Over the last decade or so I've tried to switch to Linux a bunch of times. This will probably be my final attempt.
Almost everything is already working on Linux, I can play all the games I like, there are good open source or free proprietary alternatives for all the software I use. I truly believe we are approaching the year of Linux desktop.
AI is also helping a lot here. I always had a hard time making hibernate and especially suspend-to-hibernate work in Linux. And I have managed linux instances at work so I have the know-how. But you simply can't keep wasting time on every niggle in your system. This time with a few prompts to claude code and it quickly figured out from logs what boot params were wrong that needed fixing. Afterwards it just worked, Happy hibernating me after years on linux!
the only two things that would make linux unstoppable would be affinity being first class and having something like fusion360 or solidworks work. there are web based versions of solidworks and another option that escapes me atm that would work but that's the web and it's not the same as native imo. i know there are some opensource projects out there but the ones i've seen have been not as good.
>I imagine a lot of people would find that absolutely nothing ties them to Windows anymore, even gamers with things like Steam Proton often find their needs met.
i absolutely concede the gamers dont have too much of an excuse anymore, unless you play some specific games that are windows-only (or, more accurately, where the anti-cheat malware is windows-only).
but for some reason, these announcements/conversations always leave out the biggest share of windows users, who also happen to be the slowest to change: governments and large institutions (banks, hospitals, universities).
it will be decades yet for them to switch off windows.
another often overlooked one: small businesses that use quickbooks (which is thousands and thousands of small businesses). or engineering firms that use solidworks (or other CAD)
so, yes, for home use it is a fantastic time to explore non-windows options, absolutely. but it aint the "year of the linux desktop" yet, and wont be for awhile, if you count government and institutions.
FWIW a tech company I retired from was about 60% mac and a portion of them operated almost exclusively out of VirtualBox + Linux. IT had some rock solid Linux sysadmins but not quite enough to support most of the company moving to Linux. There are some shops that could go 50% Linux especially on the development side without much issue if compliance and auditors were on board.
Year of the Linux Desktop began for me last year. All the games I play work, and that's mostly what I do at home. Work is also a Linux desktop, because our build system runs there anyways so may as well use it directly (though some still work primarily from windows/mac laptops and ssh into their desktop). Only windows machine I have left is my work laptop because IT doesn't offer Linux laptops, but it's basically just a thin client to access my desktop away from the office.
Unless you’re a gamer or have other specific use cases, that’s it. 500$ and it does what you need.
From a corporate pov, I know I’d rather support 500 Neos over 500 generic laptops. One vendor is responsible for everything. No bickering between Intel , Microsoft and Lenovo when things go wrong.
I reckon schools will get the Neo for 450 to 400 at volume. And app developers have to meet good software again, your end user only has eight gigs of RAM.
> And app developers have to meet good software again, your end user only has eight gigs of RAM.
I wouldn't bet on it, especially in an corporate setting. IT departments seem to love filling every inch of their firm laptop's CPU and RAM with security and remote access stuff. I've seen that same thing happen in every company I've worked for recently: high-end laptops sitting at 100% ressource usage absolutely all the time.
How many years of support does Apple guarantee with the Neo? At some point in the future, even though the hardware is fine, it will be unsupported, and potentially vulnerable to whatever exploits are built into its version of MacOS.
Perhaps by that time the M3 will have better Linux support, but dealing with the 8GB memory size limitation will become more difficult as time ticks by.
I was finally able to switch from Windows laptop to MacBook Pro at work for development, and so many problems and irritants just instantly disappeared.
WSL is a nice piece of engineering but it's nowhere near as seamless as MacOS X where the entire system is built on top of a BSD compatibility layer.
Also I suspect IT at my company don't devote as many resources to messing up Macs with malware and spyware of various sorts as they do with Windows.
I come from a developing country where the only OS people know is Windows. Macs used to be too expensive, and Linux didn’t have any of the applications people would use (read: pirate) for work.
Typically, college students and teachers would get $500 dingy laptops from Asus, Acer, and Dell. A decade ago, those machines were fine. My mom used one for 7 years, right until they retired Windows 7.
Then the machines started becoming absolutely useless with Windows 8, 10, and now 11. 8GB machines are barely usable now, with constant Windows updates and all the background telemetry services maxing out the disk all the time.
Sure, people can turn off some of these rogue processes. But my point is - an OS should just disappear from the user’s view and let them work.
I don’t live in my home country and haven’t visited in a long time, but I’ve heard that people are really opting for second-hand MacBook Airs. Now with the MacBook Neo, more people will go that route.
Students are opting for cheap Windows machines and flashing them with Ubuntu to make them usable.
If I could play GTA6 on Ubuntu at release, I'd probably switch, but as-is, I'll probably stay on Windows 10 indefinitely for gaming.
I've used Kubuntu as a daily driver at work several times - imo it's superior to a mac for development; Apple is so actively hostile to actually running open-source or custom software.
I think this is the year for me too. I'm in a similar situation as the author: remoting into a windows computer for games (Moonlight + Sunshine). But everything I play is Proton Gold/Platinum, which means I can move pretty seamlessly.
The biggest issues with the platform had previously been one-off errors 'Audio switcher doesn't work' or the annoyances of desktop environments. I don't want to browse stack overflow during my free time. LLMs solve this entirely. Claude solves these problems trivially, and helps me take advantage of the platform without bogging me down on its ux failures.
> Realized after writing this that I do use one Microsoft product: Github.
> It is completely fungible to me, however, and the slightest nuisance and I would just move elsewhere.
GitHub's got something its competitors don't have: GitHub Sponsors. It's a nice way to support creators and a pretty good reason to stay on GitHub. If only it was more popular.
What's wrong with it? You're also buying bread from a baker who did all the hard work. The creators of GitHub also created a product and sold it, with the difference that their product was the entire company.
I remember when I left windows in 2002. Power supply and disk on my father's computer blew up and with new parts he also got Windows XP. On my own computer I was still using Windows 95 and 98. They had to be reinstalled regularly and if I needed more free space for something I would usually choose 95, the other time I would choose 98, I really had no preference. Anyway I was well versed in both. We had LAN over coax and after each reinstall I had to setup fixed IP address and net mask. When I tried to do the same on Windows XP I couldn't find it. I got really angry because it was at different places in both 95 and 98 so clearly Microslop didn't know what they were doing, there was no vision. And neither location was better, it wasn't like they slowly get it better with each new windows, quite the opposite, it seemed like it was getting harder and harder. I found it after 30 minutes and when I clicked OK the windows XP crashed.
That was the moment I realized that Microslop will never make good OS. They are incapable of making good desktop OS. Each new version will only look different to justify the cost but underneath it will be same old rotten garbage that gets harder to use with every new version. Infuriated, I returned to my bedroom, uninstalled my Windows, installed DOS, and started looking for something better. I tried many OS over next couple years, even rolled my own, but in 2006 I finally settled on Ubuntu, which at that time had, for me, ideal combination of repository size, freshness and stability. I'm still on Ubuntu.
I bought a Macbook Neo a few days ago hoping to switch for good, but I'm now considering returning it because I still vastly prefer Windows 11. The multitasking and hub/monitor compatibility, in particular, is still unmatched, and I fear I can't live without PowerToys. I hope Microsoft will soon stop enshitiffying their great product.
The biggest benefit I saw from switching off Windows was 'peace'. I no longer had to care about whatever Microsoft was doing to make my life as a Windows user worse, I could simply use my computer as I wanted.
Over the last decade or so I've tried to switch to Linux a bunch of times. This will probably be my final attempt.
Almost everything is already working on Linux, I can play all the games I like, there are good open source or free proprietary alternatives for all the software I use. I truly believe we are approaching the year of Linux desktop.
AI is also helping a lot here. I always had a hard time making hibernate and especially suspend-to-hibernate work in Linux. And I have managed linux instances at work so I have the know-how. But you simply can't keep wasting time on every niggle in your system. This time with a few prompts to claude code and it quickly figured out from logs what boot params were wrong that needed fixing. Afterwards it just worked, Happy hibernating me after years on linux!
the only two things that would make linux unstoppable would be affinity being first class and having something like fusion360 or solidworks work. there are web based versions of solidworks and another option that escapes me atm that would work but that's the web and it's not the same as native imo. i know there are some opensource projects out there but the ones i've seen have been not as good.
>I imagine a lot of people would find that absolutely nothing ties them to Windows anymore, even gamers with things like Steam Proton often find their needs met.
i absolutely concede the gamers dont have too much of an excuse anymore, unless you play some specific games that are windows-only (or, more accurately, where the anti-cheat malware is windows-only).
but for some reason, these announcements/conversations always leave out the biggest share of windows users, who also happen to be the slowest to change: governments and large institutions (banks, hospitals, universities).
it will be decades yet for them to switch off windows.
another often overlooked one: small businesses that use quickbooks (which is thousands and thousands of small businesses). or engineering firms that use solidworks (or other CAD)
so, yes, for home use it is a fantastic time to explore non-windows options, absolutely. but it aint the "year of the linux desktop" yet, and wont be for awhile, if you count government and institutions.
Also overlooked (but only on tech sites ;)), is that the entire corporate world solidly uses windows [1].
[1] https://www.itbrew.com/stories/2024/10/22/over-two-thirds-of...
FWIW a tech company I retired from was about 60% mac and a portion of them operated almost exclusively out of VirtualBox + Linux. IT had some rock solid Linux sysadmins but not quite enough to support most of the company moving to Linux. There are some shops that could go 50% Linux especially on the development side without much issue if compliance and auditors were on board.
> a tech company
Believable. Possibly directly related, 70% of corporations are not tech companies. [1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/
Year of the Linux Desktop began for me last year. All the games I play work, and that's mostly what I do at home. Work is also a Linux desktop, because our build system runs there anyways so may as well use it directly (though some still work primarily from windows/mac laptops and ssh into their desktop). Only windows machine I have left is my work laptop because IT doesn't offer Linux laptops, but it's basically just a thin client to access my desktop away from the office.
The MacBook Neo is a game changer.
Unless you’re a gamer or have other specific use cases, that’s it. 500$ and it does what you need.
From a corporate pov, I know I’d rather support 500 Neos over 500 generic laptops. One vendor is responsible for everything. No bickering between Intel , Microsoft and Lenovo when things go wrong.
I reckon schools will get the Neo for 450 to 400 at volume. And app developers have to meet good software again, your end user only has eight gigs of RAM.
> And app developers have to meet good software again, your end user only has eight gigs of RAM.
I wouldn't bet on it, especially in an corporate setting. IT departments seem to love filling every inch of their firm laptop's CPU and RAM with security and remote access stuff. I've seen that same thing happen in every company I've worked for recently: high-end laptops sitting at 100% ressource usage absolutely all the time.
Seems like a good niche to explore. Make your security software run in 200MB.
Or clean up other stuff. Teams can be very ram hungry for what it needs to actually do.
I'm tempted to pick a Neo up and see how it likes Flutter applications.
How many years of support does Apple guarantee with the Neo? At some point in the future, even though the hardware is fine, it will be unsupported, and potentially vulnerable to whatever exploits are built into its version of MacOS.
Perhaps by that time the M3 will have better Linux support, but dealing with the 8GB memory size limitation will become more difficult as time ticks by.
https://www.macworld.com/article/673939/this-is-how-long-mac...
According to this they're still supporting a 2017 IMac, 9 years is a decent amount of time.
Apple can always change their minds and extend this out with security only fixes indefinitely.
I was finally able to switch from Windows laptop to MacBook Pro at work for development, and so many problems and irritants just instantly disappeared.
WSL is a nice piece of engineering but it's nowhere near as seamless as MacOS X where the entire system is built on top of a BSD compatibility layer.
Also I suspect IT at my company don't devote as many resources to messing up Macs with malware and spyware of various sorts as they do with Windows.
I come from a developing country where the only OS people know is Windows. Macs used to be too expensive, and Linux didn’t have any of the applications people would use (read: pirate) for work.
Typically, college students and teachers would get $500 dingy laptops from Asus, Acer, and Dell. A decade ago, those machines were fine. My mom used one for 7 years, right until they retired Windows 7.
Then the machines started becoming absolutely useless with Windows 8, 10, and now 11. 8GB machines are barely usable now, with constant Windows updates and all the background telemetry services maxing out the disk all the time.
Sure, people can turn off some of these rogue processes. But my point is - an OS should just disappear from the user’s view and let them work.
I don’t live in my home country and haven’t visited in a long time, but I’ve heard that people are really opting for second-hand MacBook Airs. Now with the MacBook Neo, more people will go that route.
Students are opting for cheap Windows machines and flashing them with Ubuntu to make them usable.
If I could play GTA6 on Ubuntu at release, I'd probably switch, but as-is, I'll probably stay on Windows 10 indefinitely for gaming.
I've used Kubuntu as a daily driver at work several times - imo it's superior to a mac for development; Apple is so actively hostile to actually running open-source or custom software.
I think this is the year for me too. I'm in a similar situation as the author: remoting into a windows computer for games (Moonlight + Sunshine). But everything I play is Proton Gold/Platinum, which means I can move pretty seamlessly.
The biggest issues with the platform had previously been one-off errors 'Audio switcher doesn't work' or the annoyances of desktop environments. I don't want to browse stack overflow during my free time. LLMs solve this entirely. Claude solves these problems trivially, and helps me take advantage of the platform without bogging me down on its ux failures.
> Realized after writing this that I do use one Microsoft product: Github.
> It is completely fungible to me, however, and the slightest nuisance and I would just move elsewhere.
GitHub's got something its competitors don't have: GitHub Sponsors. It's a nice way to support creators and a pretty good reason to stay on GitHub. If only it was more popular.
one concern, did microsoft build github? or did they buy it from someone else who did all the innovation and hard work?
What's wrong with it? You're also buying bread from a baker who did all the hard work. The creators of GitHub also created a product and sold it, with the difference that their product was the entire company.
I remember when I left windows in 2002. Power supply and disk on my father's computer blew up and with new parts he also got Windows XP. On my own computer I was still using Windows 95 and 98. They had to be reinstalled regularly and if I needed more free space for something I would usually choose 95, the other time I would choose 98, I really had no preference. Anyway I was well versed in both. We had LAN over coax and after each reinstall I had to setup fixed IP address and net mask. When I tried to do the same on Windows XP I couldn't find it. I got really angry because it was at different places in both 95 and 98 so clearly Microslop didn't know what they were doing, there was no vision. And neither location was better, it wasn't like they slowly get it better with each new windows, quite the opposite, it seemed like it was getting harder and harder. I found it after 30 minutes and when I clicked OK the windows XP crashed.
That was the moment I realized that Microslop will never make good OS. They are incapable of making good desktop OS. Each new version will only look different to justify the cost but underneath it will be same old rotten garbage that gets harder to use with every new version. Infuriated, I returned to my bedroom, uninstalled my Windows, installed DOS, and started looking for something better. I tried many OS over next couple years, even rolled my own, but in 2006 I finally settled on Ubuntu, which at that time had, for me, ideal combination of repository size, freshness and stability. I'm still on Ubuntu.
I bought a Macbook Neo a few days ago hoping to switch for good, but I'm now considering returning it because I still vastly prefer Windows 11. The multitasking and hub/monitor compatibility, in particular, is still unmatched, and I fear I can't live without PowerToys. I hope Microsoft will soon stop enshitiffying their great product.
The biggest benefit I saw from switching off Windows was 'peace'. I no longer had to care about whatever Microsoft was doing to make my life as a Windows user worse, I could simply use my computer as I wanted.
I'll believe it when I lose my last remaining customers to other platforms. We're going out of business in June.
Apple user does not like windows, color me surprised :)
But he is correct, it is time to dump windows. But for all the reasons one would have to dump windows, half or more also applies to Apple.
So yes, dump windows and move to Linux or a BSD.