Mint is one of the greatest distributions to get started with for users coming from Windows. I've been using Fedora full-time for more than four years now, but before that I used Linux Mint for about a year. It's a great, seamless experience.
Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.
Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even).
I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.
Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).
A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.
> Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it.
I switched from Windows 11 to Kubuntu a year ago, and then gave CachyOS a shot after hearing praise for it. I'm on a laptop with an AMD iGPU, and CachyOS's `znver4` optimized repos gave a significant bump on my Geekbench results:
(Note: these results are from almost a year ago though)
Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen4 AMD
- Windows 11: 2366 Single-Core Score, 10717 Multi-Core Score
Have you observed any changes in your day-to-day usage, such as faster compilation times? If it's actually decently faster I might try it instead of playing with Gentoo to get better-optimized compilation flags.
I haven't benchmarked anything other than the initial tests with Geekbench. That said, it subjectively felt "snappier"/faster in terms of UI speed with KDE Plasma than Kubuntu. I've been a happy CachyOS user since.
You can still get security updated by enrolling in the Extended Support branch. Did it in a relative's computer and it seems it will get security updates for at least an extra year, with the advantage it won't get any feature updates too (a really nice bonus IMO).
They do, but that's really not necessary. In the linked video you can see Windows 8.1 is pretty well optimized compared to the other Windows versions.
A lot of this slowdown is just developers getting complacent and getting used to the new hardware capabilities. Windows has a lot of low hanging optimization fruit laying around. It's just Microsoft doesn't really care about that: it doesn't fit the business model at all.
Why would you go for a random Linux distribution backed by DHH (a Ruby developer) instead of a established upstream distribution such as Debian or Fedora?
I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
As stated before, because my colleagues which whom I share the same projects and test cases made the jump from MacOS and are all liking it so far, I also like what I saw till now.
It's not such a difficult task to set up hyprland. And niri doesn't even need to be configured, the default configuration performs all the required tasks.
From my understanding, to get something at the level of omarchy you need to setup multiple pieces of software. In the end it has to replace the whole "desktop"
Regarding the video benchmark on the page: what would be fair is testing against the hardware that was available when the operating system was released. Windows 11 is absolutely not meant to run against hard drives, and current notebook and desktop offerings for home and enterprise users reflect that: you can get a 256gb SSD for a pretty decent price nowadays, to the point there's absolutely no reason to put in an HDD. When Windows Vista was released, your computer would absolutely have an HDD, so that would be a fair comparison.
That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.
It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.
As a software engineer who has developed on Macs (and Linux) for most of my career and has recently started a job that requires me to use Windows again, I can tell you from experience that Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11. Microsoft’s macOS team are really good at their jobs.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
> Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11
I haven't had stability issues with any Office program in years, but everything you mentioned is moot because there are Office features (especially Power___ features in Excel) that don't have parity on MacOS. If I get a workbook from a client, I need it to run exactly the same on my machine as it does on theirs.
I totally agree with you, just yesterday I edited a document in Microsoft word and opened the second document for comparison. Suddenly, the first document froze and when I closed the program, I did not see the changes that I had made before. After complaining about my life, I started anew, and only the next time I downloaded Word offered me a recovery option.
One would think multi-monitor support is the hardest thing in the universe to solve. My Linux desktop has very bad multi-monitor support, but hey, it's Linux. My $2K Macbook Pro has, somehow, even worse multi-monitor support, so bad that sometimes the productivity of an external display feels not worth the hassle of plugging it in and wrestling with it.
Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).
The first time I’ve had my multi-monitor setup(s) “just work” on Linux is recently installing Fedora 43 on my Ideapad. (After becoming exhausted trying to tweak Linux Mint to get tolerable sizing across all the screens).
Wayland per-monitor fractional scaling is delightful and after a couple gsettings tweaks restoring minimize/bottom dock I’ve been loving the polish and snappiness of Gnome. I also had to switch the WiFi backend from wpa_supplicant to iwn due to connection problems on one specific WiFi network but now it’s totally stable.
macOS multi-monitor support and scaling is a constant thorn in my side that was marginally improved by paying for Better Display. Windows 11 really is the most solid option for various monitor combinations not in Apple's happy path of resolutions/sizes.
But I don’t really like the ergonomics of using even clean de-bloated Windows as my main dev machine, so was very pleased to have such a great out-of-the-box experience trying Fedora for the first time.
Apple took a shortcut for DPI scaling implementation because they only care about selling their own hardware.
If you use anything else, it's a pain in the ass. This is a big problem of today's Apple, because they can't manage to release competitively priced hardware in some categories.
> We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.
A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL).
There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
That I can agree with hahaha. Even though I'm not a fan of Tailwind, there's absolutely no reason developers who like utility libraries will abandon them because of LLMs.
That's still pretty bloated. That's enough size to fit an entire Android application a few years ago (before AndroidX) and simple Windows/Linux applications. I'll agree that it's justified if you're optimizing for runtime performance rather than first-load, which seems to be appropriate for your product, right?!
What is this 2 MB for? It would be interesting to hear about your WebAssembly performance story!
Regarding the website homepage itself: it weighs around 767.32 kB uncompressed in my testing, most of which is an unoptimized 200+kB JPEG file and some insanely large web fonts (which honestly are unnecessary, the website looks _pretty good_ and could load much faster without them).
Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.