Install Android with gapps on windows 11 tonight because I hate myself. The app from the play store runs pretty good. It defaults to tablet mode.
windows 11 reveal was so impressive it made me upgrade across all my computers.
to kde neon.
lol… I upgraded to it manually last week. I generally like the look. I know it’s a small detail, but having the taskbar applications centered is a strong preference of mine (on Linux I use Dash-to-Dock). That being said, after I fixed all the crap Microsoft did during the update (installing applications I don’t want, changing my settings, etc.) I used it for about an hour and haven’t picked up that laptop since.
Honestly, the Linux desktop environment has come so far over the years that unless there’s a specific application (and one that cannot be run in a virtual machine) I almost see no point in Windows, macOS, etc. Linux is free, runs faster with fewer resources, and I really like that 99% of what I need is available in the OS’s repository.
I’ll have to give Windows 11 another go. I did change my rollback period to the max. 60 days just in case I really didn’t like it.
don’t get me started, i had to deploy active directory at home (using samba, thankfully) just so i could deal with endless windows 10 annoyances through group policy, and i’ve only used windows on desktop computers because gaming, my laptops has been windows-free for a long time now.
this time however i finally managed to figure out how pci-e passthrough works and switched to windows 10 vm for gaming, running on a kde neon host (with vintage radeon r7 240 as a host gpu, lol, using wayland).
it works surpisingly well although it required quite a bit of reading to setup things just right. i was completely unaware of stuff like hyperv enlightenments because i’ve never ran windows under qemu/kvm before. it also has no access to my personal data which is a small bonus, i suppose.
anyway, even though i had to waste a few days on the whole VFIO thing, my development workflow in general is way easier to deal with under linux. on windows i had to use wsl and a hyper-v vm to get things done, it was so tiresome. and i couldn’t just install android studio from flatpak. and i couldn’t use firejail for npm/npx. etc, etc.
thanks for reading my blog, etc.
e: i’ve even managed to switch my ancient ~dacha~ computer (a haswell i5 with a 1050ti) to a VFIO setup, thanks to properly functioning IOMMU support and an iGPU, and played through wasteland 3 with no issues at native speed. so it’s not like you need a lot of hardware to play with this stuff.
I actually don’t mind windows, but I also support it as my day job. It’s been so long since I tried Linux desktop I should give it another try.
On the testing android front, I have my system set to auto switch from dark mode to light mode in the day. the android system picks this up, thus tt-rss did as well. It actually switched pretty smoothly.
I like Windows 10; I’ve been using it for a few years as macOS is kind of a mixed bag. But Windows 11 was really glitchy for me. Things like switching from dark to light mode caused the background to change but not the foreground, so the UI would have white text on a white background. I have also lost count of how many times I’ve uninstalled Teams.
But like fox mentioned, certain workflows are just a bit more difficult in Windows. WSL is a nice addition but it still doesn’t feel quite right. Contrast that with macOS or Linux where a Unix terminal is native.
it’s not just terminal, microsoft terminal is alright i guess. its the userland environment, in general. even shitty bsd userland in macos is better than powershell if only because it’s so much less verbose.
i write scripts in powershell but using it as interactive shell is torture, and what else is there? cmd.exe? lol.
wsl comes with its own share of various problems, different between wsl1 and wsl2, too, so you get to pick the set of issues that bothers you less. using my work/dev environment on windows always felt a flaky wine setup to play windows games on linux would. i always had this nagging feeling that the whole house of cards is going to collapse at any moment because wsl would get broken again or some other shit like that. dealing with various minor deficiencies of wayland in $current_year is less annoying.
i could never use gnome, though. i’m not sure who this environment is targeted at, but it doesn’t work for me, at all. it’s like android but somehow worse.
I just use Hyper-V to install the distro I want to do dev work in. I’ve found it a lot simpler and more stable. I limit my use of WSL to command line tools I’m comfortable with (curl, tar, ffmpeg, etc.). This lets me use commands I’m familiar with while being in Windows. Like you said, navigating PowerShell is a nightmare and I’m out of touch with it. I often have to keep Microsoft’s site up so I can lookup commands and their arguments when I’m scripting with it.
As for GNOME, their design decisions are questionable. I find it weird there’s no taskbar-equivalent on the desktop when you’re using it. If you minimize a window, there’s no way to simply click it open again. You have to switch to that multitasking/window view, but at that point I’m already looking at open applications so why put the applications panel at the side? (Hence why I use Dash-to-Dock.) It’s weird because sometimes I can’t tell whether I didn’t launch an application or if I did and minimized it. They also completely hide the app indicator panel. I actually need those icons for various things, why is it not visible without an extension?
Still, I stick with GNOME because it’s the default and I spend 90% of my time in a browser anyway. I’ve tried others and hated them. The only exception was KDE, which I liked, but I also found it quite configurable and that led me to endlessly tweaking how things were laid out. 
Apple users. It has to be. There are so many similarities with limiting configurable options in GUI to the way the applications screen is presented to the tiled multitasking window view. It’s all so similar to Apple’s design styling. With GNOME there are things I like and things I dislike; but I haven’t found any environment to be perfect for me so I deal with it.
yeah, i did the same, but host filesystem access from hyperv is a pain in the ass so i’ve also used WSL1 for some things which had this working (slowly, with minor issues). WSL1 fake-kernel is limited though so there was no fuse and many other syscalls were missing.
then microsoft abandoned WSL1 because they can’t really finish anything anymore and told everyone to use WSL2 which has even slower host filesystem access on top of multiple unsolvable networking issues where your pseudo-VM may randomly claim one of the reserved CIDRs that you were actually using on the LAN with no way to fix it properly and bam you can’t use ssh anymore.
also, no bridging without eldritch netsh hacks that don’t really work, half-functioning localhost access, and really many other issues which i don’t even want to recall, primarily related to networking.
so, i had to use all three (hyperv, wsl1, wsl2) for various different tasks with various hacks on top of hacks (i.e. i had to use two network interfaces in a hyperv vm so i could have both host-to-vm and outbound lan networking working reliably), which made me question my life choices on a daily basis.
gnome is definitely designed by apple users (they all use macbooks, i think). i get what they are trying to do with it but it feels too restrictive without addons and with addons you get into this neverending cycle of them breaking on every minor change, which is just too much effort.
and this hypothetical normie their experience is supposedly targeted at, in $current_year, is likely going to use an ipad. not even macbook anymore, that would be too much of a computer for him/her.
well, maybe gnome is targeted at the corporate drone? supposedly, that’s why red hat keeps gnome devs on the payroll.
well, we did some very minor exploratory user testing at work on microsoft alternatives because ~geopolitics~ and i can tell you that both normies and kinda-sorta-technical people found gnome incomprehensible in all variants (fedora with vanilla gnome, ubuntu which was also deemed ugly) while they could more or less navigate through kde and deal with basic productivity apps like opening a document in libreoffice from the network share.
Yes, it is. I sort of do things backwards. I setup SMB shares inside the VM, then access the files from the host to the shared VM. It mostly works, except for some permissions issues because… Still, this has been the most reliable way for me to work.
I’m not even sure what’s going on with them in respect to that. I mean, they’re clearly a solid company (they just posted record earnings and became the world’s most valued company), yet they perpetually drop the ball on some things. It really feels like the various departments are in their own silos and don’t talk to each other. (Frankly, that’s probably not far from the truth.) (Apple also suffers from this, with weird inconsistencies between applications, but not to the extent that Microsoft does.)
Literally experiencing this with Ubuntu 21.10 where Dash-to-Dock is not updated for GNOME 3.40 and so is not included. (Even though their Unity bar thing is a port and you can use gsettings to get the look you want.)
There are a lot of smart software developers around, but I think everyone now is designing stuff for the common person. The one that really wants to see their computer operate just like their car. Turn it on, use it. If it doesn’t work, take it to the mechanic. Developers just don’t want people to have a lot of buttons to press because it leads to confusion and everyday people don’t like being confused. That’s just my theory.
I tried to like powershell, I really tried. But a shell’s main function is launching other executables, and powershell is broken by design in that area.
It can’t pass arguments correctly to executables.
It can’t pass bytes between executables.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
I’m currently using Git Bash and Busybox-w32. Each one has its ups and downs, but they work surprisingly well for my needs (mostly running build commands and deploying the results).
Funnily enough, all Windows 10 and 11 installations come with tar.exe, curl.exe, and ssh.exe out of the box, even Home editions (I don’t know about 10 S). I’ve used them in a pinch from cmd on relatives’ PCs and they were lifesavers.
This is exactly why I use GNOME. When I was younger I had Compiz with a million customizations, then I moved to KDE 4 with fewer customizations, but still too many. Then KDE 5 was released with enough bugs to make me go to GNOME 3 +few extensions. Now I just use GNOME 40 with 0 extensions. I just don’t have that kind of time anymore. So if in 5 years GNOME 50 decides to make window decorations upside down, I’ll just say whatever and get used to it.
Yeah, and I use them too when I need to get something done quick (like scp a file from a server). I just find Linux has more utilities that I use… and I like using bash.
This weekend I finally tried using WSL GUI applications on my Windows 11 machine. And I was kind of surprised at how well it works. I tried Firefox, GhostWriter, gedit, amongst others. All ran quite well (Firefox struggled with playing YouTube videos probably because there’s zero access to the GPU, but it was fine otherwise.)
No joke, this is what I do on macOS. (Mind you, despite my user name, I had not used macOS for about five years. I only this summer picked up an M1 MacBook Air.) But I don’t bother customizing macOS a lot anymore because Apple changes so much stuff between releases I just gave up. I even try to limit third-party applications because they often break between major updates. macOS is so annoying. I genuinely don’t know how developers deal with it all the time.
it works really well until you run something tremendously obscure like telegram desktop which wants to minimize into system tray. and then the whole sand castle falls down on your head.
e: last time i evaluated gnome, right from the start i had to use their wannabe registry editor to set my preferred language switch hotkey (caps lock), and it went downhill from there.
This. It’s why I can’t use GNOME without extensions, and it makes things difficult. There’s a lot to like, but some of their decisions are baffling.
Yeah, but 99% of what I do is either in a browser, terminal, or IDE. Ironically each one of them has its own way to manage multi-tasking using tabs/panes/etc. Isn’t that supposed to be the job of the window manager?
Luckily I haven’t hit a corner case that requires me to install an extension in years. But I admit my experience is not universal.