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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.
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!
The old hauppage TV tuner cards work great with Linux. I actually have some old-school hauppage (old 4:3 TV signal) tuner cards and they work great under a modern Ubuntu install. I also use a couple of hdhomerun units (which do hd) and they don’t really require drivers and also work fantastically with Linux. With Linux the drivers are (mostly) part of the kernel. If they don’t work, it usually means that they’re very new. Linux driver support is leaps and bounds better than any windows support, which is usually discontinued and forgotten about.because the companies go out of business and have closed-source drivers. Linux drivers are open source and if they don’t work, the community fixes them even if the company goes under or hasn’t been around for decades.
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.
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.
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.
Backwards compatibility, but at what cost?
The vast majority of software run on Windows these days runs in a web browser. The legacy shit in windows doesn’t impact most software engineers
Or its an electron app.
One good thing (probably the only good thing) about electron is it makes it easy to port an app to linux.
runs in a web browser.
Or its an electron app.
Something something something history repeating
The stifling of innovation. So that’s more of a feature to microsoft
I prefer ongoing maintenance over backwards compatibility, I can easily run such old software in an emulator in recent hardware.
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!
I don’t want my mom to be able to turn her computer into a paperweight…
Don’t give her sudo permission then.
How she will install anything then
Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.
Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.
Awesome
If you wanna put your qualitative hat on: how much better is today’s easiest distro than Mint was circa 2010?
Flatpaks
you can add
sudopermissions for individual users for certain commands only; and i recommend you would do that; i.e. give hersudopermission for installing/uninstalling applications, but nothing else.uninstalls the kernel package
Someone clearly hasn’t heard of dependency hell.
I use NixOS so I obviously have not.
“I can’t delete bloatware” - all 3 of them
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.
All of them are pushing generative AI that many users don’t want and you have to manually opt out on Windows and Mac.
And you’ll often just be opted back in the next time there’s an update.
nah windows will not let you disable things like windows defender and telemetry, even if you have windows enterprise edition. It might be possible to delete it some of the bloatware, but it’ll just reinstall itself in an update.
Tbf not letting the average windows user turn off windows defender is a good idea
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
GrapheneOS is not your typical android image … and that’s why its great!
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.
This is a good reason for static linking. All the dependencies are built into the binary, meaning it is more portable and future proof.
We don’t need flatpak for this!
And harder to fix vulnerabilities in a linked library, and more bloat in both storage space and memory used.
Trade-offs!
I’ll take a program that isn’t getting updates anymore or simply wasnt working in my modified environment using slightly more ram and storage over it not working at all.
I have firsthand experience with videogames made for one flavor of Linux not working on my machine due to dependency hell.
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.
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.
Every day, for weeks, my Apple Watch notifies me about available updates when I put it on after charging. Why didn’t you install the updates while you were charging, then?! It only stops when I put it back on the charger and manually tell it to update.
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.
The best way to dual boot windows and linux is with separate drives, not partitions imo.
You’re missing the last step, throw out the windows drive.
Sounds great in theory, but there are still things that only work on windows for me.
If something does not work, mostly it either has a kernel level anticheat or it’s Adobe. I just learned to live without these, I think it’s for the best. You can even do VR on Linux nowadays!
VR runs terribly on linux and I don‘t want to coinflip whether or not my racing wheel works.
Additionally if my friends want to play something with anticheat I am not going to say no. Keeping a rarely used Windows Installation is worth it to me.
SteamVR runs terribly on Linux, Monado/WiVRn is pretty playable.
I prefer to drag my friends toward games without integrated rootkits. Better for them, better for me. Thankfully, there are plenty of games to choose from today.
I’d recommend separate computers
In separate buildings.
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.
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.
--non-pqréservéè-rootònn
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!
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
The teeth on that bird are disturbing
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
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.
I have feature updates disabled and security ones delayed for 4 days but that’s only for the notification. It doesn’t actually do anything unless I click “Update”. That’s why I don’t get what you mean by saying it doesn’t allow you to update on demand. I’m on Windows Education so it might be different for Pro since it has less features.
I can’t remember the original version of the comic, what does each one of them say?
Duk. The ultimate, all-purpouse animal.
“I wish I wasn’t primarily bred to be food…”
So only the dog?
The ultimate life form.
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.
A great learning experience to not copy paste commands yoj don’t understand.
And also don’t run commands that require you to type in “do as I say” before they run
Yeah. Reminds me of a dependency fuckup with steam on pop os that uninstalled the desktop environment when trying to install steam.
I’m still pissed off about how LTT reacted to that. The warning literally told you not to do it, you did it anyway, and somehow that’s Linux’s fault? That’s like eating one of those silica packets that says “DO NOT EAT” and then blaming the manufacturer.
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.Very necessary
No it absolutely is not. When you’re looking up guides and come across an unfamiliar command, don’t copy and paste it and find out what it does. Google it. Man it. Research it. Stop copying and pasting commands you don’t understand.
My point is that if that is the case (and I do understand why) then i can’t possibly recommend Linux to people that don’t want their OS to be their hobby, because as for my experience they will come across something that needs some command line input.
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.
I would not recommend someone who does not know what they are doing replacing the DE, the process heavily varies depending on your current setup. If you want Ubuntu with KDE, just use Kubuntu.
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.
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.
You can then either ‘install’ them with
apt, which does essentially only mark installed packags as manually installed or use e.g. synaptic for that.Yeah but you’d need to do it for *everything* that’s affected, which is a lot.
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
Considering how difficult it still can be to get root on Android, I understand the shade, though.
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.
