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Your Windows 10 PC will soon be 'junk' - users told to resist Microsoft deadline
(www.express.co.uk)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I work in a linux shop.
You couldn't pay me to use Windows for development, sysadmin, backend services, etc.
But on the desktop? Hell no. We maintain a modern debian desktop environment for our users, and it's a pain in the ass. Mediocre UX, mediocre integration of mixed-bag third-party apps, and too many workarounds and gotchas you need to Just Know About. I just don't have the energy.
I use windows at home, and for my underlying work environment - and I just SSH into linux boxes for the actual tappy-tappy stuff.
You're talking about my Windows 10 experience? The european, less spying/advertising version, mind you.
If only there was an OS with an excellent graphical user interface and a direct UNIX pedigree, where you can drop into a full zsh and POSIX user land directly after install at the touch of a button.
If there's one thing that both windows and Linux users agree on, it's how weird and annoying macs are.
I'd wager that's because "we know better what you want" in mac is even stronger than in windows. It's all good while you are an average Joe, but other than that you either pay, or get a lot of issues setting things up.
At least macOS let's you change your default browser without showing you 5 million popups that look like fucking malware saying "Please switch back to Microsoft Edge, we know that it sucks ass but please use it"
As a Linux user, I'd use a Mac over some garbage Windows PC any fucking time of the day. Nearly every operating system under the sun uses some kind of Unix implementation under the hood, well, except for Windows. Running anything in a command line environment under Windows is a huge pain in the ass... Not even having GNU coreutils, BusyBox or the BSD equivalent is just horrible. Just like PowerShell. And don't even get me started on this antiquated piece of shit called
cmd
. Every time I see a CLI under Windows I just want to take the computer that it's running on and throw it in the trash. At least macOS offers some standard CLI utilities and is basically out-of-the-box compatible with most Linux CLI tools. The filesystem structure is also kinda similar to what you would find on a Linux or BSD operating system. Oh, and recent Mac hardware is pretty awesome whereas Windows on ARM is unusable. And macOS at least looks visually consistent because unlike Microsoft, Apple can actually decide to use one single UI framework for all of their stuff. You can block all of the Apple spyware with a good firewall like Little Snitch and Homebrew fills the gap of the missing package manager. And unlike Winget, Homebrew actually works and is worth using. I can also set up macOS declaratively through Nix, something that won't ever be possible on Windows either.As a linux user, I SSH to a Linux box when I want to do things that aren't file/print/email/media/games - though honestly, Powershell is pretty fucking awesome as a scripting language.
Imagine if every command used JSON when piping to/from another command, so you aren't fucking around with cut and awk and sed all the time just to pull values out. It's nice. I don't have much application for it personally, but it honestly is pretty grown-up.
People will disagree with me on this one and it's totally fine, but I don't like JSON. Over the many years of using nothing other than Linux or other Unix-like operating systems I just got used to using stuff like awk to filter out data. PowerShell might be nice for scripting, but it's terrible for interactive usage. I spend a lot of time in the Terminal and fish shell is my favorite because it's awesome for interactive usage. You don't have to use your shell for scripting though. You can also just use something like Python, Ruby, heck even JavaScript. There's also Nushell which has an interesting way of handling data, I think it's kinda similar to what PowerShell does. Check that out if you are interested.