If MS won't get its act together, they should be regulated, broken up, or have their OS seized by eminent domain for the public good.
If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software.
Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost. It just fails to surface an overwrite dialogue, and assumes the result is no.
Now Windows on the other hand.... I just set up Windows on a new laptop I bought recently.. just plain Windows as it shipped with my new laptop. Didn't do anything "outside the box" here. I've let it update after this fiasco was supposedly over, restarted - and, of course - can't boot, everything's corrupted, had to reinstall Windows from scratch. Never had this happen with macOS, FreeBSD, or Linux.
It's hard to believe, but it really is _that_ bad. I wish it wasn't!
Linux on the over hand it's a continuous installation of drivers and fixing functionality that works out of the box on my windows: graphics problems, audio, screen, usb, WiFi.
Of course and then you try to install some module and says you have incompatible modules. Then you need to figure out what modules you need to change to match the version of the module to install. This was a few years ago, but I don't have the time to do this.
Plus window management is broken on Linux, too many bugs. Last time I couldn't even alt tab like windows.
Honestly if I had a little willpower I think I might have been able to get a satisfying result at some point but the effort just wasn't worth it for me. I use my home computer like 3-4hrs a week in the weekend for games and maybe hobby projects if I don't feel like dying. I'd rather just have something that plainly works in a predictable manner, but even that seems to be asking too much nowadays...
Try installing something released in last 20 years or so.
I don't believe either of this where 100% bug free.
That's because they're usually required to accept the lowest reasonable bid. As someone who works in the public sector, trust me, we try to get the money to people we know will do a good job. We have to work with the shit we buy every day. We want it to be good. There's just a lot of people willing to put in maximum of effort on a bid and minimal effort on execution.
> Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost.
I mean, kind of. I agree it's not as bad as the article implies. However, it's a pretty common pattern to download a zip file, extract and overwrite, and then throw out the zip file. It's not directly resulting in data loss, but a very common user pattern will result in data loss when you encounter this bug.
Lots of public sector bodies use best-value rather than lowest-bid procurement.
* are required to hold a public tender
* Before you start, you create a list of criteria, with a weight for each of them.
* 50% of the weight goes to price.
* Once the process starts, common sense is treated as being bribed.
Turns out it is very easy to be 50% cheaper than anybody else if you are not required to have a working product.
1. base the software on an established, battle-tested open source product, there is one for almost any business case
2. use the money to hire an in-house team, hiring norms in public sector at least ALLOW for quality selection, unlike public procurement ones
3. develop in the open, invest into visibility, attract community members
4. shill, try to get as many agencies across your and other member states to pick the same solution and co-develop the software with you, this way the cost drops for everyone
Even if you can't find something to satisfy point 1., the other three points would still work to your benefit. If you can push this for long enough to make the software standard in more places, you could get a critical mass of outside developers to form consultancies you could hire later for additional work.
I know Munich is poster-boy of this not working for desktop OS-es but that's really a consequence of two things:
1. They made all the wrong choices (heavy customization, chasing windows look and feel, not tracking upstream progress)
2. They got elected officials who were effectively Microsoft shills (the top-down decision to go back to Windows was heavily pushed by a single executive who was pissed off he couldn't use Outlook he was used to on his previous drone job).
Turns out they often need to tender as fast as possible and just use "lowest price satisfying all other criteria" as a way of choice.
> Turns out it is very easy to be 50% cheaper than anybody else if you are not required to have a working product.
You are allowed to specify absolute requirements in addition to sorting criteria. For example, you can say, worth more than some price, "the contractor shall have at least n years of experience". As descendant says, these are used to work around ban of subjective selection. Sometimes, they overdo it, and no vendors qualify at all.
Exactly these are being used to pick a specific vendor. "Must have at least N people certified to do X for at least Y years", with "must have turnover of X for the last Y years" and few more, and you find out, that there is exactly one company qualifying.
Second half, no. That's pretty disturbing territory being leapt into, and sets a very bad precedent.
Even if there was precedent, I cannot imagine a single government taking over an globally distributed operating system AND making it better.
The US Government could maybe do something like force Microsoft to sell Windows to another large company at firesale prices, like Google or IBM, in the same way that Merrill Lynch was forced to sell at bargain basement prices to Bank Of America, at which point BofA became too big-ger to fail.
[ https://win10.guru/how-i-lost-my-windows-insider-mvp-award/ ]
The LTSB/C is a joke, it's literally just the regular release with Cortana and other garbage removed.
Companies and government should not be using the targeted version at all.
It's not an excuse for the issues, but it's not a big problem for companies as you make it seem.
I'd almost be sympathetic to them doing that - but I also think the outcome would be absolutely terrible. Necessary maintenance (fixing security bugs, updating to new hardware, etc) takes a lot of work and I'm not clear that anyone else would step up to do a good job of it. See how the various android OEMs act...
IANAL, but I think that would violate the Constitutional prohibition of Bills of Attainder.
No, it wouldn't. A bill of attainder declares a person guilty of a crime or specifies criminal punishment for a particular person.
The 5th Amendment Takings Clause, though, is likely to be an issue.
Windows 7 was peak Microsoft. Between trying to make desktop look like mobile and adding built-in spyware and ads, it's been downhill since then.
Most people are better served by NOT windows. Using Win10 without a specific program that isn’t available for macOS/Linux is bordering on masochism.
Some of us like 100% laptop support without speeding weekends tweaking them instead of being at the park with friends and family.
Even buying from Linux friendly hardware stores isn't always a success, as proven by my own Asus netbook.
The main difference these days, once you got past the setup, is that as a non LTSB/LTSC user, Microsoft keeps inflicting damage onto you (e.g. in the form of reappearing Candy Crush) with no way for you to stop it without continuously actively fighting.
It sucks that as a gamer, I'm basically forced to use Windows.
If I could run Ubuntu without worrying about game compatibility, I'd switch in a heartbeat.