitlocker on C: but got Bitlocker warning on Linux installer anyways, I was looking at stackoverflow threads to find the right commands right next to the owner because I hadn't used Windows for years and forgot how to do things lol. Fun times.
It is quick and easy. Maintaining any other OS side by side is always a bigger ordeal than not doing it. It breaks the other way around as well - If you were running some linux distro and then tried dual booting by installing windows - no way you'd be able to boot into linux without extra tweaking.
--non-pqréservéè-rootònn`
Linux: i can't stop dumb users (me) completely destroying everything with a bad console command
I much prefer that to Apple's approach of "you probably didn't want to do that, so you can't". I've literally had to boot into Linux to fix things on Macs. Fucking infuriating.
I did this. Luckily, nothing was lost because I was only using it to learn at the time. It oddly boosted my confidence because if I could break the OS, I could learn how to use it.
I'm pretty sure that if you use elevated privileges to run commands you don't understand, you can break Windows just as much as you can break Linux. Windows might pop up an extra "Are you sure?" box or two though. It's been a while since I did anything on that OS.
You can, but on windows there is no need usually to run these kind of commands.
What happened was that years ago I was trying out Ubuntu but didn't like the UI, so I followed some steps from someone to replace the gnome or whatever with something else (kde?), but then the ui completely broke down.
Given how fickle that system is in Ubuntu, I was probably using legit sources for the commands, but they were not fully up to date and something went wrong.
Ironically, something similar happened lately on my Ubuntu virtual machine, where the file explorer has rendering issues, but tbh I think this time it was because the virtual machine disk space became full mid update, so kind of my bad too.
The only thing keeping me in windows these days is that I just really like the UI, but I think next time I need to format (which admittedly might be year or two from now) I might move to GraphyOS anyway.
A great learning experience to not copy paste commands yoj don't understand.
Breaking things is a valid way to start learning. Reading man pages is very often difficult and confusing for new users. And much of the documentation is crap anyway-- it's why distro forums exist. And I'm from a time when distro upgrades/updates were sometimes dicey, (they still can break things on occasions), and you complied your kernel and drivers from scratch.
Please, I don't understand a single command I'm putting in. I'm just copying whatever some nerd posted on a message board.
But that's in my experience sadly very necessary especially in the beginning when you are getting into Linux. So getting into Linux has quite a steep learning curve because not knowing what you are copy pasting can have terrible consequences, but understanding everything before you copy paste is very demanding.
When out comes to my main rig, i never had the experience of everything just working out of the box. There was always something that required me searching for obscure fixes, hoping for the best.I never messed up my computer despite frequently not knowing what certain command I am running does. Am I lucky, can I buy a lottery on this basis?
Linux: I can't stop you.
It could. It just doesn't want to. Why would it? Its your computer.
If you want to delete / including the EFI partition turning your machine into a paperweight you should be allowed to do so.
Now that's Free Speech if I ever saw it!
SELinux: I'm sorry Dave, we don't do that here.
Sudo !!
Can't stop won't stop.
Installing old Linux applications IS a problem. They're available only if someone repackaged them for newer distros. If not they can't run anymore because of dependencies mismatch.
nixsolved this by modifying LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the desired dependency and/or modifying the binary itself.Flatpak time
NCSA Mosaic flatpak my beloved
Just supply the dependencies with a chroot. That's how we did it before distro maintainers started including the 32bit libraries into the 64bit OS.
I think this meme is referring to when Apple ripped out 32bit support in macOS a few years ago. I couldn't use Wine anymore to play old windows games on my Mac after that update for example.
But... to be fair, are there any versions of Linux that let you do this either? Replacing the OS, especially jumping from 32 to 64-bit, is kinda a HUGE deal!? I've had numerous problems switching Linux distros, and some issues switching Mac software, and they seem more or less the same to me? - if anything, it was easier for me to switch on a Mac?
I don't know about Wine and older games - I would guess that recompilation would be in order. I could see if they jumped the gun specifically for the newer (at the time M1) series, that such tools were not yet ready by third party apps as Wine. Though Mac switches chip architecture so exceedingly rarely that it is barely an issue, long-term, and if anyone using Linux switched architecture it would similarly require recompilation as well?
I feel like I am not expressing myself well here, but I'm out of time to edit and hopefully you see what I mean:-).
Distrobox would like a word, or so I've heard. Haven't had to use it yet, as the AUR has pretty much everything.
It's gotten significantly better with containerization technologies like oci containers and flatpak. Yes it uses more storage, but the drive space pretty cheap
Speaking of not being able to delete system apps, a friend of mine with a Pixel phone says Google Play cannot be uninstalled from it. Anybody know for sure?
It's a Pixel... Y'know, the phone universally supported by degoogled OSes including Graphene? The ease of unlocking the bootloader is the only reason I have one at all!
I moved from 16 years of iPhones to a Pixel 9 purely so I could put Graphene on it. It's been a couple of months so far and I'm loving it.
On adb use pm uninstall than package name. there is something called universal android debloter. Also you can use shizuku with canta to remove it.
You can via adb ( android debug bridge ) , no root needed, but you need a pc or shizuku. Although if he has a pixel device he should just install GrapheneOS imo. Edit: puxel -> pixel
No you can't, 1 version of Google Play is bundled with the system image and cannot be removed. But you can uninstall updates and disable it to remove the automatically updated copy of Google Play.
You can totally stop updates on Windows. Fully off. They don't offer good options for updating on demand on your own schedule, but you can disable updates entirely and for pro and enterprise skus you can use GPO for additional delay options.
Wat. Enterprise does allow you to update whenever you want.
I honestly don't remember the specifics of how I've got my Pro install configured for updates. I think it doesn't notify of available updates until they've been out a month (keeps me from pulling down a bleeding edge update that causes more problems than it fixes), downloads them so they'll auto-install on shutdown/restart for a week, and if I don't uodate that week then it flashes up the "your organization requires you to update by [next week]" message. I don't think it actually forces when that week runs out, so you're probably right, but it's been a long time since I've went two whole weeks without shutting down or rebooting.
I do know that I've got "feature updates" (read OS changes) set to only be available if I manually install them. So the whole "Windows forces you to upgrade to 11" complaint is pure BS at least.
The apps aren't supported
I was trying to delete a KDE program that I'll never use, but Discover seemed to want to remove the whole pile of KDE Apps. I'm sure there's a way.
Discover got the Pop OS vibe. You want to remove a small app?how about to remove the entire desktop emviroment and system components? Y/N
The K in KDE stands for kitchensink.
It may be that it wants to uninstall some kde-plasma-desktop metapackage, not the whole bunch of all kde apps. If it is uninstalled, nothing crucially important happens. Try to remove it with
aptif you're running some Debian or Ubuntu flavour.The problem is that the all those apps installed as dependencies will get marked as unused and removed with the next
--autoremove(which you should probably do regularly to clean up old kernels.The real fix would be to mark all those apps as explicitly installed, but I don't use apt-based distros regularly so idk how.
have you like
ever actually tried installing an old app on linux
or accidentally had a power outage during an updateit literally can't update without breaking and can't install old apps lol
Can't you just bury your head in the sand like the rest of us? Linux is literally perfect if you ignore all of its flaws.
Yeah I've installed heaps of old apps, it depends on dynamic vs static libraries etc but some people still use Emacs 25...
I have lost power whilst updating, can be a nuisance depending in the distro, but snapshots (zfs and btrfs both work well for me) have been life saving.
Mac and windows simply don't have a lot of quality of life features. Working with them is painful. As self a documenting systems they are fantastic though, however, when I was younger we had things called schools that served to address that gap, these have fallen out of favour in modern times.
it depends on dynamic vs static libraries
why must the user think about this shit? i can grab a windows app made for XP and run it on 11, and it'll run perfectly fine, and i don't have to think about the way its dynamic loader figures it out
ill have lower chances of running an app made for RHEL8 on RHEL9 than that
That’s literally just software stuff, not Linux’s fault lmao
And if it doesn’t affect Linux itself, it’s the developers fault
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whose fault it is.
Android hate not tolerated. Android can delete system apps, if you aee root. On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root
Or by connecting an Android phone to a computer, enabling USB debugging, launching a terminal and typing
adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.package.name.of.app
No root needed!
That's not exactly a safe, recommended or foolproof way. Adb carries a lot of risks
On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root
Wrong. You can install Flatpak apps as a user, which are very similar to apps on Android.
You can install
anand uninstall Flatpak applications in Linux as normal user.On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root
That's not true at all. You generally can't use your distribution's package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you
./configure'd it properlymake installwill put it under your home.Standard Linux distributions don't place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you'll need to sort that out.
Lol wut?
I'm running NixOS and my entire desktop environment is installed and managed without root.
I find it hilarious that the first architecture change in 10 years, that happened seven years ago, still causes anxiety and pain for people who don’t even use that operating system and probably never did.
I wonder how much Linux usership is owed to people being completely incapable of dealing with a minor inconvenience they once encountered (or only saw a meme about) on an apple product.
The sun puts out less energy than is wasted by people hating on Apple for completely and utterly irrational reasons.
An equal amount of wasted energy is output defending a trillion dollar corporation that doesn't care about those defending them at all. Apple be fine. Let's just use our computers and move on with our lives; it doesn't have to be personal.
It's probably more likely that they just needed to find something bad to say about Macs, and were too lazy to find one of the actual legitimate reasons (like it being closed source or something? probably bc the one used "sounds better", to someone who can't recognize that it is gaslighting).
The amount of purity whinging in Linux communities generally makes me sorry whenever I respond to one of these posts. On the other hand, I am not smart so here goes once more into the fray... 🤪
Based on some of their arguments it feels like they’ve never actually used a Mac. “It’s for babies and old people” they cry, like there’s not an entire Unix system under the hood.
Mac is arguably more Unix than Linux is. Mind you, that doesn't make it better, but yeah, why not allow people the freedom to choose?
Especially if your workplace is picking up the tab for the device, and all the more so if the only options are Windows vs. Mac bc that's what the company has knowledge of due to them being used before.
Linux is great. Windows sucks ass. Mac is also great. What is so hard about saying that?
