Resenting Microsoft more than I hated Linux basically. When Windows started pushing malware-like popups and automatically “upgrading” peoples OS without asking I started using Linux as my main OS. At that point I disliked Linux because I had had some bad experiences with attempting to use it in the past, but it was becoming clear it is the lesser of two evils. Over the years it got more tolerable while Windows just got worse. Not an evangelist or obsessed at all, I actually still dislike it, but there’s no way I’m going back.
I think there’s a pretty big thing here that people are kinda missing and it’s the ease of app creation. Recently gnome has done a lot for app developers to make the experience really good. Workbench, gnome builder, biblioteca all combined with the ease of libadwaita and the gnome circle make app development significantly easier for gtk than qt. There’s a big community now with a lot of inertia. I think workbench has around 100 tutorials now or so. Super low barrier to entry. Also libadwaita is pretty.
I already use gnome now, but even before I had settled on a DE, I took a look at both ecosystems and was heavily leaning towards gtk because of all these factors and against qt because of its reliance on c++. Until all of those factors are replicated well for qt (and by extension kde), I don’t think they’ll see the same level of development.
I’ve never tried NixOS, but it looks really promising.
I usually use Fedora or OpenSUSE, which have good software availability (unfortunately not as good as the AUR). Fedora provides selinux by default, and has profiles for basically everything. SUSE uses AppArmor, but Arch doesn’t provide convenient configuration for either, and only supports x86_64 (which is why I switched away from it).
I had always used Windows for the longest time. I used a certain cloud service and was impressed with how easy it was to manage services with docker. Fast forward a couple of years and I got a small mini-PC with Windows. I tried to install docker on it but Windows back then had no way of using Docker without virtualizing it with Hyper-V, a Pro feature. I thought let me give this another try. I tried to replicate the same setup with NSSM tools. It kinda worked eventually but it was a dirty hack at best and I did not like this solution.
I thought to myself, why would I pay Microsoft to use a feature I can use for free with Linux and get better performance while at it.
Kinda just ideological commitment. I sorta just started using Linux right off the bat, the only time I wasn’t a Linux user was way back when I was using the family Mac. Linux has gone quite far over the years, in quite a positive way.
Windows XP Pro was the last Windows that you could install on as many of your machines as you wanted without contacting M$. When I found that out, I knew that XP would be my last Windows and that I would inevitably switch to Linux. When XP became totally obsolete, I permanently switched over to Linux Mint. I’ve never gone back to Windows and I have zero reason to ever do so. I promote Linux whenever I can.
I started using foss software for everything, and one day, I realized that all the software I used was available on Linux, so I figured out I could run a foss os as well, and migrating was just straightforward.
Qt with C++ is a spectacular environment to develop UI apps in. Coupled with QtQuick it’s even better. It’s perhaps only outclassed by Flutter. As others have mentioned, there’s lots of inertia behind GTK+. There’s also past issues with licensing which made the OSS community prefer GTK+ to Qt.
I’ve no idea what’s involved in using Qt in Rust but people starting new UI apps in C and GTK+ today are likely doing a disservice to themselves and the larger OSS community that could contribute to development and maintenance.
Windows 11 has a bug that when I’m in file explorer and a drag a file out of the window or drag to the file to list of folder or drives on the left side of file explorer. It will freeze file explorer for about one minute. This only happens once in a while. I was extremely frustrated with windows 11 bugs that I thought to switch back to Arch Linux for real this time and even if I bricked Arch Linux, I would reinstall. There is also that Windows 11 AMD CPU bug where it will start to hitch every once in a while, when I was on my desktop. I have been thinking of going back but I love customizability of Linux and bash.
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