Microsoft putting ads into the OS was a real low blow, and they've made some really bad blunders over the years.

But there is nothing more valuable to me than my time. It takes me less time to be productive on Windows and OS X and remove all the junk, than it does to waste countless hours trying to get a Linux DE configured "just right" based on whatever combo I'm using and feature parity I need.

I'll chose my time over my money, and I'm OK with that. Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.

> But there is nothing more valuable to me than my time. It takes me less time to be productive on Windows and OS X and remove all the junk, than it does to waste countless hours trying to get a Linux DE configured "just right" based on whatever combo I'm using and feature parity I need.

Yeah, I agree.

But the major difference might be that once configured a linux desktop environment is "just right" for quite a lot longer than you think -- and once it is "just right" you get marginal productivity gains in small aspects, which in aggregate, is probably a lot of time saved.

I'm a bit biased because I already sank the cost into my desktop setup in 2011. But frankly: my desktop environment very much gets out of my way.

Setting a window to be "always on top" saves me more time than all of window's productivity features combined.

To me it's to pull the plug on my ethernet connection.

I too value my time. And yes, MacOS or Windows allow you to be productive almost right away compared to say Arch Linux. Compared to something like Ubuntu, I'm not so sure. And things which I use daily don't seem supported on Windows (using the GPG app on my Yubikey for SSH access).

But this is just an upfront cost. With Windows, which I've tried to use regularly, there are many annoyances which introduce friction in the day to day. So the "opex" if you will is much higher.

Just this morning I started my Windows machine to play a quick game and wanted to check out something on the internet beforehand. It started bugging me about some "recommended browser settings" in some Edge window that showed up half off-screen that I couldn't move. Then there's the Windows Terminal app which sometimes takes forever to start up. And windows that pop up and look active but aren't.

Then there's a bunch of other little annoyances which I now forget but over a work day end up aggravating. Of course, YMMV as they say, and I know people who aren't as bothered by those. But in case you are annoyed, the upfront cost of setting up your Linux DE just right may be cheaper in the long run.

I've spent a while setting up i3 a few years ago, just out of curiosity. I had been a MacOS user at the time for a very long time. But then something happened, and it grew on me. Now I only use my mac from time to time when idly watching a movie in bed, because I find it slower to use. I hate having to hunt around for windows, move then around, click on some Dock icon which sometimes doesn't show, others shows up while it shouldn't (in the full-screen Mail window usually).

I guess the point is that different people have different needs and are willing to pay different prices for those. There's also a case to be made about high upfront cost + low maintenance vs low upfront cost + high maintenance.

> Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.

Well, of course. Only issue is how you define quality, as related to what you need. For me, the price of the Windows license was lumped in the same bin with the GPU. Have to buy it to be able to play a game I wanted to play. But I'd feel robbed if I had to pay for it and than have to use it for my job. In my case, I haven't looked under the hood of the Linux kernel or the DE or the terminal app or anything, for that matter. It just works better for me. And I'm also OK to invest some time if it means I'll be more confortable down the road.

I've used Linux DE far less than Windows/OS X, but I've spent more time setting up Linux than I ever have on many multiples years more use of the others. This doesn't even include things like digging into systemd or other supporting ecosystem players. Wifi, Bluetooth, HiDPI, and other common DE experiences are not always consistent with Linux distros and across hardware.

Wouldn't be surprised if I've spent more time alone on Linux just figuring out network file sharing than all other DE-related configurations combined.

On the other hand, I wouldn't deploy software against any other OS (unless it's an app). There's no world where I don't want or see Linux. I'm just not sold on it's DE experience so far.

There is no customization you can make to a DE that saves me so much time and energy long term that it makes up for all the other time and energy needed to invest in Linux DE as a daily driver. Most of my energy seems to be devoted to task-specific regiments, more influenced by that tasks software.

In twenty five years, I've probably spent less than $3,000 on Microsoft products personally. I've got my moneys worth.

I've found Linux filesharing easier to work with than Windows but that's about it.

When on my local network, I'm at the point regardless of OS (Win, Linux, Mac alike) where I tend to fire up the Python built-in http.server module on whichever machine I want to share from and go to the other to download whatever files I need.

I have never gotten inter-OS file sharing like SMB/Samba to work right other than using rsync or scp. And the only intra-OS file sharing I've ever had a good experience with is Mac AirDrop.

> I have never gotten inter-OS file sharing like SMB/Samba to work right other than using rsync or scp

That's weird. I usually just fire up Samba and everything works pretty much as expected. Granted, I don't use GUI tools, but one of the examples in the default config file is pretty much what you need (share the homes, or something to that effect).

Windows and OS X come ready for both SMB and NFS, which is the bulk of experiences I encounter. Apple AirDrop has also been very useful.

Mounting remote file systems can be done easily in the GUI, as can sharing. Like any such software, it's going to have a learning curve.

I can't remember the last time I was on Linux and didn't have to start off by installing cifs-utils, and then hunting down instructions on writing an .smbcredentials file.

Windows also makes it (relatively) easy to administer file sharing if you're on a AD domain. All said and done, I personally use Unraid for my home NAS.

Windows makes it hard, when you need to have credentials from multiple domains and these domains do not have configured trust. It's a hell then.

Both macs and linux can handle this fine.

Yeah using samba is just as hard on Linux. I've struggled to get AD to work correctly with older PC's. We run CNCs with Win 98.

NFS is simpler and easier to manage.

Windows 98 does not support AD out of the box; the contemporary solution was NT4 domain.

There is a solution for that, dsclient, but it is still missing Kerberos support, so you have to account for that.

> I've spent a while setting up i3 a few years ago, just out of curiosity. I had been a MacOS user at the time for a very long time. But then something happened, and it grew on me. Now I only use my mac from time to time when idly watching a movie in bed, because I find it slower to use. I hate having to hunt around for windows, move then around, click on some Dock icon which sometimes doesn't show

I went through exactly the same experience after trying i3. Also a Mac user. I couldn't move to Linux at the time because apps, so I did my best to recreate that experience on a Mac. Rectangle+Karabiner+Hammerspoon did the trick, and at this point I'm so used to it that when I set up my Linux desktop, I actually recreated the same shortcuts in i3 vs. the default i3 config.

So I would say if you _have to_ stay on a Mac, there are ways to customise and tinker too, with the end result much better than you expect.

I was using Karabiner a lot at the time. I hadn't heard of Rectangle nor Hammerspoon, but I tried Amethyst (or something like that) which would provide a tiling experience, but I hated it. It was laggy, and I couldn't get used to the windows jumping around. Maybe it was my oldish MacBook (late 2013 15" MBP), although I still find that computer plenty fast for my needs.

I was more or less in the same boat app-wise, as for work I use Office 365 and at the time the web apps were barely usable. I also loved Apple Mail, and to me, it still is the best email client I've ever used (disclaimer: I don't tend to do anything "fancy" with my email). Nowadays, Outlook online works well enough for my needs (I'd say it's actually better than when I was using the 'heavy client' on the Windows machine I was given). Teams works well (as in no worse than elsewhere) on Linux, too, so all my work-related needs are met.

Rectangle is just an app that helps to move windows around, like on Windows: Win-RightArrow to move to right half of screen, some other combination to maximize etc. I found that recreating i3 experience as-is on a Mac is counterproductive, especially when it's on a laptop-sized screen. I rarely want to split the screen, and when I do, it's mostly left-right halves. The only exception is terminal, and I use tmux for that.

Hammerspoon is just an automation tool for Mac, you can do a lot of things with it, including moving windows around and a lot of other stuff (just look at the docs to get a feel). I use it as an app switcher: I found that it's more efficient to do "show me Slack" or "show me VSCode" than "move to workspace 3 where VSCode should be". I don't use workspaces at all nowadays. So, with the help of Karabiner, I mapped my most-used apps to combinations like "caps+g" for Google Chrome, "caps+s" for Slack, "caps+c" for VSCode etc. And for cycling through windows of the same app, there's a built-in cmd-` on MacOS.

The last time I configured my DE was when I switched to Xfce 15 or so years ago. Since then, whenever I get a new laptop, I just copy my home directory from the old one to the new one and it just works.

And you've made no tweaks or changes in the 15 years since? I have changes to my dot files on a constant basis (not to mention changing hardware needs).

I've not touched a dotfile in a decade+.

One thing that people fall into is the ability to tweak things endlessly. If you simply don't do that and use a good default install then you are going to do just fine without all that tuning.

For me my main tools are shell, browser, various audio related programs (audacity, midi editors, score editors and so on) and installing a new linux machine takes about as long as copying the data off the medium takes. Then I copy over (or mount, depending on the circumstances) my homedir and get to work.

Ubuntu also had ads in it: In 2013 they started displaying Amazon Books in their “Start menu”, which had the effect of uploading any keystroke of the main menu.

After the outrcy, the also removed it and never tried it again.

The other systems did not react the same way; they still consider that doing it is fine.

IMO the developer experience on Linux is first class, and it's ordinary user experience that drives me to MacOS — all the apps and games which will probably never come to Linux.

Plus, notwithstanding the CSAM detection thing, Apple has been steadily introducing a stream of really sweet consumer privacy features for the ordinary user, such as Sign in with Apple, Apple relay (basically TOR lite for grandma), email aliases, etc.

Even the installation process has junk in the final steps when it insists on asking about cloud and stuff, although you want just a regular local account. In end I found it easier to use an Autounattend.xml [1], then deal with that crap.

[1]: created with https://www.windowsafg.com/win10x86_x64_uefi.html

I don't see why providing commercial applications would cause Linux to "lock up".

Say someone implements an appstore for Linux, and start selling apps. This could theoretically be enough to get commercial developers onto the platform, opening up for wider popularization of Linux. That doesn't mean you have to install that appstore.. Heck of Linux ever becomes popular, it's probably gonna be Ubuntu. If you don't like that, well, use fedora then. Or nixOS!

Except steam. That is a piece of commercial software that i really want on my linux. I wasnt sold at first but a few years in and i love Proton. The ability to install the games i love without headaches, even VR title, is imho the biggest development for linux desktop since web browsers.

The way I see it it's like building a house or buying one. People should do what they want. I'd like more of us to build our houses, but to each his own.