Posted by akyuu 16 hours ago
I read this circa 2010 and it stuck with me ever since. Also, have felt this way over the years, when I see Windows users work.
As for Windows, I like living in cities. If you live in a city long enough - at least through a couple of major macroeconomic cycles - you'll see it improve in some ways and some neighborhoods, get worse in some ways and some neighborhoods, then improve again, etc. Cycles. Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years, primarily due to the org structure that took Windows shell away from people who could really look after it, and, yes some of those execs have earned my permanent scorn, like a bad local politician would. Now there's a focused team making that neighborhood better. I'm here for the whole ride.
I'll use Linux on computers I don't have to log into very much, so I don't have that UX problem (case-sensitive command lines? Seriously? The 1970's called...). I'll never move to MacOS City; it's like wanting to live in The Villages. Manicured lawns with no soul.
So I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is, but it's always changing, always moving, going through ups and downs, and now it has a new "city council" that's making changes for the better. And I'm expert enough to make it great for me, and avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck.
This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it:
1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar so I have a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon.
Now I have the same weather site, no ads, running in about 130MB of RAM.
Enjoy your choice of operating system. Live where you want. Sometimes your city has problems. Move if you want, but don't think you've permanently solved your UX issues if you do, you've just swapped them for different ones.
To be fair, that was the peak of Windows UI. Also, KDE Plasma is way ahead of Windows (any of them).
I've tried using MacOS, and there are so many frustrating things you just have to put up with. Windows is much worse, but to be fair Windows was okay at one point. KDE is, out of the box, seamless, sensible, fast, and unbelievably feature-packed. But even if the default experience isn't your taste, it's trivial to customize it to work however you want. Whatever panels you want, where ever you want, with whatever widgets you want. WYSIWYG with point-and-click. And the windows, too. Window rules, KWin scripts (which are actually full-blown plugins), whatever you want. I want Steam to always open full screen on start up on my second monitor on the third desktop? Sure, I can do that, again point-and-click.
I truly cannot sign the praises of KDE enough. I think everyone who dislikes KDE has probably not delved deep enough. I can recreate the entire GNOME desktop in KDE in an hour. I can recreate MacOS in 30 minutes.
Liquid Glass needs a lot of cleaning up but it’s fine. App Store restrictions mean very little for iOS users in general and next to nothing for Mac users. Lousy AI also means little to nothing on Mac and earns at max a shrug on iOS—you even have a handy little button to disable all Apple Intelligence shenanigans altogether which is something no Windows user can easily do with Copilot.
No, Apple users are most definitely not having to deal with the same level of bullshit Microsoft’s users are. And it’s not even close.
I put in the exact same amount of effort to install a Linux distro on my laptop that I would have to install Windows.
1. Download the ISO 2. Write to a USB drive 3. Reboot 4. Run the installer. 5. ??? 6. Profit
And all for an experience with way less bloat, none of the bundled spyware, more consistent UI design (depending on which desktop you're using), and better perceived performance.
>>This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it:
This is still a web app, it doesn't solve the problem of MS being too lazy or cheap to make real desktop apps for things. I mean this is the same company who thought taking the Start Menu of all things and re-making it with web crap was a good idea.
On Windows you have to add the step "figure out the secret incantation this week to not need to set up a Microsoft account"
It's impossible for every idea to be a hit. Liquid Glass was a miss and they backtracked on some changes and fixed some issues that people were vocal about.
... but that's what you said about Windows:
> Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years
> I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is
> [...] avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck
Really the original comment just reads like you wanted to rant about Apple users and MacOS and that's it. You didn't really give any strong arguments for why Windows is better than MacOS - and "it's not perfect" is not an argument when in the same post you say the exact same about your preferred OS.
1196 points by ajdude on March 3, 2025 | 1213 comments
Linux as an operating system is easily better than macOS. Third party software is lacking though. There’s really nothing that compares to Bear, Things, DEVONthink, Transmit, etc. What I also missed in Linux was the prevalence of what Apple calls “x-callback URLs” [0]. They are incredibly useful and great for glueing different pieces of software together.
With some of Apple’s recent decisions, I do wonder if we’ll see this change in the future. Little Snitch put out a proof of concept for Linux. While it exposes itself as a fairly rough webpage, someone is thinking about it. Linux culture would need to accept paid software, though.
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As always, Captain Obvious is quick to respond.
Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway.
For years, everyone kept saying it was fine that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?
Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...
...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).
For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today.
During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today.
Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse.
Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.
Today 8GB is bare minimum.
Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric.