I use Windows and Linux a lot, run into this often. For the most part anything I can do on Windows I can do on Linux, and I would love to ditch Windows entirely with all the AI crap being literally the only thing Microslop demonstrably cares about. But I can't quite yet, I find that Linux partisans (of course) vastly overstate how well things work there. You've got to be honest if you really want to catch up and beat Windows for some things.

Things that are just fine on both: Notepad++ on Windows, emacs on Linux. File/Repository compare: nothing beats Beyond Compare. If you want a full integrated dev / debug environment, Visual Studio Code. For term, PuTTY on Windows, ssh/term on Linux. Waterfox and Vivaldi for browser. For (most) office stuff, Libre works. FileZilla for GUI file transfer. Curve Expert Professional for curve fitting. Tixati for heavy duty torrenting. For VPN, Express or Proton (or others). TortoiseGIT on windows, SmartGit on Linux is almost as good. Thunderbird for email. Pcloud and ProtonDrive for cloud storage. Terminal on Windows sucks unless you put clink on it, then it's basically zsh. Media player I use MPC HC and Musicbee on Windows, VLC on Linux. Plenty of options for virtualization on both, Proxmox! Joplin for distributed, organized, notes. Haruneko and PMDL for manga download. Teamviewer or Splashtop for remote desktop. All on both (and most on macOS too)!

Areas where Linux technically has an alternative, but noticeably not as good once you get above a novice level: XYplorer file manager on Windows - Double Commander on Linux works, but not nearly the functionality and UI. I have to do lots of photo editing and manga scanlation, and Gimp is nowhere near as good as Photoshop for those. I've tried, in a 'f@#$ Adobe' mood! Visio on Windows for doing complex charts, layouts, and sequence diagrams - you can use draw.io or LibreDraw, but that's a real step down. I don't feel there's anything on Linux that matches Fences on Windows for desktop control. Nothing on Linux (Irfanview, xnview) is as fast as ACDSee for browsing tons of images. I miss Canva on Linux even if you can cobble together most of it separately.

Where Linux wins: setting up servers. Like getting apache working on new Linux is a breeze, I would never run any servers on Windows by choice (and don't). I really, really like tmux / screen on linux, nothing like that for Windows short of full scale virtualization. zsh or even bash is so much better than DOS batch or powershell scripting (they totally blew that opportunity).

Where Linux really falls down: Not having per-monitor display scaling really sucks. And there's a big lack of proprietary domain tools. Other people in this thread have listed some of the many, many engineering programs that just won't run in Linux. Technically that's the fault of the companies who don't bother porting, but all I care about is that I can't run it on Linux. And I have to use Excel for some hardcore engineering spreadsheets because LibreCalc just can't handle it. And of course the big thing is there are tons of games that won't work in Linux even with Proton.

The good new is that Linux is getting more and more capable of emulating Windows programs, especially on the gaming side. If I can run XYplorer under Wine then it's all good. Proton keeps getting better, especially with Steam Deck and Steam Box driving things. Apparently modern Photoshop can now be run under Wine if you crack it (which I would have no qualms doing). Maybe time for my yearly 'Let's try doing everything in Linux' quest again.

Oh yeah, sorry to reply to my own post, but I could have written that network app he spent six months trying to do with Claude in a week (leaving plenty of room) - give another week (not full time) for testing and feedback and changes and it's totally done in two weeks, one actual week of work at the outside. Woulda cost way less and it would be secure, upgradable, and maintainable. But we can't have nice things in the hellscape of 202x.

The company I was working for went out of business in March because stupid spending crap (like AI!).

I took a look at the state of the software industry and am just horrified. There's just no room for someone who can just engineer solutions, knows about resource constraints (like disk and RAM and bandwidth - this may be hard to believe but those are not infinite!), and knows that what LLM coding produces is fast, fragile, insecure solutions with massive technical debt. I have played around it with (know the enemy or possible tool) and saw this at the last place! We had a junior guy spend six months trying to vibe code a network utility app that would have been very useful. 'Oh let me just have Claude do it!' Of course the VP was all over that s#$% and the guy's only 'job' at that point was coaxing Claude to make the app.

Except... every time he had a candidate it was broken. So he'd go back and tell Claude to fix it. And it would. And it would break two other things. And since this guy has no idea what the code Claude wrote does he can't just go in and fix things himself, he has to round trip. So I told him about unit tests... and he had Claude generate the unit tests [lawl]. Which are just abysmally bad. So every iteration was still broken. When the company went under he was still trying to make it work. This whole generation joining the industry is just lost. Most of them will be unable to do anything except produce slop. But in the mean time they sure look cheaper than us guys with the institutional knowledge.

So I said eff that, I don't want to work in this industry any more. I am still doing consulting here and there, hand picked, for sane stuff like embedded firmware which is (for now) mostly free of slop code. But basically I just retired way early, will see where the dust settles. And let me tell you it is GLORIOUS. I have never been busier than I am now when every day is free, I can (and do) work on all my spare projects as I want, and I don't have mentally deficient sociopath executives to deal with, and no slop. So congrats, AI, you beat me.

Microslop gonna Microslop. I'm never calling them anything other than Microslop even again (unless Nadella pulls his head out of ass, but it's so far up he can see out his throat, not holding my breath).

But nowhere NEAR as much damage as Nvidia has done.

Have you seen RAM and GPU and flash prices? People building nuclear reactors and firing up more dirty coal plants JUST to supply the energy needs for freaking LLMs so dumbasses can make cute kitten pics instead of just taking cute kitten pics?

At this point, NVidia has joined Exxon and BP in the much coveted 'evil greedy corporations that have done the most damage to the planet and everyone living on it' category.

This seems on brand for their shitty vehicles?

At this point EA can't die in a fire fast enough and maybe liberate those IPs to someone decent.

The recent slop from them is so bad, though, that our office has actually gone back to fixed Office 2021. No updates, no AI constantly popping up, no random UI clusterfarks, we can just use it - what a concept. Office 2021 is in every way better than Office 365 is in 2025. We still have Win11 (I am not the IT guys), but all the AI crap has been disabled at a group policy level, which (for now) they still let you do if you're part of a domain. At some point though, they're going to consider whether going back to Win10 LTSC or Linux might actually be better for a lot of machines. Some people can't give up Excel, so it will probably be Win10.

Hell, everything they do has gotten worse since 2021 - from Windows 11, to XBox, to Visual Studio, to Flight Sim, to Bing, to LinkedIn, to GitHub now being 'AI first' under the AI division's control, it's all rapidly enshittifying. So we'll see where that rapidly falling line of 'At least the MS products are more usable for an office' crosses it being so bad people actually consider it. I realize, most businesses will just go with MS because it's 'safe', but now they actually have to think about it.

I find it quite funny (and appropriate) that a Microsoft company, which is making everything dogshit with their 'AI', is now so flooded with fake 'AI' crap generated resumes and shotgun 'recruiters' and hiring scammers that they're buckling under the flood and having to roll out completely useless 'AI' to cope with it.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of evil jerkwads. Who could have guessed that if you gave everyone high power fecal hoses things might get a bit stinky?

Yeah, let's remember that LinkedIn is the company that *pioneered* stealing all your email contacts and then messaging them 'from' you like tons of other malware does now.

This was before MS bought them, but they've always been dogshit and evil.

Every single f@#$ing thing Facebook has ever done since they were created in 2004 to bag on @#$%es who wouldn't sleep with sociopath Zuck has been a complete privacy disaster. They pioneered data theft and dark UI for the entire internet as it exists today. You wouldn't have Tiktok as it exists without Facebook blazing the way down to hell. The entire purpose of anything they make is to stab their slobbering proboscis deep into your deepest parts and suck them dry for his evil empire.

Which I know isn't new info for most /. users, but... needs repeating because there are so many people who don't get this. I meet them every week.

And yes, it's good to have the continuing rapine revealed like this. Not that it'll change anything, but it's good to have the specifics documented.

The fact that there are so many memory leak and bounds overflow vulnerabilities with C++ programs that are actually out there is something you just can't sweep away.

Sure, YOU are the perfect C++ programmer and YOU would never write a memory leak or bounds overflow, but you are obviously in the tiny minority (and you're not as good as you think about this, neither am I). And memory leaks are not even worst thing, they usually don't (though they can) lead to immediate predictable exploit, like, oh - the opposite of a memory leak, accessing something that's already deleted. Or stack overflow. So many others.

Imagine if we could harness with turbines the full power of all the C++ programmers who are deathly afraid of having to learn any other language (because C++ is so arcane and convoluted it takes years to fully learn, they think other languages are the same) and spend all their time posting about how safe C++ Ackshually is, we might be able to power one AI datacenter. And I say this as someone who's been programming C++ for 30 years, but learned other languages as they came along because I know its problems. Python, C#, Rust, Lisp, bash, they all have their place. So does C/C++ - I still use it for embedded firmware, and would use it for writing a game engine, but right tool for the right job.

Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I want to say that Indians (Desi) are not stupid and incompetent - educated and working outside India they can be f#$ing brilliant. One of the smartest mathematicians in the world, ever, was Indian (Srinivasa Ramanujan)! It just seems to be a cultural thing for people working in modern India to prioritize grift and nepotism over competence (like the US right now), where all the bosses hire their completely incompetent nephews and otherwise completely drag everything down into the shit, as they do at Google or Intel. This is why Google search is complete shit now, for example.

I have dealt with multiple Indian outsourcing initiatives in my career - none of them my choice, all of them by stupid f#$ing management stupidly thinking they could save some money, all of them a disaster.

Of course they claim 1/3 the cost, but if you actually want it to work, it balloons to 2x the cost of actually hiring local engineers who know what they're doing to do it right. I have sat in multiple meetings at multiple companies where the Indian outsourcers told us the reason their code did not work for us is that we had a firewall, and we had to remove the entire f!@#ing company firewall or their software would not work. And oh, they need $50K more to make it work even without the firewall. (spoiler, it would not work even without the firewall, because I, out of hatred, tried it on an external VM).

So yes, these are the sort of people who will take five code fragments from stackexchange, hammer them together till they compile, without a single concern whether they work or not (because they can blame that on the firewall), deliver that as the product, then call that a day.

And then, yes, LLMs actually do that better. I would absolutely take Gemini or Github copilot generating code over Indian outsourcing since at least it's stealing from things that actually work. If I had my choice I would do neither, but if it's 'AI' coding vs Indian outsourcing, 'AI' coding is far superior.

This was all 100% predictable and was predicted and inevitable, like the Honey browser extension thing (obviously a scan from day one). Corporations are going to suck you dumbasses in on obviously unsustainable promises of free [poop] and then turn the screws once you've had your free hit of the merchandise, and then you dumbasses are going to scream 'oh my god who could ever have seen this 100% predictable thing coming?!' Again, like the Honey thing.

So either need legislation to protect these f@#$ing dumbasses, because their education was deliberately terrible enough they couldn't even see this coming, or just let them burn. I have looked deep into my soul and... yeah, I don't really care.