exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I only use windows when I have to, ie programming GALs, FPGAs etc. My daily driver is an Mac mini M4 pro.

I'm all for win7 and Linux. I just can't stand windows anymore. I had win8 and win10 on my girlfriends mums PC.. I couldn't be bothered to go look for stuff anymore. Its layout was just a white box, like not even a border, looked like a pre-releases of win 3.11. Plus all those security claims seem BS to me considering girlfriends mum has that much malware on her PC, phone, tablet.

I used to joke in the Windows 95 and 98 days that I would go home from work and then do the nightly reinstall of the operating system because I literally did that for about two years fighting with it all. XP saw the first real usable OS. I used that for years after EOL. A lot of retro communities still use XP as the game server but anyway I don't really want to get on to all of that again.

Currently the more I use Linux the more issues I'm starting to find which are just basically outright annoying when coming from a Windows platform. I mean I get it that this whole open source community and programs are slow to develop but with the use of AI now it can really have a very good polishing which is what I'm trying to do for myself personally.

My point was, Lots of stuff in Windows used to annoy me anyway and there was basically nothing you could do about it. But with Linux being open source, those annoyances can actually be sorted out and programmed by myself to do exactly what I want and how I want. This means I can *build* the OS I actually want which suites me personally.

The problem will be, as always, how much software can be made to work in Linux from my win7 install.

Windows 8 was a car crash, and I preferred Windows 10 to 11, it was OK and just as usable as Windows 7 IMHO.

However your Linux proposition might not be quite what you're expecting. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that what's bugging you will get fixed.

Sure if it's an issue for a lot of people, then maybe, but if you're the only one, then I doubt open source will help you unless you're proposing to fix everything yourself with the help of Claude, but that leaves you very customised unless you roll what you do into what's live.

Open source isn't the panacea that you might think it is.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 03 Sep 2026 13:57 Open source isn't the panacea that you might think it is.

Indeed, open source has its own kind of bloat : API change, lack of maintainers, no documentation, too many forks, ...

rubber_jonnie wrote: 03 Sep 2026 13:57 However your Linux proposition might not be quite what you're expecting. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that what's bugging you will get fixed.

That's exactly the same problem as Windows though. I already mentioned the brightness save setting was broken for literally years, I reported it, got nowhere, gave up. Same story with Windows programs these days, report a bug and, if you're lucky, it gets acknowledged before the next big redesign makes it irrelevant anyway.

Sure if it's an issue for a lot of people, then maybe, but if you're the only one, then I doubt open source will help you unless you're proposing to fix everything yourself with the help of Claude,

Linux will "slowly" get more user friendly on its own, I'm just accelerating that myself with Claude. I don't want an OS I'm fighting with just to do basic things, and I've already fixed a load of those issues.

but that leaves you very customised unless you roll what you do into what's live.

Same as my Windows box, that's all customised too. Same with the Linux box. All the changes get pushed to GitHub so I can download them onto my laptop and other machines easily, and anyone else can use them too if they want.

Open source isn't the panacea that you might think it is.

But what you're describing is exactly the same problem I had with Windows. It's no different to the two years I spent in the 95/98 days basically doing a nightly reinstall just to keep the thing working, which was practically a second job by the end of it. I was already putting the graft in then, just with a reinstall as the only tool available.

What I'm doing in Linux now is the same amount of effort, except this time I've got direct access to the source code to fix problems deeper down, something I could never do in Windows. Point being, I can fix it myself now, and it stays fixed. In Windows I never could, unless the publisher sorted it, and they often didn't bother. That much is evident after years. So I don't see your point on the downside here?

Kochise wrote: 03 Sep 2026 14:27

rubber_jonnie wrote: 03 Sep 2026 13:57 Open source isn't the panacea that you might think it is.

Indeed, open source has its own kind of bloat : API change, lack of maintainers, no documentation, too many forks, ...

I had exactly the same problems in Windows with APIs, it's actually why I gave up trying to write software for it, I was spending more time debugging the OS than my own code.

Windows ME was still shipping DLLs held over from Windows 95 that were buggy from day one and older than the ones from XP, and wininet.dll alone went through about 20 versions, some worked, some didn't, and the later ones were generally worse. So Linux having a mess of forks and shifting APIs isn't some new problem, Windows has had exactly the same issue for decades.

The difference is Linux has a lot of people actually trying to fix things, which Windows never had, a maintainer walking away from an open project still leaves the code there for someone else to pick up, on closed software it just goes dead. No idea how long a given fork lasts before it's dropped and the thing goes back to being broken, same as Windows, but that doesn't change my point, having the option to fix and improve things yourself is never going to happen on closed source Windows.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 03 Sep 2026 13:57 I prefer Windows 10 to 11, it was OK and just as usable as Windows 7 IMHO.

My feelings exactly. But Windows 10 and 11 can be somewhat made to behave/look like Windows 7 with only a few clicks of the mouse and the PowerTools addon.

Windows 7 is the last "true" version of Windows : consistent and nice UI. Windows 10/11 UI is horrible, they removed "Aero" to save GPU power, only to add more "shadow" and "animation".

What I dislike with a passion on Linux is the package manager jungle : rpm, deb, snap, appimage, flatpak, ... Same shit with Python (pip, poetry, hatch, conda, ...), Node (npm, yarn, pnpm, rnpm, bun, ...)

So much developer energy spread across so many alternatives.

At least on Windows : setup_x86.exe or setup_AMD64.exe and voilà. Ooops, sorry : https://chocolatey.org/

So I made my own "package manager" for Windows/Linux (still need some work) : https://github.com/wenuam/wm_app

exxos wrote: 03 Sep 2026 14:29 But what you're describing is exactly the same problem I had with Windows. It's no different to the two years I spent in the 95/98 days basically doing a nightly reinstall just to keep the thing working, which was practically a second job by the end of it. I was already putting the graft in then, just with a reinstall as the only tool available.

I really don't know of anybody else who was reinstalling Windows daily, I used Win95/98 for years until I migrated to 2000 and XP etc, and had none of the issues you're describing. I was changing hardware and drivers all the time and had a nice simple time of it.

exxos wrote: 03 Sep 2026 14:29 What I'm doing in Linux now is the same amount of effort, except this time I've got direct access to the source code to fix problems deeper down, something I could never do in Windows. Point being, I can fix it myself now, and it stays fixed. In Windows I never could, unless the publisher sorted it, and they often didn't bother. That much is evident after years. So I don't see your point on the downside here?

The main downside is that it's all work for you to do - Do you want to be doing it?

Also Linux is super fragmented in terms of distros and you don't know what updates will arrive to mess up all your hard work. Sure you can retrieve your updates from GitHub, but they may no longer work.

Also you'll find there is the same issue with publishers not bothering and do you really want all your time spent fixing more and more stuff just because you can?

That's a slippery slope and one of the reasons I gave up managing my own home infrastructure.

I'm not entirely sure why you have so many issues, more so than most.

alexh wrote: 03 Sep 2026 14:44

rubber_jonnie wrote: 03 Sep 2026 13:57 I prefer Windows 10 to 11, it was OK and just as usable as Windows 7 IMHO.

My feelings exactly. But Windows 10 and 11 can be somewhat made to behave/look like Windows 7 with only a few clicks of the mouse and the PowerTools addon.

Indeed it can :)