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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

For me it was Windows XP. What did it for me back then was the introduction of product activation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation). Having as my primary workstation a computer that Microsoft could remotely disable at any time for any reason wasn't a very appealing prospect. Linux was much rougher on the desktop then, but it was good enough and has only gotten better. I still have a Windows partition, but I only ever use it for playing games, and with Steam's Linux support improving I find myself using it less and less even in that limited capacity.

For a company that used to understand that its success depended on developer mindshare, Microsoft has done a really remarkable job over the last 15 years turning Windows into a platform that seems laser-focused on the goal of making developers want to use almost anything else.

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Activation itself is a one-time thing. What you're probably thinking of is Windows Genuine Advantage, later renamed Windows Activation Technologies[1]. This is far more insidious. To wit:

   WGA consists of two components:

   an installable component called WGA Notifications
   that hooks into Winlogon and validates the
   Windows license upon each logon and an ActiveX
   control that checks the validity of the Windows
   license when downloading certain updates

I've mentioned this on HN on a number of occasions, and the community here seems totally nonplussed about it. People just don't seem to care that this software "validates" each time you log in.

However, I think this ongoing check only started with Windows XP SP3. I have a Windows XP SP2 installation in a VM. I don't allow Internet access at all for it, I copy anything I need to a shared directory. It has stayed activated for quite some time without complaining and without needing the Internet for anything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advantage

>Having as my primary workstation a computer that Microsoft could remotely disable at any time for any reason wasn't a very appealing prospect.

Unless you're normal, ie not wearing tinfoil hat.

Not sure why you're being downvoted for this. The "MS can remotely shut me down!" anti-Windows argument has always felt like FUD to me.

Can anyone here who owned a legit copy of Windows actually say that this happened to them, or to someone they knew?

I don't think they shut you down, worst that can happen is setting your background to color black and "THIS WINDOWS IS ILLEGAL" message. And that can be usually sorted out with one phone call.

> Not sure why you're being downvoted for this.

Because there's a way to communicate the point without casting aspersions on the commenter.

They're being downvoted because they used the phrase "tin foil hat" which should be a bannable offense on all discussion forums. It's only used to delegitimize other people without having to put forth effort into forming a counter argument.

> Can anyone here who owned a legit copy of Windows actually say that this happened to them, or to someone they knew?

I can almost say. I had a genuine Windows 7 license in 2011 that I used for gaming. When I'd turn on the machine, it'd give the scary "this copy may not be legitimate" message at boot. When I'd enter the product key, it wouldn't work. I could push through that message, but every 10 or so minutes I'd get a pop-up screen I couldn't ignore that said "this copy may not be legitimate" and I'd have to enter my key that should work that doesn't, or hit "ignore for 10 minutes."

So, Microsoft didn't remotely deactivate it, but they, through their error, inconvenienced me such that I got rid of something that was a $300 value (it was Win7 ultimate, 32 and 64 bit licenses. I got it for free by hosting a Windows 7 launch party. So it's the most genuine Windows you can get.)

I'm a case study of "DRM provides no advantage for legitimate users, and occasionally inconveniences them." Of course I'm just an anecdote, but you asked!

Yep, it happened to me: twice.

First time, I had an HP laptop with Windows XP Pro OEM in 2006. All worked fine, but one day out of the blue it told me that my copy of Windows wasn't genuine. I don't know what caused it & reinstalling Windows over the top from DVD didn't fix it. I seem to recall Windows then kept shutting down after 2 hours, so backing up my data before a reformat was extremely difficult. Once I reformatted & did a clean reinstall, it worked again.

The second time, I had a MS BizSpark membership via the Association Of Software Professionals, and was testing my software in Windows 7 VMs. 8 months later, my Windows 7 claimed it was non-genuine. I enquired with Microsoft, and they said my business shouldn't have been eligible for BizSpark because it was more than 3 years old, so they'd cancelled the BizSpark membership & blacklisted my Windows keys without notifying me. I would've preferred if MS verified my eligibility upfront.

I switched to Apple as a result. I know, it's another proprietary OS and tied to one hardware vendor, but at least in 9 years it has never locked me out of my data or my machine.

> Can anyone here who owned a legit copy of Windows actually say that this happened to them

Yep. Just recently my windows 8.1 installation deactivated itself and I had to call in an talk to a person to get it reactivated.

Well, activation hickup is not even close to "remote disable". It's an annoyance, sure, you have to call some support person, but it's not a 'self destruct' option.

I just don’t like it on principle. Why would I voluntarily offer potential control of my machine to somebody else? My software is mine.

MS (or anybody else) doesn't get to violate first sale doctrine[1] simply because they don't trust their customers. Once consideration has changed hands for a copy of Windows, MS loses all control. The customer can do anything they want with their copy, except for a few areas covered by other laws (i.e. distributing another copy would make the customer liable for copyright infringement).

If Microsoft is disabling a legitimately purchased copy of windows - or accessing it without the authorization of the owner - that could be a violation of the CFAA (or other laws; ask a lawyer).

Trying to say the customer somehow authorized all of this by throwing a contract of adhesion at the customer after the purchase has been made is almost certainly not binding, and is explicitly illegal in some jurisdictions. It's patently not a contract as it lacks all of the required elements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

C and C++ dev on Windows is a pain on the ass. On my GNU/Linux, I can use pkgconfig to get the lib dependences, and cmake could grab the deps very well. On Windows, I end doing ugly things to get the dependencies working...

I only had that experience with projects that use autoconf for build configuration, usually these are tied very closely to UNIX-like platforms. Most libs that use cmake to setup the build files can be integrated well on Windows (most likely because the author choose cmake exactly for this reason to be easily usable across platforms). But that's more of a problem of Linux isolationism than Windows' fault (basically the modern version of the bad old days when everyone was on Windows and all you got to build a project from source was a bunch of Visual Studio project files).

But even with cmake there's no standard place for third-party libraries to be installed on Windows. There's no /usr/lib and /usr/include analogue. So if I'm writing software that uses a third-party library I either have to bundle it into my source tree or hope there's an installer for it, burn the default installation location into the build system, and hope the user compiling my code has not overridden the default location. (I know some installers like Qt will make a system environment variable to say where their libraries are, but that's not particularly nice if everything did that.)

In my case I needed libapr, and as far as I can tell there is no installer for it, so I wound up just saying "drop a compiled copy of libapr into this location in the source tree" into the build instructions since I did not want to redistribute it with my source.

So yes, I dearly wish for something like a working pkgconfig on Windows.

> There's no /usr/lib and /usr/include analogue

I would argue that it is a good thing to not rely on /usr/lib or /usr/include even on Unix. It is a pain for when a dev who is jumping on the team specially when the dependencies are not documented. The make-dependency error-install-make cycle is very annoying.

I usually try hard to not link against 'installed' libs but instead directly compile external dependencies from source as part of my project. That way I don't need to have different libs for different build configs or VStudio versions. CMake can import sources from locations outside your source tree, and these source locations can be relative to your project (e.g. on the same directory level). That way you don't need any global system settings, or centralized locations, everything can be relative to your project. I actually prefer this also on OSX or Linux.

Add Python to the list. If you're using 64 bit versions it becomes a nightmare. I do have to remark that finally Microsoft did something about it and released a special version of MSVC to solve part of the issue, but for some modules it still is challenging to get everything working correctly.

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