Let's Discuss Operative Systems

[Corrupted Unicorn]

You know, Windows, macOS, Linux, and lesser known ones. Compare, contrast, be nostalgic about it or give recs. Here's a rather intense topic to get you started.

I'm dumb as a rock when it comes to computery stuff but my experiences tell me Windows 7 was the best one (tho it's sadly being phased out  ), Windows 10 is incredibly annoying with its updates and downright evil sometimes (it has "hijacked" my computer thousands of times to force me to update and even took away my Notepad  ), and I fear and loathe Windows 11. I hate that corporations are doing whatever they want with the hub to my online life. Help me escape.

My ideal would be being able to do my artsy/worky stuff in the oldest version of Windows possible, something like 98 or XP. However, I know this might not be feasible given that my artsy/worky stuff involves programs like Photoshop, After Effects, and Blender, and my "hipster gremlin" tendencies will need to be dialed back.

But I hate the constant Windows 10 updates and how intrusive they are. And invasive. I keep telling it to NOT do it, to do it later, and one day it gets fed up and does it without my consent. I hate that. I want to have control over my computer again even if that means I might accidentally wreck it like when I was a kid and unknowingly downloaded viruses.

So, since this computer is on its last legs and I'm going to get a more personalized one, I'm looking to get the OS that plays the nicest with me. So far I've considered three options:


- Windows 10 Minus the Spyware / Ameliorated - A version of Windows 10 that removes all the yuck - no more Cortana, no more spyware, no more useless XBox applications when I don't have an XBox and no more intrusive updates! Or at least that's what it promises

- Windows10Debloater - This one seems to be similar similar to Ameliorated, but instead of bringing a new OS to your PC it purges the one you already have. Apparently easier to use than Ameliorated, as well.

- Linux Mint - I've only used Linux once or twice in my life and I was too young to really understand it, but I could give it a chance? Still, I saw a lot of memes on how technical and user-unfriendly it is. Mint looks a bit more approachable tho.

So there's that, but this is not the only topic! Feel free to talk about other things as long as it's all about operative systems 

[shevek]

Aaah I love you! I was searching for these debloat Win10 things a few weeks ago but couldn't find it anymore! You saved me

I agree with you on Windows 10. I recognize the need I have for it personally from my circumstances and stuff I like to use, but I hope to also get Linux set up soon-ish. I am also tired of these updates, of asking me every week if I wanna switch to 11, of every update resetting my settings, specifically ones around ads or privacy. It's unacceptable. I don't like how little can be customized.. you'd think they'd offer more and more ways to customize as the years go on, but it becomes less and less. Windows XP had so much ways to customize that now are impossible without installing third party software.
The fact that ads and news are acceptable in an OS by now is something that needs to be stopped, in my opinion. I remember recently they put the Bing AI search bar in the middle of my desktop. For now you can disable that, but for how long? They're just gonna creep that stuff in year by year anyway.

It feels like I have entirely grown out being infantilized and locked in by a system, feeling like I am not in control of it but subjected to its whims. Especially with the switch to OS as a service.

[j]

i grew up with Windows 7, but i made the jump to Linux a few years back,
and i'll forever recommend it as a main OS.
Linux /can/ be unfriendly to beginners, but the beauty of what is essentially
a federated set of distributions means that folks have already made
distros that are attempts to be used by anyone, such as
PopOS, which comes with existing
drivers, a GNOME desktop and a distro-specific "Pop Shop" as an
alternative to the Microsoft Store. you can even update your system with it!

if you have the time and patience to learn, Linux can be an amazing jump
to make.
stuff like WINE exists for folks that still want to execute Windows programs
on their Linux machine, but a lot of the time there's applications native
to UNIX systems that negate the need to emulate a Windows environment
altogether.

personally, i use Tinycore, which i
wouldn't recommend unless you're looking for something similar to WinXP
or you have low-spec hardware.
TC is pretty minimalistic, with its most advanced 32-bit ISO being only
248MB.
i can still play games (especially GOG games), surf the web, write documents
and do pretty much everything any other Linux distro can do, but TC is
supported only by a small community, meaning that some stuff like packages
are heavily outdated, ergo you can run into issues when building
software from source.

anyway, happy OS hunting!

EDIT: i phrased that bit about Tinycore very poorly.
i absolutely /love/ TC as my main distro:
it fits around my workflow, is superb when it comes to being able
to build what i need and is overall pretty great for me.

what i should have said is that i don't recommend it as a beginner's
distro.
it does have that graphical side that makes stuff like extensions easy to
install, and does have some pretty neat features (like booting into RAM),
but i reckon a beginner to Linux would find TC confusing with regards to
stuff like persistent files, and restricting with the limitations
on programs hitherto mentioned.

great distro, don't use it if you're a newbie! :D

[Melooon]

I remember watching a LinusTechTips video (I really love Linus, he's always so hyped!) where he said something like "Windows is one more bad release away from losing the market, if Windows 12 flops, it's over" (my words paraphrasing).

Its totally true though; with macOS/iOS taking up most of the casual market along with a big chunk of the creative market (video editors, graphics designers etc) and then Linux taking up most of the techy market (programmers, servers etc) AND with the HUGE advances that have been made with Linux gaming in the last few years.. (steam deck, android) - it seems like Windows doesn't really fit anywhere.

If I was making a big game project today; I would prob make it primarily for Linux/Android, followed by Mac/iOS, followed by Windows - all of this kinda explains why Microsoft is going all in on Metaverse/AI stuff at the moment... it's a sinking ship!

Between Mac and Linux ?? Well, they are both UNIX-like OSs, so they are actually quite similar (minus the backend stuff like APIs - but most people don't need to worry about those)

• With Mac you essentially are forced to use Apples workflow - but it's a fantastic workflow if it works for you.

• With Linux it's all about making your own workflow - I know a lotta people love doing that, but I can't be bothered; time spent sorting out my desktop is time that I'm not spending making the stuff I wanna make.

• With Windows, it kinda has a workflow, but it's not great - and it kinda has room for you to create your work workflow but that's not great either. The biggest thing it has is legacy support - modern Windows can still run software from 20 years ago; that's amazing, but is it worth making it your primary OS? You can emulate Windows XP on any system (even iPhones  )

At the end of the day, it's just about using an OS that lets you do what you wanna do! Modern Windows is still a fine option, it works well and it's gonna support all the software you need. However, as you say it's also got super annoying issues. Linux is still much more effort (and prob will be for a long time) - but it can also prob do 95% of what you wanna do (Although I don't think it has anything natively comparable to the Adobe or Affinity suite - it's still a very techy oriented OS) - and there's a good chance it will run better on older hardware.

If you have the hard drive space you can actually split your memory in half! (Aka partition it) It might be worth installing Windows 10/11 AME and a Linux distro - then you can swap around and see what works for you. 

P.S. Does anyone use FreeBSD? Id love to hear about it!

[Icey!]

I would like to mention that Microsoft Windows has another advantage compared to MacOS that isn't just comparability. It has better window management. You can easily drag windows around to the sides of the screen and they will snap to the sides without using a fancy shortcut, but if you decide to learn the shortcuts you can easily move windows around into corners which isn't really possible on MacOS.

It's one of the only good things I can say about Microsoft Windows, although Pop!_OS (a Linux distro) seems to beat this with it's window management plugin which does the window management automatically.

[CyberCat2000]

With the Proton compatibility layer getting really good, as well as the Steam Deck and Chromebooks getting Steam support, I wonder how long it will be before Linux becomes more viable than Windows for gaming. I know some games do have issues on Proton, but I suppose those issues will eventually be fixed over time.

As for Macs, I do notice that there appears to be a greater push for getting stuff on there. One program I use at work is being replaced with a program that to my surprise has a Mac version (unlike its Windows-only predecessor.). I do fear that Apple may eventually restrict filesystem access and third-party apps on it as a push to make it more "iOS-like", but hopefully, that won't be the case...

Unfortunately, I'm kind of in a job that uses Windows-only programs, so I HAVE to use Windows. I do still use Linux since I admit there's quite a lot of stuff it does better (especially when it comes to programming, admittedly).

And finally, since this is the OS topic... anyone here curious to try out Haiku? Kind of a BeOS continuation. Despite it taking quite a while to reach its first stable release, I'm still kind of excited for it!

[vugz]

People have already made great points about Linux, I just want to add in here that you can make Linux look like Windows XP :D



Or any fitting aesthetic for that matter, I would argue ricing is a form of art in itself

[Icey!]

People have already made great points about Linux, I just want to add in here that you can make Linux look like Windows XP :D



Or any fitting aesthetic for that matter, I would argue ricing is a form of art in itself

Good stuff vugz, although I think I might just stick to my Fedora GNOME desktop for now. I would love to see a Windows 7/Vista rice with the fancy blur effects.

[arcus]

My ideal would be being able to do my artsy/worky stuff in the oldest version of Windows possible, something like 98 or XP. However, I know this might not be feasible given that my artsy/worky stuff involves programs like Photoshop, After Effects, and Blender, and my "hipster gremlin" tendencies will need to be dialed back.

Try out Ubuntu, or Ubuntu Studio: https://ubuntustudio.org/

Ubuntu is very beginner friendly, and has good driver support.

It's possible to put Linux distros onto a USB and try them without installing them. You'll want to make sure you can connect to the internet, and if you use a tablet you'll want to test that out too.

Some apps for it you might like:

• Wine: You can run Photoshop and other Windows software through it. Though, I think there's a tool to get Photoshop working on Github without it.
• Kolourpaint: Art software that's inspired by XP era MS Paint.
• Beeref: Software for loading art references into a canvas that you can move around and save.
• Krita: Art software with a ton of features similar to Photoshop (though it's aiming to compete with Clip Studio Paint.) I used it for my icon and banner.

I've only used Linux once or twice in my life and I was too young to really understand it, but I could give it a chance? Still, I saw a lot of memes on how technical and user-unfriendly it is. Mint looks a bit more approachable tho.

You might be thinking of Arch and Gentoo Linux. Those distributions are designed to be built from the ground up.

• With Linux it's all about making your own workflow - I know a lotta people love doing that, but I can't be bothered; time spent sorting out my desktop is time that I'm not spending making the stuff I wanna make.

Not necessarily. There's many distros out there preconfigured for specific workflows.

[Gans]

Did you try to run (press Windows key + R) "msconfig" and disable the "system service" (disservice might fit better) Windows Update? That's how I finished with a couple of onboard-problems on Windows XP. Just deactivate them by default. To be honest, half of these "services" can be disabled, your Windows will still boot fine, very likely even faster!

I think it's very useful to have more than one computer available. Because on every different task, a different machine can be helpful. Also never underestimate the old versions of programs. Photoshop, Corel Draw, Word, Powerpoint and whatever was already pretty well developed 25 years ago. I think you can conquer the world with those as well.

And you get them for free if you can search for the term "Abandonware" in your ordinary search engine... but don't tell anybody *shhhh*.

[PurpleHello98]

None of the current crop of OSes (Win 10, Win 11, OS X Ventura & assorted Linux) is perfect for me, but of all of them, I think the best for my style is Windows 10, but modified to have a good user interface (Retrobar, Open Shell and WindowsBlinds). Windows 11 can also be modified, but I don't like its new widget stuff rather than the action centre, as well as the new design language and the inability to use it without a Microsoft account (!), etc. OS X's new interface since Big Sur is slowly driving me away from the platform (I currently have an iMac and a MacBook Air as my main computers), as well as the inability to customize it very much, and the slight incompatibility with some older stuff. Meanwhile, Linux could probably do 90-95% of what I need a computer to do, but then I also need a computer to run iTunes specifically and sync with my iPod nano. I know it could probably run on Wine, but it'd almost definitely be a migraine and a half, and I doubt that it would sync with my iPod. Plus, although I could probably look up commands on-line, I still really don't want to deal with a terminal. I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but terminals are just too much. So it looks like when I get a new computer (probably next year) I'll buy a Windows 10 PC (or a Win11 one and replace 11 with 10) and customize it to have a good interface. Ideally, I'd still use XP or 7, but new hardware doesn't support them. (I don't believe all this "if you use an unsupported OS, you'll get so many viruses and your family will die !!1!1" fearmongering. If you surf the Net cautiously and safely, and have a good antivirus, you'll be okay. Nobody probably makes XP viruses anymore, anyways.)

[bingus_baby]

a big chunk of the creative market (video editors, graphics designers etc)

This... no longer seems to be as true as it once was!!!! I only ever see college kids and musicians praise Mac these days.

I just started my semester and immediately was hit hard, smacked right in the head with a weird aspect of my major- Everyone hates Apple. Idk why, but everyone rags on Mac computers and complains in the classes where they have to use them. A professor even brought his own computer because he hated the Mac as well as wanting his own files/programs. Students and teachers all complain about Mac, and I think that's... really weird!! For context I'm in a creative major, so these guys are all running art software on these things. I get the 3D classes, NVIDIA and whatnot, but everything else is strange. Apple sells itself as a creative machine, so when students and teachers alike complain about running programs with no major changes on a Mac it's really interesting. Like, dude... It's the same layout you're used to, turn right click on and it's the *exact same*. But hey maybe I'm just mad because I recently switched to the Apple ecosystem. (Yes, you can point and laugh.)

It just seems like Apple is the butt of the joke these days. It's a shame, because it's no better or worse than Windows, it's apples to oranges. *canned laughter* I switched because Windows screwed me over more times than I can count and I wanted something more reliable. Obviously I still have a PC that I use for PC-only programs and the occasional instance where the PC version is insanely better, but for everything else I chose Mac since it's fast and all the system programs are tailor made to utilize all its features as efficiently as possible. With PC it varies so much in terms of program stability, hardware capability, and compatibility and so on. On Mac it either works or it doesn't. (My lil black or white brain LOVES that.) I guess could go on, but I'm getting very off-topic, and VERY anecdotal.

I'd love to hear other artists' opinions on the issue. iPad users you are not welcome, we're talking about desktop platforms! (And btw, the same kids complaining about Mac are also heavy iPad users, so it further complicates the issue ;_;) Which platform did you chose and why?

[Melooon]

(And btw, the same kids complaining about Mac are also heavy iPad users, so it further complicates the issue ;_;) Which platform did you chose and why?

That sounds like they just don't know anything about computers

As for me; despite many serious excursions into each of the main OS; Im very much a Mac person - I couldn't make the projects/sites that I make on any other platform. That variability you describe is exactly the issue - if you primarily work with one program, then the OS does not matter. However each of my projects might use up to 20 different applications to make, manage and test all little bits. I need all those apps to work every time and I need the experience to be fast, seamless and use as little mental energy as possible.

Screwing around with graphics updates, the different UIs and complexity levels you get in windows programs, the general techie variability you find in windows and linux, and even the customisability you get in linux that most people love; I just don't have the time or mental space to cope with that 

[Mela]

A while ago Windows 10 updates completely screwed my previous laptop, it became extremely buggy and ended up stuck in recovery mode. Recently I decided to try and install Linux Mint on it just to see if it could work, and it worked perfectly. I'd never thought to see it in action again (it even gave me a BSOD when trying to enter the BIOS settings ), but now it's much faster and it finally has a use again!

Before "upgrading" to Windows 10 that laptop had Windows 7 and I actually never had any problems with it. It was actually faster back then... and I personally find the Aero glass theme beautiful

On my main laptop I still use Windows 10, like some other people here I tried debloating it, and I personalized it to look more like Vista (the OS I used on an even older laptop, which I still have), but I'm actually thinking of switching to Linux. Before that I want to get more familiar with it though 

[drakonic]

Before I switched to Linux, I "mained" Mac OS, and in my opinion it is so much better than Windows. At least the versions I used... I wonder if much has changed since I've stopped using it.

The thing about Windows that drives me NUTS is the infantilization and complete lack of control. I had to use Windows 10 for 2 years and it was the most miserable computer experience I've had. Not only was it Windows 10, it was Windows 10 Home. The Windows version which Microsoft is most eager to test their new "features" on.

It was horrible. My laptop just constantly did things. What was, I assume, Windows Defender, was always running in the background and causing File Explorer to restart constantly, causing all desktop to disappear periodically. There were random command line windows popping up and closing immediately. The laptop battery would drain absurdly fast because of all the installed bloatware that would auto-run. I used like 3 different methods to try to disable OS updates, but of course Microsoft knows better.
Using Windows 10 just felt like trying to work on a laptop thoroughly infected with malware. I'd say that that Windows 10/11 is malware, it does so much without the user knowing and constantly goes against the user's wishes.

I have no doubt that Apple does some shady stuff on Mac OS too, but at least they conceal it well. Lol

Mac OS had its quirks, but at least ads weren't constantly trying to worm their way into my desktop, and it didn't feel like it could just come crashing down any second.
And the UI/look and feel is SO much more pleasant, but that's a much more subjective matter.

I'd take Mac over Windows any day.