Right, but it's a minor annoyance, get rid of it with:
sudo apt-get remove --purge unattended-upgrades
(doesn't trigger removal of anything else, and you'll enjoy 420kb of additional disk space).
OTOH the real issue with Ubuntu is snap(d). Snap packages definitely do auto-update. You may want to uninstall the whole snap system - it's (still?) perfectly possible, if a little bit convoluted, due to some infamous snaps like firefox, thunderbird, chromium, or eg. certbot on servers
Or just use Debian or any snap-free fork for the matter.
I'm pretty sure you can do the same with Windows apps in Linux, since you can basically do the same with VirtualBox seamless mode too. It only requires installing the "guest additions" drivers - there's no container involved. The only major issues I see there are precisely with alt-tab - you cycle through your host windows, then suddenly ALL guest ones (and you're stuck in the guest until you press right Ctrl) - why is it so difficult to make alt-tab flow inside and outside the VM - at least in seamless mode?
Yep, VirtualBox had it too with guest additions. Once VMWare Player stopped receiving updates I switched over to it.
Since WSL became a thing I stopped using this method since getting a "native" Linux terminal through Windows was enough for me for most things.
Although now that Windows 10 is not receiving updates and my hardware can't run Windows 11, and RAM prices alone cost almost as much as my entire computer did 10 years ago I'm going to be switching to native Linux and not look back, even if it means losing certain video editing capabilities and certain games.
> Wildly ironic that an EU company doesn't ship to the EU.
Switzerland is not part of the EU in this timeline... But their rant sounds very much like an excuse, the WEEE is in effect at least since 2021:
"All EU Member States are required to adopt the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive 2012/19/EU, which sets rules for the collection, treatment, and recycling of electronic waste. However, some countries were granted an extension until August 2021 to meet the collection targets due to infrastructure limitations, including Bulgaria, Czechia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia" - courtesy Google AI overview
I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.
> it oversaturate reds out of the box on Linux, which I corrected using hyprshade
Another option would be Redshift, which has a nice widget (Redshift Control plasmoid) for KDE Plasma. It doesn't affect grabbed screenshots or stuff like simplescreenrecorder, BTW
This. Where are "Linux evangelists" in 2025? GNU/Linux as a whole has never been in better shape to catch users fleeing from Windows, it surely looks like a much easier task than it was 15 years ago (even despite UEFI's additional complexity burden).
Spot on the +17% in lenovo shipments, but shouldn't we also care about the huge number of computers they're replacing - just because they're incapable of running Windows 11?
I use Windows for one reason only: Steam and best performance and compatibility for high resolution gaming.
If I didn’t want that, I wouldn’t be on windows at all.
The issue I have with Linux is that it’s 2025 and every single time I’ve created a Linux system in the past ten years, I have some sort of issue that I spend too much of my time figuring out. I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”
The downside of open source is you have to have the time to fix it yourself, and that lack of time is what keeps me from pursuing Linux, even though I am absolutely furious at the crap Microsoft is pulling lately, from shutting off ability to create a local account, to forcing OneDrive, to throwing Ads onto the desktop, to the telemetry and marketing spyware that is now standard on Windows 11.
I find it's the opposite nowadays. I run Kubuntu LTS on an all AMD system and most Steam games just work out of the box. No tinkering with the OS, takes 15 minutes to install and set up.
Compared to the hours and hours of battling Windows to get it to a usable state. Drivers, removing bloat, hunting for exes on the internet, dealing with low quality commercial software, etc. Then you get to do it all over again when a major update drops.
Just speaking personally, but one thing I wonder about with the issues is putting aside the 'internet knowledge base' how much I've accumulated knowledge of how to gloss over all the little issues in windows that doesn't translate over, and whether that applies to other people in general. There's the common "I migrated grandma and pointed her at firefox and she's loves it" anecdote for users with little assumptions, so for different types of user it'd be an interesting project to catalogue what pain points they come across, major ones are likely well known but I expect it'd be really interesting to gather minor ones. How much is adaptation to the windows/linux "DNA" or ways of doing things that would cause breakage if they were changed and how much could be looked at by various projects.
True about open source though it's the only place where your computer is and feels like yours. Macs and Windows have you beholden to companies that have increasingly been user hostile and both have been keeping me in a constant state of revulsion.
That said, if you're having to fix your system constantly then something is off, as many distros have become incredibly stable. Of course I don't know your circumstances so can't say anything specific.
On any Linux distro it feels somewhat like my computer belongs to a bunch of opinionated nerds, and none of them are me, and their motivations are peculiar. But also somewhat like it's mine, I must admit.
If your games work with Linux, which you can check on protondb, they typically "just work" and the performance is comparable to (sometimes even slightly better than) Windows. At least using AMD. Nvidia performance is good I've heard but getting everything to work together is still a bit tricky.
> I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”
This comment literally asks him to go check to see if his games work with Linux, and that he needs specific hardware for that compatibility to be meaningfully successful. The alternative is he just uses Windows and plays his games. It's exactly the type of "extra steps" that he wants to avoid.
I use Linux systems daily, and every now and then I'll go FOSS-zealot enough to go rip my Thinkpad back out of the closet and port everything over. Then, I'm no longer interoperable with any part of society that isn't involved in a fringe movement of the Linux laptop, and then go back, somewhat disappointingly, to my MacBook Pro.
Unfortunately that is the standard behaviour every time some of us complain about Linux Desktop.
Just because we complain doesn't mean we are Linux newbies.
Many of us do use Linux at work, have been there since early days, myself kernel 1.0.9, do have multiple UNIX variants experience, what we lack is the willingness to keep doing the same over and over again on our free time.
Yet, a single complaint and there comes the same answer as back in the Usenet days.
It's standard behavior for a reason; gaming on Windows blows. It was user-hostile in the DOS era, user-hostile in the Steam Machine era, and it's user hostile today.
Go look at the reviews of the Xbox handhelds - every single one always mentions how bad the OS is. Windows is no longer a selling point outside the hyper-obsessive purist niche that is waning with the proliferation of hardware-based cheats. Gaming-based hardware is getting docked points for not running Linux as a standard, Windows 11 is a liability.
Complain until the cows come home, really. It just makes you look that much dumber next to the 8-year-olds installing and playing Metroidvanias on their Steam Deck.
You don't really need to check any more. Games just work, unless it's a competitive multiplayer FPS with kernel anticheat. In theory you should check but I've not run into any issues for years now.
And if the game isn’t supported? What then? Not buy it? Buy another PC and use windows for that?
Last time I tried a dual boot UEFI system with windows and Linux on separate drives, I spent three weeks trawling message boards for half answers from DenverCoder9 only to give up.
That is a solid option but alas voting with your wallet can be difficult (social reasons etc.)
The only thing that needs Windows for me is Valorant. Everything else runs on bazite.
> UEFI system with windows and Linux
That is weird. Were you trying to have some selection with grub?
Just having two drives and selecting a boot device in the Bios/Uefi of the MB has worked stable for at least four years with this configuration. Make your default Linux or Windows and only use the MB for one-time boots of the other one.
Last year I made the dumb decision to buy a Gigabyte Brix without really researching Linux support, after several months of trying to make its UEFI recognising Linux partitions on M2 drives instead of external USB it ended up on the recycling centre, as I eventually damaged the motherboard.
Better than what, modifying your UEFI to forcibly recognize your GPT? Once you reach that point you should know that you're heading towards paperweight territory.
Bother myself with the usual endless hours tracking computers that are supposed to work with Linux, noting serial numbers down to be sure what exact models to buy and the kind of stuff I was doing back in 2000's, when I cared.
Indeed, writing this on a laptop with Linux that cant sleep and gets random crashes with blinking caps lock about once a week. Whether its Realtek ethernet adapter can run at its nominal 5gbps on a 6.14+ or <6.10 kernel without CPU soft lockups is an open question
When windows has a problem, I am confident there will be a driver fix and windows/the manufacturer will update the driver and I download an update and I’m fixed, and I’m confident in this for a few reasons:
1. Microsoft spends a lot of time and money on driver compatibility.
2. Manufacturers are incentivized to make sure their stuff works on windows.
3. The time and money has been spent for ease-of-updates and on customer service (having notices and communications that there is a problem and it will be resolved).
When this has happened to me on an Ubuntu or Debian based system, it’s typically been surfaced through a GitHub or random forum post, with consulted instructions to fix, if there is a fix. When the instructions don’t work, I need to spend more of my time figuring out why. And this happens for even mainstream hardware.
I’ve never had trouble free windows, but the time to get the problem resolved is a lot less and generally requires little to no time on my part, which given my state in life, is what I want.
I have been hearing evangelism since Windows XP days, when DX 10 drivers were Vista only, when driver model changed, when Windows 8 went to WinRT, when Windows 10 introduced telemetry, when....
Of all of the things that are a challenge on Linux, UEFI isnt one of them. I'm curious what you mean.
The term might come up in Linux distro installers but the ones I have used recently all handle it fine (Arch, Debian, Fedora). Secure boot is even supported without hassle by all the major distributions. Once Linux is installed the user definitely doesn't need to care about the pre-OS boot firmware.
Not on the Gigabyte Brix I bought and for whatever reason could only boot from Windows formatted M2 drives, regardless of how many UEFI partition flavours I tried.
We hang out in different circles because a surprising number of my non-tech worker PC using friends are trying out Linux and liking it. The only thing holding most of my friends back at this point is kernel anti cheat.
Games using kernel anti-cheats + Ableton + Unreal Engine (editor + plugins) not running properly on Linux are the three only things stopping me from removing Windows fully from my desktop.
Are you still having bad issues with Ableton? I did until recently, but now with Ableton in a fairly simple Bottles setup it works quite well (for me, at least).
Do you have more specific needs where the normal way doesn't work? I'm no music producer, so there's lots of stuff I probably don't even know about, would love to hear your thoughts. :)
> Are you still having bad issues with Ableton? I did until recently, but now with Ableton in a fairly simple Bottles setup it works quite well (for me, at least).
Could you share the config somehow so I could try it out? Last time I tried to get it to work I couldn't get it to recognize my audio interface (USB class compliant, Steinberg UR44), and the UI was very glitchy.
I don't think I have any special needs compared to others, do fairly basic things. Which version is it that you've tried it with? Tried v11 years ago I think, and v12 when it was just released, but not since then.
"Linux on the Desktop" is great. I've been using it since 1994. "Linux on the Laptop" sucks- I just want my laptop to sleep and awake properly, without draining the battery. I'm old enough that I'm done spending time twiddling kernel parameters in an attempt to get all of the onboard devices working, including sleep.
> I just want my laptop to sleep and awake properly, without draining the battery.
To be fair this is _also_ a massive problem on Windows too, because of Windows Modern Standby encouraging laptop makers to replace ol' reliable S3 sleep with the terribly broken modern standby stuff. Macbooks and certain Framework models are the only laptops left with reliable sleep.
I just want a laptop that has almost zero latency between the CPU and RAM and at least 300GB/s RAM bandwidth for data science. Not much choice there, unfortunately.
I know many people (myself included) that stopped using Windows altogether this year. Even accounting for biases, this is a very bad year for Microsoft.
My recent experience with Linux Mint on a new PC is the opposite. I went from USB installer to a fully functional system with drivers, chrome, my fave web pages, and my fave games on Steam and Battlenet, etc running flawlessly without ever doing a single "techie" thing.
On Windows 11 I had to figure out that I needed hop on another computer to search, download and copy via USB some motherboard and wifi drivers before I could even access the Internet. A number of things in the system remain rather quirky and not entirely reliable, including video playback of all kinds.
If I was setting up a PC for say my dad tomorrow, I'm finally at the point where I'd rather give him Linux than Windows.
I have a laptop running Zorin I'm probably going to flip to Mint if the new release doesn't fix my stuttering issues otherwise I had the same experience. Also bazzite on an AMD desktop and my steam deck are a breeze to use.
The “Linux demographics” were a bunch of 20-30 year olds who are now 40-50.
Same with the “Free Software” crowd - those 20-30 year olds are now 50-60.
Aging demographics that broadly failed to attract any interest from the next generation. Honestly though, why join? There’s nothing inherently attractive about either community. Hang out with toxic gamers on Discord and join a team, or hang out with toxic old nerds still on IRC for ideological purity. I know which one wins. Even professionally, I’d rather join a model train community.
You're being downvoted, however you're exactly right.
Speaking as one of those 40-50, I firmly believe once our generation is gone all those ideals will be gone as well.
Also everyone that thinks Valve will stay the Linux white knight after current management is gone, is in for a surprise, who knows what they will do with their assets.
This comment is getting downvoted for what is likely its tone of ageism, but I don't think that it's completely wrong: the original FOSS-activist community is now a group of oldheads and hasn't successfully made the same generational shift that maintained its original philosophy. Looking at any rant from Torvalds, the Linux programming community has often held technical elitism before inclusivity. "Open source" over "free/libre software" has found success not because of its personalities and community but rather because it is a meme that can be appropriated for your own. The counterculture I see in GenZ+ that is most interested in working with FOSS/public technologies is politically aligned differently and has more pragmatic goals (e.g. will use major commercial communications platforms such as Discord).
No, they are not, because the probe doesn't have anywhere near enough fuel to do this. I suggest stopping use of any news source you have that would print this crap.
You can read their paper here[0]. I agree it's very dodgy (and without even looking at that author's past). While the comet 3I/ATLAS approaches within 53 million km of Jupiter (0.3 au), all they can propose is, optimistically, to bring Juno to within half that distance–27 million km. Hardly seems worth the risks? And that'd end all of Juno's remaining Jupiter science (assuming the MAGA! FY26 budget doesn't get to it first. It's fully defunded, if anyone hadn't heard).
Referring to their figs. 3–7, that distance figure is a hard limit—there's no possibility they have of getting closer to the comet than that.
(Keep in mind this is just one random interstellar comet; there are many, many others like it—there will be infinite opportunities to study one—and Avi Loeb is a proven clown who consistently misrepresents these things for drama).
Tangential remark: there was a similar proposal for the end-of-life of the Cassini orbiter—it didn't happen, but, there was enough delta-v for the theoretical option, of escaping Saturn and redirecting it to a second mission at Uranus[1]. It was also a dodgy idea, since the transfer time would have been ridiculous (~20 years)—it'd have been a long-shot for Cassini to have survived that long.
It is worth noting that this comes two weeks after the authors posted https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213 "Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?"
They describe this first paper as "largely a pedagogical exercise" - clearly, if they're now providing emails to news outlets recommending this course change, their view of the target audience has certainly evolved. Orson Welles would be proud.
It's not going to be able to see anything at the closest approach that we can't see from earth. So there are no gains to be had, so no risks are worth it.
And even the 27Mkm number requires very optimistic assumptions, including that the main engine that has had huge problems during its mission would work perfectly for one continuous burn to exhaustion. Realistically, that's not going to happen.
I was somewhat suspicious that a probe could perform such a feat, but the article mentioned Avi Loeb, an award winning Harvard scientist [1], the author of the proposal, even went as far as computing required trajectory, ignition etc. so I assumed he had all the necessary data, and it was possible.
I don't think considering his proposal might have damaged NASA's reputation. I also don't think the interstellar object is an alien probe, I just was excited we got a chance at looking at an interstellar object, that may be totally unlike Solar System objects, and possibly far older. Crap?
its really interesting to see once-professional/respectable people turn into cranks over time... i wonder if they were always that way or just lost their minds, or have they just become cynics and just grift their way to money...?
>I don't think considering his proposal might have damaged NASA's reputation. I also don't think the interstellar object is an alien probe, I just was excited we got a chance at looking at an interstellar object, that may be totally unlike Solar System objects, and possibly far older. Crap?
There's one image on the NASA page and others. Any more links?
In case anyone else is wondering, it's this guy: "Since 2017, Loeb has argued that alien space craft may be in the Solar System [like] ʻOumuamua"
What I don't understand on his Wikipedia page is this bit in the second sentence: "Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University". Does he work there under the alias "Frank B. Baird Jr." or what does this sentence mean? Or is the position called one person but another person fulfills the role?
While I am not familiar with this particular instance, universities will often have a permanent professorship, or chair, with a specific focus that is named either after a renown expert in the field who taught at that institution, or after the person or organization who funded (endowed) the establishment of that position.
As for Loeb himself, I'm only passingly familiar with him in passing because of coverage since ‘Oumuamua, but it seems like he is a fairly typical asgtrophysicist who decided for some reason that he would launch a crusade declaring anything entering the Solar System from interstellar space must be an alien probe or spaceship.
Usually just means the position is sponsored by a donor (in this case Frank B. Baird Jr.). Salary and sometimes other funding gets paid via endowment set up by the named person or someone else on behalf of the named person.
Frank B. Baird Jr. was the son of Frank B. Baird, of Buffalo New York, who died some time around 1947. His son, and Flora M. Baird, his widow, set up a charitable trust in his name which did things like donate to the Buffalo Museum of Science. The later Frank B. Baird Jr. Foundation made several donations to Harvard for scholarships and the like in the 1950s.
I used a Neem based shampoo for a short period, but my wife complained that it had an atrocious smell. Guess Neem based oral hygiene would take this to the next level...
OTOH the real issue with Ubuntu is snap(d). Snap packages definitely do auto-update. You may want to uninstall the whole snap system - it's (still?) perfectly possible, if a little bit convoluted, due to some infamous snaps like firefox, thunderbird, chromium, or eg. certbot on servers
Or just use Debian or any snap-free fork for the matter.
Edit: fixed
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