so I started to see stuff on O&O ShutUp10++ that help disable most intrusive windows features, but it's closed sorce, wondering if they are any open source alternatives? Shutup10 ++
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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obligatory: linux
My standard response to "just go Linux" :
I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it's still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.
As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won't even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying "you should manage data in a proper database app". No, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.
Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won't even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of windows since 2000, at the least, and would probably work on Win95.
Someone else said it better than me:
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's of a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
Linux doesn't even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it's own way), and that's a massive barrier for users.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).
All other things aside, which Logitech mouse are you talking about? Both my G Pro and my G 305 work out of the box. Logitech also advertises them as ChromeOS compatible and AFAIK the Logitech wireless dongles are USB HID compliant so seeing a Linux straight up refuse to interact with them sounds very weird.
Yup I'm using an MX Master 3s (and 3 before), one with the unifying and one with the bolt receiver, both worked out of the box. At home I have an mx vertical and pro x superlight, which has its own receiver iirc, both also worked out of the box.
The only thing you have to install yourself is solaar, so you can change the built-in settings of the mouse.
TIL about solaar, thanks!
My Dell XPS 13 (Windows) will kill it's battery if you look at it funny... Or don't look at it at all.
One time, I fully shut down the laptop and put it in my carry-on.
When I took it out after my flight, my bag was suspiciously warm and the battery was fully dead. Power management on Linux might be a joke but Dell is certainly the Carlos Mencía of the comedy club. At least I know my enemy now though. I unplug the battery to turn it 'off'.
This is by far the worst take I've seen on the topic. Sorry for being rude, but it sounds like you haven't touched a computer since that last time in 1990.
Surprise, it's 2024 and windows will obliterate the battery even after you turn off the machine.
There is, though it's via dconf, but it's justified as it's a thing few people would want to tweak.
Sounds like an excel problem to me
I don't use either, but I'm pretty sure filter views are available in libreoffice calc. Open source DB's and Access? What are you talking about, exactly?
The what now? Are you talking about CUPS daemon?
systemctl stop cups && systemctl disable cups. Enjoy your 2.5megs of ram back at a cost of not being able to print anything. Now try and do that on windows without bricking your system.If you insist on needing a GUI, go ham. But don't you diss the command line. Being able to do things without GUI is anything but a con.
That's notoriously a windows problem, not a linux one. You must be misremembering it
Not recognize it like, not being picked up by xinput, or not even listed in lsusb? I haven't ever heard of non-class-compliant mouse. Is that something to do with the G-Hub thingamajig? If so, that's on logitech, not linux.
No, it won't. If linux didn't pick it up without a driver, then win95 won't either. And it's even worse in reverse. I have a bunch of old hardware that won't ever work on modern windows because the last drivers released are for WinXP, which are not compatible nor even portable to subsequent versions. All of them are plug-n-play on linux, though.
Huh? You mean the desktop environments? The shell is a thing very few people ever care about.
The overwhelming majority of systems are either in GNOME/GTK or KDE/Qt ecosystem, unless you really know what you're doing and want to go with something completely different. But even then, there's a lot of re-use or re-implementation of components from one or the other. It's great to have this choice. Sure, it can be a hassle if components from one don't play nice with another. But then, you're comparing it to windows, that uses components from 3 distinct eras, that don't really work together either.
Of course this is all subjective. Millions of people use it as their main OS just fine, because it’s fine.
I’d never use Windows and can come up with an equally long list of complaints.
At least a few of your comments are also just false.
I have been ping ponging for almost two decades on the desktop. Currently on Pop!_OS (Ubuntu derivative) with a “safety blanket” dual boot with Windows. I went through a lot of these stages many times. So far, ~3 months on this has been the least frustrating Linux desktop experience. I’m still missing some of the power management controls and cloud file integration is kind of a joke, but an interesting time. For the many things that work well, the performance is so much better than Windows and all the other Linux distros I’ve tried on this same hardware.
Try Fedora or another distro with nearly-up-to-date kernel + KDE Plasma, the latter has a GUI for configuring power management separate for AC, battery and low battery. It even includes features like a charge percentage limit.
KDE's file manager Dolphin doesn't remember SMB passwords unless you tell it to.
For MS Office compatibility try OnlyOffice.
My brand new Razer Viper V3 Pro that releases in April 2024 works great under Linux. Not sure why your Logitech stuff doesn't.
Your quote is interesting, because it's the number one point for me when choosing an operating system: get out of my way, I want to get stuff done on the operating system, not tinker with it. So Windows it was for me, and I really held on to it for a long time, even using the LTSC version because it was less bloated and annoying. Some day, an update even started these nags in my LTSC installation and eventually it was at a point where Windows was more in my way and I had to do more tinkering to move it out of my way than just using a solid Linux distro, where yes, I had to tinker quite a bit to get everything working perfectly, but at least once its set up, it won't suddenly come around on the next restart and says "HEY I MADE EDGE YOUR DEFAULT BROWSER NICE RIGHT? WANT TO USE ONEDRIVE AND MICROSOFT REWARDS? OH AND LOOK CANDY CRUSH IS BACK. AND THESE NICE MICROSOFT NEWS IN THE TASKBAR." - this to me is just straight up disrespectful to the user.
No OS is perfect and I won't pretend Linux is, but it got to a point where it is less annoying and cumbersome.
Of course bashrc isn't going to run in the context of a desktop environment. They have zero clue how the system works at all.
Either Windows does a lot of it for them and they should have chosen a distro that does the same, or they're much more familiar with Windows and expecting that to translate to Linux without any time investment.
"Monitor doesn't look right so I installed 20 things and ran random commands," gee I wonder why their Linux installations keep breaking? If they behaved like that on Windows they'd also have a number of problems.
I'm convinced this is the main reason people say linux is hard and finnicky. They use windows their entire lives then boot up linux and expect it to work the exact same way, inevitably leading to some not-dones like installing some random packages downloaded from the internet (download a .deb and double click it. What could go wrong?) which then come back to bite them way later in an update.
What you find easy/intuitive is whatever you've spent most time using. In windows I get frustrated because 50 random things are happening in the background that I don't know of and there's like what, 7 different configuration apps from 5 different eras, some of which are overlapping in functionality. Programs I installed are either hopelessly out of date or when I launch them they need to spend a minute updating before I can use them.
What a spectacular response. If you don't mind, I'm going to bookmark and copy that text because it magnificently describes the whole situation.
Sorry, but if you want linux to be "just like Windows" it will never be good enough. It is different, and of course it takes time and effort to learn.
Skill issue
A great response it is
Lemme get your russian immigrant wife to setup that VR headset for you, so that you can disable any process you like like it's Jarvis