Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn them off
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I'm aware that Windows 10 is a "free" OS, but trying to ram this type of behaviour down my throat is despicable unethical behaviour and I don't condone it. It is why I've switched to Linux for my daily computing needs.
In other words, if you really don't want to pay, Microsoft still seems desperate to get you to "upgrade" to Win10... precisely so they can monetise you with ads (and might make more from you eventually even if you never paid for their OS). As a mass-exodus to Linux and macOS curretly seems unlikely, their strategy appears to be winning so far.
... or people just install windows 7 / avoid upgrading to 10. Hard to call that a "win"
Take everything with a grain of salt, but metrics still point to Windows 7 dominance:
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/de...
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
That claim doesn't stack up. Windows 10, for example, works fine on older hardware. As Microsoft said, they're blocking updates to Windows 7 and 8 if you try to run those OSes on newer hardware.
Wait, what if you were to redirect the download links for the automatic updates to a Linux installer? Assuming Microsoft's security is still as lax as it was during the XP era, you could get this to work without much difficulty.
[1] Secure Boot comes into play only when 1) you use distribution in SecureBoot enforcing mode (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) and 2) want to build your own kernel modules. Then, you have to enroll your Machine Owner Key into UEFI and sign your modules with it. However, building kernel modules is not something that grandma is going to do. For normal use, all the mainstream distributions come with a signed bootloader (shim.efi).
It took me a few hours of research (having never had to add drivers to get a machine to boot into a Windows installer before). I imagine that a lot of other people wouldn't have had any idea where to start.
And even after getting everything working smoothly, the touchscreen doesn't work (no drivers available, and the hardware isn't detected at all; good riddance), and there are some bits of power-management hardware that still show up as question-marks in the device manager.
New hardware will be increasingly difficult to run a reasonable Windows OS on. At least in my case, there were drivers for everything that matters to me.
I'm liking lots of things microsoft is doing as of late, but I still don't like a lot of their business practices and they are ruining their operating systems infesting it with ads.
That would make sense if the benefits were more than the costs. Which, for the average people, aren't.
Just the hassle of using a new interface, much less one that needs more admin work like Linux, is enough. And let's not go with compatibility with the various tasks people do.
(And no, most people don't just "browse and read email". They also want to be able to see all kinds of videos, they want to be able to do stuff with Office documents they receive, they want to transfer and/or edit their daughter's birthday videos, and so on...).
Not to detract from the point you're making, which is quite valid.
It was once possible to disable advertising about OneDrive, but Microsoft has reconfigured things so that's no longer possible without deep hacking (no user-level configuration options). There's an "Uninstall" option attached to the OneDrive client's listing in the Start menu, but if you choose the option, instead of uninstalling the OneDrive client, the system opens the Control Panel Programs & Features applet, where OneDrive is nowhere listed.
As time passes the advertising is becoming more aggressive and less controllable. On February 14th a commercial announcement related to Valentine's Day appeared, but I wasn't able to track it to its source. Just one example -- Microsoft is jealous of Google and they're becoming an imitation.
The deep issue here is that corporations have to decide how to most efficiently grow their companies. Do they pay attention to customers, or stockholders? At some point in the past (I think it was during the Reagan years) corporations turned their backs on customers and made stockholders the focus of their attention. And from a corporate perspective, it was a good choice, because customers are fickle and unpredictable, but stockholders only care about quarterly earnings reports -- no earnings and they walk.
Also, there's plenty of distros that look great out of the box.
I'm not so sure any more. The average home user probably does most of their stuff online these days, and you can see your friends' photos on Facebook or write a message in Google Mail or access your online banking or watch a show on Netflix just as well on pretty much any platform today.
What desktop applications do most home users really run now? Gaming, sure, for part of the market. Maybe some basic spreadsheets or word processing documents or accounting for organising household stuff or writing the odd letter that still needs sending on paper.
Other than that, you're probably into niche territory. There are a lot of niches, and no doubt some of them still rely on Windows desktop software or Windows drivers for related hardware, but they're niches because most people aren't that interested in them. And even then, for significant fields such as programming or graphics/creative work, many of the interesting developments in recent years have been on non-Windows platforms and it's the Windows software that tends to lag behind.
Remember, one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead.
Each individual niche is tiny, but once you add up all the niches, it adds up to a significant part of the market. Windows has a huge "tail" of niche software on it, and just finding substitutes on Linux is a daunting task, to say nothing of actually getting back up to the same level of productivity as one had on Windows.
>Remember one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead
Is that an actual trend? Yes, PC sales have slowed down. All that means is that the PC market has reached saturation. Pretty much every household already has one PC that meets their needs. I don't see any evidence to indicate that people are throwing away their computers and using their phones and tablets exclusively.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
> Is that an actual trend?
It points to a solution anyway. Have one family PC with Windows to run the one niche app you need, but don't put Windows on anything else. Even if the other devices are laptops and not tablets, it still works.
Perhaps, but certainly not all of the market, and (I'm guessing) probably not even most of it. It won't be everyone all the time, but surely there are numerous people using Windows PCs today who could switch quite easily to another platform and carry on using their online services without too much hassle.
Is that an actual trend?
I'm pretty sure it is. Over the past few years, we've watched access patterns on B2C sites shift steadily from mostly PC to mostly mobile, and Android dominates most segments of the mobile market today. I suspect that at this point the PC, smartphone and tablet markets are all close to saturation, but device lifecycles are longer in the PC market so people are getting access to more powerful and higher spec mobile devices sooner, which is making the shift more practical.
Last time I used Linux (well, Ubuntu specifically) every time I searched for anything in the file system I would see at least half a dozen ads for products on Amazon. Significantly worse than anything I've ever seen in Windows 10 personally. Uninstalled it and never using it again.
EDIT: 12.04. Time flies. Memory sucks.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-deskt...
You should check out https://fixubuntu.com nonetheless, which surfaced at that time, is still up and relevant.
Ubuntu has 50% market share.
I have never seen an ad on Windows 10 Pro except:
- Candy Crush - Edge Homescreen (hardly counts)
For example, the ads for Edge that now show up touting that you can stream longer with Edge. Really? I don't know anyone that that would convince to stop using Chrome. How about maybe something more basic like changing the logo, since every non-technical user that I know just thinks it's Internet Explorer and it's been pounded into their brains for years (and for good reason) to use Firefox or Chrome instead.
It's like a comical game of chicken because in less than a decade all of this software is going to be in a web browser anyway.
I know one of the big issues with adopting Linux on the desktop in companies is the issue with access control (something like AD's Group Policy). It's amazing how you can control pretty much every permission/policy imaginable within your domain using AD, and until something like that comes out for Linux it won't get adopted.
Will it, though? On the surface it stands to reason, but I distinctly recall seeing this exact argument a lot back in mid-00s already, during all the initial RoR craze. And yet, here we are.
How painfully and uncouthly reductive. Making your products skip the whole "getting infected by Malware before they show you advertisements all the time" is not the solution to making money, or growing your brand, or having long-term success. Rather, it looks more like the final hoo-rah of a sinking ship.
Microsoft is doing exactly the right thing here, loading up their OS with spyware and adware to make money from their users. I see nothing at all wrong with them abusing users as much as they want, with forced reboots, forced ads, poorly-QAed driver updates causing system malfunctions, etc. Their customers have proven over and over and over that they will not abandon the Windows platform no matter what, so it's perfectly sensible for Microsoft to exploit this for monetary gain. And given that the techies on sites like this are generally libertarian, anyone who complains about MS's behavior is most likely a hypocrite.
Here's why most people don't: they like editing Word documents, using Bluetooth, playing AAA games, printing and scanning, connecting to external monitors, watching DVDs, and transferring files from their phones.
LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.
>using Bluetooth
Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.
>playing AAA games
This is your only legitimate point, but it grows less legitimate every day.
>printing and scanning
Works fine OOTB for nearly all printers and scanners using only GUIs to configure and use the devices.
>connecting to external monitors
This has worked perfectly fine for at least 10 years...
>watching DVDs
Also works just fine.
>transferring files from their phones
I do this all the time. Works OOTB on popular distros.
The real problem is that people are change averse and that people like you spread uninformed FUD. Cut it out.
Perhaps I am missing the ever elusive combination of distro and machine.
If you hit other problems, did you do any research? Did you ask for support anywhere?
Manual screwing around in .conf files, having to care about what GPU is in use and fussing around with configurators before using certain ports, features dropping out between driver upgrades.. and all this just from your link on one model of one computer that supposedly "supports Linux".
Look, I'm sorry, this is 2017, not 1997. This is not even a sorta okay standard of usability anymore. Not for home, not for enterprise, nor should it be accepted or defended as such.
On the other hand - I would rather fiddle with Linux drivers than fiddle with Windows ad/telemetry settings. So I suspect I'll be switching back once Microsofts decides to force me off of Win7.
If someone has to do a hundred trivial fixes then you might start to believe that there is something fundamentally broken with whatever software confronts me with a hundred trivial problems.
I'd absolutely love to get away from windows but I tried it multiple times in the past and linux just isn't close to being an alternative in the desktop market. There are so many problems and almost everytime the solution involves doing some arcane stuff in the terminal. This isn't going to win your average user over to linux.
Linux runs on all my servers, where it does an excellent job, but I can't see it replacing windows on my desktop systems, not until they fix some fundamental usability and driver issues.
I never seem to have one of those unicorn hardware/driver combinations that perform well, don't drain battery, don't run hot and don't break on dist-upgrade. I have researched my issues every single time because I would prefer to use Linux for many reasons, but the fixes I find are often partial, temporary and fragile. Eventually I give up and go back to macOS or Windows.
dist-upgrade almost always breaks things for me, especially all those hard fought for fixes. And it's not just minor things that break. Last time (Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10) networking stopped working completely because some maintainer had decided that network manager should no longer manage wired connections on my particular variant of Ubuntu.
That's a 156 page thread. The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine.
And that machine isn't particularly unusual in its class.
It's a considerable amount of work for an average user to get a working Ubuntu, and even after all that work there are still things (headphone audio ffs) that don't work.
This thread is about how people today should move off Windows, and how it is trivially easy to do so.
I agree people should move off windows. I disagree that it's trivially easy to do so, especially for these class of netbook style machine. I think that your advice (basically "wait until the kernel is updated") is proof that there are problems with these machines.
Ubuntu 16.10 wouldn't boot from a USB stick, with some PM error and the CPU watchdog errors.
Fine, go to all the trouble of plugging in a DVD drive, go out, buy a blank DVD. Same thing. The Ubuntu installation media just hangs with an error. Googling that didn't help.
How weaselly. His conclusion is plain to see:
"The result? Ubuntu still doesn't fully work on that particular machine"
You seem to misunderstand that thread.
If you do a stock install of Ubuntu you'll have very many, showstopping, errors.
If you use a custom script that forces a custom bootloader, custom kernel, and a bunch of other fixes, you end up with a machine that still doesn't have headphone audio and some problems with bluetooth.
A self-defeatist attitude won't make this more comfortable. If you don't like that Windows 10 is full of ads and spyware, the time investment to get this laptop working seems pretty small in exchange for a better OS. Throw in a little extra time to get these fixes applied in the form of patches to the relevant projects. If everyone gave up because they can't put a few minutes into troubleshooting and tweaking their setups, Linux will never grow to the threshold necessary to get vendors to support it OOTB.
> LibreOffice supports this and it works quite well. I would guess most people prefer google drive these days, though.
I run LibreOffice on my Mac and documents ALWAYS render differently than on Word. I always have to proofread on an office computer before I send files out to my colleagues.
> Do you actually know anyone non-technical who has used bluetooth at all in the past 5 years? Or technical for that matter, I've used bluetooth maybe 3 times in that time frame and always had no issues on Linux.
I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.
If you're authoring the documents, you don't need to use docx. Use a more open format that's supported better by both. As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? So long as you can read it that's enough.
>I literally used Bluetooth this afternoon. I was playing music on an external speaker. I also use it to connect my phone to my car, and my friend was using it late last week to play back an audio recording that we needed to pay close attention to.
I was only referring to using your computer for bluetooth, not your phone, since that's the only subject that's relevant to the discussion. Audio is a fair point, though, but I'll point out that I have a pair of bluetooth headphones that works fine with Linux.
You know what happens when you give someone .ODF in the real world? "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"
As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently?
People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.
And ISO and Microsoft. Microsoft cared enough about ODF, that they implemented importers and exporters for the MSO.
> "Hey, (I can't open this|This looks completely broken), can you resend as doc/docx please?"
Do you realize that you can open and export ODF formats in the MSO?
> As for reading documents, who cares if it renders differently? > People in enterprise, which accounts for most usage of Office.
They are already used to this - each version or language version of the MSO displays the documents slightly differently. Some layout calculations even depend on the printer driver installed!
ODF is basically XKCD 927. It solves no problems in the real world. It has no new features. The effort spent by OpenOffice in implementing it could have been better spent on making the Word filters not suck - to this day I still have Word2003 format documents with tables that OO won't render properly.
In LibreOffice defense, it is kind of difficult to implement specification, that says things "works like Word95".
In the end, these inconsistencies are not a big deal. Neither between different Office versions, nor between LO a MSO. If you want pixel-perfect layouts, use tools intended to do that (i.e. InDesign or other DTP).
The idea behind word processing is that how you've authored your work should be rendered accurately and consistently without unintended side-effects.
As a gamer I've not seen much more progress (outside of WINE workarounds, some GoG ports and Valve-specific games). Most AAA games still exclusively windows due to things like DRM (Denuvo is windows-only IIRC)
Let's see: 183 games listed on my Steam account, 54 of those are available for SteamOS+Linux. A lot of those 54 are great games, but so are a lot of the 129 others. In my game catalog here, I've got about a 30% chance that the game I want to play right now will actually run in my current OS without rebooting. I don't like those odds much.
Wine? It's got the same issues that complex compatibility layers usually do. I consider it an option of last resort.
Debian doesn't connect with android phones OOTB. What's the opposite of FUD?
Firefox was paid by Google in the past and I believe Yahoo these days.
macOS had a connection with Bing in Spotlight.
The current incarnation is just a dog with different fleas.
This is the most relevant of your 3 examples and Canonical got heavily criticised for it. They ended up reversing their decision. Which makes it all the more important that people take this example not as "It's ok for Microsoft to do it as well" but rather "We also shouldn't allow Microsoft to get away with this".
>Firefox was paid by Google In the last and I believe Yahoo these days.
The thing here is that when you type something in the search bar you are actually wanting to search for something online - given that it's a "search" bar. It kind of made sense for Google to be the default search engine as that is the most popular search engine in the west (ie what most people would prefer to default to) so even without Google's investment I can see the logic of having a Google search bar. In fact I would go further and say that's a well received productivity tool.
However It's also very easy to change which online service is used in the search bar - or even to remove it entirely. So the Google investment does not lock you into using Google services on Firefox.
Thus I see no conflict of interest with regards to Google's donations to Firefox.
Hopefully most people wont use the "well it happened in Ubuntu too" excuse and instead think more along the lines of "people were mad then and it changed things so lets get mad again".
There's a good and simple lesson here: if you don't like a company's behavior, you need to be willing to jump ship. If you're not, then your complaints are futile and useless. Why should the company listen to you if you're not going to abandon them?
Then why say anything? You're referencing an article from 2014, on howtogeek.
It's a bit desperate.
Most people I know seem to prefer the old Workbench. Big customers are also switching to web-based tools, where they can, among other thing, track the progress status easily.
same goes for another major Chinese phone producer, their virtual phones in browser are just horrible, something I would check even with screenshots and Excel in 30mins take with virtual phone 1.5hour, complete waste of time
I am yet, to experience any web based tool which would be superior for my work compared to offline apps
oh, now that I mentioned it, certain big Japanese phone brand have really nice web tool where you can work superfast no problem 150-200 screenshots per hour including editing and highlighting bugs, but that was only exception to my experience with all other companies
However, I did use the Studio few times and I didn't like it for the same reason you don't like web apps - it was big and slow like molasses. I did most of my work with (Trados) Workbench and TagEditor - these were lightning fast compared to Studio.
So I guess, that it comes in cycles: fast forward few years and people will be complaining about the latest tools and how the previous web apps were quick and easy :).
Switch to Linux.
Windows 10 Home is now $119 and tracks you. Microsoft is trying to sell you a product and monetize your behavior. They are pursuing a way to maintain their cash cow and have an avenue to push Google out.
I frequently explore the possibility of switching to Linux, and while it's not the garbage fire it was 15 years ago, it's still just not a peer to Windows for the way I use my computer.
Windows just works, and I'll happily pay money for a good product.
Woah? I was impressed anyway..
As someone who's suffered OS pains you wouldn't believe (I mean.. I ran solaris 10 on a hp probook as my main workstation for a year one time...) and for well over a decade -- things are MUCH better these days then they were.
Windows? Fair enough for you I guess. I'm not trying to convert you...
I'll come off badly here, but I'll be honest: I kind of judge people who use MS tech by choice and while claiming to be technologists as being in the lower end of the skills spectrum.
I'm not an elitist or at least; I'm really not trying to be.. Please don't take me wrong. At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver.
If you're a photo editor or a journalist or writer or something, sure -- I get why that stack works.. Programmer? Sysadmin? I can't get my head around it.
I'd like to understand, though.. What do you do? What tools do you use? Are you just living inside some IDE all the time and not interacting with lots of different tools?
Thinking out loud as I type, maybe that's the difference here then? We *nix folks tend to use lots of small tools and if you're just sat in one big IDE perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter so much to you as it does to us??
Of course it doesn't matter. Windows, macOS, and Linux are all good enough. More than ever, you pick the operating system and hardware to support the applications you want to run.
The tools I use will work on all these operating systems, but I wouldn't consider windows or OSX 'good enough' for me.
I suspect most developers could get their stacks to work on everything from freebsd to windows (well, unless you're a .net dev) -- so that's not really the reason to pick one or the other?
I don't run linux becuase 'vim' works better than it does on opensolaris... right?
You are right about vim. It works well everywhere, so that's not likely to be the application that dictates what the rest of your system is. If you use vim and play a lot of Call of Duty, then you are probably going to use Windows. If you use vim and absolutely depend on Final Cut Pro, you're going to be on a Mac.
I am a beginner on linux, and outside of a few basic settings, I find myself very quickly in front of a terminal window, trying to guess the state of the system or what syntax could work and not break anything.
I'm genuinely just curious how your world looks as it's so different to mine -- I must live a sheltered life but even junior devs I have with routinely push makefiles and bash scripts etc..
Are you a dev? Do you just live in one big contained environment like visual studio or such that has all these kind of tools rolled in?
GUI are infinitely valuable in that case. Windows allows to do quite sophisticated stuff all the way with a UI. You can always observe the state of the system, know what can be done from there, etc. I know a few command lines for some basic things I do all the time, but for things I do occasionally, it is just not worth me investing time doing it with a CLI, like creating a VM.
But then I am hostile to this new Microsoft...
It's a wide field I guess, but at the end of the day would I be safe to assume that you're mostly playing with data in interesting ways then telling various services/apps (aforementioned chunky java apps, for e.g) to do things based on what you work out from those manipulations?
If that's the case, then I really think there is an advantage for you in mastering the 'unix ide', but only if you're doing really custom stuff all the time...
If you're working with a bunch of tools that do everything you already need them to do, then of course there's no point in working out how to do the same with different tools. If you're constantly hitting the limits of how you can play with your data, then perhaps it's worth looking into a language which is good at manipulating data and you'd be suprised how powerful this mysterious CLI can be..
People from Windows commonly have this impression because in Windows everything is either a GUI or the registry, and nobody wants to touch the registry without a long pole and a hazmat suit but you occasionally have to anyway. So you quickly build the intuition that anything without a GUI is painful and wrong, which isn't the case on other operating systems.
Most configuration files on Unix-like systems have manual pages that list what options you can set and what they do. For example the man page for logrotate.conf says you can add the line "mail address" to have it email the oldest log to address before deleting it. It's no more difficult to read the man page and find the option you want than look through seven pages of GUI settings to find it, and often easier because man pages are searchable. With the further advantage of actually describing what the option does rather than just giving you a GUI text box with the word "mail" next to it and letting you guess whether you're supposed to type an email address or a filename to mail or something else.
> like creating a VM.
There is a GUI program called virt-manager to do this on Linux. Most desktop Linux distributions have GUI programs to do a lot of things like that, people just don't use them as often because the GUI-alternative on Unix-like systems is actually reasonable. Although you picked a good example in the sense that creating a VM directly using qemu-kvm is harder than it probably ought to be.
Because it's way less work. Simple as that.
Windows, in my experience, just works. The things about it that don't work are the exceptions. Windows gets out of my way and lets me work with minimal setup and maintenance.
Linux, on the other hand, has been a pain in the butt every time I've tried to make it my primary desktop OS, and I have tried multiple times (granted, the last time was 6 years ago). Editing endless config files; building some obscure driver from source to make a device function correctly; and heaven help you if you want to do an OS version upgrade.
Yours was the exact reason I used OSX for almost 6 years; it stopped being true and I switched back to linux at the end of last year.
Since then, I've had exactly one time my laptop didn't wake up from sleep in around 2 months VS daily crashes and annoying popups from my last mac.
Also lots of grateful family/friends who recieved all my old apple gear ;)
Ubuntu 16.10 can't handle an external monitor with a DPI/resolution. And keeps throwing up error boxes after a fresh install on a Linux machine that came with Ubuntu by default.
Better? Maybe. Good? Hardly.
Out of the box, Ubuntu & friends (which have improved a lot in 6 years) are far more functional than Windows, assuming the hardware is properly detected and configured. When something goes askew, it's a toss-up whether it will be easier to fix on Windows or Linux. Familiarity/experience play a huge role here.
In return, I judge people who use technology choice as an indication of skill as inexperienced. At one point, I was like that too. I was all about tweaking and customizing Linux; getting it to run just so on hardware that, in some cases, was actively hostile to it (I still haven't entirely forgiven Broadcom). Moreover, at that time I was time-rich and cash-poor, so it made sense for me to spend extra time in order to gain open-source versions of closed-source tools that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
But, at some point, I realized that I wasn't really getting anything out of it. Watching stuff fly by on the command line, and tweaking config files by hand makes you feel like a 1337 h4x0r the first time you do it. But after you've had to tweak config files to get your wifi working for the twelfth time, after you've had to apologize to your collaborators because you can't edit their documents, after you've wasted people's time because your laptop can't connect to a projector, you realize that the real determinant of success isn't whether you're using Windows or Linux. It isn't whether you've memorized man pages or obscure command line flags. It isn't whether you can rattle off the contents of your xorg.conf and smb.conf by heart. It's whether you get stuff done. All the rest of it is just means to that end. And I realized that Linux, on the client, was more of an impediment to getting stuff done than a help.
I still use Linux. I have a half-dozen or so Linux VMs running on this machine right now for various projects. The fact still remains that new programming languages and server technologies come to Linux first, OSX second and Windows much later. But in terms of desktop/laptop experience? Linux still requires far too much tweaking and configuration, and I find it much easier to get stuff done with Linux on the server and Windows on the client.
Well, better late than never.
First off; I totally agree with you.
I wasn't trying to say that ability to configure xorg or tweak your desktop setup constantly was any indicator of technical skill and I've also met a lot of people who think that it is and they irritate me significantly too.
I'm not one of those. I don't judge skill on how well one can edit config files and I disregard the views of most of those who do as juvenile and in search of a measuring tape.
I had a similar journey to you w/r/t the need to get shit done vs having a fragile mess of customization to maintain and eventually it drove me to OSX (one 'yum update' before going away for lunch and coming back to an 80x25 console just as a change window opened was the straw for my particular camel).
I was comfortable there for a bit. It stayed the hell out of my way for most of the time (I just have fullscreen terms and a browser) which is what I needed from a machine that I'm working on. OSX stopped being the best tool for that job recently, but that's a post for another time.
So, back to my judgmental/biased statement.. I'm not really sure in both what I'm trying to say here or how to say it, but I'll try again for the hell of it.
I have found through years of personal observation (YMMVx1000) that windows users in any tech position that I'm involved with is an immediate smell of lack of technical skill. Again, that sounds really bad. Once again to be clear: I'm not saying there aren't smart .net or whatever folks around and I'll be proven wrong at some point (happily!), however I'm sticking to my view that as far as I've seen, on any team I've had (be it java devs or sysadmins) that the one or two folks using windows are always the weakest members of those teams.
While you can shoot me for being honest, I find the idea that a capable ops engineer or java developer would willingly choose MS as a driver, after they're at the point where they understand the issues around closed source and privacy, incomprehensible.
It also depends on your field. Yeah, if you're doing web dev, seeing Windows on the desktop might be a smell. But if you're doing embedded programming? Or gamedev? Or even just native software development for desktops? All of those areas pretty much require Windows. The toochains are, in many cases, Windows-only, and even if there are cross platform toolchains, 95%+ of your users are going to be using Windows, so you may as well run it to experience the app as your users will see it.
In fact, this is why I lament the lack of Windows in web development. There are so many web sites out there where you can tell (usually from font choices) that the entire development team was using Macs, because the site looks fine on a Retina display, but absolutely atrocious on, say, something like a 1366x768 TN laptop panel.
Moreover, in the Seattle area, at least, I'm see a slow but steady movement back to Windows machines from OSX because Apple is neglecting its offerings, and people are finding out that most server-side programming languages and frameworks actually work just fine on Windows these days. While setting up, e.g. Python and Ruby on Windows was really complicated and annoying at one point, these days it's as simple as just downloading the .msi installers from their respective websites and running them. And that's leaving aside WSL, which (though currently unfinished) promises to bring a full Linux userspace to the Windows kernel.
I don't know what you mean by, "Choose MS as a driver," but I personally have willingly chosen to go back to Windows as my normal day-to-day computing experience. Linux GUIs are atrocious messes designed by people too busy cargo-culting what Microsoft and Apple put out in their last iteration to do any actual UI/UX research. And OSX, for whatever reason, never really sat well with me. Maybe it was the lack of a proper "maximize" function. Maybe it was the menus at the top of the screen rather than the top of the application window. Maybe it was the fact that closing the last application window didn't close the application. There were too many decisions that I, personally found weird and unintuitive, even though OSX is supposed to be the more "intuitive" GUI environment. Again, this is all client-side. On the server, I still have no hesitation in choosing Linux. It works, it's stable, and it's very well supported.
As far as "closed source", well, honestly, I don't care that much. Like I alluded to above, I've seen too much crap open source software to have the illusion that open-source is some magic pixie dust that makes software better. It doesn't. The continuing state of Linux GUI (un)usability proves this. The fact that there are no open source IDEs that even approach the power, speed and usability of JetBrains products or Visual Studio proves this. There's a reason that "the year of the Linux desktop" only happened when Google took over and transformed Linux into something indistinguishable from a closed source OS.
When I said 'choose driver' I really meant 'daily driver' which means workstation/laptop OS to me (so apple, linux, windows, bsd, etc etc) -- almost everywhere I've worked with in the last few years allows anyone to use whatever they want so the choice is personal and not enforced.
It's all personal, I'm not sure what we're debating anymore. Use what works for you. I guess I have less requirements than you when it comes to interfaces. It's good to have alternatives and I'm glad that MS is becoming more friendly/capable as a host for developers..
My workflow for the last few years is I ssh into some big linux/bsd servers and do almost all my work there via tmux, my workstation is just a terminal and browser (two workspaces, both fullscreen). OSX was okay for this, the hardware was great (I had one of those fanless tiny macbooks after a few MBP's and it lasted 10 hours on battery weighed nothing and was really pretty) but now I'm on a XPS and I spent a single afternoon customising dwm which has turned out to be a much better fit for me (even though I still don't do anything locally).
Linux isn't a great desktop os for non-developers. It can work, sure, but I don't see it owning the consumer market and getting a tagged year :}
As for IDE's -- that's another personal matter and is largely dependant on where you work. You'll lose patience being the only member of a team using jetbrains when everyone else is on netbeans or the other way around; but I duck in an out of teams without having their specific IDE setup with just git and a term no problem.
As someone else in this thread pointed out, I've only seen the Candy crush ad once, that's all.
With bash on Ubuntu on windows, great hyperv based docker and the windows system I'm just much more flexible. I have an the advantages of Linux with WSL (windows subsystem for Linux) and at the same time I don't have to spend time on getting my computer to work.
Whenever I see someone presenting using Linux, they have to spend like 10 minutes configuring their beamer. I'm just connected, with great scaling handling and ready to go.
Additionally, I have a surface pro 4, so whenever I want I can just start sketching on it (great for a programmer).
Stop judging people by the technology they use, because maybe you're the one being fixated.
EDIT: Oh, and PowerShell is actually a nice to use terminal.
If you want a system that 'just works' with Linux you should buy from a vendor that supports Linux like System76.
Blaming Linux for not supporting hardware that the vendor did not bother to patch in support is like blaming MacOS for not working with your hackintosh.
It's truly tragic. As a species, we're hoping to build a self-enhancing mega-AI, but we can't even keep relatively basic OS technology stable without breaking it.
I absolutely understand that some of the reasons for breakage are economic and political. But even so.
Thank you.
As someone who uses all common OSes on a regular basis I am always surprised, almost intrigued, when seeing the huge confirmation bias causing some users who mainly use 1 OS to bash on the others with reasons which usually come down to 'I actually don't know how to use your OS but once I did and it sucked so yeah my OS is definitely better than yours'.
With windows 10, this has gotten /way/ worse. Sure bluetooth works out of the box, but sometimes it just disapperates. I'm doing like, rain dances and getting tons of wrong answers out of google, only to find out that somehow Windows decided to turn the radio off, and there's actually no way to re-enable it except booting into linux because when the radio's off, windows says the hardware is physically /not there/.
I install it for a while, play some steam games, then usually just boot it out and go back to linux.
It's generally hard to switch operating systems, not just one way.
I would highly encourage you to learn the command line as it is considered a valuable skill on this site. You do not need to learn every obscure program. I often forget how to use quite a few Linux comamnds and just refer to Google or man.
- Setting up a scheduled job
- Manipulate the firewall (I don't include third party packages as "UI")
- Configuring a website
- Changing permissions on a .py file to execute it
I also had huge problems a few years ago when the only Linux servers I could rent from OVH had no UI, and I didn't manage to figure out how to install the UI from a command line.
I'll need to get into Linux. But I find it to be hard work (for someone who does that as a hobby).
http://corntab.com https://github.com/alseambusher/crontab-ui
> Manipulate the firewall
> Configuring a website
http://apachegui.net (How can you do it in gui on windows?)
> Changing permissions on a .py file to execute it
Any normal file manager, i.e. thunar.
> I don't include third party packages as "UI"
Why? They're not hard to install if you need it.
IIS has a UI for pretty much everything
> Why? They're not hard to install if you need it.
Yes but 1. pretty much everyone uses txt commands so configuring these things with a UI would typically not appear in search results when looking for how to do something 2. having a UI is about making the OS self discoverable and intuitive. If it takes to be aware of and install some third party packages then the UI failed its objective.
Another thing that often tripped me in linux is the variety of distributions and tools to do the same thing. I can understand why advanced users appreciate having the choice, but from a beginner point of view, it makes it quite hard as the syntax that will work on one distribution of linux or with one tool will break another.
And it was game of "where they did hide that thing I need to configure right now?" at the beginning. Fortunately, later they did allow config files.
Additionally, GUI does not allow all the thing you can (and want) to configure using the config file.
You can also put your config files into svn or git repository and track changes to them over time. No more "what did I set to that server two years ago?" moments. You can also recycle config from one server to another, without clicking all the days.
So as a beginner, do not get used to GUI applets. Later, you will be thankful you didn't.
And sadly that is a game that the Linux user space devs are getting very adept at implementing...
So I guess you are talking about transitioning from Windows client to Linux server.
> I also had huge problems a few years ago when the only Linux servers I could rent from OVH had no UI, and I didn't manage to figure out how to install the UI from a command line.
Never heard of OVH. Try Digital Ocean and select their premade options, you can get a fully configured WordPress image from them.
> I'll need to get into Linux. But I find it to be hard work (for someone who does that as a hobby).
I don't know what to tell you. Sounds like you need to take a class or attend a Linuxfest where people will sit down with you and guide you through it.
> ... (I don't include third party packages as "UI")
Keeping UI as optional is deliberate as it reduces the surface attack structure of a Linux system. It also reduces resources with scaling a server farm. This is an important point to understand if you want to learn why Linux (and Unix like) dominates in servers. If you really want a UI, rent a CPanel managed Linux system.
That seems like an unimportant distinction, if it otherwise does what you need. It makes it sound like you're not making a sincere appraisal of the tools based on their merits.
With windows's new mandatory driver signing, some of my hardware will never work with newer windows. I have to either dig up a copy of 7 or XP, or throw it out. Even on 7 it's a pain. The same hardware works fine under linux.
Also, your "manually editing obscure config files" is my registry hell. I'm pretty sure every operating system sucks (I'd say OSX's equivalent is defaults.write)
I just played Tropico 5 on Ubuntu with Steam. All the hardware was detected. I installed a PPA to download the latest driver; that will keep me updated.
> This works well if your hobbies include manually editing obscure config files
I had to edit obscure entries the registry to block Microsoft's spying on my Windows 7 system. I have had to edit entries to fix obscure issues in Windows XP. I have yet to edit 'obscure config files' for my Ubuntu desktop in years.
For the PC gamer, the indie game market on Linux is growing, but it's still not the same as the Windows market. Microsoft had one of the last minimal-bloat systems up until Windows 10. I don't want to enter a world where we need to start ad-blocking the entire OS via custom DNS servers.
Microsoft is still making money of the initial OS license with every new machine. People will still pay for Windows. Why do they keep fucking it up?
It effectively killed their audio market overnight, with the fact that everything had to go over their DRM stack.
We could have had machines with DSPs for sound, GPUs for accelerated array math, and general purpose CPUs for everything else. But MS decided that for us... Even though us Linux people can use advanced DSPs and the like.
The switch from XP to Vista and the concurrent death of CRTs were a lot about holywood.
Sound Cards, analog screens and advanced video programming (ie: changing how the screen acts directly instead of sending pixels on an standard defined manner) all allowed people to skip DRM and also all prevented new formats from getting popular.
This is still that way, note 4k video cards and screens showed up at the same time a new bluray variation is coming out, despite tech for that being ancient. (in 1995 Silicon Graphics was selling workstation that could push in the monitor 48bit colour images at resolutions around 1080p, if you had deep pockets 4k 48bit was possible...)
Virtual GPU support in KVM is something I am looking forward to maintain Win7 on a future Ryzen system.
I switched my very very non-technically savvy parents to Ubuntu several years ago and I don't regret it for a second. Once I got their wifi, browser and printer set up and reminded them about the UI once in a while, the tech support burden was minimal. They use their PCs even less now that they have large Android phones for email and messaging.
I'm still hoping Microsoft will come up with something to challenge Android. They have the resources and brains. Unfortunately they're copying Googles business model of dark patterns to swallow as much of their customers data as possible (whether you choose to call it smart business practice or privacy destroying unethical behaviour), but additionally charging them for the privilege.
The "Not now" button does seem like a anti-pattern instead of a simple no. Reminds me on how iOS apps bug you over and over again to rate them. I assume in X amount of time, it would show the banner again? I think it should be like "Learn More" or "Dismiss". Then have Dismiss never show it again on that device(unless they did like a reinstall of the OS). I'm sure it's useful to know it's available, especially to non tech people but you shouldn't have to jump into a long list of settings to stop it.
Imagine some day your car dashboard updates and starts showing banner ads for deals at near by places when the car never did it in the first place. That'd be kinda creepy too.
Try running low on storage and see how long it takes to get spammed with notifications to buy more icloud storage.
That bit's important - I don't have to be using Microsoft's storage system at all to loose a good 200 pixels to the banner after every restart.
I'm not even signed into a Microsoft account with my account; doesn't matter.
I'm running out of disk space on my MacBook and it wants me to buy iCloud storage so I can offload things to the cloud. I'm not an existing customer, I've never given them a dime for storage, and yet they keep pestering me to buy.
Right now the only problem I have with it is that it looks like an ad and shows up in too many places. Had it just shown up in in the OneDrive app or just once during setup then I'd have zero problems with it.
Storage is advertised in iOS and Mac OS too, it's just a little more tasteful.
I completely trust Microsoft will not advertise shoes and hamburgers in windows. They'll keep that crap to e.g the consumer version of Skype I hope. I hope they will never even display a third party service in any part of windows itself.
I think the whole "omg Windows shows ads!!" reaction is - at this point - totally an overreaction.
Cortana. On an OS that's supposed to be a server. I can tell that I'm going to have a ton of fun locking this stupid thing down. Also, seeing a process named "NetworkSpy" got fun, fast; whoever named that thing sure knew how to get my attention.
I like the core Windows OS; it's a nice kernel. But there's a lot of crap on top of it, and their testing is getting worse. Ask me about Remote Desktop regressions... well, don't. It's the weekend and I want to forget.
Can't set the "active hours" to more than 12 hours to prevent restarting when it dictates, so end up disabling the update service entirely which is a complete anti-pattern to what they were trying to "achieve". I mean, the active hours stuff is a good idea, but for the love of god in a server environment it should be easy to disable automatic restarts.
If you're already using Windows Server, have it serviced by someone trained in it, and you won't see forced restarts. If i can have 100% control of it on my pro system with only out-of-the-box tools, including selection of which updates i want to install and which not, then so can you on the server version.
For the other: This is primarily a shift in their philosophy of considering every user someone who would happily endanger the entire internet for their convenience. If you're not the type of person to have received notification of this change as part of your training and/or doesn't double-check it as part of their job duties, they expect you to be the type of person who lets their servers go unpatched and infected by worms sending out spam and DDOS attacks for years.
Mind, they're not saying this out loud, but their actions speak very loud.
A lot of that is also misreporting and half truths by journos who don't give a damn about anything but being the first to get the clicks with the most exciting headline. For example the group policy update configuration was changed with the anniversary update to not reflect in the user update ui, but still works perfectly fine and is still reflected in the group policy ui.
I like to say "Nobody goes to Home Depot to buy a drill bit; what they want to buy is a hole."
I don't use Windows because I want to use Windows. I use it because there are things I need to do that can only be done with it.
The "just switch to Linux" reaction is an understandable engineering reaction. And, frankly, if your world is limited to web development and some forms of embedded development it might make a ton of sense. Yet, from a business perspective it makes no sense outside of scenarios that fit Linux well.
For others it isn't that simple. What would the Linux proponents suggest we do with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in software not available on any other platform? Solidworks, Siemens NX, Altium Designer, FEA and other simulation tools, CAM and other manufacturing tools, an myriad other applications ranging from business to medicine to engineering that depend on this platform.
The goal of a business is to deliver goods and services, not to play with operating systems. The operating system is irrelevant. It's all about the software that runs on it and the utility it provides to users. As an aside, this, I believe, is exactly where Apple has gone wrong. By insisting on having totalitarian control over everything on their platforms they have effectively limited the utility of their devices. At the same time, this is what makes them so good for a certain range of utilization scenarios.
We use Windows because it is the only way to buy a hole. We could not care less what OS is under the hood. All we care about is the hole we need to drill.
And, frankly, Microsoft has been making a better product with time. I've been using MS products since DOS on the original IBM PC (I bought one when they came out for $3,200). Save missteps here and there, MS software has always improved with time. What they need is our feedback in order to make it even better. The criticism is fair, of course.
The enterprise does not want to hear this. To learn in hindsight their early decisions to take easy paths with well advertised and pressured products would end up stabbing them in the back over the long term can quickly bring your decisions into question and make you emotionally defensive.
But the solution is to acknowledge mistakes and work towards fixing them, rather than just kicking the can down the road and ignoring the problem.
Every year the sectors that consistently say they cannot switch to Linux continue to pay for the Windows-only closed ecosystems they depend on directly sabotage their future potential success by funding their own antagonists. But they are not technically minded, or maybe just not informed enough, to know that the solution is not that complicated. Keep self-sabotaging on proprietary ecosystems that rob your freedoms, but also dedicate funds to correct your accrued technical debt by funding (if not using) the FOSS competition in that domain - and if none exists, start funding it yourself.
> We could not care less what OS is under the hood.
The whole point of this discussion - from the OP on - is that people, on Windows, do care when Microsoft behaves against their interests and forces those decisions upon them. They have no say because that is what they signed up for, but this is exactly the ignorance to the technical debt of business I speak of.
I understand, yet the challenge is exactly the same every time. Say, for example, you launch a brand new electric car company and need a bunch of integrated software and automation tools to help you do everything, from running the business to designing the cars, manufacturing, supply chain management, document processing, etc.
You have two choices: You can be an operating system, FOSS, free beer, free speech, pink unicorns for everyone zealot. Or you can go buy shit that works and get on with the business of getting shit done.
The difference is this: A business should only be concerned with delivering it's products and services and doing so on a timely manner while staying ahead of the competition. A business should not waste one microsecond on "technology jihad". That is not their job.
It is up to entrepreneurs who are "believers" to identify opportunities --if and where they exist-- and work hard to create solutions that appeal to the businesses who need them. It's a tall task, because success might require replacement solutions across a wide range of disciplines. This guarantees that multiple solution providers would have to engage in this "holy war" (sorry, sticking to a bad analogy at this point) in order for the car manufacturer to be able to even consider making a switch.
And then there's the other factor: Even if you could switch to an alternative universe and make it seamless within your organization it could still be a terrible business decisions. Why? Because if the vendors and suppliers you have to work with depend on communicating across company demarcation lines by using files produced by specific types of software you are almost assured a great deal of friction if you don't use the same tools. Don't believe me, call-up 100 machine shops and ask them if they accept Siemens NX or SolidWorks files and see what you learn. And both of those platforms run on Windows.
> people, on Windows, do care when Microsoft behaves against their interests and forces those decisions upon them.
Any professional is very careful about OS and software version transitions. Microsoft has had glitches here and there but they have always been nothing but rock-solid-reliable in their support of the needs of their business customers.
We might be looking at another glitch, I don't know, but I don't really care, they'll do the right thing. Not saying this because I love MS. It's just a matter of historical fact. Thinking back over 36 years, I can't remember the last time MS boned anyone. I can remember multiple times where both Apple and various Linux issues did.
Switching to something else requires you to replace that software. That's a cost. But having an OS that you first pay money for and then have it show you ads is also a cost. Every time they do something like this, it increases the number of people for which the second cost now outweighs the first. It also provides an opportunity for people who don't use any Windows-locked software to consider that there is nothing standing between them and a viable alternative.
And even if you don't switch today, you can still contact your software vendors and ask them for a Linux version. The more people do that the more likely they are to produce it, and once they do then you don't have to weigh one cost against the other anymore.
My point is that this is impossible. You can't buy the software you need at any cost. It does not exist. You can't even consider other platforms for this reason.
> you can still contact your software vendors and ask them for a Linux version.
Zero interest in that for on simple reason: There's nothing wrong with deploying and using the software on Windows. Why would a company bifurcate their development effort to support multiple platforms when it isn't necessary.
Programs like Solidworks, for example are highly particular about drivers and, in addition to that, need tools such as MS Office. CAMWorks, which is an integrated CAM programming tool for manufacturing uses an MS Access database for tool and operations parameters.
Coming back to the ads in Explorer. I lack context because we are switching all of our workstations to Windows 10 and I have yet to see any such ads. Do they exist in the higher level editions or just in Home edition?
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea at all. But, frankly, we probably spend significantly less than 1% of our time fiddling around with files in Explorer. When I am spending 12 hours a day on SolidWorks I couldn't care less what happens with explorer.
This is no different from visiting StackOverflow and ignoring the ads. Yes, I know one is paid and the other isn't. Yet, in the context of a workstation with $30K to $50K of software installed, the cost of the OS is a rounding error, it might as well be free.
Now, if ads start to pop-up in the middle of an 18 hour FEA run it's war.
There are people who can. Most people don't use $50K worth of Windows-locked CAD software. 80% of people who use Microsoft Office can get by perfectly well with LibreOffice or Google Docs, despite the loud objections from the remaining 20%.
> Why would a company bifurcate their development effort to support multiple platforms when it isn't necessary.
Because it's profitable. There are already people who use other platforms. Typically software prices are the inverse of popularity; more specialized software costs more. How many users does it take at $50K/user to justify the porting cost? 50? 500? That is not a large number against platforms with millions of existing users.
And porting to three platforms costs about the same as two, because the differences between Unix-like systems are much smaller than the difference between Windows and Mac, and by that point you're already on a cross-platform framework like Qt and cross-platform database like postgres. So adding support for Mac justifies adding support for Linux, whether it did initially or not.
> Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea at all. But, frankly, we probably spend significantly less than 1% of our time fiddling around with files in Explorer. When I am spending 12 hours a day on SolidWorks I couldn't care less what happens with explorer.
The problem is the only thing they hear is money, and you need to be objecting to this more than anyone else for your own benefit.
Every time they do something like this they lose users at the margin, because the annoyance pushes those users above the switching cost. Those users are gone, because then the cost is to switch back. But every user they lose increases the level of ad spam the average remaining user will tolerate, because they know those users have higher switching costs and therefore a higher tolerance for ad spam before losing their business.
Which means the only way for you, as someone with very high switching costs, to avoid being inundated with ad spam in the near future, is to push the switching costs down for as many people as you can. Demand that all your professional software be supported on Linux, even if you aren't going to use it on Linux. Encourage the people who can switch more easily than you to do it. Because that's the point where they stop -- when the number of users they lose costs more than the profit from the ads.
If they stick you with ads and you don't like it but nobody does anything about it, tomorrow there will be even more ads.
None of what you say above makes any sense in the real world.
Absent a clear, true and significant competitive advantage not a single responsible business owner would make the reckless move of switching platforms.
And, BTW, these advantages go far beyond cost. Frankly, in the end, if you have a real business, cost isn't as significant as function. And, by "function" I don't mean how the software works. I mean how the enterprise functions, with software being one set of tools at your disposal.
Simple example: Hire office workers familiar with and trained on MS Office tools, of course on Windows. Now hire 1,000 of them. Shove them in front of Ubuntu Linux with Libre Office.
The productivity dip will be significant and it might last a while while they learn both a new OS, new GUI and new tools. And, of course, now you have the potential for one or many compatibility issues as you communicate across departments or with other businesses.
So long as you don't use MS Office compatibility, by definition, will always have a question mark next to it. And, if there are tools that depend on MS Office you have a serious problem. One example would be domain specific Excel add-ins.
Yet, that's not the worst of it. This forced switch at scale causes the company to lose focus and have to concentrate on something totally unrelated to what it is they do for several weeks. Not only is that bad, that's irresponsible.
And, in the end, what do you gain? Nothing. Actually, no. You gain problems and potential problems. The kinds of things you might regret in six months or five years as documents and work accumulate.
"If it works, don't fix it" is sage advice.
But now 30 years later, hardly anybody is buying IBM -- they don't even make PCs anymore and there are more than a hundred commodity server customers to each mainframe customer -- because the more and the longer people say "you have to stick with the incumbent" the larger their competitive disadvantage becomes because they know they can get away with it.
The only question is, do you want to be the company that spends $1 to avoid $1 in costs and disadvantages sooner, or do you want to be the company that waits until later, gets even more locked into the incumbent and then has to spend $100 to avoid $200.
The point about switching to an alternative isn't an engineering reaction, it's a political suggestion that is based on sending the right message. When MS does something you find objectionable, the way to signal that you strongly disagree in a capitalist system is to vote with your wallet. Continuing to use Window only sends the message that the recent changes are acceptable.
> For others it isn't that simple.
I'm sure it isn't, but that was one of the risks in building a business that depends critically on a product you have zero control over. MS has a very long history of doing things their own way, and usually in their own interest.
> What would the Linux proponents suggest we do with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in software not available on any other platform?
Accept that you may have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad investments? You invested in tools that depends fundamentally on a risky platform. Investing in new tools and/or rebuilding your business to not depends on tools that are risky or unavailable will probably be time consuming and expensive. Do you want to start paying those costs now? Or do you want to continue using Windows, encourage MS to abuse their product even more, and generally throw more time and money at your current situation? I suggest paying for past mistakes now, because problems tend to get more expensive when you ignore them.
--
Note that none of the above comments mentioned Linux. I do recommend moving to a Free (as in speech) platform, but the point about switching is to leave MS. Often there isn't any alternative; fortunately Linux/BSD and a lot of really good does exist, so you have an alternative, even if it isn't perfect.
Microsoft is forcing changes onto other people's property. If this was a physical product you bought, the manufacturer forcing changes onto your property would be considered vandalism. Of course, apologists will try to shift the blame to the victim - the users lacking technical training - by pointing to dark patterns in the setup or "EULA".
Microsoft isn't the worst offender re: platform freedom, but calling windows "free" ignores decades of bad behavior, the current moves to lock down Windows while adding spyware and other miss-features, and the simple fact that proprietary software outside your control is by definition "not free".
No. What I meant to say is that only engineers or technical folks without business experience say these kinds of things.
My mission as a businessman is to get shit done. It also happens to be my mission as an engineer. I could not be bothered to worry about these OS issues. Windows allows me to buy 50 workstations, load them up with a pile of engineering software and get shit done. From a business perspective that is the right decision and the right solution. Quirks don't matter.
Switching OS isn't a consideration or an option because it is irrelevant. The goal is to spend 10 to 12 hours a day working with specific applications to get specific work done, not to spend 10 or 12 hours a day playing with the OS. That's a huge difference in mindset and focus.
> I'm sure it isn't, but that was one of the risks in building a business that depends critically on a product you have zero control over. MS has a very long history of doing things their own way, and usually in their own interest.
You are absolutely wrong on this one. MS has ALWAYS protected their users. The stability afforded to business users across decades is probably without match. In sharp contrast to this Apple has gone through a number of episodes where they pretty much said "screw all of you, all your software is now dead", most notably with the transition in and out of the PowerPC platforms. MS has never done that.
No, MS has always been the soundest investment. Not even Linux can match the stability of the platform. Over the years there have been driver issues as well as UI confusion. In many ways Ubuntu is the greatest thing to ever happen to Linux and it still has faults and is a challenge to use outside of technical environments.
> Accept that you may have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad investments? You invested in tools that depends fundamentally on a risky platform.
The truth is exactly opposite your statement. The platform has never been risky because MS understands business and the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested are perfectly safe. We still have some very expensive software from a couple of decades ago that runs very well under Windows Vista, 7 and 10.
Also, I don't think you understand that these tools are simply not available on any other platform. There's a reason for which all the major MCAD companies have product that runs on Windows. It's because their multi-million dollar investment across decades is safe there and goes nowhere on other platforms.
Look, I wish Windows had a Linux foundation and a bunch of other things under the hood. That's me, the geek, speaking. Me the businessman fires-up a VM with Ubuntu and, as they say, is happy as pigs in shit. My job isn't to play with the OS, it's to get useful work done with the tools we need to use to get product out the door.
Fuck everything about this. My computer is my tool and my work environment.
I think this is just the price we are going to pay for "evergreen" operating systems. As a consumer, you now only buy Windows once. Microsoft has to make up for these lost sales so it makes sense. I don't agree with it, but having to toggle off advertising is not going to keep me from using what I consider to be the best operating system for my needs.
Once per device. Consumers (with a few exceptions, of course) don't, in the standard sense, really "buy" Windows. They pay for it, sure, when they buy a new computer, phone, etc., but most consumers don't buy a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 10 off the shelf. Microsoft is still making money off of Windows with every purchase of a new desktop or laptop.
I'll grant that they may have lost some revenue by "giving away" Windows 10 upgrades and such but it doesn't seem to be affecting them too much. From a quick glance, it looks like $MSFT is currently at an all-time high.
> ... having to toggle off advertising is not going to keep me from using [Windows] ...
Out of curiosity, where will you draw the line?
Will you change your mind when they remove the option to turn the OneDrive ads off? What about when the ads change -- from OneDrive ads to ads for other Microsoft products? Or ads for other, unrelated, third-party products?
What about when the ads expand to other parts of the "Windows experience"? Right now, according to TFA, they're only shown in Windows Explorer. Will you change your mind when Microsoft starts injecting ads into other applications you use on a daily basis? What if they begin showing video advertisements before you can watch a home video of your kids in (the modern equivalent of) Windows Media Player? Or when a slideshow of your family vacation photos is interrupted by an advertisement being shown every tenth photo?
It sounds absurd, I know, and these scenarios are a long way off from what's happening now -- showing OneDrive ads in Windows Explorer -- and I wouldn't really expect any of the above to ever actually happen. Then again, as recently as a couple years ago, we wouldn't have expected our operating system to ever show us any ads at all.
If we had been asked a few years ago, most of us (in "the tech community") wouldn't have ever expected that Microsoft would someday implement the privacy-invading tracking features ("telemetry") that now exist in Windows 10. It would have seemed absolutely crazy that they'd do something like that -- but they did. If memory serves, it was -- at first -- relatively easy to disable. My understanding is, however, that they continued to implement more and more telemetry while at the same time making it even more difficult to completely turn off. Even today, I don't think there exists any way to reliably -- and with 100% certainty -- prevent a Windows 10 PC from sending any "telemetry" back to the mothership.
If these ads make Microsoft money -- and I have no doubt that they will -- why wouldn't they expand on this idea and squeeze in more ads anywhere they can? We've already seen that customers will not move away from Windows as their desktop operating system (in any significant number) when Microsoft implements these new "features", so what do they have to lose?
Rest assured that these ads will not be going away. To the contrary, they will almost certainly continue to exist and become even more widespread. We will, someday, reach a point where the average Windows desktop resembles a NASCAR race car -- covered with logos and advertisements -- and wonder "how did we get to this point?".
---
Myself, the line that I drew was crossed by Microsoft many, many years ago. Looking back, I'm glad that it happened when it did. It saved me from dealing with a decade's worth of Microsoft's bullshit.
Could always end up as Embrace, extend, extinguish v2.0 - but here's hoping they get it right this time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
I use the "Shutup10" tool to disable everything can be disabled, but I don't use Windows 10 as my everyday OS.
Some perks to note of:
* No bloatware
* Updates every 60-90 days (as opposed to the oppressive every 5-7 days); choice to reboot auto or not.
* No Windows Media Player
* No MSFT Edge; Only Windows Explorer classic
* Classic calculator
* No Windows App Store
* No background apps
* No upselling shenanigans annoying my experience
* No MSFT cloud
* Cortana is removed completely not disabled
* Mission-critical updates only...avoids needless flair in favor of stable security.
* Never seen an ad ever.
All in all, I would highly recommend it. For those that can see dead comments: you're welcome.
Although, problem is, this edition is just not available to mere mortals... well, legally. As far as I understand, it requires Volume Licensing, which may not be available for individuals (depends on reseller and jurisdiction, I guess - most probably won't bother to deal with non-companies at all) and, AFAIK, requires to purchase at least 5 licenses.
If you feel the urge to turn it off, switch to GNU/Linux. Turn annoying things off is not a solution, it is an excuse.
I think the difference is in what people find annoying. I find technical issues such as driver support, font rendering or dpi scaling 10x more annoying than an occasional ad or a fear of snooping.
It's more an individual choice of what kind of annoyance you prefer. If there was an OS with great ivory tower polish and great attitude towards integrity and openness I'd be interested. Right now you just have to choose one or the other.
I won't personally benefit -- I've run Linux exclusively for almost 20 years -- but when I visit Windows in connection with my work, I feel compassion for those who put up with it. I think, "Wait ... people pay to be abused this way?"
The problem is that Microsoft is constantly adding and/or changing the options, settings, registry keys, etc., and they don't exactly publish a nicely compiled, authoritative list of all of them.
The folks writing these scripts (or even just documenting the settings) are working by trial and error, reverse engineering, and so on, to find the relevant knobs to tweak and switches to flip to get rid of these "features".
If they do manage to get lucky and come up with a working solution, it's out-of-date as soon as the next update drops.
Like you, this advertising isn't a problem for me. I was introduced to Linux in 1995 and it's been my primary operating system (along with a few OS X "phases") since then. I have friends and family, however, who can't switch (for various reasons), and so it still annoys me to no end that Microsoft does this kind of stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/comments/5y2we4/tron_v10...
Edit: and also on blackbird: http://www.getblackbird.net/screenshots/
In native apps mobile apps, there are some okay ad-blocking solutions.
But when the ads are baked into the operating system itself... I have a hard time seeing Microsoft or Apple losing the ad blocking battle.
So, instead of getting ads somewhat sandboxed inside a browser, in the future we may be getting ads inside the start menu, inside spotlight, on the toolbar... and instead of semi-directly funding content providers, the ad space will only ever be funneling money to the these same huge companies to spend as they see fit. Bleeech.
It used to be that I would be eager to buy a new iphone because I was keen to get the new features. Now I hold on to my older model because it has less of this nagging and new "features".
At the risk of hijacking your comment, what's the present situation with regards to running Linux on Apple hardware?
I quite like my Macbook and am generally tolerant of MacOS (mostly because it's POSIX-y enough to feel familiar), but would definitely consider installing a Linux distro depending on how well it worked.
DNSCrypt DNS resolver with a sinkhole that blocks ads and telemetry for any device is fairly easy to setup, I've done it for myself.
Searching for "ad blocking smart DNS" shows there's a ton of such services already. I expect a lot of them will be placing Adwords against "disable windows 10 ads" now.
Next in the arms race, however, Windows will start ignoring your DNS settings and use their resolvers, like some applications do today.
or Switch to Mac if you can.
Also - I know an OS is different from a webpage, but slamming a company for having "shitty" ads when you've got some obnoxious full-screen ads of your own is pretty funny: http://imgur.com/a/3eJ4H
It's been several years ago and I don't keep up-to-date on Windows server tech anymore but, at the time, I knew many people (devs, mostly) who chose to run Windows Server 2008 on their desktop instead of Windows 7.
It was quite easy to do because 7 & 2008 shared so much of the underlying code. I'm not sure if the same is still true (e.g., with 10 and 2012/2016).
I have a Zenbook Pro UX501VW, and getting Linux to run well on it has been unusually challenging. Although as time goes on and newer Linux kernels and nVidia drivers come along, a fresh install should get easier.
I wanted to ditch my iPhone and Macbook this year. I still may after I do some more research on an encrypted Linux setup.
Here's a quick rundown of the issues I remember encountering, in case it matters. (I was setting it up a few months ago, so I would have been trying to install Ubuntu 16.10 and Mint 18.1.)
(1) I can't remember all the details, but I was unable to install either Ubuntu 16.10 or Linux Mint 18.1 using the traditional BIOS-based installer. I had to use a UEFI-based one instead. (Which wasn't a big deal, but I had no past experience with UEFI, so I had to read up on it first.)
(2) The trackpad jumped around a lot. I found an easy solution at [1]. IIRC, I had the problem initially with the 4.4 kernel that came with the Linux distros mentioned above. The problem might be fixed on its own with more recent kernels.
(3) The laptop has both nVidia and (built-in) Intel graphics chips. The ability to switch between them is pretty seamless, except for the need to log out and back in again in order to go back and forth. However, this only worked well for me when using nVidia's proprietary driver, which in turn prevented me from (easily) using very recent Linux kernels (4.10+). Supposedly there are other ways to get this working (Bumblebee, et al), but making that work required more effort than I wanted to invest.
(4) The laptop has two connectors for external monitors: a USB-C, and HDMI. My monitor accepts DVI and HDMI. IIRC, I tried three ways of connecting the laptop to my monitor (a Dell U2412M):
(a) HDMI --> HDMI
(b) HDMI --> (adapter) --> DVI
(c) USB-C --> (adapter) --> HDMI
(5) The laptop has a high-DPI display, which many Linux apps have trouble with [2]. Those problem aren't peculiar to this laptop, but mention the issue because a lower-DPI laptop display wouldn't have this trouble. For one app I use (Intel VTune, which uses Gtk2), the only really workable solution was is to use an external monitor when using that app.
Another consequence of the high-DPI display is that the virtual terminals (e.g., the terminal you get when you hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 ) have really small text. Which can make it a real hassle when you have to fix graphics-driver problems, etc. There may be an easy fix for this; I haven't checked.
(6) When I'm fiddling with graphics drivers, sometimes the laptop's fan runs loud and stays on until the next time I reboot. When I've got the graphics drivers working right, this problem doesn't occur.
[1] https://github.com/vlasenko/hid-asus-dkms.git
[2] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-hidpi-support-for-gnome-k...
As a direct result, I am spending some time tonight researching running Linux on my Suface Book.
I have been impressed with what seems like a new Microsoft. I even made the switch from OSX to a Surface Book as my primary laptop. I used OSX for a decade and ran Linux as my primary OS before that.
Probably not the best hardware to run Linux on. There's an entire subreddit comprised of woes of people trying this https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/ . Try something very new like Fedora 25/upcoming 26 or the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04.
* yes, I'm being pedantic, but the ad for one drive is in the file explorer, not the file system. Its doesn't appear in the command line.
In both cases they seem almost insane how many people are up in arms about this. It's them pushing a service of theirs in their os.
Apple does it, Google does it, Ubuntu does it, everyone does it. And it's such a non issue. They are promoting a service that is very tied in to the OS that a lot of people want and don't know exist.
Maybe I'm the weird one, but it just seems like a hit piece when so many websites started reporting on this so hard and it's not even a big deal to me...
How are those being targetted?
Ads on sites and apps -- yeah okay. We got to pay the rent for the content we're viewing..
Ads baked into the OS, especially one you'be paid for, is disturbing.. For me anyway..
I've not used windows in a long time, but I'm kind of dissapointed in the way they've been going. They appeared to be going in a good direction with the new guy after balmer -- for a while I thought they'd buy github.. More OSS, some cool tech -- but they've been slowly getting into the data business and when that happens by degrees it's hard for people to be outraged enough to call them on it.
Don't stand for this shit. Even if we don't, though, it won't make much of a difference since we're the minority who can even understand what's happening...
Just like how Apple pushes their cloud storage, Google pushes drive, even Foss software pushes or bumps other complementary packages.
They are being "targeted" because you are already running the software, so if it's saving your shit to a paid account, just hide it, if it's not then show it. No tracking or nefarious stuff needed.
If they were really truly putting ads in explorer, I'd be right there with everyone shouting about how bad it is, but this isn't doing that, it's telling you they offer cloud storage.
It's a popup slinging integrated cloud storage? Mef. I'm with ya. Who cares.
They are all worded like MS is putting banner ads for "hot singles in your area" in your OS... And this story has been covered by every single major tech news site the same way... It's odd.
It's coming, eventually.
Yet.
Citation needed. If you're talking about Ubuntu, that does not represent all FOSS software just like Oracle does not represent all proprietary software; there's many other Linux distros out there, and there's lots of FOSS software which is not a distro. And if they're just notifying you about other FOSS software (with emphasis on the 'F'), that's rather different than a proprietary vendor which is trying to get you to spend your money on something else from them. Telling people about something they can go get for free is not the same as telling people about something they need to spend $$$$ to get.
MS's cloud storage (and Apple's too) is what's called an "upsell". It's one thing for a vendor to try it when you're already talking to a salesperson, like car dealerships do by trying to sell you overpriced accessories. It's quite another for a vendor to try it when you're using the product you've already purchased. If I were car-shopping and I looked at a car that openly advertised overpriced accessories to you while you were driving, that would be unacceptable, and I would not buy the car.
However, given how many people are perfectly OK with this kind of thing, and given how many cars have big-screen "infotainment" systems installed now, I'm actually surprised no car companies have tried forcing in-car advertising to make more money. Sure, they'd piss off some people, who would then buy other cars, but there's obviously plenty of consumers who will happily go along with this, especially if they're told (even if it's a lie) that this allows the carmaker to sell the car to them at a lower price. I could definitely see GM adopting this; their buyers are already perfectly happy to be tracked with OnStar.
Better get used to it; that's how people think these days. Just look at some of the other messages here that say "it's no big deal". Face it: people today are perfectly happy to be advertised to, even when they're paying money for it. And it's nothing new. Just look at cable TV: it was billed as being "commercial free" pay TV when it first came out, but it didn't take too long before they put the commercials back in. Did people abandon it? Nope. It's still highly profitable, and only recently having some problems with "cord cutters", which was caused not by the commercials alone, but rather by the availability of internet services and the general loss of interest in TV due to other interests (using the internet, video games, etc.). But for 30+ years, people have been perfectly happy to pay for cable TV and then watch the ads on it.
>Don't stand for this shit. Even if we don't, though, it won't make much of a difference since we're the minority who can even understand what's happening...
That's the problem. A few techies switching to Linux at home isn't going to make much difference. More importantly than anything, all the businesses are sticking with it, all the software ISVs are sticking with it, and most of the consumers are sticking with it.
They know how to boil us slow so that it doesn't seem terrible at first.
It's unbelievable how MSFT turned Windows from the great Win7 to the worst spyware operating system in human history aka Win10 in just 5 years. Is it just greed? Is it that they failed with Mobile (WinPhone is dead and has 0.1% world wide market share) and Android amd iOS have a bigger market share than Windows 7? (Win10 has way smaller market share). On desktop Windows 7 has like 50% market share, where as Win10 is around 20%. Is it that they failed with XBoxOne, now Sony and Nintendo eat MSFT former console market share as breakfast.
I bought two highend notebooks one a MacBookPro, the other with Win7 Pro preinstalled. The will last for the next five years. I stay with Office 2010 and additionally installed LibreOffice. I skip Win8 and Win10, and I am running Linux in VMs.
What's really disgusting is that in future many smaller companies like law firms, doctors will leak your private confidential data to Microsoft - as Windows 10 collects audio from connected microphones, collect keystrokes from connected keyboards, and indexes all files on local drives and sends a lot of data home to many different domains (some are owned by Microsoft, some have very dubious names and owners).
What everybody's talking about are metrics. Anonymous usage metrics. And trust me, as a user and programmer I know of no company that doesn't collect metrics like that. It's totally common.
Between, as far as I know, from the next update "creators" (this or next month) you can actually turn them off too.
Oh wait, it has been documented by third parties.
Win10 has a whitelist in the signed 64bit kernel mode network driver, so you can't stop it except by putting a hardware firewall in front of your Win10 box - good luck with your Win10 notebook.
If an app sends home metrics, it can be stopped with a software firewall. If you can't trust your operating system any more, it's a whole different ballpark.
Adware and spyware companies with their unwanted toolbars and what not got problems with the US law since 2004. Win10 is an adware and spyware per definition, see news article of this HN thread.
Furthermore, even if the current system is OK, this might change at any time without prior notice due to a pushed update.
Finally, others doing it, too, doesn't make it any less wrong.
I'll think you'll find that XBone has sold pretty well (faster rate than the 360 in the same time period). It just that the PS4 sold extraordinarily well in comparison. Too early to tell for the switch but WiiU (which was competing with xbone) was nowhere near eating their breakfast.
If you're thinking about switching, I'd recommend you looking past stock Ubuntu, it is no longer the premiere distro in the community, instead consider:
First off, pick supported hardware - you'll do that for Windows and macOS as well. Use known hardware, like Intel, use DELL XPS or system76, it will save you a lot of frustration.
Ubuntu MATE - https://ubuntu-mate.org - If you need the Ubuntu ecosystem, UM offers a more polished experience, if not as much eye candy.
Arch Linux - https://www.archlinux.org - Before you skip this, no it's not unstable, at all, I clock one of my systems at 3+ years without an issue, the rolling release is great and the AUR makes any software just a command away. No fuss, just works.
The ArchWiki is the best resource on all things Linux, it' great.
Fedora - https://getfedora.org - If you want stock GNOME.
KDE - https://neon.kde.org - If you want upstream KDE.
This kind of incivility isn't allowed here, regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong the other person is. Same with "Don't be an ass" elsewhere in the thread. Your comments would have been fine with such bits edited out. Please do that in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905313 and marked it off-topic.
HBO subscribers are shown ads (for other HBO shows) at the beginning of the play. I believe that happens with Amazon Prime Videos as well.
Google shows ads for Chrome browser when you google from a different browser.
how is this any different ?
If I'm going to shell out $120 for a Windows license, I don't want to see goddamn ads built into the fucking operating system.
Apple shows ads to older iPhone users (https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/11/apple-advertising-iphone-6s-t...).
how is this any different ? Actually Windows can at least be turned off.
Does that Apple ad come up more than once? If it does, yeah that's pretty annoying and disappointing too.