I'd really like to see Linux desktop become a popular platform for games and game development. Proton is great, but Windows is still too mainstream.

Same thing happened to me. 10 years ago using Linux on the Desktop was tricky but worth it for me. Now it's almost the opposite, my Linux desktop feels smooth and unobtrusive compared to Windows, and rarely has any problems!

I'm not sure how much the Linux situation has improved really. I used to use Linux in the early 2000s when I was a student and had time to burn. Quickly switched back to Windows/Mac when I got a job and needed stuff to "just work".

However recently I started working for a company that provides Linux laptops. I was curious how much things had improved in 20 years. My conclusion is: not much.

Here are some of the issues I've had:

* Linux memory management is still really bad. On OOM it kills a completely random process and 90% of the time for me that means it hard-reboots my laptop. Maybe this is partly because they didn't set it up with any swap for some reason, but I'm unsure that would help (in 2003 it didn't; the system would just grind to an unresponsive halt... but we didn't have SSDs then).

* If you set a WiFi network to automatically connect to a VPN, then delete that VPN, it means the WiFi connection will always just instantly fail with no error message. Even dmesg didn't help. You can imagine how fun that was to figure out.

* For some reason half of the network settings are not in the network settings. They're in some third party app you have to run from the console. It isn't even linked via an "advanced" button in the gnome settings.

* Gnome's desktop notifications are hilariously subtle. We're talking dark grey window that disappears if you touch it with the mouse and there's no notification history. I ended up fixing the colour to make it red by hacking some CSS. It was a simple 27 step process. Couldn't fix the other issues though.

* Somewhat hilariously if you click a truncated link in a notification, the URL it takes you to will also be truncated!

* Screen capture doesn't work in Wayland. Not that I regularly need to share my screen with coworkers or anything... Fortunately switching to X was easy and doesn't seem to have any downsides at all.

* I haven't done this but multiple coworkers have accidentally uninstalled Gnome while trying to upgrade Python. HN mentality will be to blame them but that is the unthinking response.

* It takes ages to wake up. I sometimes have to absolutely mash escape for about 10 seconds.

* Battery life is of course hilarious.

Never had issues like this with Mac or Windows (though I haven't used Windows laptops really).

> I decided to try it out and during setup of the new free Outlook I got asked how I want to see my ads: As a banner above the mail window or in my inbox

It's absurd of them to even imply that anyone wants to see the ads at all. They clearly know that given the option, pretty much everyone would answer the question "where do you want to see your ads in your mail client" with "nowhere". There are certainly products where I grudgingly recognize that ads are the only way they're able to provide the product at all, but I can't see how they possibly could claim that here when they're literally going out of their way to move people towards using it.

Note to self: the market for 3rd party windows mail clients is going to grow next year.

I've been out of the loop due to using Linux the last 20 years, but back when I was using Windows XP, the default mail client was also called Outlook (well, Outlook Express).

So apparently I missed some time period where it was called "Mail" instead. But now it'll be Outlook again. Full circle!

I wish I wasn't tied to Gmail because it means I can't really use any other clients if I want instant notifications. And their official app has ads that look like emails.

I assume they must do that on purpose, right? Make their IMAP implementation bad so people will use their clients with ads? I'd kinda hope regulators would step in on something like that for a case like Gmail where they're practically the default email provider for most people.

The only place you'll find ads in macOS is the App Store, in stark contrast to Microsoft, which seems to seize every opportunity to push ads.

It's in the spirit of preloaded crapware, Yahoo, and AOL.

You’re paying, AND you’re the product. Great days to come!

Thunderbird is alright but I think it's in need of what Firefox was to Mozilla Suite – a lean and mean cross platform IMAP client with a nice UI, and that's it. I don't want an Outlook-style client that's full of things that aren't email (calendar etc).

Recently I've had delivery issues with Thunderbird. That makes me rethink my use of it.

I sent the same email from the same address to the same recipient once with Thunderbird on Windows, once with Apple Mail on iOS. The one with Thunderbird was silently dropped (not even reaching the spam folder), the one sent with Apple Mail reached the inbox without issue. I've had that same issue with 2 different recipient companies.

And yes, my address passes SPF, DKIM, has a strict DMARC, and isn't in any blacklist (uses iCloud+ as host).

Also Claws Mail for Windows:

https://www.claws-mail.org/win32/

(The URL is /win32/, but there are 64-bit builds there too)

Installed it again today. I use Windows only for gaming and therefore didn't care much about mail on it.

I use a $300 second hand W540 maxed out on RAM (32G, I don't think it would take 16G modules but I haven't looked into that, this is sufficient) with two external monitors attached. Uses a tiny bit of power compared to the desktop that it replaced (when I switched the house over to solar power I did a conservation exercise first and my desktop was one of the worst offenders) and everything works as far as I can tell. This box has been up and running for two years non-stop now, the only big change I made to the original is to put a nice fat SSD in it and to remove the battery because it never gets unplugged anyway. As OS I use Ubuntu Studio which makes for a nice development platform for music related software.

You can put Linux Mint on a bootable USB and try it, to see if it works well with your hardware. Mint is a great first Linux for former Windows users, since its desktop has a similar layout and it comes with a lot of free, good software, and maybe the best GUI software package manager ever.

Other distros have other advantages - I'm a happy NixOS user now - but Mint makes an excellent first Linux.

I did puppy linux on a flash drive for a while, then jumped straight to Arch.

Recently I switched to Ubuntu because I’d switched to a laptop, and I thought it would handle things more nicely for me. I regret it. It does too much.

I’d recommend the first two steps I took, though.

Acompli, the mobile mail app Microsoft bought and rebranded as Outlook, was like Newton and other email apps of its day - it used OAuth and cloud APIs to check messages on its servers and then created a combined inbox by sending push notifications to your phone as it received new emails on your behalf in the cloud.

It sort of sounds like maybe the same infrastructure was borrowed here to set up the iCloud account in the local Outlook app. Presumably the local app is now based on the prior Acompli infrastructure.

That said… it really doesn’t pass the sniff test, it feels like Microsoft wants your contacts the same way LinkedIn (also Microsoft) wants your contacts. Personally, I wish I hadn’t trusted Google, Meta and LinkedIn as much with my contacts as I did in the past. Live and learn, I suppose.

I had this exact same reaction less than a week ago and it prompted me to switch to Thunderbird. For years I've fallen into the "if not for gaming ..." camp of Windows users. But I'm getting closer and closer to just not caring about that any more and switching to Mac or Linux instead just to get away from Windows.

I think it's kind of stockholm syndrome what's going on here. Windows users I still know are either so much accustomed to the UX that they see any alternative as bad, even MacOS, or they are clinging to a past which no longer exists.

Anyone, and I really mean this, who has the option tho choose between Windows, MacOS and Linux (KDE / Gnome / some custom thing) chooses one of the latter two. That's speaking of my (medium sized) org of >15k Emps worldwide.

Ads, Forced Edge, Bing, Ultra-Slow file system compared to any other OS, Shady "Driver"-Sites, could go on forever. I agree this comment sounds a bit flamey, if it wasn't just describing the reality. Even MS recommends switching to Linux by now as a replacement for the Win 8 -> Win 10 / 11 upgrade.

Even on a fully paid license that I upgraded to Windows 11...I get weird adverts for xbox gaming, one drive, teams was pre-installed, and there's some weird cortana replacement called copilot. Every now and then I'll get another disruptive notification trying to sell me on something. I paid a lot of money for that license.

Never mind that every update will try and reset defaults and it shoves Edge down your throat at every possible opportunity, and you can't change the search engine for a lot of things away from Bing. Who exactly owns my hardware, Microsoft?

It feels like windows is being managed by inexperienced MBAs who are desperate to use their heavily entrenched OS as an ad platform.

I stopped using the built-in Mail app though because it was pretty buggy. Search was useless.

how can they train their parasitic AI on your emails if you don't provide it to them?

Probably because the new outlook can only access microsoft servers, so they synchronise icloud to outlook server-side and you only access outlook client-side.

When I tried the beta, it didn't even support IMAP whatsoever. It only supported Outlook, Gmail, and iCloud Mail.

Priorities straight.

7 was great, 8 was trash, 10 was great, now 11 is trash.

Maybe they’ll see the light with Windows 12

So they are trying to strong arm people into paying for a subscription by giving them a worse experience with ads until they do. Paying for it at that point is just letting Microsoft know that they were successful and should continue to implement more ads into things.

Part of using windows at this point is learning how to turn off all the bait and switch nonsense and user hostile stuff going on under the hood. There are a lot of programs and scripts out there to turn off telemetry, ads, forced updates and more. Unfortunately it is required to not be at the mercy of your OS updating under you or selling your data behind the scenes.

It's funny because you are saying they are STARTING with an insanely bad dark pattern and you're ok with it - where to next?

It would be better without an add. Free Outlook will become the default mail app pre installed with Windows, a commercial product that costs actual money. It is just shouldn't have ads. Just like Apple's Mail app doesn't have ads.

Having ad free software should be the norm.

Still waiting for Movemail support to be restored though. When using apticron it's nice to get upgrade notifications (and other local mail) in Thunderbird rather than when I invoke a command in xterm (which I find very distracting).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1802145

Why would they do that? OEMs already pay for it via agreements and at this point Windows seems to make no effort to do anything if the copy is not activated, so M$FT doesn't care about the few people not paying. Making it free would make no differnece other than killing a revenue source for no benefit. So it is very unlikely to happen.

Because you can go to a shop and buy a Windows laptop for 300 dollars. No Mac is as cheap as that.

And subjectively the UI of a Mac is worse than Window's. I liked the menu at the top only on the original Mac with the builtin 9" screen. It started to be a bad choice on the next models with a larger separate monitor. And Windows' UI is worse than the customized Gnome desktop I've been using since 2009.

I use Windows as my personal OS (1-2 hours a day) and macOS as my work OS (8 hours a day, M2 Mac). I would never have macOS as my personal OS because exactly it has a poorly designed UI for my use cases. I need to spend a higher cognitive load with the UI and my day-to-day activities require more clicks or UI interaction time. Additionally, I have less screen real estate and some applications simply won't work on a Mac. I like the hardware, though, just not enough.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm...

>if you port your game to Linux, you can't be on Xbox

Thankfully Proton exists, so technically developers don't have to go out of their way to 'port' to linux :)

Its great that Valve started investing in Linux for gaming, as they are nowhere as misguided by greed like Microsoft is.

Because it prints money without much effort.

I do use Thunderbird. My mailbox is a POP3 account. I download mail and move it to folders with per sender filters.

That said, 9,999 other people are about to reply that they use GMail or something like that. Maybe 99,999.

In my view, they're committing a crime by unfairly leveraging a monopoly (Windows) to violate antitrust by pushing Bing, Edge, Office 365, and OneDrive.

MSFT-ActivisionBlizzard also shouldn't happen.

New Outlook does have ads, and this move replaces Mail with Outlook therefore the default mail client will now have ads because it's Outlook. You can remove them with a 365 subscription. So while the article doesn't mention it, the statement is true.

I would be hesitant to donate money to Mozilla, almost none of the money goes to software development.