Windows chief Terry Myerson out as Microsoft reorganizes
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time, but the OS has grown to become my favorite desktop environment in the past few years, if for no other reason than that everyone else keeps screwing around and tweaking things that don't need tweaking. Linux GUIs have been getting all fancy with it, Apple thinks desktops are just for making Apple software, and yet Windows remains a great place to play games, watch movies, browse the Web. It's by far and away the fastest, most responsive desktop GUI out there. I hope it gets back to basics.
> Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time
Stop, you're making this macOS user jealous.
You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.
And as arguments you mention playing games, watch movies, and browse the web?! All three are possible on all mentioned systems. The last two even in the completely same way as on windows (besides user interface).
I am just glad that i switched to the other two options and never had to look back. Apple also fucks up things. Still a pretty solid system for my use case. Also i am not able to see the iOS-varent movement you mentioned. Also Linux GUIs get better and better. It shocks me everytime what Windows Users tolerate while bashing the other two system, when i have to configure something on our AD (only used Windows Server in house). Inconsistent GUI Designs on expensive software, xbox gaming center preinstalled on a SERVER EDITION, everything shuffeled together, ...
I use Debian for work but the gaming rig is straight Windows. Shame SteamOS never took of, I was into it (got the steam wifi dongly doo on the TV in the living room with four steam controllers lol)
If steam on Linux supported 1/10rd of triple A titles instead of 1/100th I would switch and never look back.
How is Far Cry 5 on Linux? How about MacOS?
Also do you know what the difference between a Windows fuckup and a macOS fuckup is? The macOS fuckup makes news while the Windows one in business as usual.
And there are adds. Built in to my OS. Fuck that.
That's how Windows 10 behaves for me. I already knew it, but just tried again for you playing a movie using VLC and plugging in my headphones. Works like a charm.
Every so often it will "forget" that it should be using the usb dac and revert to the hdmi audio output.
Apple solved that problem by not even letting you plug in headphones!
3rd party software on Windows machines is an ongoing problem.
Sure they can tell you that. X can be a disaster and a pain to use, and still be better than Y, if Y is a worse disaster.
This is Emacs vs vi/vim vs GUI editors (Scintilla-based, Sublime, Electron-based, whatever).
You can feel that Emacs is the best thing ever, but still hate Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta combinations. You can love vi and still sometimes get annoyed about switching modes.
Seems to me that part of what he's feeling is that MacOS has become the unwanted outsider, and frankly most people have better things to do / aren't OCD enough to want to spend a bunch of time trying different windowing systems.
this is true mainly only for current Gnome and KDE-
stay with xfce, lxde or even a window manager and this is not the case.
Unity or whatever Ubuntu ships with did not like working from an install on neither my macbook pro nor my thinkpad, and it really didn't like my 4k monitor. KDE didn't like switching between 4k and my laptop screen.
The menus, etc. help me grope my way through the dark as I learn the "Linux Way" of computing concepts.
Edit: fix my grammar a bit
Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year.
Have you ever noticed how in most orgs, every IT guy's first response to a weird-looking Windows problem is to suggest a reinstall? And that's not even irrational. Troubleshooting Windows takes too long to be worthwhile, because there are too many places to look for where things might be going wrong. Its complexity has become unfathomable to mere mortals, and it shows in maintaining the OS.
If you're interested in avoiding that, try a rolling-release distro (updating frequently) with good documentation and a sane low-level setup.
I've heard good things about OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have never tried it, so I can't vouch for it.
If you have the time and energy, I'd recommend you to look at a couple of distros yourself and see how much of the "dirty hands" part you can grasp yourself from the documentation. Can you fix GRUB or their equivalent yourself? Is there documentation on how to do things without a GUI? I'd say those are certainly a good sign.
As a bad example, I wasted a whole afternoon once trying to uninstall a botched Radeon driver in the TTY on Fedora (since it screwed up Xorg beyond repair). Their documentation was abysmal[1]. That's the stuff you want to avoid.
[1]: In fact, in the end, it turned out I had to set a magical environment variable that was never mentioned in the small paragraph there was in the docs. Oh, and of course, the driver was botched because of a system upgrade I couldn't revert.
Edit: OTOH, if you're more patient than me (and don't screw around with e.g. PPAs because you want a new-ish version of certain libraries), you might find using ZFS for your main drive to be a good idea. Make a snapshot, upgrade and if something breaks: revert and wait for a fix.
Edit2: Also, if you're going to try a rolling release: Don't wait too long for updates and find the news channel where breaking changes (and the necessary upgrade steps) are communicated. It's important to know about those, and it simultaneously helps you in guessing how often they're about to happen. Arch's feed is on their landing page, for example.
When I was first reading your comment I assumed it was experience in the distant past. The different experiences people have with the same software is incredible to me. I have owned four Windows computers, up to present day, and maintained those of family and some friends, and not once have I had to reinstall Windows since the days of Windows 2000, excepting harddrive failures. I always wonder what makes the difference.
But I guess if I knew, Microsoft would know (being staffed by people smarter and more informed than me), and hopefully fix whatever causes the problems necessitating reinstall.
It's like all the complaints about Firefox's memory usage - people have complained about it for years, it's clearly a real problem for some? many? users, but I have never seen it on any platform.
To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine.
Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more.
Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works.
This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.
But ... patching.
I had been dabbling with linux, so I switched to Ubuntu for a few years. But then Ubuntu also lost its mind, so I switched to Arch for a a year. I learned a lot during my time with Arch, but the most important lesson is "wow, a full blown OS, with an integrated DE, network management, and a dozen other systems does so much more for me than I ever knew."
Then I switched to OSX for a time. I suffered greatly. Folks think Apple's software quality issues are a recent thing, but they aren't. Apple has always been extremely bad at making reliable software. I wasn't doing anything fancy, but experience data loss issues due to file system errors, iTunes wiping out years of song metadata, and on and on. And OSX is incredibly slow - not because of the software, but because of the CPU, RAM, and heat limits imposed by apple form factors. Even now, my work laptop is a fancy MBP, and it is just dog slow when doing any kind of meaningful work. The only nice thing about OSX is being able to pull of a terminal with familiar tools.
I decided to try out windows 10 on my home desktop. I built this rig for much less than the cost of a mac, with all top-end parts. With 8 logical CPUs and 64gb RAM, it flies and I almost never experiences a slowdown of any kind. It doesn't matter how many dozens of browser tabs, terminals, or apps I have open. Running Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux is very pleasant and gives me access to proper command line tools. I haven't experienced the issues you mention (drivers all work like magic, haven't seen any ads, no tablet mode issues).
I have some issues with Windows still. They've really outdone themselves in making the system settings windows almost totally unusable and confusing. And I wish a bash shell was the default terminal, along with more pre-packaged open source tools. Probably the single worst part is Windows Update - it is a fucking abomination, impossible to predict (will restarting or shutting down actually cause a 20 minute update cycle?) and disrupting work at all the wrong times. And bitlocker's refusal to just encrypt a hard drive without a TPM module present is stupid, especially since it wont let me save the encryption key to dropbox (saving to the same drive being encrypted is not allowed).
But none of the downsides are deal breakers for me. My system is super stable, is always fast, and let's me get work done. I love it.
???
Do you have Pro or Home? The full Bitlocker in Pro does (or did) allow encryption without TPM. Both my desktop and old laptop did not have TPM and have Bitlocker enabled. It also let me back up the key to the local (Bitlocker encrypted) drive.
In fact, you have to go the extra mile to break stuff.
Previous leaks of Windows source have indicated Microsoft ends up putting in a lot of workarounds to give specific third party apps old functionality just because some app is popular and badly written and a fix for something else broke it.
If it didn’t poke you in the eye ten times a day it’d be perfect. However Microsoft have been chasing fad dragons for the last decade and only get 80% of the way through engineering efforts before direction changes. That last 20% is what makes people nod approvingly and smile and it’s called quality.
Hopefully this change will resolve that problem.
This is not huge praise for the Windows desktop but there really is a very good OS under all the crap that Microsoft seems to be piling on.
It almost feels like there are two groups running Windows development: One group that is cleaning up the file manager, the settings dialogs, adding the Linux subsystem, fixing the console, etc. And other group adding Candy Crush, Cortana, screwing up the start menu / search, Edge, etc. The look, feel, and usability of these things are so radically different it's hard to believe that same team is responsible for them all.
Whoever is working on the kernel, the driver subsystem, etc, and whoever is working on CLR stuff, can stay. Everyone else is fired.
There are so many things that would just need a better tool shipping with the OS to be fine, but are neglected (say: the event log (slow as hell and not nearly as comfortable as `less`. 'nuff said), the services dialog (still looks like in Win95, still can't auto-refresh, still has no useful search), notepad, PS ISE, the `scheduled tasks` dialog (still confusing as hell), even the effing task manager). Then there are tools MS actually owns (cf. Sysinternals) but refuses to distribute with Windows. And then, there are the new shiny things that get implemented to the point where they just barely work, and are never touched again (like the new terminal windows and workspaces in Win10).
I mean - especially the workspaces! Just give them to an intern and tell them to do the obvious improvements. They could be great, but they are still cumbersome.
Microsoft doesn't want to distribute more tools with Windows (like sysinternals) because they'll have ship them forever. They should, however, put them in the store.
It feels like a lot of the new features are half-baked. They have tried to go to a rapid release model which should mean continuous improvement but I don't think they're quite comfortable with that. It's like the worst of both worlds right now -- slow fixes but lots of churn.
Also, I too can see that there is work that has gone into the task manager. It's still nowhere near where it should be, though. Personally, I'd switch to ProcessExplorer on any machine in a heartbeat, exept that I can't, because it's not bundled, and some businesses are very paranoid on software that has to be installed additionally. Note: I'm not saying it should be the default, but it should be there.
If the thing that's holding such changes back is the release model, then perhaps this reorg might change some things? Though, I somehow doubt that was the issue here...
My home desktop is a Phenom II w/ just 4GB. It has had Vista, 7, 8/8.1 and now 10 on it. I think I did a clean sweep with 7, but I've gone through all the upgrades since then, and it's still running pretty well. (It won't cold boot, but that's a motherboard hardware problem!) It's approaching 10 years old at this point. Of course it has an SSD (actually 3...) or it would be pretty painful to use. But it isn't, and that's pretty impressive.
Yes, my Windows just works as well, but not without tweaks and regular maintenance.
Sadly, Microsoft has decided to follow this path lately too. It's truly terrible that this mentality has infected them because there doesn't currently exist a decent alternative. They'll just keep screwing things up just enough that other desktops are still screwed up worse.
Makes me want to give up computing and live in a cave.
Source or example of malicious stuff done?
Things like this[1] should not be possible.
Then you have the black screen with the circle, and then the blue screens "we are configuring your updates and didn't touch your files".
It drives me insane.
In their defense, there was a pretty large subculture of technically knows-enough-to-be-dangerous people who would do everything in their power to totally disable Windows Update for various reasons.
Microsoft looked at this as compromising Windows' security and harming Microsoft's reputation. Their solution in Windows 10 was to make it much more difficult or impossible to delay or turn off updates for Home and Pro users. It's annoying as all hell for those who know what we're doing and do stay up to date. I hate it because it restarts in the middle of the night, then boots up into the Bitlocker screen - so when I get up in the morning I discover my desktop has been running at 100% CPU and blasting fans like a jet engine for god knows how many hours thanks to Windows update.
But at the same time, I can see why they did it, but there had to be a better way.
By itself this isn't horrible, but it (and many other Windows features, for that matter) crosses into malware territory when it treats the user as hostile (like re-enabling itself or working around blocks like DNS)
I'm genuinely curious what the difference is between my install and yours.
Yes, you can turn these advertisements off easily. But considering how much we pay for Pro (~$200), there shouldn't be any advertisements anywhere.
And I don't think they're actually paid ads, for either the suggested apps or the rare occasion they've put an "ad" as the lock screen background. They've promoted the Surface on it before, and then for Tomb Raider, I think they were mostly pushing the idea of "hey, you can get games in the Windows Store now", rather than it necessarily being a paid campaign with the game studio.
So you're saying MS doesn't profit if you buy a Surface or something from the Windows Store?
That's an advertisement. My computer has never had anything related to Fitbit on it. Ever.
Thankfully for now there are still settings to turn off most of it, and removing all squares/tiles form the menu makes the Start menu look like the classic clean concise style, but it's frustrating that most people get stuck with the subpar experience.
Windows 10 home on my hp laptop
Both are in insider branches
Never seen an ad. Never had it update without me telling it to. I never modified anything in Windows to get rid of telemetry.
I have a suspicion that Windows actually gets more strange the more you "fix" it
The only silver lining is WSL, but it’s a toy at best, not a fully featured POSIX-compliant development environment.
Windows 7 was fine, but the spammy feature bloat is so frustrating.
Or you work for an organization that has an Enterprise license.
I used to uninstall the things I want gone, but I've given up. Contacts, maps, money, music, mail, news, weather, and the other bloatware just kept coming back. You can't uninstall stuff like Cortana at all, AFAIK.
Gotta love corporate speak. Do they even realize how awful that is?
"We just wanted to let you know we've exited John. We spoke and he agreed it was time to pursue new opportunities elsewhere. There's nothing nefarious going on, so we wanted to reassure you there's nothing to worry about. Business as usual."
:|
Personally I have no problem with politeness, even if it's a veneer. There's a reason cities full of millions of people can function without clawing eachother's throats out, and it's got nothing to do with Law.
Why load headlines with any form of negative language whatsoever? Why plop any mines into future interviews he may have with other companies?
Saying "we have been planning for is for Terry Myerson to pursue his next chapter outside Microsoft" is a stab in the back. Not only did they show him the way to out but they also gave him a kick in the ass while on the way out.
Off the top of my head, when the oil and gas market dipped in 2014, tons of great engineers lost their jobs because the companies simply didn't have work for them. Or a CEO that's really good at 5-50 startups simply not being a good fit for scaling 50-100 and upwards of 1000s of employees. Etc.
I have no idea whether this is actually on good terms or not, but there aren't very many exec VP level positions to go around; it's entirely possible there just doesn't happen to be one that works for both him + management.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-and-why-microsoft-is-...
The general impression was that he was one of Satya Nadella's darlings. One wonders what finally felled him?
The subsequent attempts to turn desktop Windows into Windows Phone were infuriating and ill-conceived. Almost everything that I liked about Windows Phone did not translate to the desktop.
The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so.
Microsoft had to make a hard choice, and they made the hard choice. That hard choice is the reason 98% of wannacry infections were on windows 7 and barely 1% on windows 10.
If ubuntu somehow ends up replacing windows in hands of the general public, don't be surprised to see the same update system to appear in it.
If that happens, don't be surprised when a fork of Ubuntu comes out without the forced updates.
> The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so.
The choice doesn't have to be between 'update now' and 'update never'. There are more polite ways of pestering people into doing something good, than completely hijacking their system.
The choice doesn't have to be between 'security updates AND feature updates, together' or 'nothing at all'. The "feature" updates don't have to include ads and auto-reinstalled Candy Crush. The "security" updates don't have to auto-enable explicitly disabled telemetry settings of users.
All of the development machines in my office either auto-apply security updates or prominently nag us to manually apply updates that can/could not be automatically applied. None of them reboot in the middle of a development session. None of them auto-install feature updates or ads or sponsored apps. All of them run Kubuntu LTS.
This is huge. Few companies have reinvented themselves as many times as Microsoft has. From developer tools (BASIC) to Dos to Windows to Office and now to Cloud and Services.
Under Nadella, Microsoft has regained the agility for which it was famous for under Bill Gates.
Windows 10 - Nightmare
macOS - Slow & buggy.
Linux - No Apps & Games, Frequent changes in fancy GUIs
I think we've run out of options here. It's 2018 and we still don't have a solid Operating System. This is really sad.
I just hope fuchsia takes off really well.
... now if only GPU prices would come down. Goddamn blackchain craze.
Windows 10 Pro N is a good starting point for a non-annoying Windows "Experience", but I'm fairly certain you can't game with it.
The image of the VM is portable.
A force shutdown would force shutdown my VM, yes. I haven't ever had that on my PC, can't remember if it's because I fenagled updates or what.
It's the anti-features I have a problem with, like the fact that Candy Crush has to be preinstalled on each domain user in a corporate environment. The general unreliability of the build cycle needs some serious rethinking as well, right now it takes five months to get from a new build to a stable release... and builds are only six months apart.
Second, LTSB is not really intended for general desktop use, even in a corporate environment. LTSB is intended for devices like MRI machines and the like which need Windows, and the latest security updates, but literally no improvements whatsoever otherwise.
Ideally, corporate users should remain roughly one major Windows 10 release behind the current one, but of course, three times in the last six months, Microsoft has broken the updater and updated PCs to the latest build despite group policy prohibiting it.
My number one pet peeve after switching back to Windows from Mac is the search.
On Mac, I used a hotkey for Spotlight to launch apps. It always found the right stuff, even with typos.
On Windows, the Search results can be ridiculously bad even when you spell things correctly. Given how MS owns a search engine and that Apple doesn't, you'd expect it to be much, much better.
My number two pet peeve is that there are two types settings - the new Windows 8/10 settings and the old Windows Control Panel. I don't know why it's taking so long to consolidate them, it unnecessarily complicates the user experience. Just pick one and go with it.
Microsoft has never successfully unified their settings and likely never will. Even though the Settings app has come a long way, it's still unideal for a lot of purposes, and they annoyingly have been making it harder to get to the Control Panel quickly. (Protip: If you want the legacy Programs and Features, searching "appwiz.cpl" is now the fastest way to get there, since they explicitly block "Programs and Features" from appearing in the search box it seems.)
While annoyingly they've broken the legacy user management to force people to use Settings so they can repeatedly shove Microsoft accounts down people's throats (even in a domain environment), things like managing local/roaming profiles still requires you go all the way back to an XP-style advanced properties dialog you can only get to from the 7-style System Control Panel.
Settings - it's a transition thing. With so many legacy CPLs out there - system and 3rd party ones - that's the only reasonable approach they could take - to duplicate everything over to modern settings and leave the old ones around long enough. As time has progressed more and more stuff has appeared in modern settings.
With the availability of great hardware options, it's hands down the best platform right now for users and developers.
On others, i.e. multiple apps that share the same words or prefix, like `photo`, or multiword apps where the keyword is not the first word in the name, it fails miserably.
For example, if I type in the word `power` on my desktop, and I have Cyberlink PowerDirector and Cyberlink Power2Go and Cyberlink PowerMedia installed, only Powerpoint shows up in my app list to run. For me to even get all of my Cyberlink apps to show up, I have to type in the word `cyberlink` completely. Typing in `cyber` only shows two of the five Cyberlink apps I have installed. Mentally in my head, when I think of my Cyberlink apps, I think of the app names, not prefixed by vendor name.
For your example "cm command prompt" - I use Cmder instead of the standard command prompt, which literally starts with `cm` unlike command prompt (yes, I get that the actual file name does start with `cm`), and Cmder is never the first option until I get to the `e`.
Misspell a word, and all bets are off.
Spotlight on Mac was way better at guessing what I wanted than Windows. IIRC, the accuracy was in the high 90% range on the first couple of keystrokes.
And I'd love to say it is a recent development (or "bug") but Windows search has been junk for many years and releases. I mean they themselves must know something is wrong since they tried to reboot it in the failed Vista offshoot (WinFS in Longhorn[0]) using a relational database instead of their current index. But since that failed, they just stuck with it and kept piling on failed concepts to a broken core.
Windows 8/8.1's web search took something inherently unreliable and tacked on a web search. Windows 10 tacked on a personal assistant. But often all people want is a reliable way to search file metadata (name, date, author, etc), file content, and misc OS constructs (Settings/Control Panel Applets, Shortcuts, etc). It gets none of that right.
If I was in charge of the Windows division I'd fire the entire search team, and bring in a fresh set of eyes. There's something dysfunctional in a division that can consistently put out such poor software.
For me the staggering number of Windows non-server SKU options [3] has been a pet peeve. I have zero insight into how profitable it is for them to structure things this way but in terms of optics it's just comical. Now they might be carving out the Home editions even further [4]??
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_editions
[4] https://www.onmsft.com/news/new-windows-10-editions-windows-...
Under Search, you may want to enable "match path", then set up your favorite hotkey and read the search options and you should be all set.
For apps, I just use Classic Start Menu (wonderful), but Launchy or something like that may be more up your alley for super common apps, not sure what the current best of breed is in that space.
Once, I was searching and searching for a particular file, couldn't find it anywhere. Was starting to wonder if I had deleted it or lost it...so I went looking and found HN users referring to this Everything thing.
I installed it, checked the box for "run Everything now" on the finish wizard, the window loaded, I typed the name, and poof, there the file was, 27 (or whatever, way more than 5) directories deep. My jaw hit the floor, and the rest is history.
The only thing I really use it for is launching apps (via the Windows key), in the way I used to use a hot key + spotlight on Mac.
While re-orgs are probably good for re-organizing the workforce around a set of goals but I think for lower level managers and individual contributors these are very distracting. Constant change in leadership affects employee morale.
Personal experience differ, but here's my story. When I joined MS 9 years ago it was in the midst of the big layoffs, and my recruiter reached out immediately after news broke and made sure that everything is still in place and I am still due to start in the summer after my graduation, and I've been happily working here since.
Good luck!
Microsoft has lost the next generation of computer users to Android and iOS because of their regular release of completely botched products. The enterprise company I work for just rolled out their Mac program and we are slowly transitioning from Windows.
It's time for a shake up.