My first hand experience with Windows vs Linux this month:
A friend of mine recently bought a very expensive laptop to do some gaming. I helped him set it up and god that was a horrible experience. For example, we could not get rid of LinkedIn and other crap Microsoft wanted to force on him. Disabling copilot and removing Office required registry surgery. And the damn fans were always running because of some unknown activity in the background, maybe Microsoft is moving into bitcoin mining business?
He eventually got fed up, installed Ubuntu 26.04 as an experiment and a week later still seems to enjoy the experience. Games run fine on steam and his laptop finally feels like his own.
Most surprisingly, Linux worked fine out of the box. Windows 11 on the other hand needed a bunch of PowerShell and registry hacks to be copy pasted from various sources before it was even remotely usable. It's funny how it felt as if Windows was the OS for nerds with too much free time on their hands while Ubuntu was created for ordinary people. And my god, Ubuntu feels so much more fluid on the same hardware. The difference is *huge*.
But it's the kind of things you'd expect Windows to take care of automatically, or in the worst case, to prompt the users to install on first boot, especially if Linux (with overall less driver support from manufacturers).
And with a preinstalled Windows (tuned to the laptop) this behavior should not be observed at all.
I have never personally owned one, but I have been told that some Alienware and similar flavored devices have had issues like this when you closed their bespoke Alienware management software because it was the thing driving the fan controls.
I got a new computer a couple weeks ago, with a 5070, and installed ubuntu on it and it was incredibly slow. I looked online and found some claim that 24.04 has some incompatability with nvidia, tried installing a bunch of different driver versions and nothing helped, tried turning everything off in gnome tweaks and still slow, tried installing 26.04 and 22.04 but the installer hangs forever in both, tried linux mint 24.04 still slow, gave up and installed windows with WSL :/
I'm running Ubuntu on a 9950x3d and 5090 and it is not slow. Games in Steam with Proton are buttery smooth.
One hiccup was I had to disable variable refresh rate because moving the cursor didn't "count" as a reason to update the screen, so moving the cursor on its own (rather than e.g. moving a window) looked choppy.
But a choppy mouse cursor isn't "slow".
Tip: if you have a performance problem, run Claude Code (or an AI agent of your choice) and ask it to investigate.
Claude Code would probably attach a profiler and take a peek under the hood. Agents are making sysadmin and system introspection way more accessible, and the tools, unlike Windows, are generally command-line, easy for an agent to automate.
Mac chose another path. You buy a pc and OS and the same vendor makes both. You can’t choose but at least you also never need to wonder whether your laptop and OS work together.
Microsoft took a more difficult path. They have close contact with OEMs, run certification programs etc. A massive apparatus to make it somewhat likely that hardware will ”just work”.
Both of these are valid models. I’d be happy to use either. I’m not very keen on doing this work myself though. I can buy a PC with Ubuntu but then it’s still hit and miss if I buy something new for it. There is no canonical store selling canonical gear like the Apple Store
Came here to say that. I've recently tried linux mint and it just works. You don't have to use the terminal if you don't want to, but i do enjoy using it. It's a breath of fresh air after windows. I'm now waiting for the year of the linux desktop. Though i'm not holding my breath. The average person will carry on using their system until it grinds to a halt under all the crap they've installed on it, and then complain their computer is too old.
This is a choice for you! I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer and whilst I've run Linux since I was in college (UK college, not US) I've always had a Windows install for gaming.
A few years ago, I finally decided I'd had it with Windows and their crap and uninstalled it. If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
I'm lucky in that a majority of games I play run fine on Linux, the only real game I'd love to play is Vermintide 2. My friends also run a mix of Linux and Windows and so we're fairly fine skipping games as a group if we can't play on Linux.
That is a problem of any operating system switch, you need to figure out what software is compatible or weather there are suitable replacements. It's the same even if you switch between iOS and Android.
That said, Linux used to be a tough cookie because there were so little support for software people wanted to run and the alternatives didn't do it any favours, plus the barrage of problems you used to get installing it on a random machine was discouraging, at best. Nowadays your chances of running it well on a random machine is pretty damn good and getting the software you need is lot more feasible. But don't go YOLOing a linux install, see if meets your use cases. There is nothing wrong with waiting until it's good enough.
I'm just down to Creative Cloud now. It's the only thing I still need Windows for. Everything else runs on Linux or there is a suitable alternative. So I've got several Debian machines running at home and at work, and one Windows machine that I boot only for photo editing.
> continues to be such a consistent source of bugs - many with serious security implications... just feel that io_uring is a questionable example.
Are you saying this as someone with experience, or is it just a feeling? Please give examples of recent bugs in io_uring that have security implications.
There are a couple of notable examples of projects[0] and companies[1] that have got tired of it, and no longer use it.
There's considerable difficulty these days extrapolating "real" vulnerabilities from kernel CVEs, as the kernel team quite reasonably feel that basically any bug can be a vulnerability in the right situation, but the list of vulnerabilities in io_uring over the past 12 months[2] is pretty staggering to me.
Not OP, and I'm no expert in the area at all, but I _do_ have a feeling that there have been quite a few such issues posted here and elsewhere that I read in the last year.
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=io_uring seems to back that up. Only one relevant CVE listed there for 2026 so far, for more than two per month on average in 2025. Caveat: I've not looked into the severity and ease of exploit for any of those issues listed.
Did you read the CVEs? Half these aren't vulnerabilities. One allows the root user to create a kernel thread and then block its shutdown for several minutes. One is that if you do something that's obviously stupid, you don't get an event notification for it.
Remember the Linux kernel's policy of assigning a CVE to every single bug, in protest to the stupid way CVEs were being assigned before that.
If we apply risk/reward analysis, how probable is such a chain of exploits? If you already got local root, you might as well do a little bit more than a simple DoS.
Depending on how much performance would be gained by using io_uring in a particular case, and how many layers of protection exist around your server, it might be a risk worth taking.
I find the whole premise of writing some vague instructions, feeding them to a stochastic parrot and expecting a solid engineering process to materialize out of the blue quite ridiculous.
Any sufficiently advanced "AI" technology is indistinguishable from bullshit.
> The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations.
Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly...
It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone?
I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!
Because it's important to recognize sometimes when someone you disagree with is right about something, I would like to note that Musk sacking most of the Twitter staff has not made the site unable to stay up. (The site has got worse for other reasons)
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