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Comment by csmattryder | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate: You're supporting `n` billion devices around the world running your product, and the users are typically non-technical (from "I know how to open Word" to "Where's the 'Any' key?")

You need to battle against your competitor's product that "just work" because they can target one specific hardware profile and you can't, so you put in telemetry to improve compatibility. Makes sense.

It enrages us, the technically-minded and privacy conscious, but only serves to make Windows better for the non-techies and help MS stop haemorrhaging users to iOS.

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If they used the collected data only for compatibility improvements and discarded it when done.

If they allowed me to opt-in and I could shut off _all_ other telemetry.

If I trusted Microsoft.

Then we could talk :)

They actually have incredibly strict policies about user privacy. Everyone in the company recently had to watch a short movie (with actual actors and realistic scenarios) about appropriate data usage and permissions.

So put a big red scary "PRESS THIS BUTTON AND YOU'LL GET HACKED IN TEN MINUTES UNLESS YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT CRASH BEFORE THAT" that turns telemetry off and let me press it.

Ever worked the help desk? My users would push that button twice then call me in 5 minutes to tell me their computer has been hacked (just after it crashed of course).

I hate the telematics and the "anti-user" stubbornness of Windows in general, but at the same time, I know all too well who they're targeting and why. More and more of my less technical users are requesting Macs, which are a PITA to admin but at the same time generate fewer tickets because they're really hard to fuck up. I don't like seeing Windows move this direction, but I get it.

> and the users are typically non-technical (from "I know how to open Word" to "Where's the 'Any' key?")

This isn't nearly as true as it used to be, because those people are on phones and tablets now. People who actually use desktops fall into one of 3 categories: content creators, office workers, and gamers.

Microsoft has ruined Windows by trying to make it into a webapp with a tablet UI in a vain effort to recapture that audience.

Meanwhile, the Linux Desktop has sacrificed any chance it once had of being decent by constantly sacrificing transparency of operation on the alter of "just works".

So here we are, stuck in a world where a really shitty version of Windows is still just barely the least-worst choice.

You had me until the Linux part. I've been using GNU+Linux and BSD as an OS since the late 90s. I've supported windows and osx as a sysadmins as well.

Windows is not the least worst choice, and gnu/Linux has made huge strides in the past few years towards just works. That said though,one of my issues is this concept that everyone should be able to use a computer without learning how.

Comp uters are inherently technical, its not that hard to learn. Its like what I started telling all the old people who kept saying, at the workplace, "I don't know computers..." Or some variation.

My response, well you better learn or you aren't going to have a job much longer...

I just don't get the want for a chimpanzee usable OS.

> Linux has made huge strides in the past few years towards just works

This is precisely my point. "Just works" is great, until something doesn't "just work", then you have to untangle a pile of complex and opaque interactions, often with poor and outdated documentation, to make something work.

In the past, Windows at least had relatively straight-forward mechanisms of operation that were all well documented and, importantly, didn't ever change all that much. That's starting to change now because MS has moved to the web-developer model of making breaking changes, and not documenting them, in rolling releases. But, it still has significant advantages in all 3 of the use cases I mentioned, so it manages to be slightly better.

What both desktops need to return to, in my idiot-on-the-internet opinion, is simplicity of operation of the underlying mechanisms. The OS doesn't have to be understandable by a chimpanzee, but it should be relatively intuitive and understandable for the average person who's willing to dig in to how things work.

>then you have to untangle a pile of complex and opaque interactions, often with poor and outdated documentation, to make something work.

As if windows doesn't do this but worse? At least on linux I can see the source code of whatever is breaking and fix it. MS's official documentation is crap compared to gnu/linux documentation, not to mention linux has a very helpful community on places like irc. Have you ever taken a visit over to MS's "help" website? Worst outsourced-scripted-answerfest I've ever seen. I've been supporting Windows for many years as a senior sysadmin, years of licensing issues and bugs and ms shadyness, and windows 10 was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I switched to gnu+linux only and haven't looked back.

All I can say is this. If you put off linux a few years ago, you owe it to yourself to at least spin up a new just works distro like manjaro at least in a vm. I think you might be surprised just how far gnu+linux has come, and personally, I think that as vulkan solidifies and suddenly we have more AAA gaming titles on Linux, the cards show Linux poised to make a surge in the desktop market. Also, as much as I have vocally had issues with systemd, it has allowed many of the past init bugs to be done away with so the focus in dev has turned much more to the userspace and it's showing.

GNU+Linux is the computing choice of the future imho, and it's not dying or dead, it's thriving. It already runs most of our key infrastructure, supercomputers, etc. It just needs some tweaks for lay-user-compatability.

This is why MS is pushing the OSS angle so much. They recognize that gnu+linux and foss (as opposed to oss) in general is a real and credible threat!

It's also worth remember the nut-to-butt relationship MS has with NSA.

The source doesn't help you untangle the interactions of complex systems to find the root cause now does it? Even then, it is often easier to simply work around the problem than go through the trouble of rebuilding from source, with all the headache that comes with that. That you even consider this a viable answer is evidence of the deeply rooted problems with the mindset of the Linux Desktop community.

Windows has a lot of the same problems now, that's what I'm saying. That's where MS is screwing up. My opinion is that they still haven't screwed up as badly as the Linux Desktop has, and more importantly the advantages Windows Desktop brings to the table are greater than those of the Linux Desktop. This is why I said it was "barely the least-worst" instead of "the best".

I could spend hours writing about all the problems I have with the Linux Desktop, but it would fall on deaf ears because you'd just point at Windows and say "but they suck too!", which has basically been the Linux Desktop Evangelist strategy since 1990. Unsurprisingly, this hasn't spurred mass adoption.

It's great that the Linux Desktop fits your needs well enough that you can use it as your primary OS. Apparently there are about 4% of Desktop users for whom that can be said and "works fine for me!" is not going to win any of the other 96% over.

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