Update: made quite a few edits, footnotes/references should align now.

Scott Hanselmann writes: Introducing open source Windows 10 PowerToys.

With playful reference to https://blog.enoch.kim/the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-is-further-away-than-ever-before which I enjoyed reading and which seems to be a mostly true description of the state of the art:

The Year of the Linux Desktop is Further Away Than Ever Before

An incredibly long diatribe of my struggles moving back to Linux

I'll say right off the bat that Windows is the not the ideal OS. I recently set out to put a Linux distro back on my laptop after growing frustrated with my Windows install...

Especially the part about making a bootable usb stick is relatable to me: when I am happy with my setup I leave it alone and work so until recently the last I installed Linux was sometime back in 2016 or so. Trying to install Linux this year has been a pain until I realized balena etcher is the only tool that works reliably now. After that however I haven't had many of the problems mentioned – but that is only because I know better and usually go straight for the worlds best desktop environment[0][1] instead of trying to make Gnome usable for me ;–)

Personally however I mostly use Linux except when customers demand I use Windows. Using Windows mostly isn't a problem at all, except for testing my patience, but my patience kind of depends on the situation, and if somebody pays me to send 50% longer time waiting for builds I'm fine with that[2].

[0]: The best distro I found is availble here: https://neon.kde.org/

[1]: Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes I think rationality is as well. I even know smart, extremely productive programmers, way better than me who use Mac, but if I didn't I wouldn't believe it, at least not right away.

[2]: But if you are a programmer and don't ever get annoyed by waiting for your computer then maybe one or more of you, your employer and/or customers could maybe[3] benefit if you studied “Three great virtues of a programmer” (quoted from Larry Wall himself in his “Programming Perl”, 2nd edition according to that site).

[3]: Alternatively if you program in a mainstream language and everything is super smooth you should feel free to make a blog post about your setup and tell me about it, contact details in the pinned about page, probably visible as a link on top of this page.