spartanatreyu

I don't have the time for a proper reply but just a heads-up about WSL2:

You can set up a dev drive to get around any IO issues by mounting a real storage drive directly into WSL2.

No one is entitled to anything from open-source projects.

I never said anything contrary to this.

but Mac/mac (what is it now?) without hardware or VMware wasn’t fun

Letting MacOS users support MacOS hardware is generally easy when you already have BSD and/or busybox support already.

Windows support should always be seen as charity, not an obligation, for all [open source] projects where it’s not the primary target platform.

Ordinarily I'd agree, except these are GUI Libraries.

The whole point of them is to be a generic interface that prevents you from needing to use the platform specific APIs directly.

If GUI libraries aren't going to target the most widely used platforms, then why wouldn't the developer just use the platform specific APIs directly?

Windows XP completely sucked until SP2

The service packs were mainly minor bug fixes, security changes, and support for new hardware. Besides a handful of new settings pages, almost none of the changes were noticed by users.

Also, of the whole windows XP era, SP2 is the one that most users experienced and remember.

, and then it was only “good” because it sucked less than what came before.

Windows XP came after both 2000 and ME. 2000 only focused on businesses and they loved it, and ME only lasted 2 weeks and was recalled, so almost no one had to deal with it. XP came after both good and bad versions of windows and was generally loved.

Windows 7 was only “good” because they undid the worst of the changes in Vista

Actually 7 was good because it continued the changes. Vista was half baked and rushed out due to the failure of the longhorn project. The user facing problems of vista fit into two buckets:

1. New hardware driver model
2. Poor optimisation

The new driver model wasn't given to hardware teams early enough so almost no hardware worked out of the box with Vista. And the hardware that did, often had stability issues because there wasn't enough time to test the drivers that they launched with.

Windows 7 used the exact same hardware driver model as Vista. People often thought changes were made to Windows but no, it just the fact that the hardware folks had enough time to sort out their own drivers and test them.

The poor optimisation was a Vista problem however. Vista was pushed out the door generally feature complete, but the devs didn't have enough time to optimise Vista's processes. Windows 7's internals were mostly the same as Vista's, except that the features were already there, so the devs could just focus on the already existing software.

and 8 sucked more.

8 actually continued the optimisations from 7, but the replaced UI was definitely a major screw up.

The same is largely true of 10, it’s only “good” because it’s less bad than 8.

10 actually continued the optimisations from 8, and the new UI resembling 7's was a welcome change.

Funnily enough, 11 actually continued some optimisations from 10, but you would never know because there's so much bloated adware inside it. That's why people like the "fixed" versions of Windows 11, like the regular version after running open source fix of choice (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc...), the open source debloated installs (like Tiny11), or the official debloated/debloatable installs (Windows 11 IoT LTSC, Windows 11 Enterprise).

Windows 11 is optimised enough that a bunch of devs enjoy sticking it on ever underpowered and unsupported hardware. Someone ported it back to a 9 year old smartphone (32-bit arm), and recently someone got it running on a smartwatch. Technically, you could run an app in a containerised Windows 11 install on a server and have it take up 290mb storage but I wouldn't call that a typical windows 11 user experience.

I actively like my hybrid CLI + GUI workflow, and Windows offers a terrible CLI experience.

Windows used to offer a terrible CLI experience.

Now it comes with Windows Terminal and either powershell for a powerful non-posix shell, and WSL2 for whatever posix shell you want (and wslg for launching linux gui apps from said shells).

I highly doubt any script could make Windows usable for me. There’s just far too much I hate about it.

Windows XP and 7 were almost universally praised. They were consistently usable, productive, performant.

Windows 10 was seen as a successor to 7 but was more of a rolling release that saw a gradual transition to a new user interface for system components that was haphazard and lacklustre at first, but slowly improved over time. You can't really give Windows 10 a specific rating because what Windows 10 was changed over time.

Windows 11 is a case study in what happens when a product is stolen away from a product team and given to a business team with no product team oversight. They started off with a great base, created products they could commodify then bloated the base with those adware / microtransaction filled products.

The good thing is they couldn't change everything with wreckless abandon, lest they lose their enterprise customers, so every piece of bloat they added can be turned off with a switch somewhere for each enterprise's sysadmin to find.

The open source fixes mentioned above (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc...) just run through every switch and turn them off. As soon as Microsoft's business team adds another "product" to windows 11, the open source community just adds the new switch to the open source fix.

The closest comparison is using the internet without an adblocker vs using the internet with an adblocker.

It's a night and day difference, and makes the internet actually useful again.

That said, opinions on openSUSE? It’s developed by SUSE employees (good or bad, depending on your perspective), Tunbleweed is arguably the best rolling distro, and the installer is great.

Personally I wouldn't recommend openSUSE purely because it's not really intended to be a general purpose OS. It's for a specialised use case and caters for those users in particular.

Let's not conflate defending OSs (and their derivatives) with the organisations that produce them.

Ubuntu has always been a great entry for Linux users yet canonical has always had at least one thing going on to infuriate the community (flip-flopping around half-baked DEs and the transitions between them, snaps, etc...)

Arch has always been the most customisable, but the leads have shied away from including a little setup wizard/script to automate what 90% of all users end up installing anyway.

Fedora has always been a great middleground, but on the other hand: Red Hat

Windows and Microsoft are no different. Base install Windows 11 is a 5/10 experience, but with your set-and-forget open source fix of choice (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc...) becomes a solid 9/10 with next to no effort.

Good.

Too many libraries/frameworks/products don't factor in accessibility from the start.

Along the same vein, too many open source projects don't factor in non-"gnu/linux" environments from the start.

It's a lot harder to tack on after the fact rather than just having it be a part of the base design from the beginning.

Making these front and centre in a survey should be a be a bit of a wakeup for people who don't consider what doesn't run on their machines.

The 2/3/4/5-000 series cards use a driver that's more open than the older cards, so nvidia support tends to be better than it was before.

Flip-flopping in and of itself isn't bad.

What it is - is a symptom.

A symptom of being an absolute dumbass. Now that is what's bad.

Huh?

You can be right wing in FOSS networks.

There's two things you can't do (at least if you want to keep a community healthy):

1. Break the rules of the network (which are usually things like: don't spam, don't scam, "Wheaton's Law", etc...).
2. Be so unpleasant to be around that others don't want to be around you.

There are cases of those who dehumanise others (e.g. racists, anti-trans, literal nazis, etc...) who get banned because they're doing the two things you can't do. But in those cases they're not banned because they're right wing, they're banned because those actions break communities, so the community has to ban them to continue existing.

display port cables are cheaper than usb-c cables that support display port

Two things:

1. Learning git reflog will save you from needing to worry about the sudden dread that comes from using reset hard in git.

2. Using an proper git client will save you needing to use reset hard in the first place. I highly recommend the confusingly named: Fork. It's free the same way that sublime text and winzip are: about once a month it asks for you to buy it but you can click on the "I'm still just trying it out" to keep using it for free.