nfh

5. Windows as a whole is less useful than prior versions in significant ways. They presumably know this, but think they can make it better in the long run than it was before, without AI. But given that a lot of what they’ve done is tear out well-suited technologies for the problems people face on desktop OSes, and replace them with LLMs that aren’t as well-suited to the task, I’m not sure how they can justify that to themselves. I can’t imagine the justification is particularly good.

I just upgraded from Win10 to Debian on my primary/gaming desktop; every game I’ve played in the last 4 years in my Steam library is listed as compatible, most things I do on my computer are either a website, a game, or an application with a native Linux version or good wine compatibility.

As a personal user who does a wide variety of things on my computer, I don’t really need Windows anymore. I’m dual booting for the time being as I configure things, but I’m quickly running out of reasons to use the old Win10 partition. And all the weird slowdowns it was exhibiting? Totally absent in Linux. I expected performance to be a wash, but it’s noticeably improved.

In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it’s gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. “Why shouldn’t we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days”