There’s a good explanation about that here: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites

This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.

Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…

I think Alpine uses Busybox, but it’s feasible for a Linux distro to use BSD coreutils. Not sure if any do that, though.

User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.

Interesting… I didn’t realise Skylake isn’t supported. I agree with your comment. I thought people were talking about much older equipment.

TPM 2 has been around since 2015ish and I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows starts relying on it more heavily. A lot of businesses have already required employees to use computers with TPM 2.0 for a long time, and enterprise use is a big focus for Microsoft.

not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.

Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.

You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.

User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.

The thing is that most Windows users don’t care and will continue to use it. People like you and I know about the benefits of Linux, but sometimes we overestimate how much regular users care about the OS they’re using.

Forced restart for software updates

If anything, they’re moving in the opposite direction. Windows Server 2025 is going to support hotpatching, which means that system updates can be applied without needing to reboot. Not sure if the technology will come to consumer Windows though.

Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.

How long do you expect legacy hardware to be supported for?

Why will it be better in just a couple months?

Explicit sync. It’ll fix most of the issues with Wayland on Nvidia CPUs. Wayland landed support for it in April, and Nvidia recently released a beta driver that supports it. I think every graphics driver will implement explicit sync eventually, since it’s a lot better than implicit sync.

Some great information about why it’s important here: https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/04/05/explicit-sync.html

It’s an immutable/atomic version of Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

My understanding is that the core system is immutable (read-only) and major upgrades essentially just swap out that whole layer. Updates are atomic, meaning the entire thing either succeeds or fails and you can never end up with a broken half-updated system. UI apps all run using Flatpak.

I’ve never tried it though!

Are there guides for this in Fedora and Debian?

Thanks for the link :)

NVIDIA is likely to be stable on Wayland next month.

Do you have a source for that?

Isn’t there some way to force Electron to use Wayland?

“ButterFS” is one of the accepted pronunciations though.

I remember them being exactly the dame many years ago

This is one of the reason I like Debian. They don’t change stuff unless there’s a good reason to. Network configuration on my Debian servers is in /etc/network/interfaces in mostly the same format it was in 20 years ago (the only difference today is that I’m dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 everywhere).

The default software was one of the main reasons KDE was created. The original creator didn’t like that every app on their system seemed to use a different UI toolkit, and wanted a consistent appearance across everything.

when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.

I haven’t used desktop Linux in a while, but I feel the same about MacOS font smoothing. It’s way too blurry. I’m not sure why people like it.

still do the scripting in Bash for portability reasons,

For what it’s worth, Debian and most of its derivatives use dash (a Linux port of ash) instead of bash for /bin/sh. It’s ~4x faster and uses much less RAM than Bash. Usually the only scripts that use Bash are scripts that aren’t POSIX compliant or that use Bash-specific features.

Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens

I’m surprised this is still an issue. I remember it being an issue when I used desktop Linux 15 years ago. At the time, Linux devs didn’t want to risk accidently infringing on Microsoft’s ClearType patents, so the text smoothing techniques had to be completely different.

Those patents all expired in 2018.

don’t know if I can run & debug .net 8 applications on a linux machine

The .NET SDK is cross-platform. Try install it then run dotnet run in the same directory as your project file (.csproj).

Most .NET APIs are cross-platform, but there’s a few that still only work on Windows, and it’s also possible to write code that only works on Windows, like using P/Invoke to call a Win32 API.