Between these issues, the end of support for Windows 10, and the total lack of respect for customers ("yes/maybe later" is unacceptable), I'm happy for my recent switch to Linux.
Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly painless.
It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is, nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the developers.
KDE Connect works on Windows, and I think mac too. I get the feeling that it's really just people making stuff for themselves and sharing it with the world, and not trying to "win" in some fashion.
The more reasonable alternative is to have a souped up linux desktop at home and access it remotely with a low latency "game" streaming protocol such as sunshine+moonlight. It's a bit involved to set up and make work properly trough a low quality internet link but the final result affords the choice of virtually any laptop, freeing you from worrying about performance and battery life when running things that saps energy. You can even buy a common pc laptop, install linux and as long as you can get it to use less than 5W of energy when doing the remote streaming (which is pretty easy with most laptops from the last 10 years), you will get between (assuming decent, non degraded battery) 6 and 11 hours of battery life and potentially way more if it has one of those giant 90Wh batteries in it.
In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance.
Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it!
Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
Nothing that compares to M-series MacBooks, sadly. I've been looking for years. My T480 is basically tethered to the wall (granted, it could use some fresh batteries) and for my MacBook I usually don't bother packing the charger. It's night and day and I hope that'll change some day.
With the dozen or so laptops I've switched over Linux, battery life is usually either much better or much worse. In the later case, some tinkering fixes it.
> this update disrupts mouse and keyboard functionality within the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), making them unresponsive
> Early last week, Microsoft accidentally broke the Windows Media Creation Tool (MCT) just a day ahead of Windows 10's end-of-life. Additionally, the company began requiring Online Accounts for Windows 11 installations, making them increasingly difficult to bypass.
> Every previously reported issue has been addressed or resolved, except for the broken localhost functionality and now this WinRE problem.
Wonder if they used Copilot for coding those features and then AI to review them. I bet the productivity of the engineers was off the charts for that one.
In Win11 as admin, take ownership of the following files, and remove all permissions for the system user. This prevents any updates and can be easily undone at any time. I turned off updates, and life is much better. I no longer feel guilty about having my system "at risk". It's no longer worth the pain of updates.
Yea at this point updating stuff is just almost more pain than pleasure, since new features are very limited nowadays and most of the time things end up being more broken.
For example, the latest MacOS sequoia security update broke the touch id reader when logging in, i need to type my password now everytime. And lets not forget about the new glass design and UI changes in the latest iOS.
Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
That's the result of (maliciously) bundling security updates with feature upgrades. Security and feature updates should be entirely orthogonal, so that you can install security updates without affecting the functionality.
I can't wait to try this. Long have I feuded with the Task Scheduler and its slippery ability to reenable the update services when I look away. Thanks!
> I no longer feel guilty about having my system "at risk".
The risk of not updating your desktop OS every week is vastly overstated, and I believe this is at least in part due to fear mongering by companies like Microsoft who use said fear as a tool to keep people on the latest version with the latest tracking and ads.
Microsoft updates feel like they are boiling the frog, changing the whole OS to something you never signed up for. Why can't they stick to just security and stick their bloatware AI crap in Windows 12
My home mini pc is having Bluetooth issues from last 6-7 months after some update. I can't go back, tried every possible solutions. Best option: wait for them to fix it.
The issue: Sometimes if the Windows boot normally, Bluetooth won't turn on. I have to force restart to have it on. My guess is it's trying to optimize the power or something. I gave up.
My other laptop and work computer are still Windows 10, so some sanity left. I have installed kubuntu on another spare laptop and slowing moving towards linux entirely.
I was running Mint on a 256GB SATA SSD for about 6 months before finally just making the switch and moving it to my 2TB M.2 NVMe drive.
But I had to put my Windows install somewhere because some rare games like Battlefield 6 require onerous anticheat access at the kernel level and refuse to support Linux, so I moved it to my 256GB drive where Linux used to be.
I did that on Friday. And Windows corrupted itself on every boot. Eventually I gave up trying to make it work and shoved it onto a small partition on the end of my M.2 drive. The SSD is a bit older and has some errors on it but Linux worked just fine, but Windows couldn't handle the drive.
Reminded me of the meme about roses dying if the pH balance of the soil isn't perfect, but daisies are like "Fuck yeah, concrete!" growing in literal cracks in the sidewalk.
I wonder if my problems were related to them fucking with things, or if it's just a coincidence.
They got rid of most QA people, and nowadays apparently devs do QA as well, except that apparently not much of it, like in large majority of companies, where testing and docs come last.
Then there is the whole AI KPIs that most companies are pushing on their employees, and given CoPilot, they surely must be pushing a lot.
Switched? The Windows Insider has 3 different tiers for testers: Dev, Beta and Release preview and still update rollouts are an example of how not to do it
Microsoft is just completely pathetic, it's become completely opposite of what companies want and it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes politics soon to switch to Linux on office spaces.
office 365 is the only thing stopping people from switching to linux as the only current alternative is ironically chromeos (android office) and macos (fully supported by microsoft)
Most tasks are done OK with the web version of office365 tools and I know a few companies who do not bother to pay the licence to install the full suite to all their workers so that should make them easy to switch.
I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
Between these issues, the end of support for Windows 10, and the total lack of respect for customers ("yes/maybe later" is unacceptable), I'm happy for my recent switch to Linux.
Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly painless.
It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is, nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the developers.
Ah Dolphin. Forced to use MacOS at work, most things do the job but man I miss Dolphin. I really wish I could run it on MacOS.
KDE Connect is a wonderful piece of software, and works on more than just KDE! Most distros are supported, I believe.
KDE Connect works on Windows, and I think mac too. I get the feeling that it's really just people making stuff for themselves and sharing it with the world, and not trying to "win" in some fashion.
It's still limited by the features the OS supports. For example, on Windows you can't mount the phone's filesystem wirelessly.
Are there any Linux laptops with very good (read: all day) battery life for software dev in an IDE?
The more reasonable alternative is to have a souped up linux desktop at home and access it remotely with a low latency "game" streaming protocol such as sunshine+moonlight. It's a bit involved to set up and make work properly trough a low quality internet link but the final result affords the choice of virtually any laptop, freeing you from worrying about performance and battery life when running things that saps energy. You can even buy a common pc laptop, install linux and as long as you can get it to use less than 5W of energy when doing the remote streaming (which is pretty easy with most laptops from the last 10 years), you will get between (assuming decent, non degraded battery) 6 and 11 hours of battery life and potentially way more if it has one of those giant 90Wh batteries in it.
In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance.
Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it!
Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
Nothing that compares to M-series MacBooks, sadly. I've been looking for years. My T480 is basically tethered to the wall (granted, it could use some fresh batteries) and for my MacBook I usually don't bother packing the charger. It's night and day and I hope that'll change some day.
Framework laptops are popular among Linux users
Most laptops can become 'Linux Laptops'. You just install Linux. Battery life is often similar.
With the dozen or so laptops I've switched over Linux, battery life is usually either much better or much worse. In the later case, some tinkering fixes it.
Double Commander is the best (actually Total Commander but that is for windows).
> this update disrupts mouse and keyboard functionality within the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), making them unresponsive
> Early last week, Microsoft accidentally broke the Windows Media Creation Tool (MCT) just a day ahead of Windows 10's end-of-life. Additionally, the company began requiring Online Accounts for Windows 11 installations, making them increasingly difficult to bypass.
> Every previously reported issue has been addressed or resolved, except for the broken localhost functionality and now this WinRE problem.
Wonder if they used Copilot for coding those features and then AI to review them. I bet the productivity of the engineers was off the charts for that one.
In Win11 as admin, take ownership of the following files, and remove all permissions for the system user. This prevents any updates and can be easily undone at any time. I turned off updates, and life is much better. I no longer feel guilty about having my system "at risk". It's no longer worth the pain of updates.
C:\Windows\System32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\usosvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\wuaueng.dll
Yea at this point updating stuff is just almost more pain than pleasure, since new features are very limited nowadays and most of the time things end up being more broken.
For example, the latest MacOS sequoia security update broke the touch id reader when logging in, i need to type my password now everytime. And lets not forget about the new glass design and UI changes in the latest iOS.
Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
> Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
As a systems guy by trade and now a security guy by role, that scares the every living fuck out of me.
That's the result of (maliciously) bundling security updates with feature upgrades. Security and feature updates should be entirely orthogonal, so that you can install security updates without affecting the functionality.
Same boat here, but I'm not surprised in the slightest.
I'd also argue that the inevitable fallout from large numbers of people making a similar decision is on Microsoft, not the individuals.
Yep the recent Windows update broke a videogame that I was playing.
Windows used to be about backwards compatibility. Microsoft was proud of it. Twenty year old software ran on it.
Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck about.
I'd rather use a non broken operating system than disable updates.
I can't wait to try this. Long have I feuded with the Task Scheduler and its slippery ability to reenable the update services when I look away. Thanks!
I pinned the system version on 23H2. It does get other updates still.
> I no longer feel guilty about having my system "at risk".
The risk of not updating your desktop OS every week is vastly overstated, and I believe this is at least in part due to fear mongering by companies like Microsoft who use said fear as a tool to keep people on the latest version with the latest tracking and ads.
Microsoft updates feel like they are boiling the frog, changing the whole OS to something you never signed up for. Why can't they stick to just security and stick their bloatware AI crap in Windows 12
At this point Arch Linux is more stable than Losedows 11.
Windoesnt
Windows 11 rant:
My home mini pc is having Bluetooth issues from last 6-7 months after some update. I can't go back, tried every possible solutions. Best option: wait for them to fix it.
The issue: Sometimes if the Windows boot normally, Bluetooth won't turn on. I have to force restart to have it on. My guess is it's trying to optimize the power or something. I gave up.
My other laptop and work computer are still Windows 10, so some sanity left. I have installed kubuntu on another spare laptop and slowing moving towards linux entirely.
I was running Mint on a 256GB SATA SSD for about 6 months before finally just making the switch and moving it to my 2TB M.2 NVMe drive.
But I had to put my Windows install somewhere because some rare games like Battlefield 6 require onerous anticheat access at the kernel level and refuse to support Linux, so I moved it to my 256GB drive where Linux used to be.
I did that on Friday. And Windows corrupted itself on every boot. Eventually I gave up trying to make it work and shoved it onto a small partition on the end of my M.2 drive. The SSD is a bit older and has some errors on it but Linux worked just fine, but Windows couldn't handle the drive.
Reminded me of the meme about roses dying if the pH balance of the soil isn't perfect, but daisies are like "Fuck yeah, concrete!" growing in literal cracks in the sidewalk.
I wonder if my problems were related to them fucking with things, or if it's just a coincidence.
This is affecting me. I created a new Veeam Backup recovery USB and mouse and keyboard isn't working. Ridiculous how this got past testing.
Whyis quality dropping like this between Windows and macOS? Is this asking this even just rose-tinted glasses on the past?
Has Microsoft switched to vibe coding? Seems like the last series of blunders coincide with Coidiot rollout.
They got rid of most QA people, and nowadays apparently devs do QA as well, except that apparently not much of it, like in large majority of companies, where testing and docs come last.
Then there is the whole AI KPIs that most companies are pushing on their employees, and given CoPilot, they surely must be pushing a lot.
It's worth noting that QA change happened >10 years ago now. It's really the shift in focus that accelerated things recently.
Kind of, it has been slowly felt during Windows 10 and 11 time, especially in anything related to UWP and WinRT.
Closed tickets look better on KPI than re-opened ones
Switched? The Windows Insider has 3 different tiers for testers: Dev, Beta and Release preview and still update rollouts are an example of how not to do it
eating their own dogfood
Microsoft is just completely pathetic, it's become completely opposite of what companies want and it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes politics soon to switch to Linux on office spaces.
I see macOS growing in share for corporate laptops/desktops first, but it would be nice to see widespread Linux.
But for now, with big enterprise office requirement, macOS is the next best refuge for most companies.
office 365 is the only thing stopping people from switching to linux as the only current alternative is ironically chromeos (android office) and macos (fully supported by microsoft)
Most tasks are done OK with the web version of office365 tools and I know a few companies who do not bother to pay the licence to install the full suite to all their workers so that should make them easy to switch.
I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
Office because lawyers send docs in .docx format like it was written in the blood of the Benjamin Franklin
DirectX because steam defacto runs on Windows only for the vast majority of games, and not everyone wants a steam deck form
I can't think of any other S tier use cases tbh
99% of Steam games work great on Linux now thanks to Proton. You might be thinking of how it was back in 2015.
directx to vulkan works good enough these days, what breaks is DRM, anti-piracy and anticheats.
I'm 100% gaming on Fedora with proton and have been for quite awhile.
Playing Arc Raiders now on Linux just fine, and several other new games. Not BF6 though, that requires you to basically install a windows rootkit.
Drivers and such are still usually windows first.