Ask HN: What do you dislike most about Linux and Windows?
3 comments
Windows: Over-commercialization (account requirement, OneDrive upsells, ads in Start menu, Copilots everywhere). Runner up: bad performance.
Linux: Absence of a strong, universally recommendable distro. Ubuntu pushes Snap which has all kinds of problems. Fedora doesn't include proprietary drivers, causing problems with GPUs. PopOS is in the middle of switching DEs. Arch is Arch.
macOS: Liquid glass.
Linux: Absence of a strong, universally recommendable distro. Ubuntu pushes Snap which has all kinds of problems. Fedora doesn't include proprietary drivers, causing problems with GPUs. PopOS is in the middle of switching DEs. Arch is Arch.
macOS: Liquid glass.
Windows:
- Bloat: software packages and services that cannot be entirely removed (at least not without 3rd party tools) like Edge, OneDrive, Copilot, etc.
- Requiring a MS account
- Their focus on adding new features and changing visual elements to make things feel fresh (and justify their asking price) at the cost of stability -- both in terms of system stability (it's absurd how often file explorer windows crash in Windows 11 compared to Windows 7) and in terms of user interface stability, aka being able to find what you want because it's where it was in the past.
- The settings tool is disorganized and many settings that were in it in previous versions aren't in it at all. Those settings are still available if you can find the right .msc to access them. Many settings are only available through the registry because they plainly don't want you to change them (for example, restoring the Windows 10 style context menus or disabling "News and Interests" on the start menu).
- Ads
Linux:
- Surprisingly suffers from the same settings chaos. Desktop distros often have control panels for some common settings but inevitably I always find myself editing some random config text file to fix something (like broken wifi or bluetooth).
- The directory structure is nonsense and not clearly defined. As an example, it's a crap shoot if a random github project is setup to use /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, or /opt/bin. I regularly see sys admins deploy software to /var. Even standard commands like mkdir might be in /bin or /usr/bin depending on the distro. It's the wild west. Software is often hardcoded to use specific paths, so fixing the directory structure would require serious effort (take a look at what Gobo Linux had to do to attempt this). To be fair: the directory structure in Windows is also riddled with redundant, ambiguous, and unused folders, but you have to dive into those folders much less often on Windows.
- Poor or delayed hardware support.
- Audio latency, wifi, bluetooth, and high res video playback all continue to be a crap shoot.
- Bloat: software packages and services that cannot be entirely removed (at least not without 3rd party tools) like Edge, OneDrive, Copilot, etc.
- Requiring a MS account
- Their focus on adding new features and changing visual elements to make things feel fresh (and justify their asking price) at the cost of stability -- both in terms of system stability (it's absurd how often file explorer windows crash in Windows 11 compared to Windows 7) and in terms of user interface stability, aka being able to find what you want because it's where it was in the past.
- The settings tool is disorganized and many settings that were in it in previous versions aren't in it at all. Those settings are still available if you can find the right .msc to access them. Many settings are only available through the registry because they plainly don't want you to change them (for example, restoring the Windows 10 style context menus or disabling "News and Interests" on the start menu).
- Ads
Linux:
- Surprisingly suffers from the same settings chaos. Desktop distros often have control panels for some common settings but inevitably I always find myself editing some random config text file to fix something (like broken wifi or bluetooth).
- The directory structure is nonsense and not clearly defined. As an example, it's a crap shoot if a random github project is setup to use /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, or /opt/bin. I regularly see sys admins deploy software to /var. Even standard commands like mkdir might be in /bin or /usr/bin depending on the distro. It's the wild west. Software is often hardcoded to use specific paths, so fixing the directory structure would require serious effort (take a look at what Gobo Linux had to do to attempt this). To be fair: the directory structure in Windows is also riddled with redundant, ambiguous, and unused folders, but you have to dive into those folders much less often on Windows.
- Poor or delayed hardware support.
- Audio latency, wifi, bluetooth, and high res video playback all continue to be a crap shoot.
Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS): No good integration with OneDrive and Google Drive at the filesystem level like on Windows. Too many distributions to consider. SNAP on Ubuntu (uninstalled). Scary Ubuntu LTS upgrades. Have not figured out Wine for the few Windows apps I would like to use. (Would love just having a VM like in the old days, with window manager integration.) Audio drivers, latency and music software is very fiddly. Bluetooth is sketchy, especially for audio. Support for hardware lags Windows heavily (e.g. Strix Halo, nVidia). Poor support for business devices like some scanners etc. So many problems with Wayland, screen sharing, window positioning, etc.
But I am starting a migration to Linux slowly but surely. Windows keeps getting worse; Linux is improving. (Linux user since 1992.)