zlacker

>>beezle+(OP)
So far in the last year or so, I've heard 0 reasons why I'd even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn't even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.

>>cronix+Te
Unfortunately, there's one very big reason you'll need Windows 11: that Windows 10 won't get security updates forever. After October 14th, 2025, you'll need to "upgrade" to it to stay secure.

>>joseph+7f
That gives me four years for the tools that lock me to Windows to decide to port to literally any other OS.

>>Initia+Nk
I'm not old and I have lived to see this sentiment come and go at least twice before. We're still on Windows.

>>willis+0p
Thankfully we have options. I'm planning on moving my main desktop to Arch over my Christmas break from work. It's been a while since I ran Linux as my main desktop, my only complaints have been around gaming performance. I have a friend who plays the same games as I do and he's got everything working on his Arch install. That's really the only thing that holds me on Windows and if it's as smooth of a transition as I believe it currently is then I just have no reason to not give it another fair shake.

>>scrupl+es
I try to move to Linux desktop one or twice a year for the last, what, 20 years.

I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it.

The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc.

I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on laptops.

Again, I love Linux and have managed literally thousands of them since 1994.

>>Brando+ov
Haven't you heard? It's the year of the Linux desktop :)

In all seriousness, until about a year ago when I got a discount on a Macbook and changed to that, I had been running Linux for about a decade across different laptops, and feel that since ~2017 the desktop experience has improved substantially. I bought a new laptop in 2017, installed Ubuntu on it...and that was it. I spent exactly zero minutes installing drivers or mucking with configurations, multiple monitors with HDMI audio worked out of the box, and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. Granted, I'm a bit of a Linux veteran at this so maybe there were a lot of things I was tweaking that I just don't remember since I do them so often, but I do not think that was the case, since I got my wife (who is not a software engineer) using Ubuntu as well for awhile.

I think part of what made it better was using AMD hardware for everything. The drivers are just included with the kernel, and they work great out of the box, at least for me.

I realize that telling everyone to shop for a computer based on the drivers that will be available isn't exactly a great sales pitch for Linux for the average consumer, but I suspect if you frequent HN you probably have a reasonable ability to differentiate video cards and whatnot.

>>tomber+yD
One problem here is that you always get posts like this. I've seen discussions about Linux on desktop going back twenty years, now, and there are always people saying it was problematic a few years ago and is so much better now. But then always plenty of people still having trouble and plenty of listed in-thread issues with sleep, trackpads, multi-monitor, configuration, compatibility, etc. It seems like you have to get lucky or do a lot of research. Or both.

Windows is always getting worse, too, but still basically works on all hardware. I've been thinking of switching away, given how bad Windows 11 looks to be and how irritating Windows 10 has been. But then, Windows XP, Vista and others were also known to be terrible but still mostly worked.

On balance, I'd say that Windows is likely to continue a user-hostile decline but still mostly work and Linux on Desktop is likely to always have a lot of effort involved if you want everything to work well. But there's probably no point at which Linux will work well on all hardware or Windows will be less usable by default.