And regarding Windows, first I want to tell that I'm not a fan of recent MS trends too. Second - I personally never had a single ad on my Win10 and current Win11, so I wouldn't know how to remove those :) . And third - to remove bloatware just uninstall it from the Programs and Features, like OneDrive or Office. LLM can be disabled in Settings. Some bloatware will remain due to deep integration, but that's the same issue as with Google or Apple. For instance I may not want to see Stocks app on iOS, but that's not my choice to make apparently :) .
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/how-... https://windowsforum.com/threads/how-to-disable-annoying-ads... https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-wont-show-any-ads-if-yo...
I never see nags about Edge. Basically you can avoid those by never opening Edge.
OneDrive can be fully uninstalled (this wasn’t always the case). It legit doesn’t even show up when I search for it anymore.
The start menu cluster, I mean, it’s not the best interface on the planet, but the annoying recommendations can be easily removed…or you can just replace it entirely.
I know this is a user choice and therefore way less egregious than being forced to endure it on the Microsoft side, but perhaps it’s even worth pointing out that running Steam on Linux as a respite from commercialization and ads of Windows is…not really accomplishing that goal. And you don’t really avoid the browser wars by switching to Linux either, as many of the top distributions have Firefox+Google Search as their default configuration.
Do you have an enterprise install managed on a Windows domain where your admin has disabled all this stuff by any chance?
Windows is so bad, that I've lost any hope for it to recover.
MacOS is not that bad, but it's tied to Apple hardware and I don't like it. Also it's not getting better either, new releases bring more bloat and features I didn't ask for.
Linux is what I use, but I also lost hope for it to ever become polished experience. Just recent months they introduced another bug to GNOME which probably will not be resolved in years. No big company wants to invest in desktop Linux and without investments it's just not good. I can navigate Linux bugs and workarounds, but I'd prefer not to.
Expecting some new unknown operating system to appear and be ready is foolish, it won't happen.
So Android is the only operating system that could realistically be ready in the foreseeable future. Linux have good support for desktop hardware. Android have good polished stack for applications. Developers know how to write apps for android. Security story for Android is miles ahead that of desktop Linux. So I totally see that Android Desktop could actually be a good thing, with Google sponsoring its development. And if Google will put too much bloat in it, its open source nature would allow for volunteers to build better distributions of it.
It's pretty openly in bad faith to assign malice to open-source developers.
Also I don't like that KDE does not have its native launcher. I need to install some SDDE stuff which works under Xorg or something like that and looks ugly. Pretty weird stuff all that. GNOME just have GDM which just works.
My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want. It doesn't exist, unfortunately. May be I should try to write is, as I complain about it so much. Just have no idea about scale of such a project.
There are no other 10 DE environments. GNOME and KDE are the only two mature ones. Rest are either obsolete, especially with Wayland conquering Linux desktop, or for weird use-cases, like tiling WMs. I'm used to traditional windows managers, I don't want tiling WMs.
> I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me.
Why not use the default provided then and take the defaults as opinionated? That's what I do actually. I might change very few options, but I generally use the defaults. It's not that you have to configure kde before it becomes usable, the defaults are pretty ok.
In something as complex as a display stack this is an important tradeoff.
I just want to type D, enter and open Documents/, how hard can it be. It's been almost a decade since they removed it, and I still can't use vanilla Nautilus.
I always end up with Nemo or a patched Nautilus.
rant aside, the rest of gnome seems fine. Don't love it, but also don't hate it. I can add my own shortcuts with rofi/dmenu.
But afaik it still defaults to search.
Have you ever tried Icewm?
Every now and then I distro hop and ended up on LMDE (linux mint debian edition, the real linux mint) which only has a cinnamon offering out of the box. Much to my surprise its actually good. It still has random bugs triggered by stuff I've tried adding to the panel, but that's par for the course with gnome, XFCE, and MATE lately anyway. Over all it's a solid DE now even if the stock start/menu is underwhelming everything is fixable.
Why would we have any reason to believe that there would ever be a super-opinionated desktop environment that would be good? The examples we have -- which notably DO NOT include Windows 95, which had a zillion tiny knobs, many in the UI, but others requiring dropping to the registry (which is no different from screwing with confirmation files)... and, frankly, doesn't even include macOS, the system with some of the best customization of key bindings and the most universal automation -- are mostly bad. Put in the day or two of effort to make something that isn't opinionated work the way you want, and then reap the rewards for the following few decades of your productive career.
Is the problem that you don't want choices as long as the maintainers always makes the same choice you would have when taking options away?
I just reinstalled and can confirm that I don't see anything in the System Settings as you say.
[1] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/releases/tag/v1.2.8
Security isn't just about technical features but also about trust, while I trust my Linux desktop, I don't trust my Android phone with the Play Store running as high privilege, advertising id in the OS and unknown manufacturer additions.
Meanwhile something close to GrapheneOS running on desktop sounds fantastic.
Android's sandboxes are weaker and AFAIK rely on closed, non-auditable hardware (which is owned by Google in, e.g., GrapheneOS). Qubes protects you more reliably and doesn't require to abandon root privileges or a possibility to take screenshots.
Also, you don't have to run every app in a dedicated VM on Qubes: Instead you group them into security domains, which allowed me to organize my digital life like never before [3].
In addition, Qubes can protect you from supply-chain attacks by isolating VMs from the network and using different OSes side by side. I dream of using Qubes on mobile.
[0] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45017028
[1] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45017028
[2] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/how-to-guides/how-to...
MacOS is bad because it has opinions about what hardware you should use.
Linux is bad because it doesn't have opinions.
Ready for what ? Working with files on Android is ... interesting. Real app support on Android (shells, compilers, CAD/CAE) is ... interesting and the UX is... total crap.
Classic straw man: a single GNOME bug doesn’t mean all of desktop Linux isn’t worth investing in.
Developers have been writing Linux desktop apps successfully for decades. Moreover, who cares about polished desktop apps when most apps are just web apps that look the same on all platforms?
For the record, I despise web apps.
This bug manifests both for vscode and Idea. I configured these apps to run under native wayland, but they're not ready and other bugs manifest (e.g. no border around vscode window), which are less annoying, but annoying nonetheless.
Most Android applications are free. Furthermore, Google allow you to install a separate store where you can buy from, allowing you to not have to pay those 30%, or to pay them to someone else other than Google.
And if anyone is trying to normalise 30% rent seeking on desktops, it's the incumbents already directing you towards their store (Microsoft, Apple).