Microsoft intercepting Firefox, Chrome installation on Windows 10 Insider build
ghacks.net
ghacks.net
When e.g. you look how aggressively Google is trying to switch me to Chrome from my Firefox on all of their properties, a new low was set. But from my insider buddies at Google, that strategy is working well.
This here from MSFT dials it up another notch. With the anti-trust cases in the EU, they probably will be able to geo target this feature so that from the EU all will be fine and dandy, but the rest of the world will get scared into switching to Edge.
https://www.alexkras.com/firefox-launches-marketing-offensiv...
It's terrible behavior.
Maybe you could make a tool that lets you make changes, schedules a modification of this file on next restart, and after the restart it propagates the changes in the registry too.
Yes, "please reboot to apply your new mouse position^W^W^Wfile association changes", yay, but that'd work.
Although I'd definitely hate it.
Same here, and it's maddening. That kind of bullshit, along with OneDrive ads in the freaking file browser, and now the subject of this article, have pushed me completely off of Windows.
Now that Steam Play exists and works with every Windows-only game I've thrown at it, I have absolutely nothing holding me to Windows on my gaming PC and workstations at home. I still have to deal with WSE 2016 and Windows 7 Pro at work, but that decision is not up to me and even if it were, we'd still have to stay with Windows for some of our software. The owner would absolutely love to make us a Mac house all the way but she understands why we can't make that move.
One example: https://kolbi.cz/blog/2017/10/25/setuserfta-userchoice-hash-...
The fact that his utility received AV false positives is also extremely disturbing --- what more effective a way of forcing your choices on others than to label all workarounds these others find as being malware? AV is like the ultimate in censorship.
Perhaps Moz Corp haven't heard of Wikipedia and so couldn't keep that page updated.
Sorry, I'm having a cynicism overload. Carry on.
Don't forget the bit where Chrome rams its fucking updater down your throat at every occasion and any way to disable it is only temporary.
And Chromium manages to be even worse at least on OSX: it apparently decides that being quit is unacceptable and relaunches itself hidden in the background.
If you want to manage Chrome updates on your own, use the msi installer.
They are simply no longer willing to disrupt the status quo, even to help their users. They are far more motivated to be "popular", and have a big "audience", and a respected "brand", than about sticking up for their users. The fact that they even think about software development in terms of "building an audience(?)" shows that they are way off course. The most important software we use that is actively developed is made by people who are primarily concerned with making good software, not with this pseudo public relations cargo cult corporate speak.
Hint: Go back and look at what Firefox used to be like 10 years ago, and notice the difference in culture.
The fact is, if Mozilla took a proactive stand against Google Apple and Microsoft, that would greatly increase their popularity.
The old Firefox was "irresponsible" by including a popup blocker by default, and upset a lot of people. Firefox also refused to support any of Microsoft's early web DRM. People said that not supporting DRM would lock users out of content, but it actually probably contributed to the death of those systems.
Google has been slowly clamping down on user freedoms. Just one example, Google removed the option to save html5 video[1] (I'm sure users were begging for that "feature"). I would honestly not be surprised if the UX clowns at Mozilla remove that function from Firefox as well.
How long until they remove the "view source" option because being able to view source is confusing to people who have never used a browser and it is used less than 1% of the time or some other flimsy justification?
There have been people within Mozilla who just want to abandon their own code and simply release a re-branded Chromium. Because they only care about their precious brand and keeping the donations coming, and they are truly terrible stewards of the software they have inherited. Besides, once they stop actually developing their own software, they will have lots of money leftover to give themselves bonuses and throw expensive galas.
This is just false.
I guess you're not aware of the content blocking work we've been focusing on lately?: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/30/17800714/mozilla-firefox-...
Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on Firefox. I can say, without hesitation, that we definitely give a damn about protecting the user and protecting the health of the web.
There's no reason for this kind of dog whistling.
Can you give an example? While I personally don't agree with everything Mozilla has done in the last couple of years (like the native pocket integration for example) I do not agree with that statement.
Pocket integration: not the right thing, at least not the way they rolled it out in Germany, but not a restriction on user freedom.
Removal of about:config entries: This changes in response to changes to the engine, and restrictions can make sense if they avoid mainstream users from being confused about their setup so they find it difficult to find help. The developers edition usually has a bit more flexibility here, for advanced users.
Move to WebExtensions: This massively increases evolvability of Firefox, which I expect will result in better security, better performance, and less interference between extensions.
Changing appearance: I guess things like this are a side-effect of moving to WebExtensions. Maybe they will be supported again as the API evolves.
Dropping bookmark descriptions: these are identified as a possible attack vector in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1276819
Transmitting user data: this really does help developers and I find the way Mozilla go about this not to be sneaky the way their rivals are.
Setting the defaults to values that don't confuse mainstream users is fine. Removing the corresponding settings from the settings dialog or other easily-accessible UI ... maybe. But removing them even from "about:config"? That used to be the place explicitly for advanced settings for advanced users, settings that were too scary for the UI. These settings need to be somewhere. (What if mainstream users discover the Developer Edition? Mozilla will have to make a Secret Developer Edition to make sure only the real advanced users can find it!)
Also, where in that Bugzilla thread are bookmark descriptions mentioned as being an attack vector? I can't find anything about it.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Dev...
I was wondering the same thing. The only relevant item I could find is in bug 1402890 [0] linked in the very last comment. It says:
> Websites dictating what goes in a user's bookmark without any way to change that would be a terrible idea. Doubly so if it's secretly stored without even being viewable.
To me that seems like a valid privacy concern, but it should be solvable without discarding the entire feature. The "it's too hard to maintain this, let's just drop it, some volunteer will implement this again if it's needed (yeah, it won't integrate with our own UI like the current solution does, so what)" mindset in both those bugs just reeks of CADT [1].
I read the issue where it was discussed and a few suggestions to handle it in a way that didn't break bookmarks for people who used the description feature were pretty much ignored by the developers. The only reason I could infer from the detractors is that it was inconvenient to implement. As a long time supporter of Firefox the way they disregard us users shown in that thread altered my opinion of Mozilla significantly.
They can't outright come out and take an adversarial position against google -- they rely on them for hundreds of millions of dollars. Mozilla would not exist if Google did not pay them to be their default search. Donations account for 5% of their revenue, maybe.
Pale Moon is proof enough of that - the platform is viable, and people care about it. If Firefox were to discard the wrongheaded choices, I'm pretty sure sure that the PM community would fold back in. Rather than saying, "oh maybe there's a reason Mozilla Corp's not using the money for real advertising", users would still be going out like we did in the early '00s and building word-of-mouth to support a product worth supporting.
Corporations do not exist to "play nice". They exist to overtake, consume, and ultimately to destroy. Google has almost fully overtaken the Web for corp backers. Mozilla needs to develop the guts to take it back for the users.
"Pale Moon? What???" -- 99% of the world. It has 0.06% marketshare.
If you have a way for Firefox to make money without corporate support I am all ears, but fundamental idealism isn't going to solve anything for Firefox, it will just cause Mozilla to go extinct. I'd rather have them around than not.
And close enough to zero top-tier developer hours as to make no odds, so the "democratic decisions" would make no actual difference to an app that would be suddenly dead in the water.
Yeah, I would love to see a fierce, wholly independent Mozilla both doing the technical ass-kicking it's been doing, and with a much freer hand in user advocacy. But if Mozilla's income were to be cut off, everyone would suffer: they would suddenly have zero momentum with which to continue either their technical excellence or their existing, worthwhile advocacy efforts.
Further, we are not exactly talking rocket surgery here, this is an extension anyone can install with a few clicks and as many can attest this is some serious bang for the buck all across the board (performance, privacy, security). Not to mention in the meantime they had the resources to auto install addons like Looking Glass
> There have been people within Mozilla who just want to abandon their own code and simply release a re-branded Chromium.
Citation needed.
Here's my quote: we're committed to Gecko.
It dates from back when Mozilla seemed to be losing quickly, and actually rebranding Chrome (with their own changes) might have made sense. I'm glad they didn't, of course.
I have no reason believe he, or anybody else at Mozilla, currently thinks that way.
See https://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/and-then-there-were-thr... on Presto's demise (except it lives on after death in Opera Mini, to this day!)
And https://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/04/blink.html on the Blink fork.
I _am_ curious about the motivation behind Firefox Focus though. I use vanilla Firefox on Android and really enjoy it.. what was the motivation for using a Webkit base for Focus? Seems like the stripped down, privacy focused experience would have worked fine based on Firefox proper?
I'm pretty sure the answer is quite simple, which is that the Gecko embedding story has been diabolical for a long time (i.e., it's hard to put Gecko in a new product), whereas the majority of WebKit ports and Chromium (through its Embedding Framework, or to a somewhat lesser extent its Content API) are designed to be easily embedded in new applications.
AIUI, the fact this led to this ridiculous situation is part of the reason for the renewed interest in embedding Gecko (and the emergence of GeckoView).
The work to make GeckoView offer a full set of functionality in Focus should also help other apps.
However, Focus (on Android) is now moving to "GeckoView", Firefox for Android's Gecko engine repackaged into a WebView-like component. GeckoView will be available for app developers (Mozilla or others) to build new browsers. Watch Mozilla's Hacks blog for news coming soon! :)
Here are instructions for test driving Focus+GeckoView now:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Release...
Ironically, the only successfully growing Gecko-based product is KaiOS (see http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/india) but the current MoCo+MoFo leadership killed the upstream support a while ago to focus on Desktop. Maybe they will see the light...
Despite? I'd say because of. The last of my primary reasons for using FF over chrome were killed with Quantum.
Which?
Most likely the parent used one or more of these, as they were some of the extensions you could point to that Firefox had but Chrome never really did, and without them Firefox arguably doesn't have the same appeal.
There's still plenty of reasons to use Firefox over Chrome, but there are also plenty of users bitter about the loss of their previously working extensions.
this. I was never a tree view tab convert, but definitely miss noscript and vim bindings, plus things like the selenium UI.
XUL sucked in many ways, I tried writing extensions with it and I have no illusions there. But coming up with a reasonable upgrade strategy for a huge swath of popular extensions was something that should have been done before deprecating it. Rather mozilla basically told people that if webextensions didn't do what they need now, then just hope for the best sometime in the future, and in the meantime too bad, your extensions are gone.
But honestly this wasn't the only thing, just the most recent. It's the general attitude of willingness to ignore the actual use cases of their actual users for some theoretical appeal to a mass market of "average users" that they've yet to convert. I felt much the same way after the Aurelius release broke a bunch of ui, and any number of other breaking changes over the last few years.
And by "the selenium IU" I assume you mean Selenium IDE, i.e., https://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/selenium-ide.png
Is that what you mean?
I'd suggest that you read my colleague's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15696184 to understand just how much friction the legacy addon ecosystem was creating. It just wasn't sustainable.
[1] https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p/issues/15#issueco...
That's why I installed Linux Mint on my parent's computer, it runs Firefox, Skype and Google Earth just fine, can download photos from camera, copy DVDs and that's basically all. No shitty antiviruses they can download and I can SSH to the machine to check what's going on. Nothing, if you're interested.
I was looking at Google, but I no longer have any idea what the heck their strategy on Hangouts, Meet, Allo, Duo and whatever else they're producing these days is.
FTFY
Unchecky works well to prevent that crapware from ever getting installed. It unticks those default 'install my paid crap' offers.
Working well in what sense? Is the stated goal to do evil and highly imorral stuff and get away with it?
Maybe they are trying to make life on the PC so miserable that people will switch to android.
1) Information gathering. This one I think needs no explanation
2) Controlling a platform is incredible powerful in influencing your users. Lets say you control an OS. Then you can nag on your users to also use your browser! If you control the browser, you can nag your users to use you mail system. Perhaps someday they will nag on the users to use their marketplace, their movie distribution system, their whatever.
They're nowhere near striking distance of making that happen; but you can bet your life that if they were, that they'd make a run at it.
Also, a browser can track your browsing behavior, data that can be sold.
Put shortcuts to your other products. An Xbox bookmark/button is an ad for the Xbox.. increasing Xbox sales, but also reducing the money they need to spend to promote the Xbox
If users decide they want a completely Microsoft platform- they login to windows with their msft online password, use ms office, etc they’ll be more likely to pick a windows phone or other Microsoft products that integrate with the products they already use (saving them setup time, transferring settings, etc).
If they have more information about you, they can make ads in bing more relevant and perform better.. increasing the price of the ads, and the ctr
There are a few ideas off the top of my head.
But it is a bit of a bait and switch, making a weird transition toward the very end into an advert for brilliant.org.
That fact doesn't negate the well-done informational portion, and brilliant.org sounds like a cool offering, but what a yucky tactic for such a high-ground video.
Every installation of Chrome on Windows is an opportunity for their most dangerous competitor to siphon off future opportunities. Anything which reduces that number is a fundamental win.
They also get to direct some percentage of users towards their properties (e.g. Bing) which do make revenue.
Finally there's the opportunity cost of not being in the game: having users in their camp gives them moves which they would otherwise not have. (Similarly Bing—some might call it a relative failure, but it's a roaring success compared to never trying in the first place. It was a good decision.)
All the other comments here are also true, but this is the main reason. They directly benefit every time you open Edge. I wouldn't be surprised if some ad sales VP made this decision after seeing the numbers broken down by "edge new tab impressions" vs "everything else."
Well for one thing, keeping people away from Google's browser keeps people away from their office suite, one of the biggest moneymakers outside the X-box division for Microsoft.
Windows tells me Edge is better when I install Firefox in the EU too.
It proved very difficult to keep my mother on Firefox. Chrome kept getting installed, for awhile it was bundled with all sorts of application updates.
Dark patterns, dark patterns everywhere.
The effort trying to remove this was immense. The crapware installer also managed to install a scheduled task to a randomly named executable that when I tested it with Microsoft security essentials said it was 'ok' but virus total told me it was some bag of shit malware.
WORSE STILL, Microsoft security essentials USED to pick this up as a quick google of this crapware update engine linked to a microsoft malware page, which no longer exists. Reading further I noted that MS stopped identifying some malware because "users might choose to use the applications that it installs"
No MS. If it's been sneakily installed with dark patterns consent has not been given, and it needs to be destroyed with fire.
Thankfully ClamAV picked it up, so I now regularly scan with that. sigh
WHAT ARE YOU DOING MICROSOFT?
If you mean Chrome proper (not OSS Chromium) SourceForge was doing this for a while and it was all over hackernews. Mostlikely that's where it was from.
I'd also like to see if the Web Archive has a copy of the microsoft malware webpage.
What you're saying would be 1000x as interesting/relevant/headline news if it was citable with screenshots and so forth. I do believe you, but references create lots more momentum.
If you think you might come across the info sometime in the future, posting it here or maybe reddit whenever that is would be awesome.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ccleaner+driveby+install+Chr...
Suggests that CCleaner at least had it, didn't check Reader.
Mine's on Debian. Seems to be working out pretty well. When other machines in the house are gunked up with who-knows-what, it's still there working reliably.
I'm still feeling ashamed at Google every time I see they push an ad in my (or my colleagues) face asking me to "upgrade" my browser.
Hey ass-holes! It's not an upgrade. It's a switch! Stop being dishonest about it. Stop intentionally confusing users.
Seems nothing much has changed in their approach in 30 years.
There's no way a decision like this one didn't get approval from the top layers of the company as it no doubt had to go through different levels of legal, product and everything in between.
Three years ago, I sold one of those restaurants inside a mall while still owning one just two blocks away. People from the mall come into this restaurant. Just yesterday someone told me that they hated the mall one. "They're just so mean to everyone!"
They did not know I was the owner.
Eh, this is like saying that people are just collections of cells. It doesn't tell you much about the high-level behavior observed.
If someone hands you a cupcake and punches you in the face with the other hand then you don't think that the two actions are from separate "organisations" of cells (maybe, in cases of schizophrenia, or similar).
People in an organisation often lack agency to fully control actions based on their personal ethics. This is often exploited by controlling influences.
The story of a how new, enlightened CEO was going to embrace open source, etc. was tailor-made for folks who want to believe they finally won over the last fight's great satan. The buzz seemed to be everywhere for a while, and then stopped. And it was timed conveniently around several open source releases that also made a splash - classic reenforcement advertising.
And it seems to have worked.
What open source releases were these, and what tim{e,ing} was this?
This changed slowly over the last two years for me as I watch the dot net special interest group at Fedora struggle. Microsoft has not released enough of dot net core as free and open source software. It looks free and open source but it isn't. The programmers at red hat (almost all the dot net sig folks are red hat people) are too nice to raisea fuss over it.
I don't think Scott Guttrie's team is lying. I want to believe in their sincerety. However, I also understand likely nobody at Microsoft: from the bottom engineer to Satya Nadella or the board is nearly at all enthusiastic about free software. They may approve of "open source" but only as far as it helps business. I can't blame them for being practical. However, I can yell at their hypocrisy.
Microsoft, give the fedora people what they need. Release the sources please.
Could you expand or do you have a link to the discussion? First I'm reading of this (but also haven't really looked into it).
And there's also the issue of communism the economic system, and communism the social control system. Economically speaking, does have some justifications. But the social control is more than willing to kill and imprison people for disagreeing with the economic system.
Capitalism also has similar types of flaws, and its own directly related deaths it causes. The difference is that capitalism the social control system blames individuals for systemic issues, including death and injury.
you're mistaking the economic law "Marxism" explaining why and how that stuff is happening for the actual political forces who advocate and force such a change. It like Newton's laws and the actual people shooting the guns which are working based on the Newton's laws.
The problem is not mere ownership though. Who owns it matters, because different owners have different incentives.
The incentive of a private business owner is profit. Especially for a company that is publicly traded, where investors have the power to sue management for malfeasance if they don't get a return and the company has been particularly charitable. If it can be done, you must fuck over the customer to make profit for shareholders, or be replaced by someone who will.
The incentive of a nationalized industry is the good of the state and its voters. Management is incentivized to provide a good product at a fair price to everyone, or else they get voted out of their job.
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
GNU Terry Pratchett
I don't recall these being "beloved". This sounds like a troll to me.
Sure Intel do FOSS graphics driver development, but I doubt they've ever been beloved due to their constant scandals (ME and Meltdown recently, and further back there's ClassMate, Itanium/Itanic, etc.)
AMD promised open drivers. We're still waiting.
ARM systems are usually locked down and full of blobs (e.g. for graphics, etc.). Plus ARM don't make chips, they just sell licenses to their designs to third parties, which is completely anti-FOSS.
Google do support a lot of FOSS development, but their online monopolies and spying infrastructure have always kept people suspicious.
Apple has a habit of turning liberally licensed FOSS into proprietary software (e.g. OSX is based on Mach and BSD, Safari is based on KHTML, etc.). Their mobile OS also requires programs to be signed, and they charge a $99 fee for developers to get a certificate.
As far as I'm aware IBM have historically been the enemy. They certainly pushed Linux forward around the millenium, but since then I've not come across them outside bloated "enterprise solutions" that I doubt many in the FOSS world would consider relevant.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
There you go.
No, we aren't. AMD's promise was fulfilled quite a while ago. They officially contributed, and work on, a FOSS driver for the Linux kernel, and also for Mesa. One of their devs is one of the most active Mesa committers this year alone.
AMD are more committed than Intel is, it would seem, given that AMD's drivers are far better quality than Intel's.
(I haven't been tracking this closely since I've avoid NVidia and ATI (hence AMD) graphics for about 15 years, due to their driver blobs)
They are more open with their development division, as they have to be. Windows is a completely different division, and more often than not, the notable members of the development division will call out their company.
Windows and development are subject to the same executive team, and same orders from the top setting corporate direction.
It was precisely that break-up that was ordered by the US court during the anti-trust case, and stopped with the arrival of the Bush administration.
Mobile and XBOX aren't subsidiary companies. Mobile rolls up closer to Windows than the browser team does which led to the mess that is UWP and the Windows 8 (and on) start menu.
Sorry, your comment is inaccurate.
Do you judge a given country population by the act of their leader? Because you have no reason to care how a given country divide its stuff. If a country does something that must mean that everyone in this country support this thing right?
If people act malevolently, encouraged by the leader of the country, then that leader is bad, and the country is bad because of that leader (and their associates who could stop the malevolence).
It doesn't matter that in some small corner of the country there's a grandad baking cupcakes for orphans, the country isn't saved from the malevolence (or ignorance) of their leaders by that.
You can give countries aid to convince them you're nice; but if your leadership is countenancing selling armaments to the Saudis -- knowing they're using them against civilians -- then they're corrupt.
All companies who want to do some evil for profit also take part in window dressing, it salves their own consciences and acts as PR.
It's entirely possible for Microsoft to do bad things like this while GitHub keeps doing its thing and Typescript and VSCode developers keep doing their thing.
Well, their PR department changed a lot, so they can keep the same old tactics while having people think they're the good guys now.
Open sourcing libraries and tools that make the lives of programmers much easier and even porting them to run on linux.
This may be a selfish approach approach from Microsoft (win the hearts of developers and the regular users will follow), or it might be signs of actual positive change.
The one thing that is clear is this openness does not extend to regular users of windows.
I'm mentally making notes that I should really be switching back to linux for my core desktop computing, even if I continue to use Microsoft technology like vscode, typescript and dotnet core.
Every now and then I hear some PR spiel or read some comment on HN about how great Windows is now and I try to run it, but I always run into some dumb thing like this that turns me off.
It’s not a good reason, but it’s possibly the reason. Ultimately it’s not really useful to attempt to paint an entity as large as Microsoft as all good or all bad.
Coming soon: github.com "best viewed in Edge".
There's also the whole Shadow DOM v0 stuff with YouTube that more or less artificially slows down rendering in non-Chrome browsers.
Google is just more subtle about it.
I don't want to be Microsoft apologist, but Google is doing this shit for years, and nobody says anything. One annoying popup in Windows and the end is near. Yeah, because we don't trust MS for things they did ten years ago. But we trust Google even if they're doing the same thing right now.
Google Hangouts Meet doesn't work in anything but Chrome.
Woo!
So it works even with the current ESR.
About a month ago, on a fully-updated Firefox, one of those (I forget if Hangouts or Meet) refused to start for me, saying Firefox was not supported.
Even now, every time I'm in a Hangout, it'll work on Firefox, then after exiting it redirects to a page that says Firefox isn't supported.
It's like the user-agent check was switched with something less reliable.
Oh, and it doesn't spy on me.
>The collected data is not-personally-identifiable. Meaning that a user cannot be singled out or tracked based on the data he/she provided. Here’s what Ubuntu collects
> Version and flavor of Ubuntu you’re installing
> Whether you have network connectivity at install time
> Hardware statistics such as CPU, RAM, GPU, etc
> Device manufacturer
> Country
> Installation time
> Whether you choose auto login, installing third-party codecs, downloading updates during install
> Disk layout
Hope you uninstalled all the extra bundled stuff from Amazon and friends.
I'd have to download the 18.04 ISO to check, which is currently unfeasible at this moment.
Ubuntu comes with a shortcut to Amazon on the sidebar. Clicking it just opens Amazon.com in Firefox. It doesn't spy on you or anything, it's just a hyperlink.
>and friends
Such as?
unity-webapps-runner --amazon --app-id=ubuntu-amazon-default
Application Options:
-a, --amazon Launch amazon (with geoclue store selection)
-i, --app-id Launch a webapp with a specific APP_ID
-c, --chrome Launch a webapp in default browser
So, that webapp also runs
/usr/share/unity-webapps/userscripts/unity-webapps-amazon/Amazon.user.js
Okay, ignore that. What else is default installed as webapps? Looking around the
/usr/share/unity-webapps directory shows only Google and Amazon.
Dash plugins include things like Facebook and Google Drive (again?)
At least the search bar has more applications than just the proprietary garbage. There's things like Flickr, Shotwell, Yelp, Picasa... hmmm.
However, in what.. 10 mins? you've been able to discover exactly what causes the "spying" and an idea on how to disable it. Perhaps in less than an hour you'll have a good idea on exactly what data is being sent.
Compare that to say, Windows, there we have no idea on exactly what data is being sent out or how to completely disable it (beyond being a company with volume licences or using firewall rules).
True, but that's only because I've been using the OS for a while. A lot of this is accumulated knowledge. There were a lot of gotchyas over the past 4.5 years (approx time I've been using Ubuntu .. coincides with my current employment time) that have been... eye opening.
Yes, it's still better than Windows as far as inspectability for the reasons you just identified. And it's still better than OS X as far as usability (my opinion). But it's still be very disappointing on many levels. I'm sure there are other things which could cause additional disappointments in Canonical that I have yet to discover.
Honestly I use Fedora at home. Even that isn't ideal -- I very much dislike the default GNOME environment and have repeatedly encountered trouble upgrading to different releases. I've been seriously thinking of just building my own personal distro.
Essentially this hasn't been an issue in about 4 years.
I would have to disagree. The mere fact that it's there and visible by default means it can be accidentally clicked on. Doing that opens a native application which loads an Amazon-provided javascript file. Cards are off the table after that loads.
Based on your vocabulary, I'm assuming you don't install Ubuntu using the network installer and expert mode, and then create your own desktop environment starting with a good window manager like i3. A person like you is definitely better off using macOS or Windows.
I'm not necessarily going to disagree with this - I switched from desktop Ubuntu to Mac and have hardly looked back because I really don't miss constantly dicking around with config files playing UI glitch whack-a-mole. Mac UI certainly has its own healthy share of warts - in fact I find it practically unusable without Divvy and Moom, for starters - but on the whole it's polished, functional, aesthetically pleasing, and usually doesn't get in the way of doing work. Those are all very important qualities to me as someone who spends a non-trivial amount of time doing things outside of a terminal.
Just because I'm capable of rolling my own desktop environment doesn't mean I want to or that it's a particularly good use of my time, and I imagine a lot of potential/would-be Linux users probably feel the same way. Being dismissive of that perspective is counterproductive if you believe that the world would be better off with more FOSS usage (as I do).
"Rolling your own desktop environment" takes all of a few hours. I'm pretty sure you made as much of an investment learning tools for your new mac when you bought it.
You get what you paid for is what ignorant people say about software. The entire software landscape is absolutely littered with very very expensive turds. Cost and quality don't seem to be terribly correlated.
The real problem areas are when people who want a personal computer try to color outside the lines of whatever the distro developer intended as a use case ("Why would you want to do that?" is a common and annoying response).
I don't remember a Linus Torvalds say "you're not supposed to hold it this way" to anyone. Instead, …
He would probably use a lot more profanity.
But unless it's a gnome dev speaking, I don't think it's something commonly aimed at users.
Consuming content these days often involves DRM, which rarely works on Linux. For example, if the context is books, good luck dealing with Adobe or Amazon DRM to read them on your Linux desktop (you can strip it, but it's a lot more technical than just clicking and opening it on Windows or Mac).
Or how about music? How do you sync your iPhone with your Linux desktop?
Both strategies work fine under linux. Did you not know that Netflix and Hulu work on linux just fine?
Regarding iPhones I would imagine most people who run linux on the desktop just don't bother buying them. Did you know that Apple's global marketshare is only about 15%? More people actually buy just Samsung's android phones than iphones.
Most people who run Linux on the desktop probably won't use iPhones, yeah. Which is because they're computer geeks. Which is to say, not the "kind of people who only use computers to consume content" at all.
In US, iOS market share is about 45% as of 2018. Globally, it's 20% (15% is counting smartphones only and ignoring tablets).
Which services don't work on linux other than itunes?
> For example, if the context is books, good luck dealing with Adobe or Amazon DRM to read them on your Linux desktop
You can also read your ebooks on your nook, kindle, or tablet which would probably actually be a better experience.
You can buy dead tree books.
You can buy non drm encumbered books.
You can buy dead tree books and then go and download a digital version of the same work from library genesis knowing that you have supported the author but not drm. Then you can read on whatever device you like.
If you are poor you can skip the first step and just read the books.
Your local library still exists and is positively full of books.
Many libraries provide free access to technology books via Safari Books.
The claim that you can't enjoy books without windows is a curious claim when so many options exist.
I'm not sure that's necessarily the reason to choose Android over iOS. Many use Linux on desktop because it is good enough or better than other choices, but might be ambivalent towards or disapproving of stock android. Android has its flaws and is far from being strictly better than iOS.
Pick something other than gnome?
IMO the real pain points are for more advanced users, I prefer to develop on a Linux box but I have always had to keep a windows installation maintained just for mech CAD software, there simply isn't anything decent avaliable for Linux.
Like Linux Lite distro[0], I'm running it right now and except for the inability of using super/windows key as part of multi-key shortcuts ala Windows 7, it's almost perfect as a drop-in replacement for the latter (for me personally and a couple of my friends)...
I did this awhile back. Grandma got upset that her library of Windows games, some of which she had been playing for over 15 years, weren't around anymore.
As more and more stuff has moved online, this is less of a problem, but my mother is still reliant upon Flash for certain online games.
Also those online experiences are, in general, inferior. They have lots of ads and pop-ups abound. The web pages are made as confusing as possible to try to entice viewers to click through to a "partner" and sign up for some service, etc etc.
Comparatively, the old Wheel of Fortune game my Grandma got 15 or more years ago (on a physical CD!) is better than anything available now.
If he weren't a grouchy old 85 year old man, not too receptive to fancy new technology, I'd buy him an iPad, put a nice chess game on it, and confiscate the PC.
Yeah but then a few updates later the chess game adds IAP and starts showing deceptive ads every 5 moves.
:(
"What do you mean my keyboard isn't supported?"
"Why does my battery only last two hours now?"
"Oh, this software is only available from source because the maintainer doesn't bother to release packages for my distro."
"Oh, that's a bug in version X.1, but we patched that 9 versions ago. Why are you still using that?" "I have Debian." "Oh."
conversely: "LOL, my media player broke because @HARDCORE_DISTRO released an alpha package as an update and now sound doesn't work."
Graphics drivers didnt work during install, no big deal, I'll just use text mode. Except the text mode didnt work either for some reason. To fix the issue I would have had to compile my own image, or to trust some random guy on github that he didnt put a rootkit in his installer.
There are definitely annoyances like these which you dont have on windows/mac. You dont need to be a good programmer/hacker to fix issues like this, yet on linux, you sometimes do.
While I really love linux and its distributions, you cant expect endusers to run them without big issues
Can ubuntu nowadays install nvidia drivers or does that still not work? For an enduser "installing graphic drivers" is not particularely easy ("what is a driver, why do I need it", etc), yet something pretty basic ("why does this [linux compiled, opengl] game run at 1 fps?")
The funny thing is, even when decompression "works" on Windows 10 (that is, when you join hands in prayer and don't disturb the machine), you could theoretically just download the decompressed files faster over the internet. I can only guess the there's something fundamentally broken about Windows and file systems because many operations are so ridiculously slow no matter the hardware. It's perhaps my biggest gripe about modern Windows, aside from the actual desktop (working with multiple windows) being very bare and annoying to use, useless set of default applications, and that the built-in localized keyboard layout is obsolete and thus quite restricted as far as punctuation goes.
Yeah but I have, on multiple occasions, installed updates through a Linux package manager and after a reboot been brought to the console.
> I can only guess the there's something fundamentally broken about Windows and file systems because many operations are so ridiculously slow no matter the hardware.
NTFS is bad handling a large number of small files.
> aside from the actual desktop (working with multiple windows) being very bare and annoying to use,
How so? I love the hotkeys for snapping Windows, and Windows also has hotkeys for moving windows between monitors.
Lots of third party utility apps exist that can extend this functionality out.
I have, however, spent a whole day trying to install Windows 10 because of obscure "can't find drivers message" which turned out really meant "you should unplug your install usb and replug it into a different usb port and then I can find the drivers on it".
Or trying to work with students on a Swift project, only to find out that the MacOS file system pretends to understand Unicode file names, but really ignores them.
Wait, really? HFS stores Unicode file names in (according to Wikipedia) the "Apple-modified variant of Unicode Normalization Format D)", but it really does store them, I think (unlike case, which it preserves but ignores, which basically means it guarantees wrong behaviour).
The real problems for me are:
- outdated packages or unstable rolling-distro (OpenSuse Tumbleweed is surprisingly good, but not as well-supported as Ubuntu/Fedora)
- bad game support (few titles and shoddy Windows ports)
In 10ish yeaes Linux has in all except one case:
- installed faster than Windows
- worked out of the box, no hunting for drivers
Spend about 5 minutes poking around on the internet with your eyes open and you'll see. If you're too lazy for that, this guy has put together a convenient, but by no means complete, list [0].
> rather than have some particular paradigm forced upon me?
You have many paradigms forced upon you, they're just paradigms you happen to be comfortable with so you don't count them.
[0] https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
Why don't you just say what they are, rather than trying to offload and displace the question?
> You have many paradigms forced upon you, they're just paradigms you happen to be comfortable with so you don't count them.
Such as what? Monolithic kernel vs microkernel? What paradigm is forced upon me?
> Such a Linux Desktop evangelist comment chain. Step one: ask what problems people are talking about. Step two: completely dismiss and downvote all responses.
Except what problems have you pointed out? You're just hand-waving and saying "Oh course the Linux Desktop is unusable. Just at random webpages - that proves it!"
You asked for examples of problems, so I provide a link to a well put together list of common Linux Desktop problems.
What does that even mean?
Although it worked fine for my Desktop computer, I ran into numerous issues on hers:
- Touchpad didn't work
- After fixed touchpad, physical touchpad buttons still don't work
- Wifi doesn't work
- Wifi hotspot doesn't work
- Lack of gestures
And others that I can't remember off the top of my head.
The solution is to manually patch your BIOS, which doesn't always work and is extremely technical. It's also not a solution provided by Lenovo, so officially, there is no solution.
Ninjaedit: Hmm, it appears Lenovo may have finally issued a BIOS update to fix this issue.
[0](https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201801-26053/)
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Linux-Discussion/X1-Carbon-Gen-...
https://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/22/apple-encouraging-safar...
Much less invasive than what this is doing but still pretty disappointing.
I don't like this move by Microsoft, but they called out on shit like this more than other tech companies it seems.
Chrome for iOS already does something similar but you only get to choose between gmail and the native mail client.
Out of curiousity, how well does that work on a bigger screen like that?
I recently installed the Android version of Firefox on my Essential Phone and find it pretty snappy and nice to use.
It doesn't integrate quite perfectly with ChromeOS, but that's not surprising. Supposedly Pixelbooks have built-in support for running normal Linux apps, so I might end up trying the desktop version of Firefox at some point.
Why does it keep suggesting Chrome?
AFAIK there's no option to set a default web browser on iOS.
TBF, I automate my installs so both Firefox and Chrome are installed from the command line via brew cask. Maybe that's why.
But it's not cross platform. I use a Windows desktop, Debian laptop, and Apple phone. Edge is available on exactly one of those platforms, while Firefox and Chrome are available on all of them.
Until that is fixed I will not consider edge, despite how fast or "secure" it may be over the competition.
Edit: seems that Edge is available on the App Store[1], and Linux requires a Wine workaround. I prefer native support, without hacks or clunky install processes.
[1]https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-edge/id1288723196?...
Unless you count safari, if they still bother porting that outside iOS/OS X. In which case that wouldn't be preferable anyway.
There is nothing wrong with running different browsers on different operating systems.
Chrome on the other hand, I discovered just yesterday, refuse to export bookmarks from android unless you sync. Yet another reason not to use chrome I guess.
Cannot comment on iOS, but the main value of Firefox on Android (vs. the default Chrome) is that it runs extensions, particularly uBlock Origin.
> But it's not cross platform. I use a Windows desktop, Debian laptop, and Apple phone. Edge is available on exactly one of those platforms, while Firefox and Chrome are available on all of them.
It's actually available on less than one platform, since it only runs on Windows 10, and only on desktop editions (so not on thin client desktops, which use Server).
Oh how quaint. Do you have a Ryzen CPU? If so you're leaving performance on the table, because core complexes are internally implemented as NUMA nodes. Windows 10 Pro does not ship with a NUMA aware scheduler. If you want that you're looking at $300[1] for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. -- Personally I would not consider Pro a "standard" option since it doesn't work w/ ~40%[2] of new CPUs sold.
[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-10-pro-for-worksta...
[2]: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Intel-AM...
AMD do disagree that windows 10 scheduler is a problem, for standard Ryzen anyway https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-and-Windo...
Do you have benchmarks for the same cpu on Windows 10 Pro, Workstation and Server?
EDIT: I'm not using a Microsoft account, that might be it?
And we're not fine with it, we just can't do anything about it because Microsoft does not listen to complaints.
Cheers.
that's a great point, though. You can live in a world where you can have a software business that does not depend on Windows. 20 years ago, that was pretty much a dream.
But if Microsoft wants to convince people to use Edge, they should start by dumping a bunch of resources into sanding down the rough spots and applying some spit and polish. It's like 90% of a satisfactory browser at this point, maybe even 95%, but the remaining bits can be really, really frustrating.
Here we are complaining about Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla's behaviour. Arguing about openness, paying for software, market share. You control exactly two of those things. You control what you pay for, and your choices affect market share. Yet you're complaining about the level of open-ness of companies who aren't trying to be open, hoping that someday it will change.
They don't change because their customers arbitrarily WANT them to change. They change when their market share is threatened and they are FORCED to change.
You want to make the Windows team listen? Stop using Windows. You want Mozilla to stop using Google as their default search provider? Change your default search provider manually. You want Google to stop spying on you? Stop using Android.
A lot of people will argue that it's not practical, too much effort, too costly. That's fine, but don't expect anything to change. You're acting like sheep so you're being treated like sheep. In one breath you say "companies only care about their bottom-line!" and in the next you whine "Microsoft is upselling me, Googleplex is tracking me, Firefox is in bed with Google!"
Well, that's because Microsoft pushed Windows 10 in your face and you ate it. Google tells you they'll sell your info and you let them. Firefox tells you they're gonna hop into bed with Google and you said nothing about it. You're screaming, but they have headphones on that are made up of your cash. When you speak softly and carry a big stick, these companies will listen.
I have exactly zero influence over that.
Believe me, I've tried.
You've missed a key line of what GP said:
> A lot of people will argue that it's not practical, too much effort, too costly. That's fine, but don't expect anything to change.
It's not practical, and it's a lot of effort, and it's too costly, but you could use a different operating system. Find an employer who doesn't use that operating system. The "cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face" option.
Lived in part of the world where healthcare wasn't tied to employment
You don't have to become a mountainman. You can't solve children starving in Africa at the same time as you solve racial inequality in the American justice system.
It's fine to just pick a couple issues and do what you can. If your contribution to open source is pestering your boss about it regularly, well, there you go. Yell about it on Twitter a bit as well, maybe write your congressperson. There's options.
At that point, I no longer need the Windows team to listen do I?
I actually like Windows in general and I have plenty of devices running Linux and other operating systems.
But if the balance ever tips so far that I stop using Windows as my primary desktop environment, I'm not likely to go back.
Every single one of those operating systems comes with their quirks/pile of warts and I can't objectively say that one is so superior to the others that I'd want to run it exclusively.
At work, I've switched from a Macbook to a Lenovo and I vastly prefer Windows to macOS. It somehow manages to get out of my way better than macOS does, plus it has a window management UX that is not a hot mess like the one in macOS.
Catering to people who want a super easy streamlined experience is hard. They want rigorous QA, tech support, and broad compatibility, all of which are very expensive goals to chase with diminishing returns.
A good video-editing UX for amateurs looks completely different from a good video-editing UX for professionals.
Long-time users of vim or emacs love their editors because of their UX, while many new users hate them for the same UX.
Doesn’t help that there are relatively few desiners that are contributing into open source projects compared to devs. It’s rare to find a designer contributing a cohesive ux to a project and when they do it’s hard to find someone that understand every piece of the program to actually swap out the interface.
Project with a good lead can at least mitigate that by gating new contributions and fixes to adhere to some general design, at least improving the app invrementally.
It's like who says that if the price of gasoline is too high we should simply stop using cars for a couple of days and the oil companies will drop the price, sure but what if I need my car to go to work ?
The real deal is that these abuses of dominant positions should be punished, a company like Microsoft or Google shouldn't be allowed to do actions aimed at damaging other small concurrent companies or discouraging the use of alternatives.
The fact is, even if I go through the trouble to not use anything I find problematic, it's not going to affect those companies. "Here we are complaining" because getting others to be aware of the problem and to take action is the only thing that'll work.
Hence, why we scream our heads off over things like this.
I'm unable to find a source right now, but I remember reading in like the New Yorker or something YEARS ago about how all throughout the 50s-90s, the TV content ratings and what appeared on television was functionally decided by an organization titled something along the lines of "Christian Mothers of America," who would mass-write studios based on a similar value set. Given that this was the most tactile feedback the studios were getting (bearing in mind they're also getting ratings and viewership numbers), this was the primary determinate of TV content for decades.
I recently gave them several hundred dollars, partly to make up for lost time. Browsers are effectively operating systems now. What's a good OS worth to you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
A few months back, I had to log into my Windows partition, something I avoid as much as possible. I wanted to install firefox. So I get on IE, search for "firefox" on google.com. Above all the results, the top prominent ad slot is for Google Chrome.
Google stoops just as low as Microsoft.
Does that imply that having MS Edge installed is something to be warned about, or that installing Firefox/Chrome is somehow bad for your PC?
I've noticed this trend since Windows 8, but it's gotten really bad in Windows 10. Their messaging has become very anti-user.
My personal favorite from more recent builds of 10: "Windows is a service, and regular updates are an important part of keeping it running." Oh really? A service? My mistake, I thought I had licensed an operating system.
It seems to me they learned a lot. That using monopoly advantage to attack the competition works like a charm and that anti-trust cases are toothless.
Microsoft essentially "won" the anti-trust case since they weren't broken up.
They're still attacking the competition but they're not doing a very good job of it.
I deal with Microsoft a lot. They are back to 90s Microsoft mode. You should be skeptical of anything they say.
Not all of us had a problem with 90s Microsoft mode.
Every time I have to deal with Android development chores I miss MS tooling.
Using ChromeOS or Android with Googleplex as gateway for every mouse movement or click is tenfold worse than using Windows 10.
Is it? Did somebody compile data on Android telemetry already? Anyway, ChromeOS is a wash, but you can always remove Google software from an Android installation (well, more like flash a new AOSP installation but eh) which is 100% worlds better than any Microsoft software offering, in my opinion.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...
Flashing Android devices, the hobby for grandma when nothing worthwhile is showing on tv.
Of course, for maximum privacy, an open source with minimal blobs ROM like Replicant would be much better. Shame 2011 era hardware in mobile land is so much relatively inferior to laptop land (e.g. X200 with Libreboot)
Again, you can't do this in Windows 10. The telemetry and "add-in apps" get installed again periodically after updates [0] last I checked
[0] https://www.resetera.com/threads/windows-10-keeps-reinstalli...
Typical geek answer that regular consumers wouldn't understand a word of, neither want to void their guaranty in some shady computer store.
99% of Windows 10 users can't grok disabling telemetry and trawling deep into powershell script every update too. (Well, at least Microsoft doesn't think disabling excessive features to be warranty disabling, for now...)
What I discussed was how a proactive, technically competent user can wrestle Android back into having 0 Google telemetry and spying, which... Can't happen in Chrome OS, or say for example Windows Phone 10 (RIP).
These kind of solutions is one of the reasons why desktop Linux never really took off, rather Android, ChromeOS, Tizen and such, where the presence of the Linux kernel is a mere implementation detail, as it could be changed by any other POSIX like kernel without any difference on the user experience.
We should strive for solutions that work for everyone, not the tiny percentage of proactive, technically competent users that know about HN and XDA.
They are all "open" where it suits them and closed where it doesn't. I think what we can observe is that these days it suits Microsoft to be open in more areas than it used to.
I think Microsoft isn't set up in a way that allows to judge them uniformly. Trust the typescript team or the VSCode team seem warranted. I personally quite like what the Kernel team is doing ever since Windows NT. But the User-facing layer of Windows has made dodgy decisions for decades and has always favoured pushing an agenda over user-friendliness, with some successful usabilty pushes in between.
To evaluate Github the real question is how much upper management was involved in this feature, and how that might impact Github. That doesn't seem clear to me at all.
They can say "one of the safest and fastest" browser though.
We've had a number of cases like this over the years where a company makes a statement like "the best pizza in town" and they can't prove it and have to change the text.
that doesn't sound like a particularly threatening consequence
I'm actually OK with non-measurable claims, "best" is abstract, the best pizza is the one in your hand, or something.
Now, "biggest"/"fastest"/"$weight"/"$size"/etc. well they better damn well be just that, if you're "footlong" is ever less than a foot (not on average either!) then I want your company crushed until it bleeds money.
Not sure that will fly in Norway.
Not really into consumer protection laws but I live in Norway and we had this[0] discussion 3 weeks ago about the use of the word "free" and I guess they might be equally picky about "best" as well (a good thing IMO).
Yesterday an old neighbor phoned me that after an update he lost everything and he could not connect to the Internet anymore. He spent most of his life without computers and clearly is not a tech guy, but he's also not an idiot and if some update warned of software deletion he would not allow it. Long story short and in his words because I wasn't there, at every boot a requester told him he had to allow an update, so he allowed it. The PC then kept making its own business for some time and when he logged in back, everything was gone. I took a look at the machine in the evening and yes, the desktop was just like it had been freshly installed, with only the background and profile avatar and credentials exception. The system also left a file on the desktop containing a list of the deleted software; there were about 5 or 6 entries and both Firefox and Chrome were on that list. Luckily all his documents were still in their directory, but after reinstalling Firefox, all his bookmarks and saved passwords were gone without a single warning and no way to recover the profile data. I won't go further describing how annoying then became Edge in remembering us it's the best possible web experience. Just no thanks, he'll stick with Firefox (Chrome has become suspicious as well), and the Migration to Linux is about one week away; he won't be the first 70+ years old user I convert.
I could easily imagine someone stumbling onto this and running it. (Windows Security -> Device perf & health -> Fresh Start).
So, they're lying. They're straight-up, bold-faced, red-handed, lying to their customers to get us to install their spyware which reads and syncs your text messages.
I'm finished with Microsoft. They're such a garbage company and always have been.
Remember, the scorpion ends up stinging the frog in the end, because that's it's nature.
1) All the Microsoft haters are going to latch on to this and cite it as an example of how truly evil is regardless.
2) It might stir the pot enough to encourage Microsoft to reconsider.
Almost like how Fox News has intentionally misleading news to rile up conservatives?
I don't understand. Why should this not be cited? They shipped this code to their customers. A limited release doesn't mean it unhappened.
Microsoft's Insider program is an opt in where you get to try out potential features. There's a history of features being pulled from the channel, their Sets feature was pulled in June.
1. HN guidelines stating, "Don't editorialise titles," and
2. The article itself is quite upfront on the issue - it's not like they tried to bury it or mislead (arguably except for the borderline headline), and
3. It does tell us, in no uncertain terms, that at least some coterie within MS is thinking of doing this thing.
My guess is that this inside build functionality was deliberately leaked to test the waters, see whether anyone would care.
Could the headline have been better? Probably.
Should we be concerned when the veil momentarily pulls aside and we glimpse the real MS behind the New Shiny Friendly MS mask? Certainly.
I don't actually know what an insider build is, btw.
In the beginning, it was just Microsoft.
Interesting follow-up there is that Facebook, in lifting so much of Snapchat for use across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, has been giving Evan & team a pretty terrifying karmic kick in the rear... and though there might not be a connection here, Microsoft does own 1.~% of Facebook, after all.
Disclosure: own shares of SNAP; probably not selling soon (it either wins by chance or I write the whole company off as a loss). I don't exactly have the best opinion of the company.
Still, the blatant advertising is repulsive.
No, Edge is not faster than Dillo or NetSurf ;-)
- window title
- certificate that signed the executable
- the "downloaded from the internet" flag that IE and Edge set on downloaded files on the NTFS level (the one that causes the "Do you really want to run this program downloaded from the internet?" one-time confirmation modal)
That's not quite true, considering how Chrome ended up on many PCs, e.g.: https://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/26/avast-7-will-install-googl...
That's kinda the impression I get, there is definitely no sense of "security" or "privacy" in this or in the first run of Chrome or Firefox messages that also tend to show up.
It sounds more like "if you follow our recommendations we won't be so obvious about us monitoring what you do."
But if not, I don't think the UK Advertising Standards Authority's remit includes adverts built into already-installed software.
Microsoft can claim anything, whether true or not.
Oh and not to mention that any code could potentially be buggy and lead to yet more malware infections. Not something Windows needs help with!
If an OS will intercept your download, and guide you towards a "better way", how will a competing product even gain marketshare.
One of the reasons against developing for the desktop.
> While there is certainly a chance that Microsoft is just testing things in preview versions of Windows, it is equally possible that such a setting will land in the next feature update for Windows 10
Still don't like it, though.
They've catched up quite a bit on that front: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...
Also, IE before version 6 had a history of being extremely innovative (DHTML, anyone?). That's part of how they won the first browser wars (that and pushing the browser through their OS).
> and exposing system vulnerabilities via ActiveX
Now that's just baseless fearmongering. Edge supports neither ActiveX nor Java Applets. That's why IE is still around: for legacy websites in corporate intranets that still require this junk. I'm not sure if IE is installed on non-Enterprise SKUs of Windows 10, but it would surprise me if it was.
Every. Single. Time I open Google using Edge. And Chrome is just as annoying wanting to be the default browser.
How is this different to a prompt when I install Chrome?
Both are highly annoying.
I thought it was just some weird misconfiguration, but now I wonder... Could MS be actively slowing down downloads from LibreOffice to discourage users from using it?
While this is quite the abuse of marketshare in OS to push Browser marketshare, I don't think the EU will care that much considering that Edge is a niche product, they will care once they do have a sizable chunk of browser marketshare.
I do sort of agree in this case because it creates more competition in the market (ie Chrome vs Edge) which is healthy.
IE11 is not going to die this way. Why can't they do what the Chrome Frame did years ago, and just offer Edge-inside-an-IE11 frame so we can finally move forwards JS-wise? I don't mind adding a dozen custom headers and meta tags this time around, but please, come up with a way so every-day-web-developers can get away from IE11's constraints
The only reason I like IE over other browsers is because its UI hasn't changed much and remains relatively un-dumbed-down and un-mobile-apped like a Windows application should. Its configuration dialogs are also standard ones.
The article lost its credibility in the opening paragraphs.
How?
Microsoft was fined for bundling IE.
Google have not been punished yet but will hopefully IMO soon be for abusing their position to push Chrome.
Edit: Two remove all doubt; I do not intend to defend any of these two. This is abuse of market position by both of them IMO.
[1]: https://www.onmsft.com/news/microsoft-quietly-takes-controve...
The user being actively steered away from an alternative browser, is unlikely to expose the user to 3rd party risk. It might expose them to personal data being collected by Microsoft.
Whereas, for example, Apple's latest hardware with Secure Boot, lacks both an Apple signing service for UEFI applications, and the Microsoft UEFI public certificate (which near as I can tell all non-Apple x86_64 hardware does have). Linux distros get their shim pre-bootloader signed with the Microsoft UEFI key, that's how they can leverage Secure Boot. But on the latest Apple hardware, no Linux for you unless you disable Secure Boot. I've found no support document how I can add enroll a key, either my own, my distro's, or Microsoft's public UEFI key.
I think the Apple case is provably worse, it does expose users to 3rd party malware.
Engineering lead: "I'll ask the Edge team to add an overlay when the user visits a Chrome download URL, but that might change. The installers are signed though, so we could check the package name and author at install time..."
Boss: "Great! Go for it- give me a timeline, this has highest priority for the realease in N weeks"
> "You appear to be installing Firefox on Microsoft Windows, there are less painful alternatives you know!"
I remember when my old job blocked my installation of Tor. "Unwanted software detected." Why wouldn't a company want people browsing with Tor? The surveillance is increasing. Not as bad as China, but I hope I go to the grave with something more positive to say than "not as bad as China."
You're supposed to be working on your work machine and "IT teams know best". Tor is usually a big red flag that your machine is attempting to evade corporate surveillance, which means that you're actively exfiltrating data or that you've been infected by something bad.
Sure, you probably don't want Google to know that you're studying the market for a specialized piece of software/solution. But Management doesn't care, so just use the Incognito Window, and be happy...
How have the added convenience features added to Windows 10 that do make it more accessible like a phone, equate to a reduction in your ability to work on it?
I use Windows 7 as my primary workstation and I am constantly annoyed by the rough edges. I'm looking forward to my company migrating me to Windows 10.
Bluetooth support in Windows 7 is horrid. The stack is proprietary to the vendor and device support is unstable at best. Intel provides proprietary drivers to Lenovo but doesn't change the Device IDs so Windows Update tries to install the bog standard Intel Drivers. Their proprietary drivers don't support Bluetooth 1.0 devices and their standard ones don't support A2DP.
While the Win 7 Startmenu's layout is ideal, the implementation is crap. Pinned Apps and the quick access flyouts are the last thing to load (upwards of a minute after logging in). The search prioritizes documents over Apps and Control Panel so you're twiddling your thumbs waiting if you search for "Add remove programs".
File Explorer can't make up it's mind if it wants you to use Favorites or Libraries more. It enumerates Network Devices in the Navigation Pane just cause. The Libraries in the Navigation Pane doesn't show all of the libraries you have setup, it gleefully shows Videos and Pictures which I'm pretty sure no one has ever used but leaves out Documents and OneDrive.
Ever tell your laptop to shutdown or hibernate, waited for desktop to fade away to the throbber screen, then shut the lid? That's always fun because when you open it up later it wakes up from sleep and finishes shutting down or hibernating.
Because they've implemented those features in a managed runtime that is slow as molasses. I have 64 GiB of RAM, a high-end enthusiast CPU (Skylake-X), an NVMe drive, a high end GPU -- and the start menu lags, and sometimes loses keystrokes altogether. Search was completely broken for me between builds 1607 and 1709 (the start menu would not find recently installed apps, it would not find any files at all, etc.)
This completely disregard for performance and consistency infects every part of the operating system they "update." -- The new control panel's VPN applet frequently gets out of sync w/ the actual state of the tunnel, and the connect/disconnect controls stop working. There are many things you can't even do with the new control panel. There are many instances where you have to wait for the control panel to fail it's happy path (e.g: printer auto discovery) before it just gives up and presents you a link to the old printer adding wizard.
Then let's talk about their updater: I've already told you I have what I consider to be an enthusiast-class workstation, yet the last major update took over an hour to complete. What is it doing w/ nearly an hour when it has 50,000 IOPS and 300Mbit/s of WAN at its disposal? Any Linux distro I have ever used can basically finish an installation as fast as it can do IO, meanwhile the Windows updater doesn't even in-flight a second download while the previous package is installing, and then it proceeds to waste my time with three to four reboot cycles.
Then, after these updates are finally finished, they pull stunts like in the OP. When it did the Fall Creator's Update (1709?) it reset my default browser to Edge. (Nevermind that part of my job is web development, and I'm very particular about the suite of browsers I have installed & how I have them configured.) -- I've had Windows tell me I'm running out of RAM when I have >30% left. (That's _20 gigabytes of RAM._)
This is absolutely insane, I have lost so much productivity to this pile of trash. I have never regretted an OS purchase from Microsoft before, but I regret this purchase, and that is coming from someone who owned Windows Me and Vista.
I also get the impression that you're primarily a Linux user who has to use Windows and is just latching on to any reason to complain about it.
> Because they've implemented those features in a managed runtime that is slow as molasses.
To my knowledge the Windows 10 UI is written using the C++ Runtime, not a managed one. The use of XAML is not an indicator of a managed language, UWP Apps can be written in C++.
> There are many things you can't even do with the new control panel.
Microsoft is gradually migrating features from the Control Panel over to the Settings App. As such the Control Panel still exists and is readily accessible.
> There are many instances where you have to wait for the control panel to fail it's happy path (e.g: printer auto discovery) before it just gives up and presents you a link to the old printer adding wizard.
And for most people the happy path works and is significantly easier to deal with. Not everyone is comfortable editing CUPS config files.
> the last major update took over an hour to complete.
How long does an distro-upgrade take you? Because that's the equivalent procedure. It really sounds like a problem with your system because the Spring Creators update too about 15 minutes on my systems.
> meanwhile the Windows updater doesn't even in-flight a second download while the previous package is installing
Windows 10 downloads all of the updates prior to attempting to install any of them so... what are you talking about?
> I've had Windows tell me I'm running out of RAM when I have >30% left.
Again, that sounds like you have something else going on and you're just blaming the thing you despise for all your woes.
While I use Linux for development work, I still prefer W10 for gaming and design work.
Your comment about Tor being blocked by your employer has nothing to do with this discussion.
Most "free" tools like this aren't free, because they rely on data-trapping techniques. These programs are roach motels, with no good way to lossless way to take control of your own data. But that's exactly why it is "free" ; because your data is worth more. Thats the cost.
I use things like the interactive BOM https://forum.kicad.info/t/interactive-html-bom-plugin-for-k...
along with uConfig, I can make KiCAD parts directly from PDFs. https://github.com/Robotips/uConfig
Digikey also has almost all their parts in a KiCAD library. Clone the repo and import it... Its crazy complete, and combined with the BOM tool, even generates DK part number links. You can determine price easily....
Along with that, there's a great many plugins for FreeCAD as add-ons here: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-addons . I really like the GDT, a LOT.
Open source starts out rough, but the more work is accomplished, we get better than the commercials do :) We all build on each other - we're not competing in a death-math style competition.
Seems like if they were forced to do that, there's no way they would get away with this, but I'm not sure if that ruling still applies.
Windows 10 still has N variants for Europe to comply with those rules.
If this goes through that will be a whole lot harder to do with a straight face :-/
This is why computing is going off the rails, and computational literacy is critical.
The computer belongs to the User. It's sole purpose is to compute, FOR THE USER. If your software is running on someone else's machine. And you want data exfiltrated back to you, normatively speaking, you should ANNOUNCE your intention, EXPLAIN it, and ASK for permission, this includes honoring their decision if they say NO.
The industry has clearly been sliding down a slippery slope in which businesses have unilaterally decided that running THEIR software exempts them from having to respect the User.
This is madness. If a society operated on the types of practices that are considered "appropriate" in computing, we'd be liable to label them as savages.
Keep your interbusiness competition OFF MY MACHINE!
(Thank God for Linux From Scratch!)
I wish, but this hasn't been the case since 2005. LFS won't help if your firmware limits kernels to those signed by Microsoft, or help you decrypt the signal sent to your monitor with your monitor vendors pubkey, or stop TCPIP running on the proprietary copy of Minix that Intel installed for you.
General purpose computing was lost a decade ago.
I've also tried to avoid EFI and Intel processors. My previous laptop used OpenFirmware and a Geode processor, which I'm assuming never had a hidden OS/Web/etc. stack like Intel's. I eventually upgraded about 4 years ago, when the first laptop (a refurbished ThinkPad x60s) got the FSF's "respects your freedom" certification. It's not perfect, since it's got an Intel processor and I think there's EFI running underneath LibreBoot, so I've been keeping an eye out for a replacement.
I don't think we need to give up. There are some promising developments, with "bottom up" efforts like RISCV and "top down" mitigation efforts like those of Purism. 'Consumer electronics' may be a lost cause (without legal intervention, at least), but there are still options for those who prioritise digital freedom above convenience, price, etc. (e.g. Talos II)
While your entire principled nature is worth admiration, may I ask what your objection to EFI is?
As far as I know it's an open standard, and there's nothing fundamentally bad about it.
I know lots of people have issues with UEFI Secure Boot (mostly based on FUD), but secure boot is strictly optional. Not to mention many UEFI firmwares lets you load your own keys: I.e. it respects your freedom.
Are you sure you're not accidentally conflating UEFI with Intel Management Engine (which is indeed spyware)?
Pretty sure
> may I ask what your objection to EFI is?
> I know lots of people have issues with UEFI Secure Boot (mostly based on FUD), but secure boot is strictly optional.
I'm not the most knowledgable about this, but as far as I understand it secure boot is a hard requirement for Windows 8 hardware certification on ARM, although as you say it's optional on x86 (presumably for legacy reasons, like users expecting to have control over their machines). This is essentially the same strongarming of OEMs that contributed to killing OS/2, BeOS, etc. so the fact it's (currently) optional for certain machines doesn't quell my concern to having so much of the world reliant on Microsoft keys.
> Not to mention many UEFI firmwares lets you load your own keys: I.e. it respects your freedom.
That's not a feature I have any intention of using, and prefer to "vote with my wallet" by trying to avoid it and support alternatives.
(This is based on my existing understanding, supplemented with skims of pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In... )
> As far as I know it's an open standard, and there's nothing fundamentally bad about it.
Purely anecdotally/ranting, my only real experience with EFI was trying to boot from a USB stick on someone's machine (to try and recover some of their data, if I recall). I couldn't figure out how to even get a menu or anything, so I gave up.
In contrast, it didn't take me long to feel quite at home in the Forth prompt of OpenFirmware; despite never having used Forth before.
Fair enough, but it is a security feature I can use to harden my system against attackers. Several Linux-distros support this OOB these days.
But if you're not interested, no pressure. Everything works fine without it.
> Purely anecdotally/ranting, my only real experience with EFI was trying to boot from a USB stick on someone's machine (to try and recover some of their data, if I recall). I couldn't figure out how to even get a menu or anything, so I gave up.
EFI is different for sure. I can't say I blame you for not wanting to read up all about it[1] when you had other stuff to do.
That said, EFI is conceptually and practically much simpler than traditional BIOS boot. It doesn't rely on magic bytes being written in specific sectors, it doesn't put a limitation on boot devices or types.
(Overly) simplified: It just says that if your medium of choice contains a file a \efi\bootx64.efi on a FAT-partition, your machine will be able to boot that thing with no further action required on anyone's part.
As such creating a bootable medium involves 1. having the right FS-type, 2. copying the files.
I haven't looked into OpenFirmware so I can't really compare, but compared to traditional BIOS I find EFI conceptually much simpler, much more manageable and to top it off much more secure.
I'm happy.
[1] https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how-does-...
It is; but BIOS is a very low bar to beat ;)
Switching from the Amiga to the PC around 2000, it surprised me that such a primitive, legacy system like BIOS was still in use at all.
These types of practices only started when people started fighting over arket share once PC's started to become more popular, and most of the people who were working on them were either too busy making cool stuff to complain, or being ignored as geeks.
The Free Software movement, however, has been there for a long time. Just nowhere near as well funded.
There are many industries with similar, parallel, practices that are directly at odds with serving the "user." For example, groceries. A typical grocery store presents a selection of products in a grocery aisle. This presentation is not optimized to give the shopper the best experience, lowest prices, or highest quality products.
The products, and product displays, are optimized to extract the most profit from the shopper, often resulting in inferior products. Grocery stores also collect and analyze reams of data about individual shoppers -- again, not for the purpose of providing better value for the shoppers, but for extracting maximum profit from them. Want that data back? Good luck!
A better comparison would be walking to the checkout line with $brand_A sugar and watching the clerk put down $brand_B and start the motions of scanning the barcode forcing you to make the active move of stopping them to say "no, I know what brand I picked out, get out of my way and let me buy $brand_A"
Simply suggesting a what works best on the side of a box can't reasonably be compared to actively halting an operation deliberately initiated by the user.
Not very successfully.
> your printer tries to stop you from using ink cartridges from a different manufacturer
I can inject ink into the port, for cheap.
> your car will often strongly discourage you from getting it serviced by anyone other than an authorized dealer.
Only the top-range cars, for rich and upper-middle-class people, who have the ability to buy different but won't because it's a silly status symbol.
My wife lost her purse with (it turns out) the master key to my minivan. The minivan is maybe worth $4k. (I'd have to fix it before I could sell it.) Getting the key replaced is $750. Because that is what Toyota wants to charge and nobody else can do it.
If I had an older car, it would be a cheap visit to the local Home Depot to duplicate the remaining key.
I haven't replaced the key. I don't value the threat model that they theoretically protect me from. I do value the convenience of being able to replace the key. But it isn't worth $750 to me. Instead that is just one of several things that are on my list of "replace if X happens".
The problem is twofold:
1. There should be a single checkbox that says "keep your grubby mitts off my machine." As it is now, users must proactively keep Microsoft out. Even then updates can give Microsoft the keys again.
2. Microsoft cannot be trusted to work in the user's interest. They always steer the user towards Microsoft products.
Don't thank God, thank the people that actually made it possible. RMS, for example. You don't have to use LFS to be free. You can use any other free software distribution.
Corporations have more rights than individuals, and they have less responsibility. We as a society have decided that Corporations are more important than the individual and we made that determination because of jobs. We must treat corporations gently or they will move all of their jobs to other countries. What you are railing against is just a small piece of the puzzle.
I believe it to be accurate to say that there is a party with a vested interest in making sure that Corporations have more rights on paper. I do not believe it terribly fair to make the assumption however that EVERYONE is okay with that.
I can literally pop open a dialog box asking for permission to browse your Documents and extract some 'interesting' data and I bet 70% of users will click "ok", since, well, that's what The Computer (like it's its own sentient entity) "wants me to do", and I need to get my work done.
Your suggestion simply cannot work, because 99.9999% of users don't hack their own .vimrc and have no idea what the heck those annoying boxes are asking of them, but they do know that by clicking "OK", the box goes away.
Yes, there are a LOT of defaults people will just "go with" on the basis of path of least resistance. That does not absolve we programmers and software engineers to write well behaved, principled software that respects the sanctity of the user's digital sovereignty.
A computer is a tool, not a playground for the first person to throw code at it. Attitudes in the vein of your comment aren't uncommon, but that doesn't make them right.
The fact it has taken so long for technical literacy to get to where it is at is because most people have grown accustomed to the machine making decisions for them because it didn't occur to the programmer to present the option to think for themselves. Or, that saintly programmer wanted to, but got shot down in the name of UX and quick KPI boosts rather than creating an experience of the computer as a tool a user can do something with.
So again, I beg to differ.
Having rules this complicated and debatable as to when they've been violated is like having no rules at all. The rule that users should have complete read/write access to all of the software running on their own machine is enough.
Reroute their water into your system?
Siphon off their power? (Which embedded cryptocurrency miners and unwelcome analytics and data gathering are a perfect example of.)
Or use their cellular data, for that matter?
I realize there may be a lot of dislike of this ethos as it may be seen as leaving money on the table, but fundamentals are only fine to skip over when you actually show a credible mastery of them in the first place.
The tech industry's ability to ask before doing has been far from proven. It's only now that people have started to understand enough to realize just how much has been going on out of sight.
So you have. My bad. Seem to have filtered it out since it pops up in places where I'm usually mentally filtering for relevance to the issue in question.
#2) I stay away from Italics because they actually make reading more difficult for those of poor sight. This is counterproductive for making sure you can get the most important bits of your message across and if caught without my glasses, your italics are very difficult to see. Caps stand out, generally have thicker, or less visually ambiguous glyphs, and are immediately visually recognizable. I'd use bold, but the editor doesn't seem to support it through any syntactic convention I'm used to.
I consider capitalization to be a way of making sure text stands out, as I've been legally blind for most of my life, and while I'm not as bad anymore, I'm painfully aware of the challenges people with visual impairment face, Therefore, Italics generally take on a less meaningful role in the context of emphasis for me, due to their ability to be more easily mistaken when being looked at. So unless communication is something fairly trivial, or an out-of-band thought, I generally use bolding and capitalization imstead.
By the way, screen readers were not well known for reading out typographical characteristics, so often, a visually impaired person will have to figure out where it LOOKS like emphasis may have been in text. For more don't's to make your content consumable by the visually impaired, have a look at
Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines, it should be trivial enough to Google.
Have a gander at https://www.w3.org/WAI/
And even
https://sw00000004.schoolwires.net/site/handlers/filedownloa...
Or for that matter ANY guide on internet accessibility.
Furthermore, I don't understand why you thinking it's yelling takes anything away from the conventional point of yelling, which is to... provide an auditory form of emphasis via audio signal amplitude modification. The changing of typographical glyphs, draws the eye to content (when said change can be discerned), and primes the mind that Thar be a point to be made here. Perhaps that is my own brand of social ineptitude, nevertheless, I do make a habit of questioning anything that doesn't make sense on functional and aesthetic grounds due to an interest in minimizing overhead in communication and minimizing the number of restrictions on the myriad ways people may attempt to express themselves.
I don't want to derail the thread anymore, and despite this finer point of typography and content rendering in a way which is conducive to the visually impaired being a rather passion invoking topic for me, I assume everyone else is not here for that. I'd prefer not to have too continue, seeing as it breaks yet ANOTHER guideline.
I'd also like to direct your attention to
Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Both points which you (though you are doing it I assume in pursuit of the execution of your your duties to the best of your ability) are straying rather close to.
Instead of providing a reasonable and substantive reply to any of the content in my original comment, you have quibbled over the way it was delivered, detracting from the quality of the conversation despite knowing the typographic convention was being deployed in a way reasonably discernable as conveying emphasis.
So if you are a moderator, consider your message received. I will do my best to abstain from typographic conventions that offend your company's sensibilities to the detriment of my own personal readability without my glasses, and to anyone else's.
Thank you for the link as well. I hadn't noticed the Guidelines on the bottom, again, de-emphasized textual prominence, being a bit of an issue for me.
If you have any ability to escalate feedback, implement bolding and accessibility aids for the love of all the visually impaired.
If you'll excuse me, I'd like to see what I can learn from other's input, I have largely tried to keep comments substantive and on topic.
i still won't use edge personally, but for other reasons.
Notifications? No Startside? No Tracking everything? No
And most business that are not big-tech (as in, most of the world's businesses) are still utterly invested in Windows and Microsoft.
Enterprise has always been Microsoft's biggest cash cow.
Companies like this stifle innovation.
Perhaps. But then again, I'm using my iPad to draw with Procreate, and it's the best experience I've had (both software and hardware). I'd argue in this case Apple is quite innovative.
Things are never black and white.
Right now is it not worthy to build a business selling desktop software to Linux, unless we are talking about enterprises, movie studios and a few other niche markets that migrated from UNIX workstations to Linux desktops.
I'm happy to pay for lots of things. But I'm not interested in paying for crappy software. I wouldn't, for instance, pay for Microsoft Word.
It amazes me how little people value other people's work on this site.
I cringe every time I have to deal with a Word file.
People do say this though. People have personal preferences for the software they have to use all day, and most of the time people don't agree on what that software is. And most of those decisions are driven by the type of work people do. I don't expect a lawyer or a business analyst to use command line interfaces, and I don't think they expect software engineers to code in Word...
And the other people, who were discussing the command line, ignore them.
The point is that you can't really criticize something when your criticism seems to boil down to "I don't understand this".
And who said anything about writing code in Word? What are you on about?!
For the last year Word has actually supported LaTeX for math equations, see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2017/07/30/latex-ma...
But aside from that, Word is great for short and medium length documents, especially ones that need group editing. Put a Word file up on Sharepoint, and now there is user friendly change tracking and commenting.
I've written multiple technical specs in Word, it serves as a great way to collaborate, so long as everyone has bought into the ecosystem.
Well that's the problem isn't it, every potential collaborator who can't or won't buy it will be shunned.
The same argument can be made for any piece of software. People have to buy in, even free software requires taking time to learning it vs whatever existing workflow is in use (if any).
OP points out LaTeX, but for non-technical and non-academic people, this is a non-starter. Word has an extremely low barrier to entry so it makes tons of sense for the general public and K-12 education markets.
There's a reason it's so popular and why LibreOffice and GSuite have emulated the bulk of it's feature set.
As a lawyer, I deal with other people's Word products all day every day. What Word features am I missing out on? I am genuinely curious and not trying to be snarky in any way.
All those pesky macros that would allow your computer to be infected
Not seen Word in a while I guess.
An office document format is basically source code.
That's why the openness of a graphic format doesn't matter, but clear specifications on how to interpret an office document make an enormous difference.
I would seriously fork money over if MS would ever build Linux version.
I have never lost a document in LibreOffice, Vim/gvim, AbiWord, WordPerfect (long time ago), or OOO.
I lost a ton of documents, sometimes to the cost of many thousands of dollars, in Word. (Disclaimer: haven't used word since like 2010 or so)
People get burned, and thus jaded, by lots of different, sometimes opposing or contradictory, experiences.
I know another example that goes in opposite direction, of Humble Bundles, where Linux had consistently higher average payment than Windows, but that may have changed in recent years.
> Again, we've done the research. The profits aren't there -- very few Linux users are willing to pay for commercial software. And the cost of entry is still high because of the fragmented Linux landscape. The Linux world has to change before commercial software will have reason to invest in Linux ports. And we haven't seen much real change in the Linux market in several years.
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/487814
> At the height of the Dot-Com era, dozens of startups tried selling proprietary applications for Linux -- and not one survived more than a couple of years. Even Adobe, after releasing a popular beta of FrameMaker, withdrew it from circulation after a poll suggested that users were unwilling to pay for applications.
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruc...
It wasn't perfect software by any means, but perfect is the enemy of good anyways.
But, lot of software I need to use doesn't need to be that high level and for what I need plenty of high quality open source options exist. I have no problem paying for software, whatever os I use, if it's the software I need. But if an open source alternative with comparable or sometimes better features exists why wouldn't I use it?
And games honestly, There are plenty I would spend money on if they supported linux and i've purchased ones that have interested me.
I used open source software on Windows, and I carried that habit over when I switched to Linux. I have only ever paid for games on Linux, because everything I have needed has a satisfactory FOSS alternative.
Hell, I bought a macbook a couple years ago, and I have never bought a piece of software for that either.
It's not because of the OS.
My gut sense is that open-source/paid-support model is an ideal, which also provides an incentive for the publisher to produce as good of software as possible. I don't know if Red Hat or Canonical are profitable doing that, but it would be nice if that were the way that everything could work (maybe, I haven't really thought that much about it and am open to rebuttal).
I am averse to paying up front for something that I don't really know whether it'll be what I want and won't just be a pile of shit.
I don't buy many phone apps either, for that reason.
Not everything is a web app these days and many people still prefer to own their software instead of being a recurring revenue source for the same functionality month after month.
I worked at MS for a long time. I can say that sort of stuff hasn't happened for quite awhile, and people involved in it happening were fired, some of them rather publicly.
Now days, expense reports are gone over very carefully. Everyone at Microsoft attends yearly ethics training, which covers all manner of topics, including what is and is not acceptable to do to win sales.
Realistically, when it comes to cloud based productivity systems, the choices are Microsoft or Google.
> then the top executives with no technical knowledge are happy to sign multi-year contracts that lock them into those vendors
Any half decent company is going to have at least a CTO in charge of these decisions. The CTO should have multiple people working for them that are capable of making engineering decisions.
If a company sends a bunch of non-technical people to a technical presentation to make a technical decision, that is the company's fault.
2016 isn't that long ago, and that's just one that was badly-judged enough to have made the news:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-18-microsoft-gdc-...
The overall feeling inside MS at the time was "wow, that was stupid, hasn't that team being paying attention to how the industry has been changing?"
An even more formal policy change was then sent out, reminding people of dumb stuff they aren't supposed to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corruption...
It was nothing in-your-face like strippers, but still pretty immoral.
It must be a toxic environment, working with people who needed to be continuously trained on how to be ethical.
Good on them for trying to do something about it, however.
If you want to make honest money with software then you need to solve a problem I have and help me do more work with less effort, for such a software most people will pay.
If you want to game, I recommend dedicating a separate Windows machine to the task.
As a result, games are getting nicely filtered /proc.
The gist is to prepare the directory structure, icon, .desktop file, flatpak metadata, appstream info, add dependencies not provided by flatpak runtime (for games, libGLU for example), put everything into ostree repo (flatpak build-export ...), and then either install from that, or export the content into .flatpak file (flatpak build-bundle ...).
The last step can take a while, .flatpak files are lzma compressed and the compression during export uses only one cpu core. For 20GB game, that isn't exactly quick, to be diplomatic.
As a fallback if some new game appears and I really want to play it I can get it on my kids console.
Having said that, I haven't really observed a difference in Linux users willingness to pay for large functional applications. I don't think there are objections to paying for IntelliJ or Photoshop grade applications in general.
Ubuntu seems to be trying to make a paid appstore/proprietary appstore using Snap, which could be good, could be bad. We'll see.
Selling Free Software doesn't tend to work very well, since every customer is free to resell it and undercut the developer. Still, I do spend a lot of money on Free Software since I have a bunch of automatic donations to affiliated organisations (FSF, WikiMedia and Open Rights Group in particular).
(I don't use proprietary software due to ethical concerns; see, for example, this HN submission)
I think the way the software economy works today has a lot of malincentives. I don't think simply transplanting that same economy to linux would solve any of the problems.
Microsoft has fallen in the market-share of OSs, can no longer be considered monopolist move.
But yes, it's a new low, there was never a "new Microsoft" just better PR.
Maybe it's possible to run Firefox through the new Linux apps option they added?
That's not how anti-trust works. Just because a player does not hold as much of a market they used to, does not mean they do not have a monopoly or cannot abuse it.
Microsoft absolutely has a monopoly on the desktop OS market. And even without that monopoly this is abuse. With monopoly, this becomes abuse of their power in addition to being abuse of their users.
For example, the consumer choice feedback loop breaks down when scale gets large enough that market signals from individual decisions are smaller than the amplitude of the noise, making it easy to neutralize them with marketing. We are heading in a direction where market breakdown occurs long before monopoly power, and cartel-like behavior is more likely. The largest players are so large they have more incentive to cooperate to keep everyone else down, while maintaining only nominal competition with each other.
That doesn't mean anti-trust is no longer relevant, but that people arguing for it need to revise their position. Antitrust has never been about monopolies, but about abuse of power in the market. It was only a historical coincidence that that lined up with monopolies when the total economy was smaller. Corporations have now become so large that market failure begins long before monopolies, and our trust-busting strategies need to adapt to that.