It’s funny, I feel quite the opposite. Using windows is a form of asceticism, and Linux is the easy way. Everything just works under Linux, but under Windows, things go wrong for no apparent reason, the system installs updates and reboots without me telling it to, there is massive network traffic that I didn’t initiate, none of my tools work properly, there are ads on the start menu, and software I know I installed is nowhere to be found. Talk about mortification of the flesh! Nothing humbles you like being subject to Windows.
Using Windows when you're accustomed to Linux is masochism, which is not the opposite of asceticism. I had to install Windows recently, and for all the few hours I used it I had Marie Kondo's voice in my head saying this does not spark joy.
Windows+WSL (1 and 2) is a viable route these days. Whenever you feel exhausted from Windows, just continue in a nice and clean Linux shell. Sometimes, there are still very good windows oss apps, like np++, sumatrapdf, typora, keypirinha. I enjoy these on windows and ignore the rest, thanks to WSL.
Linux in a VM is better than no Linux at all, but 60% of my complaints about Windows still apply so long as windows is the host. Network load, fans spinning up for no reason, the start menu ads, arbitrary reboot policies, plus the fact that I can’t bind Hyper. It’s weak tea compared to the real thing.
I have to use MS-Windows at work. It feels as if I'm in an abusive relationship with an partner who gaslights me at very turn but I can't leave him because we have kids and I feel I have an obligation to care for them. The partner (i.e. Microsoft) is the sado-masochist.
You suffer for a corporation when you use Windows, and they get richer and greedier.
When you use Linux, your suffering might push you to break and waste a weekend fixing an upstream bug, from which the entire world benefits for free. When you use Linux, your suffering builds positive karma, and next life you get to reincarnate as a cat, released from the hell that is software engineering.
Yep, exact opposite for me too. I enjoy using Linux the way I have it setup and it brings me joy. I've practically removed/automated all my annoyances over the years and now things just work the way _I_ want them to work. Rather than changing the way I work to fit the my tools.
I just started a new job that has forced me to use OSX. It truly feels like a form of asceticism to me. Can't change anything, accept what Apple gives you and suffer quietly.
Having to relearn how to do things less efficiently (and being mostly powerless to improve it) was very humbling for me.
I use the latest Fedora KDE on my laptop and I find it to be a better Windows desktop than Windows itself. I cannot even say it is ascetic - everything just works really really well.
I have been evangelizing this message to my close circle of friends and colleagues lately. None of us are devs. I switched my laptop to Fedora this summer. All my windows problems evaporated. Search works, and is a button away. File organization works and my file manager doesn't freeze if it can't access a remote share for whatever reason (usually work VPN inefficiency on Windows). What is installed and uninstalled is genuinely under my control (not Microsoft's). And once I learned my way around the fifteen software installation methods (AppImages, repositories, flatpaks etc.) I even enjoy having the choices. My battery life is under my control, as is all interface with hardware on my terms (speaker/webcam behaviour/drivers).
I've been telling everyone who asks that Windows has lost the Laptop market. The market just hasn't realized yet.
Edit: It very much feels like being on a Symbian phone in 2005 or 2006. They were horrifically broken, couldn't load a web page, had no path forward towards even basic note taking, calendar organization, social media, or anything. But the iPhone hadn't shown up yet, so a majority of the world still used Symbian.
> I've been telling everyone who asks that Windows has lost the Laptop market. The market just hasn't realized yet.
It's not just the laptop market. Windows used to be a tool that allowed you to easily use your computer and programs. It no longer does this and is now mostly a vehicle to sell Microsoft's services.
KDE is solid but I think is just different enough to throw off less technically oriented would-be switchers. I think a fork of KDE that changes it to be more of a 1:1 match to Windows would be highly beneficial here, especially if this fork has a dropdown menu that can switch which version of Windows it mimics (lots of people miss 7 and XP and would find a zero effort way to get that experience back tempting).
Themes are great, but they're surface level and don't change the numerous little behavioral/UX differences between KDE and whichever version of Windows. They also require the user to have gotten as far as to discover that KDE supports themes and downloading, installing, and enabling the theme.
That's why I think a fork that implements the requisite changes would be of value.
What exactly would change ? Only thing I can think of 'normal' users using is ctrl-c/ctrl-v which already work in KDE (even ctrl-win-arrow for virtual desktops could be configured without a fork.)? Different icons/shortcuts wouldn't require forking KDE...Not sure what else you'd change?
If I sat down to compose the list, it'd be full of lots of small things. Think how under KDE, the file copy progress UI is a semi-persistent notification banner instead of a normal dialog like it's always been on Windows. While each of these differences on their own aren't likely to pose issues, in aggregate they can give an impression of the DE being more unfamiliar/alien (and thus, daunting) than it actually is.
I would probably also overhaul the settings app. For example, the whole Appearance & Style group and its two drill-down sections could be pretty easily reworked into a single panel that directly surfaces the most pertinent settings while tucking away the rest under an "Advanced…" button that opens a modal — with themes for example the average user will at most be interested in changing the global theme. Only advanced users even know the difference between window decorations, application styles, etc much less want to be able to change any of those individually.
Hmm - I'm not sure those sorts of things would require a fork per se, but I can see making it more familiar to windows/mac users could be a good thing. I was just curious as I was a big KDE fan back when I used Linux full time, and wondered what had changed.
The two biggest issues I'd have with Linux full time would be audio and video. I haven't even attempted to run Linux audio in like 5-10 years - it was always so titchy with multiple 'standards' to configure. Video was not quite as bad, as I don't game much so I just needed basic functionality. But now I have multiple 4k monitors, high dpi, and all that jazz, I don't know how big a pain it would be. I just run linux in VMs (standard device drivers and setup) or ssh into a linux server for now.
A fork wouldn't be explicitly required, but generally in established FOSS projects, when attempting to make changes that are either large or widely peppered throughout the project you're going to be fighting against headwinds from people who are happy with project as it is, which is understandable. You're likely going to find yourself spending more time on negotiating and politicking to get changes committed than actually making changes.
Audio/video has more to do the distribution being used than it does one's desktop environment, though the DEs can do things to smartly design configuration UI and surface the most commonly used A/V settings in the right places.
It depends a lot on what hardware one has and what software one uses, in my experience. A laptop that’s a generation or two behind built without discrete graphics, Intel networking, and a display that’s usable at 1x UI scaling? Smooth sailing. A bleeding edge tower with off-brand integrated networking and an Nvidia card hooked up to a monitor that requires fractional scaling on the other hand might be more trouble.
If you mean a Linux desktop PC, then no. I have been using a Linux desktop for many years, but not exclusively. I have tried, but I always have had at least a dual-boot with Windows. Yes, you have more control under Linux, but the reason I still use Windows sometimes is that many things just don't work properly.
And I love linux, I have a Linux desktop at home, which is pretty minimal by the way (Debian mini.iso), and that that it doesn't do weird things behind my back is appreciable. But it absolutely doesn't "just work".
It’s true, I have the luxury of using Linux on older laptops with mature hardware support. I’m sure it’s frustrating to discover that a $600 gpu has poor support. I have the absolute privilege of not needing to run the kind of software that requires this kind of equipment. It’s also fair to critique my position as one of shifting the blame around. I would never have chosen to spend good money on the Canon printer in my living room, but there it is, and its driver support is abysmal. Personally, I regard this as case of Linux working just fine, and Canon making defective hardware, but I can see how one would disagree.
I feel the same way about Windows. But that's only because I've already paid the initial cost of adapting to a Linux environment. Ascetic actions can increase your overall comfort as you get better at them.
Think about it from a 5-year-old person's perspective, or an average computer user. Which one do you think is more comfortable to use, Windows, or Linux?
You need to be more specific when you say "Linux". I use Debian Unstable and stuff breaks all the time. Which is to be expected, so I'm not complaining, it's on me. My understanding is that Microsoft has shifted QA to the users quite a bit in recent years, not unlike Debian Unstable. And I am part of the QA process I guess.
we're not talking bugs or stability here - we're talking about the objective suffering experienced when forced to use the highly polished spyware & ad delivery platform that is win10/11
Agreed. With Linux and open source, if there's a problem, you can fix it or file a quality bug report that'll often lead to the issue getting fixed. With Windows you deny yourself this comfort and suffer with what Microsoft provides.
Reminded me of this Stallman quote "People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance". (I use (Neo)Vi(m) BTW)
Windows is great except when it does something unpredictable. It will be amazing for months at a time before it decides it's update time.
But they get a lot of things right, like their backwards compatibility via statically linked packages and a large "standard library".
Unfortunately it's all proprietary and doesn't work if you can't live with the random updates, or if you need to support small cheap embedded things well...
Perhaps we have different definitions of ascetism. It's about having less, not more. Less guis, less random traffic, etc..
That said, linux is in a way like processed foods, and windows is organic.
Linux is distilled down to the essential components through chemistry, it's like sugar or table salt, or maltodextrine.
Windows is just a thing that is alive, but not even a single thing, it has a flora that the manufacturer can't even tell you what it is in the ingredient list (can't share source code, they don't have it) they can't put all of the natural bacteria that coats an apple in an ingredient list.
> That said, linux is in a way like processed foods, and windows is organic.
I would have said the opposite.
Linux is organic - you get the bare essentials (whatever grew from the ground), and little more.
Windows is highly processed - you get the food, but also the chemicals and sugars and additives (AI in your taskbar! Candy Crush and political clickbait in your start menu!) designed to keep you addicted and coming back for more.
I can see how you would think that. The concept of purity is double edged, on the one hand it can seem pure to eat an apple from a tree, but on the other hand, raw sugar has a very high purity!
So windows is pure in the first sense, but linux is pure in the second sense.
You say that with linux you get the bare essentials, whatever grew from the ground, but take a look at the size of a linux distro, linux is actually very distilled, Windows is RAW. You get a binary in there that nobody knows how it got there and there is no source code.
There is source code/recipe/ingredient list/dependency manifest for a vanilla and fudge pastrie, but there is no source code for an apple/windows, you get what it is. For the most part windows didn't have source code in the early stages themselves, it's not like they kept the source code hidden under lock, rather they discarded it or lost it to the ages. It's like compilers, it's just something that grows over a couple of generations from the previous version.
I don't know where you got the idea that MS doesn't have copies of their own source code. They aren't just blindly shipping binaries from decades ago with unknown provenance. They keep meticulous archives, and even employ full-time digital archivists. Some of their source has leaked in fact*, spanning all the way from the 1980s to the 2020s, so you can see for yourself if you really want to. If you can download a torrent, you can bet MS has a copy too. And if you search on YT, you'll find people who have built working copies of the OS with these leaks. It's all there.
I don't get it, for me a computer is a tool. I want to get away from it as fast as possible, having to tweak the environment is a waste of time .
That's why I like macos so much, nothing is perfect but I know that whatever I do there are tools somewhat easy to use .
For instance I wanted to read an epub on my computer that runs windows, believe it or not but finding a good or even descent epub reader is a nightmare. Wasted a lot of time before settling on FB reader.
On mac, you just have the book app. It's not perfect, when you export highlights for instance it always add 'copyright blabla' but it's good enough for my casual reading.
Same for pdf, you want an app that can read pdf and do some basic stuff like reorganize pages or compress them. On Mac there is preview, on windows ? Edge can just read and it's a browser, adobe is paid software and install a lot of junk.
And you repeat that for basically everything it's such a waste of time.
Linux is even worst than windows on that matter.
If you are looking for that kind of 'experience' like the author, i suggest hitting yourself on the balls with a hammer. That would be quicker.
> for me a computer is a tool. [...] having to tweak the environment is a waste of time.
In woodworking and other circles, there are folks who only buy the best-est, most expensive tools money can buy. Then there are folks who take regular tools and modify them for the job at hand, creating a better tool that money can't buy.
Point is, there are many kinds of folks out there and if you need a good ball-hitting hammer - well you won't find THAT at Home Depot, but someone creative could probably put together something better.
Folks have been espousing the quality, stock software that macOS and iOS sports as the final word on this conversation since a while now. (And almost always, focusing on the epub readers). I'll admit that it's a general leg up for the getting started UX and makes it easier to recommend to grandma but it's not really that big of a deal as you make it out to be. And yes, I also hate having to configure shit.
Sure, you have to spend some time to find the best tools at first but it's not really something you have to do regularly. This goes for Windows, Linux and Android, I've been using the same few apps for basic computing tasks for a decade now on all of these platforms and I can confidently most are still the community's choice in their niche. Truly, aren't SumatraPDF, Calibere and MoonReader a web search away?
And sure, the app stores on these platforms are a relative mess but it sure does seem the larger useebase they're serving is getting along fine. And not to mention the many other cases where you'll actually have to pay for some basic utility on macOS. Apple products are generally the best in class, don't get me wrong but this is hardly the differentiator the way I look at it.
> Truly, aren't SumatraPDF, Calibere and MoonReader a web search away?
I already knew about them, but just take a look. Their interface are, to say the least, ugly and no consistency ever. UI is not just about the look, it also helps a user understand quickly and efficiently how to do things.
> And not to mention the many other cases where you'll actually have to pay for some basic utility on macOS.
It's better to have paid app than nothing or lackluster. If forklift for instance was available on windows I would definitely pay for it. Instead you have file Zilla and winscp, that are free, but damn it's a pain going from one elegant software to an ugly, not really thought, one.
Funny, that's precisely why I much prefer Linux over MacOS and Windows—I don't have time to fiddle with stuff all day long. On MacOS and Windows, to get any software, I have to:
1. search around the web to find a good program for a given task, crossing my fingers that it's not going to be malware
2. track down the download link for the software, then download the package
3. unzip the installer, open it, then click "yes I'm aware that this is a program downloaded from the Internet and I accept all the risks," thereby making me feel a little nervous about the whole transaction
4. choose the install location, install type, and so on, click "next," "next," "next," then scroll through a seemingly endless legal agreement by which I legally agree to god-knows-what
5. use the program, but inevitably endure an onslaught of annoyances from it: pop-ups that push me to buy the premium version, pop-ups that tell me to download and install an update for the program (for which I need to go through steps 1-4 all over again); the list goes on and on
And to make matters worse, each program asks me individually to update it, meaning that if I'm using 10 programs, I have to handle 10 separate update requests, with no way to batch them all.
In contrast, how do you install a program on Linux? `apt install some-program` or equivalent. How you upgrade all your software at once? `apt upgrade`. That's it. I don't have this epub problem you have—I just use Foliate. And PDF readers are aplenty, too. If you use GNOME or KDE, most of that is already installed for you. At most, it's one or two clicks away, in GNOME Software, for example.
Microsoft's Edge browser used to have epub support. Then they removed it. Then they put it back again but hidden behind a command-line switch. Then they took it away again. It's mad.
The sheer lack of useful software in a stock Windows install has always been a bit baffling to me. Linux is better in this regard (depending on distribution), but nothing beats macOS for time from fresh install to usability. Not only does it come with most of the basics covered, apps like Mail don’t favor Apple’s services, unlike on Windows where MS can’t pass up the chance to upsell an MS service.
I was surprised going from Android to iOS how iphone are much more open despite everyone saying it's a closed ecosystem.
On Android to sync my calendar and contacts I need to install a third party app called davx that updates every 30 minutes, meanwhile iOS and macos supports natively icloud but also exchange, google, caldav (standard protocol).
Just having the equivalent of macos mail app on windows would cost me 60$ (em client). A pdf app that actually allow basic pdf organization, that's another 60$ with pdf xchange editor, and so on and so on.
> it's just as quick to run shrinkpdf in a Linux terminal, and, well, more ascetic.
certainly, but 99% computer user never ever opened the terminal.
And even then, good luck rotating page 4 of by 270° using terminal, then inverting it with page 5 and filling the form.
true, until someone hooks up Linux to an LLM and being CLI driven it would have no problems doing this & more
(Also, I think PDF viewers can do that well in Linux too, I only use a minimal viewer so I don't know)
> until someone hooks up Linux to an LLM and being CLI driven it would have no problems doing this
I appreciate your enthusiasm but man you're over complicating stuff. Beside LLM hallucinations, you would have to type to the computer everything you want to do. I can rotate page with one click, move them to another part is doe with a single mouse drag.
I was unsurprised to find Arch and NixOS mentioned, they're more or less for asceticism, and they usually show up on the ascetic's path. But having learned the power of going without from Linux, there's a lot of similar places to go besides an increasing difficult progression of Linux distributions.
Repeatable Builds is something that can be practiced without Linux, but which the Linux ascetic will find pleasingly austere. Working with immutable data send like another. And then there's all the ways one can avoid using a pointing device, or not buying things your can't hack...
It's a path that Linux can teach you to to walk, but it's not Linux's path.
A very interesting perspective that really resonates with me. My ventures into Linux have been mostly characterized by this. I still remember, when running Ubuntu on my main machine, not being satisfied because I felt like I couldn't «grip it» and the enormous amount of learning I had to do in order to run Arch on my main box. Although I today run MacOS on all devices, and only interface with Linux on servers, I am grateful for all the things I learned from my period with Arch.
I’ve gradually started using more UX-friendly alternatives to the tools I've used for so long, and I don’t think the time spent learning those lower-level tools was wasted at all.
If I ever switch to a MacBook (since they're easy to carry around and have good battery life), I’d probably feel the same way as you do. But I don't see that happening shortly since I don't see an immediate need or benefit of it.
This argument would more compelling for BSD variants.
That aside, I've noticed that certain kinds of users spend a lot of time thinking about their operating system. Personally, it's the opposite of what I'd like to do when I'm using a computer.
For most people, I'd advocate that they buy the best hardware they can afford, which during the M1+ era has been a Mac, and Macs run macOS. Some users want something more specialized, like native Docker or Windows-only engineering applications, but those users probably know who they are and don't need to be asking me for advice.
> ...I've noticed that certain kinds of users spend a lot of time thinking about their operating system. Personally, it's the opposite of what I'd like to do when I'm using a computer.
This is why I stopped using Windows; it now negatively forces you to think about the operating system you're using when all I want to do is use the programs I installed on my computer.
I've occasionally chosen to use Linux in this way. To abstain from certain aspects of the operating system to better learn Linux. Several of my close friends and I will also do things in Linux for the learning more than the outcome, but most of them use their whole toolbox. It's interesting to put a religious connotation, because I was doing this behavior while recovering from a heavily religious childhood.
I’ve been using Linux for a long time for personal purposes and I understand what the blog says. But I also feel like it doesn’t have to be this way: Linux should be easy to use, with little hassle, friendly to newbies, with a community of support.
Over the years Linux desktop has indeed improved, but still with much problems to use. We should adopt a growth mindset instead of sticking to asceticism.
I do think, though, he’s drawing a slightly artificial line between self-improvement, personal control, and practical concerns. If you haven’t “self improved” to the point where you know how your system works, can you actually control it? If you don’t know how to tell your system to do things, does it gain much practical value?
I used to run Xen on my desktop as the hypervisor and then have hardware virtualized guests.
This was circa 2008 or so and I feel now is the time to dump my regular Debian and go for Proxmox VE... For my desktop. I'm no Proxmox dev but I know some are using Proxmox on their main desktop/workstation.
I kinda feel it's would be pretty ascetic: running an hypervisor and all your other stuff only inside guests requires self-discipline. It's a bit more involved than just installing a Linux OS and all the software directly onto the "main" Linux.
Great post. But something not expounded upon by the author, and not addressed much in the comments here, is that asceticism is not a binary. Sometimes you really have to get-shit-done, and in that case, yeah use something fully featured. But a lot of the time, you'd probably be better off accepting a bit of slowness and pain in order to learn more. It's the classic framework vs. scratch debate. Use the framework if you want to go fast, build from scratch if you want to get better.
He mentions arch. I thought that was a standard distribution (though I think I’m mixing it up with Manjaro, which we used one machine when our European intern installed it)
This resonates with me. I think configuring Linux for on a Raspberry Pi for a specific task that includes network IO, storage and compute is a light version of the Askesis he describes. And absolutely a worthwhile exercise if nothing more.
As a software engineer, this post resonates with me.
But, you can find this attitude pervading the whole linux desktop ecosystem. This post may as well be titled "Why it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop".
I don't really care about "the Linux Desktop" and I don't quite understand why so many people do. I use Linux and it works great for me. If it never makes inroads among my non-technical friends and family, who cares? They are doing fine without it.
I guess this is what survives of the 90s/early-2000s Slashdot mentality where people defend software for ideological reasons and get in Linux vs. Windows fanboy fights, but I think that's anachronistic today. Linux Desktop is never going to take over among average people (increasingly many of whom don't even use desktops at all) and that's fine.
