>> Windows 10 was released in July 2015 and dubbed "Windows as a service"

Can we please have 7 back, with its complete lack of built in ads, dark patterns ramming the Microsoft browser down your throat, telemetry everywhere (the calculator, really?), changes for the sake of showing that some manager did something rather than functionality (Rename this PC -> Rename this PC (Advanced))? Windows 10 still regularly shows clients as offline even though their internet connection is functioning normally, has trouble putting my laptop to sleep when I shut the lid (with ALL programs closed), and the recent 21H1 update caused a number of blue screens across our fleet.

Just fix your damn mess before you "hail a new era in personal computing", Micosoft.

bsd44

You should look into an alternative then. Linux is quite beginner friendly these days and with Wine you can emulate pretty much any Windows application if that's what's holding you back from switching. If not then MacOS is the way to go. If you really want to go "back" then you should have a look at ReactOS which is a sort of an open-source Windows clone.

I can't comment on recent Windows-related event as XP was the last version of Windows that I used and even back then I wasn't happy about all the "spyware" that came with it. I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then.

tored

Even if Windows 10 has problems with scattered settings, old style programs vs new style apps, default apps and start menu annoyances, Linux Desktop annoyances are on a completely different level.

The huge Gnome 3 schism, that lead to many different Gnome forks. And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps.

And if you manage to pick a desktop, hopefully by avoiding Gnome 3 because it constantly changes workflow and uses buggy JavaScript plugins, you realize that you will probably have Gnome 3 installed anyway because apps or the distro having dependencies to Gnome, if you don’t want to settle for old forks of those apps with less features.

And if you didn’t pick Gnome (or KDE) it is a good idea to install a compositor if you don’t like software rendered desktop like the good old Windows 9x days.

Be sure to turn the compositor off if you plan to play any games, especially if you thinking about playing on Wine. Or accept to always play in full screen. This will of course annoy you every time you need to look up something online.

If your game doesn’t run well, just add this unknown PPA that will installs nightly compiled graphics libraries (who wouldn’t?).

And if your computer freezes mid game, sorry you didn’t change the virtual memory size before because it is a fixed size. Tough luck.

And then of course the entire X vs Wayland situation.

zxzax

>And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps.

This is not really true, and has not affected anything that I've seen. Basically every GTK desktop (including GNOME) has another separate widget library on top of GTK, to include its own widgets specific to that desktop. Also GTK3 is currently release frozen and will not be adding any more features, GTK4 is the current version.

>hopefully by avoiding Gnome 3 because it constantly changes workflow and uses buggy JavaScript plugins,

I haven't seen any desktop system that doesn't change workflow over time, or doesn't have some bugs in the plugins. That's a sad fact of life when you have hundreds of plugins made by various people, with varying quality. FYI KDE is also using javascript as a plugin language for the desktop, and for a number of other QML things, so it makes no sense to single out GNOME for use of javascript: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

>And then of course the entire X vs Wayland situation.

The situation with compositing should improve over time with Wayland, the idea there is to not ever turn off compositing (though the Wayland implementations are still optimizing this for the various edge cases).

tored

GTK, here are two forum threads that covers this.

GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/gtk3-regressions-from-a-gtk2...

Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/horrible-gtk3-gnome-ui-desig...

And then you have the terminal Termite

https://github.com/thestinger/termite

  This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility towards other 
  projects using VTE as a library. GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of 
  the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are 
  meant for others to use.

JavaScript can definitely work as scripting language for a desktop environment, but it doesn't work for Gnome in the current state.

I have written about this topic before, see thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195694,

quoting myself

  Personally I prefer building GUIs in a scripting language 
  like JavaScript over a compiled language like C and C++

and

  I think for Gnome and other desktops that uses this 
  technique, it is in the right direction

But the negatives in short are poor documentation, memory leaks, you end up only using the approved plugins (if you don't like to restart your desktop more than once a day) which of course negates the whole idea of a plugin system.