Microsoft Releases a Linux Version of the ProcDump Sysinternals Tool | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Releases a Linux Version of the ProcDump Sysinternals Tool

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455 pointsArtWomb354 comments

This thread is yet another example of "you can't please all the people all of the time". This tool is a useful addition to the Linux toolbox, made freely available by Microsoft, in what would be yet another step towards embracing and supporting OSS - yet for many in this thread, that's just not good enough.

That's because people have weirdly unrealistic expectations when you put 'Microsoft' and 'Linux' in the same sentence. The biggest thread on this post seems to be about the prospect that Microsoft should/must/will (circle as applies) completely abandon Windows in favour of Linux, based on very little evidence, almost certainly because people don't know what to make of … well, any of it. Microsoft have been contributing to open source projects, the Linux environment, and so on for years (at least since Ballmer's left), and yet people are still coming to terms with it because it still messes with their world view — and quite rightly, too; forty-odd years of precedent in the other direction is hard to scrub from one's mind.

"Microsoft Linux" would be the most EEE thing they could do and I don't think anyone here expects that. However, it would be nice if there has been a bit less fuss about Microsoft going open-source. They should do just what everyone else does: extract useful software from your software stack, release it as free software and make the community a bit greater in doing that. Get your praise from the software you release, not from the fact that you do.

(To be fair, I think Microsoft engineers are actually staying low-key and just release stuff, while the management, marketing and fan groups are talking about how great Microsoft has become for FLOSS)

For the people that are still against Microsoft's involvement in mainstream technology, I don't think there will ever be a time where they'll accept Microsoft.

That's not to say that their criticisms are unfounded. The main criticism today is around advertising and telemetry in Windows 10, and that's absolutely a problem for a professional device. There are many scummy practices still going on at Microsoft, and the disjointed nature between their divisions is plain to see.

I don't mind it, because I think criticism is required to keep people/companies honest, and to drive improvement, but at this point I think a lot of people in tech will always find something to complain about in regards to Microsoft.

Since quite some evil tactics have been employed by MS against the FLOSS community, it is also good if an official apology would be issued. I really believe such a thing can "clear the air". They are supporting Linux now, and contributing in FLOSS: so we know they do not thing that open source licenses are "evil". Yet they have advocated for them evil in the past. So make a public apology and move on, now it's like they simply hope every one forgets.

Issuing an apology will do squat.

The people that oppose Microsoft aren't asking for one, they're asking for changes to other things so the apology is moot. Microsoft is far from perfect, but they're possibly the only one of the big 4 that is at least trending in the right direction.

They've apologized in many ways over the years, and especially in many of their PRs about their open source efforts, but also in casual moments and jokes in their conferences. Ballmer himself admitted he was too harsh on open source in a magazine article somewhat recently.

I doubt they simply hope every one forgets, they probably hope every one forgives eventually.

Thanks. I did not know they apologized for stiffling the FLOSS effort.

I've never seen such PR, but I will trust you on it.

Who is supposed to issue this apology?

The person writing the press release for such an apology didn't do anything, so there's nothing for them to apologize for. The people responsible for Microsoft's anti-OSS stance are minimally involved in 2018, if at all.

There are plenty of people and companies who apologize without putting action behind it. Apologies are a nice gesture on a personal level, but they don't mean anything without action, and they don't mean anything at all at a company level. Microsoft is, at a minimum, showing it wants people to think it's changed. People unwilling to give them a chance are not going to be persuaded by a press release with apology in the title.

> Who is supposed to issue this apology?

Who was involved in the decision to fund SCO in their lawsuit against IBM over copyrights in Linux? I could stand to start with those people.

Next, round up all the people who paid for (and probably ghost-wrote) articles, in all the trade press, to persuade corporate America that Linux was a copyright-absorbing cancer?

I'll believe Microsoft "LOVES LINUX" when they announce Office365 for Ubuntu, and not a day before.

Yes, I'm bitter. I was very active in trying to get Linux more-widely accepted at my Fortune 250 in the 90's, and a bad-faith manager used the lawsuit, and the coverage of it, to stifle my efforts.

What lawsuit happened in the '90s? All I see on the Wikipedia page started in 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#Tim...

Are you sure it was a lawsuit and not the state of the still very new Linux in the '90s? From what I recall, Linux didn't have a good reputation before 2.6.

It would be a nice gesture, but I still don't believe people will forgive Microsoft.

Microsoft are a different company to the one that tried to damage FLOSS. Those people want an apology from a strong Microsoft, not one they refuse to acknowledge as a top-tier tech company in 2018.

IMO, it's not the attack on FLOSS that people hate. It's the impact on the tech landscape during their time in tech, and no apology will repair that history. All we can hope for is that Microsoft continue to fight the good fight, and focus on creating good products and services. As I said before, criticism keeps a company honest, and hopefully that hate will balance out the praise and make Microsoft into an honest voice in tech.

> Microsoft are a different company to the one that tried to damage FLOSS.

Sure, "the river is never the same" :) But it's also the same shop and should be up front about this type of change in attitude, right?

> IMO, it's not the attack on FLOSS that people hate. It's the impact on the tech landscape during their time in tech, and no apology will repair that history.

I do think they still suffer from their sneaky behavior. That kind of impact on tech is to be expected of any capitalist outfit. Fixing that would be gov't's job.

People who remember the Microsoft from the 90's and early 00's are justifiably wary of them "embracing" things they like. When we used that word it was generally followed by two others, none of which was "supporting".

And it's not like present day Microsoft is without issues. As a user as far as I'm concerned every new version of Windows is worst that the last for instance. Ads everywhere, dark patterns in the UI etc... There are reasons to be cautious when we see them setting foot in FLOSS world, there's history here and it's not like MS suddenly turned into a non-profit open-source advocacy organization.

For the people who weren't around back then:

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" was one of Microsoft's key strategies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

The people who weren't around back then still hear it being shouted every time "Microsoft" and "open" are seen in the same headline, so we know.

Even if Microsoft wished it still had the power to EEE Linux, everybody crying "Embrace, extend, extinguish!!" seem to not realize that the Linux ownership of the data center ship sailed a very long time ago and it's not coming back. Regardless of whether the perception of the Microsoft's current leadership is more forward thinking with a desire to be good corporate citizens, the reality is Microsoft is making these kind of moves towards OSS because it's good business.

As a note: Microsoft was still under US Federal oversight until 2011 for their past behavior.

Also, Steve Ballmer left Microsoft just four years ago and Bill Gates still works there. No, he did not retire or leave.

> and Bill Gates still works there

That's a good thing, right?

That depends. Microsoft was evil under Gates, but they could also be competent. Under Ballmer, they were evil, but more incompetent. Under Nadella, they are less evil, but still incompetent. If Gates could help with the competence, but ease up on the evil, that would be good.

I have problems with Microsoft, but I'm also annoyed the amount of praise some devs give Microsoft for doing anything related to open source. Some devs just fawn over every little thing Microsoft does, while also expecting Microsoft skeptics to forget most of their history just because of the past five or so years.

You can't just appreciate them for being reportedly the biggest commercial open source contributor, while still hating them for everything else? There surely is some nice, open source tools from Facebook and Google, that I use on a daily basis, but I trust those companies only as far as I can see them, too (which isn't all that far).

I don't care at all about Microsoft being the largest open source contributor. It doesn't change my opinion about them one bit. In fact, I use it against them because they constantly talk about it as if it were a big deal.

Microsoft and Microsoft fans just can't let their actions speak for themselves and allow opinions to change naturally. They just have to force themselves on developers and say "wow you don't love me, OKAY, I'll just buy the platforms and services you love so you'll have to love me". I know why they do this though - it's because Microsoft's history is akin to Sauron, Darth Vader, or Lord Voldemort. Microsoft's history is just comically evil and the only reason they've changed is because the landscape shifted in such a manner where Microsoft was FORCED to change. They aren't doing this from to bottom of their hearts and they don't deeply believe in the open source idea and spirit; they are only doing it because, by the grace of God, the internet became the place to do business and not the desktop.

Microsoft would still demand its pound of flesh from all of us if they could; and they'd still be a closed source firm that looked down upon people who believed that free, high quality open source tools were a win for society in general, and they sure as hell wouldn't have let go of Balmer. Microsoft and .NET developers with stockholm syndrome need to stop treating us as if we're dumb for not bending the knee before Redmond.

Trust is important. It's a filter that allows us to efficiently interact with the world around us.

The company produces and ships spyware and adware.

For better or worse, that influences how all of their actions are seen.

Microsoft skeptics fail to realize that most of the mid- and upper-level executives increasingly spent their entire career using, creating, and contributing to F/OSS software. Many of them were involved with early MSFT OSS efforts back in 2008-2010, and many came from deep Linux/OSS community via acquisition (Nat Friedman). Hell, the creator of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, someone who bears the scars of the Microsoft War on OSS, now resides happily at Microsoft now.

For whatever faults MSFT has today, any sort of antipathy or guile towards OSS or Linux is not one among them. Credit where credit is due. Too many are stuck reliving past glories.

If you want an actual OSS bogeyman, you need only direct your attention to Oracle. Too many transferred their goodwill towards Sun to a company has, among other things, tried to claim Java’s APIs as their own intellectual property. That’s a company that still merits this kind of hand-wringing.

Actually, the only two well-known OSS guys that work for MS are the ones you mentioned. Their reputation is far from flawless, in fact for a long time they were considered to be a negative influence on OSS because of their MS-focus.

Seeing you present them as champions is kinda funny...

Microsoft got a bit smarter since their anti-trust days. They saw that giving away OSS kept everyone off Google's back and allowed them to focus on building an immense spying machine.

Now they're applying the same recipe with some success (software people are suckers for OSS trinkets), but they started from such a poor image that it will take a while for all the dirt to wash off.

I'd be really impressed if MS made Windows open source. Maybe that way someone could finally disable that pesky telemetry spyware.

Oracle is all about money and it's obvious to everyone that they're not good guys. The ones to watch out for are the insidious ones like Google or MS.

Some Microsoft skeptics are more thoughtful than you concede. For an example, I strongly suggest you to watch the "Linux Sucks. Forever" talk by Bryan Lunduke [1] (who worked at MS some ~5 years).

If you don't have the time, the most interesting part starts at 7:29 [2] with a tour of the many ways Microsoft attacked Linux in the past, while from 13:55 [3] on he goes into how he thinks Microsoft (and others) are hurting Linux today.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVHcdgrqbHE

[2] https://youtu.be/TVHcdgrqbHE?t=449

[3] https://youtu.be/TVHcdgrqbHE?t=829

Microsoft is in the Linux camp now because the Windows camp is dead for serious enterprise uses. Windows objectively failed to keep pace with the cutting edge. To Microsoft's credit, their leadership sees this and is working to build a viable replacement business model through the combination of Azure and data harvesting.

Reality is that the raw technical reality has forced MS to the open-source table. The fight played out and Windows lost -- Microsoft lives on.

Perhaps neither camp is happy with the situation, but if we're being honest, there's probably not anything that anyone can do about it.

One of the things I miss most about working for Microsoft was all the great internal tooling. There's stuff that blows away what's available on Linux. I wouldn't trade it for apt-get any day of the week but it would be nice to see a lot of it get ported.

> One of the things I miss most about working for Microsoft was all the great internal tooling

Like what? I am not trying to be snarky here. I honestly would like your feedback. From my perspective Linux is way better than Microsoft in this regard, but maybe I am just looking at/using the wrong MS tools?

It sounds like he is talking about internal tools, ie not available to the public.

Here's just guessing:

- Most of the tools by Sysinternals, eg. ProcessExplorer, ProcessMonitor

- Tools by Nirsoft, eg. TCPView, GDIView, HeapMemView etc.

- Microsoft's own tools eg. WinDbg, System Profiler, all the snap-ins for MMC

- Tools for looking at system components related to COM/OLE

That's just guessing, but I find I respect Windows more and more the more I learn about it.

I recommend reading the Windows Internals books because it shows the amount of work that has gone into things that are overlooked often eg. NTFS (which is miles better than Apple's new APFS, which seems to get a lot of praise for unknown reasons).

You can find out a lot of what is happening under the hood with Sysinternal's tools, including IPC which would be far harder to trace under Linux I believe.

The problem with Windows was never the core technology but rather policy decisions by those in charge.

Windows Performance Explorer is an example of something public. It’s like dtrace on steroids. Page Heap is really helpful for finding buffer overflows. I’ve never used a debugger with a better UI than the VS one. WinDbg’s reverse debugging is super powerful and fast enough to be useable.

Not public: the best instrumented profiler I’ve ever used. Smaller things like Assert tags so you can uniquely ID them. A massive distributed test system (love hate with that one). Profiling and optimization tools to answer pretty much any question about how your product behaves.

I always thought MSVC’s dialect of C++ was a little more programmer friendly. E.g. you can construct an object inline and pass it by reference. The compiler doesn’t do ridiculous things once it finds out you sign overflowed - it’s designed to support applications not meet synthetic benchmarks. PDBs make a lot more sense to me than packing debug info directly in the binary.

> WinDbg’s reverse debugging is super powerful and fast enough to be useable.

For this use case on Linux, there's rr: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/

This wasn't the case until they bought SysInternals. I think Microsoft has very good dev tools overall, but the utilities created by Mark Russinovich put everything Microsoft had to shame, so they hired him and bought his code.

Also azure was used internally (and with large internal clients) for a long while before being exposed as a service to customers.

Sounds a lot like what I hear about google. The internal tooling is second to none. "If you have a problem, 5 people already solved it in a really elegant easy to use way already"

I wish I was working in such an ecosystem. :(

I find it interesting that feedback like this still abounds (and for good reason), considering the many tools and frameworks and services available online today. Apparently the field for delivering another tool or service continues to remain green :)

Their distributed build system is better, and they have better tools for debugging distributed system problems.

My impression is that for local stuff their tooling is not much better than public. They have a lot more reliance on logging.

I’ve never worked there so this is just all second hand info.

Google has a lot of tools are are best-in-class— if you spend a large fixed cost setting them up and get everyone to use them. Obviously this is easy for Google to justify: they spent the fixed cost once ten years ago, and now that everyone uses the product, it's easy for new products to integrate too. But it makes them hard to spread outside Google itself.

Bazel, Google's build tool is a good example of this. Google actually open-sourced most of Bazel a few years ago, but as far as I know, it hasn't gotten much uptake. It requires doing a bunch of boring configuration work to use it. But as someone who used it internally I definitely prefer it to all the alternatives, due to its speed and reliability.

(I work on Bazel)

Although Bazel is still in beta, more and more companies are using it (e.g. Dropbox, Huawei, SpaceX, Pinterest, Stripe - see https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/wiki/Bazel-Users) or interested enough to attend the recent Bazel conference (see https://conf.bazel.build/about).

I wish you allowed people to be more open about how you build and deploy software at Google. I asked about how a change in an angular website gets to production and the response was that they didn't know completely and wouldn't know how much they're allowed to share even of the things they do know.

I can imagine there is some fear of espionage or sabotage but I'm just asking the boring stuff about deploying a (web) front end system.

You can do the exact same with a few lines of bash and the gdb package which includes gcore, a standard utility that saves core files from running programs.

Doing things simple and fast is not the Microsoft way. The goal is to abstract everything from the user to that they become helpless and dependent on bloated interfaces.

I guess the sampling and triggering part is the idea.

There's an "explain vs gcore" issue on the github, which mentions among other things that they use gcore to generate the core dumps but want to move away from it: https://github.com/Microsoft/ProcDump-for-Linux/issues/13

So this is kind of more like perf, which includes sampling and triggering both?

I don't know, pointers to relevant perf functionality would be welcome. I just looked and couldn't find an obvious way to get core dumps frpm memory or cpu usage thresholds.

My prediction for 2019: Microsoft announces Microsoft Linux, with many Microsoft store apps working via a compatibility layer. Office for Linux coming early 2021.

MS lDOS: the New linux distro for 2019?

Microsoft OS^2 (Open Source Operating System)

That would actually be a really awesome name!!!

I actually thought for the longest time that they would eventually acquire red hat. But now I'm thinking it will be canonical

Now that IBM bought Red Hat I think that would actually be good for Linux.

I can imagine MS wanting control of a Linux server edition for Azure, and Canonical looks like a good target. Not least as canonical seem to have been preparing for a sale. I suppose the real question is how they will treat desktop Linux. I can imagine they would be interested in it as a development environment for their Azure Linux, but less interested in supporting it as a competitor to Windows.

One step closer to Debian...

I wonder if they still hold the rights to the Xenix name? Looks like no - the product was sold to SCO in 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Why would they have any interest in Linux on the desktop? I could see them having their own distro, but I feel like that would have to be geared towards servers.

Microsoft have shown a tendency in the past to unifying their server, workstation, desktop and even phone operating systems.

I don't know if they will keep that tendency (plus, it's more likely to lead to them sticking with Windows on servers)

However, if they do move towards Linux on servers they will naturally explore Linux for workstations too.

Can't believe I'm saying this but I think MS could own Apple if they took on Apple in any programming realm outside of objective c/Swift if they embraced Linux desktop.

Unified frontend development with .NET is their big opportunity for this IMO. Something like Xamarin Forms but a lot more optimized like Flutter and supporting mobile, desktop, and browsers would be incredible. Right now .NET seems pretty unpopular but a really strong front end use case could reverse that.

If their prediction is that if Linux starts getting a share of locked-down corporate desktops (think insurance companies, warehouses, big retail, etc) it would make sense to be playing in that field, given that it's a familiar name for people transitioning from tired old Windows XP Embedded or similar.

It would be very clever for Microsoft to start offering Office 365 for Linux but only support it on their own distro. And it's understandable; getting that bucket of ugly bolts to work on Linux would be an epic hack job and probably would never be particularly stable on random distros.

> Why would they have any interest in Linux on the desktop?

Short answer: Chrome OS (also Android).

Chrome OS is a Linux distribution being aggressively promoted by a large, well-funded competitor. It can already run Android apps (in release versions) and Linux applications (in beta). Ironically Visual Studio Code runs really well on Chrome OS, as do the Android versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint -- full screen like a proper laptop application[1]

Microsoft's applications already run on Linux; it's really up to Microsoft to decide whose Linux distributions they get to run on.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/rp0VFR4

Considering how good a job Microsoft has done of fragmenting the UI, breaking things with frequent updates, and generally turning Windows 10 into a Goldberg-esque nightmare, it looks like they're already practicing running their own Linux Desktop Distro.

It would probably make more sense for them to support Android/Linux applications on Windows rather than trying to make Windows applications work on Linux. Especially since they're continuing to work on slimming down Windows and getting to run efficiently on ARM, I don't see why they would invest any resources into Linux on the desktop.

Why would they do that? Linux desktop has no penetration into the market. It would be a big investment to capture an additional 1% market share.

I can see MS porting all their server apps(MSSQL, Exchange, etc) to run on linux since Linux is dominating the server market and it would be a significant opportunity for them.

SQL Server's already been ported and made available.

It works quite well too. As I understand it, SQLServer itself is effectively running on top of its own "OS" like layer (even on windows), so porting cleanly was made significantly easier.

How is it performance wise?

Is there any advantage to running it on Linux (except maybe the cost of a Windows license which is probably trivial compared to the cost of Sql Server itself)

I haven't seen benchmarks but I would guess that there isn't going to be much of a performance difference. It's like comparing the performance of your VM on different hypervisors, unless something is very wrong you won't see much difference.

As the OP indicated, MS SQL has it's own facilities for managing memory and disk I/O. It basically asks for all the resources from the OS and then does everything itself internally. I'm exaggerating obviously but it does try to avoid costly calls to the OS whenever and however possible which is why it was so easily ported to Linux.

The Docker images are smaller for Linux for one. Our team use the Linux version in tests during builds just for that. We are relying that Microsoft manage to keep the two versions close enough that it's meaningful.

Seconded. SQL server does work quite well on Linux and was surprisingly easy to get going. I prefer Postgres but sometimes we don't always get what what we want and hey, I'll take it cause I can use it on Linux!

As for MS Windows, WTF? Not only the forced ads making it seem like in some kind of casino built for 4 year olds (assume it's some kind of play to suck the kiddies in?), it's an abortion of mismatched UI, half of it trying to look like a cheaply built web app, then on next screen dumping you back into some NT style select panel. It's just awful. To say nothing of invasive updates and general Windows unpleasantness. I can say without reservation I have no use for the OS at all, Linux is just so much more pleasant to use at this point.

Thankfully you can still run Windows+R > control

Or "control [shortcut]" eg control fonts

Or can still use MMC, or blablabla.msc, eg. devmgmt.msc

and hardly have to interact with the snow-blindness Settings app.

Who said anything about desktop? Microsoft needs something for phones and tables and they don't want to pin their cart to Google's Android horse.

What, another mobile thrust? They gave up on that completely. All-in on cloud, unless something has changed?

I don't think anything has changed and it definitely wouldn't make sense now. There is zero growth in mobile phones, in the US and globally overall. That isn't going to get better, it's already a stagnate, saturated market. Now would be about the worst time for Microsoft to decide to re-target that market.

Azure can be a ~$30 billion sales business eventually, probably spitting off $6b or $7b in operating income. It's a dramatically better business than messing with smartphones again (other than building apps for Android & iOS). They should just keep focused on their booming cloud business.

IMHO thing an MS Linux could really add for SME IT teams is.

1) An easy way to join a Windows domain. Being able to use AD user auth and Windows file sharing with AD groups that is as easy as it is on Windows server would remove a major scare factor for Windows admins trying Linux. I hope this could be implemented by contributing to SAMBA and being a wrapper for SAMBA rather than a reimplementation. I have had frustrating times with Linux unmounting Windows shares and having to reboot to get them to remount.

2) Training. MS have a well trodden path for learning to be an MS admin. Bringing it to Linux would surely help more people test-the-waters.

> 1) An easy way to join a Windows domain.

Red Hat's sssd already makes this trivial. You can join a Windows domain from the Fedora "first run wizard" or via a simple "realm join xyz.tld" command. It works pretty well mostly. You get AD integrated logins and SSH/sudo access and can use AD groups for access control just like normal groups. Kerberos SSO to Linux boxes works fine etc.

AD is all about group policy, logins are merely table stakes. If you want to distribute firewall rules to every machine in your arg AD is the way to go. Ditto for forcing updates (or preventing them), and any other manner of mass configuration. Then there is also centralized logging and auditing.

Linux has most of this in an ad-hoc fashion, but the key benefit comes from the centralization.

SSSD makes joining AD easy for any linux. Suse has integrated it into Yast and it's super easy. There are also tons of linux training initiatives. The simple fact is alot of Windows admins are incurious or set in their ways. It's true for Linux as well, but not as true.

This is my guess and the one I'm excited about:

Azure is a cash cow. Windows brings in money but is increasingly difficult to monetize _and_ its increasingly difficult to keep bringing legacy app support forward and stay competitive.

PowerShell, .NET Core, and MS SQL are all happily running on Linux.

By all accounts WSL entered the market with little drama is pretty great to use (IMHO).

The idea of doing a native SSH from WSL into a Linux container on Azure running a bootstraped 'MS' version of *nix with official support for a discounted price compared to a Windows VM is certainly appealing.

I would run MS Linux as a dev environment in a heart beat. MS would do well to _not_ to brand a desktop and just run a very clean gnome or plasma default.

Then a dedicated app store can really push PWAs like Teams,Skype and fully manage the interop layer for other apps that need a little more hand holding (wine, mono, etc).

tl;dr - I'm into this.

Given the tight cooperation between Canonical and MS for WSL I would somehow expect that MS would use Ubuntu if they were to ever sanction a desktop Linux. This is just my guess, though.

Following that thought:

If Microsoft buys Canonical it will be very interesting. Seeing that IBM bought Red Hat,

This. It's the first thing that came to mind when the redhat deal was announced. Oracle has Sun, IBM has RedHat, it would seem logical for MSFT

Windows is more or less over and MS has been gradually coming to terms with it, helped along by inflection points that made it painstakingly clear that the Windows way was beyond outmoded, like containers and cloud. I don't think MS is even pretending otherwise anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see MS give up on WSL, acquire CodeWeavers, and reimplement "Windows" as a proprietary desktop environment for a nix-ish OS with a super-souped-up WINE doing much of the legwork. At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).

Selling software, as a general business model, is on the ropes and this is a great indication of that. The victory of open-source here is both blatant and decisive.

Had it not been for every major software company deciding they can subsist on a combination of a) rental fees and b) advertising/demographic data, we'd probably have another RIAA v. The Internet-style showdown to confront over the next decade. In this respect, I suppose we should be grateful for the opportunity to pay 6x more to be in "the cloud".

As an observer, it's a weird situation to see, and still trying to orient my feelings and understand what to make of it.

I would be very surprised to see them take that reimplementation path as their backwards compatibility has been so important for decades (yes I know not everything runs still; but a large amount does). They have provided an evolutionary path and that would be revolution. The benefit to them seems likely to be outweighed by the disruption. And they know points of disruption are where they are more likely to lose customers.

> At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).

I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.

WINE runs most applications extremely well. With actual backing from a MegaCo, especially the MegaCo that owns all of the IP around Windows, I have no doubt that a year of work would round out the rough edges such that compatibility differences don't exceed what would be expected between major versions of Microsoft Windows.

Get a working version of .net 4.6 working in wine with text that actually renders like it does on Windows and I'll admit wine is a viable alterative.

It is getting an appropriate amount of love though in the last year. I'm really hopeful that it will keep getting better.

I'm not enthusiastic about this possible future, but here's why:

it means they could eventually just adopt Linux as the platform for Microsoft applications. That would do away with a lot of historical reliability issues, and would mean that they would have less to support internally. They're making more and more money on things like Azure and Office365 etc, and none of that really depends on Windows.

> They're making more and more money on things like Azure and Office365 etc, and none of that really depends on Windows.

I just did some googling, and it looks like Azure actually runs on Windows. It started out as a fork and then eventually merged back with server 2016.

The source for this is unfortunately a video, but here it is.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/videos/mark-russ...

Azure can run on Windows, sure. But the majority of instances are running on Linux: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-now-dominates-azure/

Poor wording on my part. I wasn't referring to the OS's running on top of the VM, but rather the infrastructure that's running the VM's.

https://www.quora.com/What-technology-is-Azure-running-on-Is...

Right, but that doesn't necessarily require all of the desktop parts of Windows. I see your point though.

I don't think any of this is likely, even remotely.... but if it was, they wouldn't be motivated by adding that 1% to their user base. The motivation would be to deprive the competition of that 1% user-base: weaker competition.

A few weeks ago MS suspended development of Office for UWP, so unlikely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097569 discussion for that, in case anyone else was curious

I don’t see Microsoft releasing a desktop Linux but I can see them releasing a Microsoft Azure Linux distro.

Linux is already massive on Azure so it makes a lot of sense from a support POV. Whether they go with their own version or just buy a distributor (Ubuntu for example) is an interesting question though.

Eep, MS buying Canonical. With GitHub, I can't even sweepingly dismiss the idea.

At least they can kill Launchpad then right? I can't be the only person that hates it.

MS buying Canonical would be an epic irony given how Mark Shuttleworth promoted Ubuntu at the beginning and how he wrote Bug #1 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 ).

That bug only affects 2450 people. That's ironic.

Still, I don't think Microsoft would have a Linux distribution itself, for consumers, the cloud and related services is the current focus for Microsoft.

That doesn't make any business sense for Microsoft. They might do a server fork of RHEL for their cloud offerings (as Amazon has done, very poorly, for AWS), but desktop? That'd be nuts. It would just lend an air of respectability to an OS that still has no traction on the desktop.

I will bet that MSFT is going to embrace and extinguish Red Hat's position in the corporate Linux market.

MS vs IBM once again :)

Maybe MS Android? That will make more sense.

MS version of Fuchsia is far more likely.

Having used OS X for the last 15 years, a good Microsoft Linux is probably the only thing that could conceivably get me to switch to either Microsoft or Linux. I don't think it will happen, but it's a good idea.

No need. Ms office is being ported to the browser. Once that’s done and it runs on chromium or Firefox, then all they have to do is test /fix it on the Linux versions of those browsers.

I played with it this summer and some of it actually works!

This sounds absolutely awful. Electron is much slower and running Excel queries in JavaScript sounds like a terrible experience.

Electron is, Wasm isn't. You won't be running it in javascript, it will be compiled just like desktop Excel.

Wasm is a improvement on JS for sure, but proper native compiled still thoroughly beats it.

Why wouldn't WASM implementations do native compilation? It's the norm for most modern language implementations nowadays, anything else would be silly.

Many languages that compile to native are rolling out WASM support, or have it in their roadmaps, but there are many more architectures and formats that you have to handle in native land.

I guess theoretically, if we agreed to support the main desktop and mobile/tablet OS’s and chip architectures, and then got everyone to use a standard compiler and IL format (LLVM maybe?) then you might get some of the way, but that would be a lot of work (cool if it happened though...)

The IL format is WASM, it's already here. When the browser gets WASM, it's free to interpret it or compile it to native code. AFAIK, it is already getting compiled to native, and I'm sure we'll see some awesome JITs coming to WASM.

The problem right now with warm WASM is lack of features (e.g. you can't do threading), though those are getting sorted.

Targeting multiple architectures is a solved problem, as you said with LLVM. I don't know if that's how WASM is currently implemented, as a LLVM front-end, but I'm pretty sure most implementations in fact are proper native compiled, or they intend to be. As I said it would be silly to do it any other way.

So how big is the download the first time, and how big will the (weekly) updates be?

MS Office was ported to the browser 10 years ago. You can go use web Excel right now, and could have since forever.

A WASM version of the local apps would be interesting though.

2018: IBM bought Redhat

2019: Microsoft bought Ubuntu

Embrace Extend Extinguish

Really though, how would you extinguish Ubuntu? GPL?

It doesn't seem possible.

Instead of taking away, which you can't do with GPL you can always push things that cause problems. You could make Ubuntu terrible enough that people stop using it.

Or just stop developing it. A massive effort would be needed to mount another organization to continue development back again.

And? There are plenty of other great distros out there. People can switch pretty painlessly. And I say that as a Ubuntu user.

I was just giving an example how you could destroy something if you were so inclined.

I don't see why MS would want to do that but it's perfectly possible to "extinguish" GPL projects, especially something as massive as an OS.

You buy Ubuntu, put a lot of money into it, slowly force more and more of your MS software on people, make more and more third party software depend on it and eventually the effort needed to fork away and maintain "clean" version is simply too huge to be worth it.

But of course in this case there are many other Linux distributions out there already so it shouldn't be a huge cause for concern.

This is what happened with Android. Google bought it, released it, and made a big deal out of how it was open. Then they slowly moved functionality over to their proprietary systems under the guise of ensuring people could get some security updates on phones the OEMs stopped supporting.

Its definitely coming, and its strange that so many people dont see it.

That seems unlikely to me but if I was playing fantasy CEO, I could imagine it going more like Windows grows better Linux compatibility to the point where they can push for Windows to be the primary development platform for Linux server software.

Next stage after that would be to launch Azure Windows VMs that are competitive with a "real" Linux OS for running Linux binaries but with access to Microsoft GUI management tools.

Once you depend on the GUI tools you depend on Microsoft as OS provider.

How would that be different from Azure App Service for Linux, a Platform-as-a-Service offering that runs apps that require Linux instead of Windows?

A lot of the comments in this section appear completely uneducated about the Windows architecture eg COM/RPC and seem to think that it's just some high-level recompile to get it to run on another platform. It is unrealistic.

Eg their compatability layer for their own apps Metro > Win32 is quite thin.

What about all of the other companies who have built useful Linux tools over the years? Probably quite a few more useful than this.

I'm sorry but I just don't believe that Microsoft is good for Linux. Although Linux has only a tiny fraction of the market, it's still one of the few competitors to Windows. They are competitors. MS does not try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart. They do it despite themselves or for PR or in an effort to try to mitigate Linux in some way. If possible they would like to eat Linux up, incorporate a version into Windows. This is not because they want to help Linux adoption. It's to try to keep developers, who would otherwise run Linux, inside of Windows.

> Although Linux has only a tiny fraction of the market

It has a significantly larger install-base than Windows. Which market are you referring to? My DVR runs Linux, my TV runs Linux, my phone runs Linux, heck even my car's infotainment unit runs Linux. Windows is only on PCs and Laptops these days.

> They are competitors. MS does not try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart.

Microsoft no longer views Linux as a competitor but an opportunity. They're making plenty of money off of Linux's back via Azure and SQL Server licensing.

Microsoft views its future as largely in digital services. The advantage to that for them is that it isn't tied to the Windows platform, so they continue to profit when people have a mobile device or a Chromebook.

> If possible they would like to eat Linux up, incorporate a version into Windows.

They already have that via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which aside from being the worst name ever, is a full Ubuntu running in the user's context that interoperates (kinda) with Windows.

That's a very personalizing argument.

No, MS does not "try to help Linux out of the goodness of it's heart."

(a) its a corporate - corporates don't have hearts

(b) even individuals usually have an ulterior motive for their actions. Perhaps by helping Linux, we get some personal ego boost from seeing our own name on the contributor's wall. Or perhaps when Linux wins, the market for our Linux skills grows.

Whatever, no-one does anything much out of the pure goodness of their hearts.

This. They run millions of Linux systems in Azure and need well known tools for it. So they ported ProcDump to Linux. And open sourced it, because customers may also need it.

They needed some grip on developers to promote Azure. So they hand out VSCode and .NET Core.

Microsoft needs to earn money. The simplest ways to keep or acquire customers is with good toys.

Microsoft is a cloud provider and mobile is king. This whole Windows vs. Linux competition for desktop is very old thinking. Microsoft makes money providing Linux servers, so they support Linux. It's pretty simple.

True, people forgot that 40% of Azure VMs are running Linux.

Microsoft nowadays says something close to 50%. I guess the container technologies also change a lot in that space.

Azure Kubernetes Service doesn't even support Windows containers yet - they launched only supporting Linux, with Windows supposedly coming later.

I don't like Microsoft.

I tried this tool.

It was extremely useful.

I read its source code. I didn't find anything compromising.

I added this tool to my toolbox. Excellent work by Microsoft.

You see how I can have a personal opinion yet use a great tool that helps me?

So, in others, a public-traded, for-profit organization is engaging in activities to broaden adoption of their products?

A few more thoughts. Microsoft doesn't view Linux as a competitor. Why would it? It has less than 1% of the global desktop share. You could maybe argue that Linux is a competitor to Windows Server, but then again, I'd counter with the claim that people who user Server are probably going to use Azure, which runs on Linux and offers users the ability to spin up Linux vm's. Microsoft views Linux as a tool. Their competitors are Google, Apple, IBM, and Oracle.

Also, your last 2 statements just make no sense. They have incorporated Linux into Windows via the WSL with Suse, Ubuntu, Kali, and Debian. They have done so pretty much to entice people to use Windows over Linux. I'm not sure how this is bad? They can't force developers to use Windows. Going back to what I said, a company is improving it's product to attract new users. Why should they care about Linux adoption? That's not their business model.

Someone isn't old enough to remember the Halloween document.

Or too old to interpret the world in terms of heroes and villains.

I am more than old enough. I also know the original documents are 20 years old at this point, and the world has changed since then. If Microsoft is running an EEE campaign against Linux, it's not very effective considering over half of Azure is linux.

Seriously, grow up. Microsoft is a publicly traded for profit organization. They're not embracing Linux and free software out of the "goodness of their heart" but because there's compelling reasons to. Russinovich literally said they transition because of "practical business reasons". They're not out to get your desktop or your phone. Their aim is Azure. They want people building stuff on Azure. Would they like you to build on Windows? Of course they would that means more money. However, they ported VS to macOS, released a multiplatform code editor, and pushed SQL server onto linux. They're realized the OS is nothing but a tool.

I have kind of gotten used to the "New Microsoft", but not really, actions like this still blow my mind.

embrace it

and we all know the next step.

yes, a software company releasing a software tool for Linux must surely be their first step in the grand plan to extinguish the entire marketplace! Devious, Microsoft, very devious!

it was more a reference to OP's phrasing than anything else. I don't think Microsoft is interested in extinguishing the Linux ecosystem at this point in time. Co-opting it, yes, but not extinguishing.

If an abuser continuously abuses and then one day is kind, forgive those abused for skepticism...

The "new microsoft" provides a baseline operating system riddled with spyware, an update system that takes over the control of your system and pushes random content to your drive and a closed-as-ever groupware suite. Nothing has really changed except some developer allure, which seems to be working.

But I don't want to be tracked when I paid for their stuff. I want control over my system. And from a developer perspective, I'm still 1000% more productive on any nix based system where the tooling is (and has generally always been) years ahead.

There are very few areas where I need to use windows, and it's only due to vendor lock-in. Embedded development tools and professional RE tools are stronger on windows, sadly.

Mark Russinovich is a treasure.

CTO of azure, not a bad career path.

I like the tool but I'm aggravated to see that the sysinternals trope of printing BROUGHT TO YOU BY MARK RUSSINOVICH [ovich... ovich...] on every use persists. Pompous.

Can you imagine if they created, for example, core-utils?

Yeah. That'd be awful.

    $ bc
    bc 1.06.95
    Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
    For details type `warranty'.
    ^C
    (interrupt) Exiting bc.

Neat idea, process state sampling by uninvasive core dumps. Is the Windows version the same concept, does it produce windows minidumps or some such?

It looks like this tool automatically/periodically dump cores when certain performance conditions(CPU, memory usage) met.

I don't know but is there no equivalent tool in the entire Linux history?

gcore creates dumps and you could do periodic dumps via cron. But performance triggers aren't easily possible afaik.

Makes me wonder if the story Wired did in 2005 about Linus Torvalds joining Microsoft and making a Linux-based version of Windows could actually happen. Link to that story is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383909

Honest question. What is a typical use-case for this tool?

Bleating about how wonderful Microsoft are while they work on locking everyone in to Azure in the background.

Say you have a problem which is hard to reproduce — e.g. your service gets slow in the early morning but the app-level metrics don’t show anything unusual, and maybe the problem duration is too short for someone to easily catch it in action.

You could set a trigger based on CPU or memory load so e.g. the next spike will capture a few dumps over a set period of time. You don’t have to deal with a ton of data from a simple periodic trigger or having to try to time an irregular event — nothing world-changing but a nice time-saver.

Would be great to get ProcDump itself on GitHub as well!

Interesting reading through the code, which looks very much like Win32.

Dont' know why they didn't use C# with .Net Core to write this.

If I had to guess, the person who produced this likely just wasn't as familiar with C#/.Net Core. Looking at the code, there's very that wouldn't easily convert, you would need an unsafe section in C# however.

Thank you Microsoft.

Microsoft do cool things like this which makes me think "oh wow they really are a different company to 15 years ago"

So I go and check out a new Windows 10 laptop and the first thing I see, even on Microsoft's own Surface devices running a 'clean' Windows install, is a bunch of adverts on the start menu and sigh.

FFS Microsoft.

Why do you do so many great things then ruin your most popular brand with crap like Candy Crush and Twitter on your clean Windows install on your £3000+ premium laptop running Windows 10 Professional?

Not to mention how you conveniently always reset my settings to your defaults including reinstalling all your ad-crap every 6 months with a new Windows release. So I have to go find that damn PowerShell script again to wipe them out because a normal uninstall option is just too much to ask for isn't it!

Honestly it does my head in. Windows 10 is a solid OS but they trash it with these awful little pointless decisions. Fine stick your Candy crap in the Home edition but leave Professional alone, especially as you offer me no alternative as an independent development as I can't meet your Enterprise level requirements.

Do you see Apple loading up third-party apps into macOS? No? I wonder why.

Solving a lot of the complaints about Windows 10 isn't some super hard development problem. All they have to do is provide an actual clean version of Windows 10 with no third-party crap and cut out a few of the MS apps as well like 3D Paint (really?), 'Get Office' (again really? In your Professional version?), stop nagging me about changing from your own products, remove all 'suggestions' and tips, allow me to properly disable Cortana and OneDrive with a single option and they be actually gone for good, and maybe have an option to fully disable telemetry (not that I would as I know it is beneficial to you and I but it will shut up some noisy people online and makes everyone happy).

See not that hard is it? Also please go to a one release per year. The fact you have screwed up the last two consecutive updates shows you are pushing to do too much too quickly. Who are you in a race with anyway? Just take your time and do a nice solid update every Spring and everyone will be much happier.

Being fair, the advertisements can be switched off (and Windows Setup offers this during the Out of Box Experience when the computer is first used or a major update occurs), and those icons can be removed fairly simply. Also, those third party apps aren't preinstalled; they're just shortcuts to the Microsoft Store to download them.

I see a lot of people spending more energy ranting about this, a problem that doesn't necessarily exist in the way that people might think, than doing a quick investigation to find that the apps aren't there in the first place.

People shouldn't have to spend any time on this, at all. Very few people want ads for games or anything else than their operating system focus in their start menu. There should be at most a subtle opt-in option.

>Very few people want ads for games or anything else than their operating system focus in their start menu.

Why do you think the average person wouldn't want these popular apps a click away?

Because if I want software to perform a particular action I will go looking at it. I don't want unwanted icons hanging around waiting for me to accidently click on them.

That's because you are not part of MS Store's target user segment.

I actually have yet to meet a person that plays Candy crush windows, and not for lack of hanging around non technical people.

Is there some way I can opt out of "average person" justifications for crappy experiences? If I'm paying a niche price for a niche product I should expect more than "average".

> Being fair, the advertisements can be switched off...

There's nothing "fair" about that. I shouldn't have to.

Especially in a Pro version. Groove Music is my complaint as that cannot be removed with the uninstaller.

I have never seen an option in the OOBE to disable the automatic installation of Twitter, Candy Crush, Trivago, Fallout Shelter, Kindle and other such crap. What setting are you referring to?

You are correct in that they are stubs however the moment Windows finds internet access it begins downloading them. This is obviously their preferred solution to ensure the user gets the latest and greatest version of the appvert.

Some can be removed easily and some not. I know Microsoft are working on making it easier to remove more of their own apps which they should have done in the first place IMHO.

Yes I am spending energy ranting about this because it is a problem to me. I shouldn't have to spend any time on removing such crap from an OS that I paid around £200 for (Pro license remember not some free upgrade from Windows 7 back in 2015) that is baked into the £3000+ price of my Surface Book 2.

It isn't that it is too difficult just that it shouldn't be required. It would be like buying a Mercedes and having to remove advertising stickers from the back Windows.

I'm curious what your opinions of Windows Loader/picoKMS et al are.

On the one hand, it would get an Enterprise copy running.

On the other hand... this is old (may 2017) and the URL shortner hiding the "followup article" is down, but there's this: https://twitter.com/m8urnett/status/866353982217699328 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389441

I think it's a bit like having a big smudge of snot on your screen. Sure, you can clean it off. Certainly, it's trivial. Equally, it devalues the product, far more than any value it could bring Microsoft. When I buy a new laptop, I don't want to spend 3 hours reading articles about how to get rid of adverts for mobile phone games, and switching off other blatantly user-hostile features.

It's just vaguely schizophrenic. You have all this genuinely cool, nicely done engineering, then the initial impression is ruined by a load of slapped-on garbage. It's like selling a BMW with a bunch of McDonnalds special-offer vouchers stuck to the steering wheel.

> I think it's a bit like having a big smudge of snot on your screen

Or, to take the laptop analogy, like having unnecessarily-difficult-to-remove stickers showing off the processor, graphics, and chipset inside… we're all oddly desensitised to devalued products and apply different standards depending on what strikes us as more outrageous.

> I don't want to spend 3 hours reading articles about how to get rid of adverts

Sure, so just be sure to disable ads during the OOBE session when you first turn the computer on. It's a checkbox or switch or whatever Windows has decided to use now.

Of course, I do take the point. Especially when it comes to regular people, whose apprehension at seeing the words 'advanced' and 'setup' in the same place make the prospect of choosing anything other than the Express Setup out of the question. I'm just saying it's not the drama that some people make it out to be, not for the technically minded I assume this site's audience to be.

There are plenty of people who are very technically minded that have absolutely zero interest in configuring their computer.

I'm not outraged by it. I just feel bad for the talented people at microsoft who sweat over the OS, only to have somebody glue-gun a bunch of trash to the front at the last minute.

> Being fair, the advertisements can be switched off

Sorry, but Citation required.

I've installed more than my fair share of Windows 10 Home and Pro versions, had both shipped on new devices and nowhere was I offered any options which controlled installing this shit.

> a problem that doesn't necessarily exist in the way that people might think

Even if it was a shortcut to the Windows Store, but it still there eating up space on the start screen... But even still it doesn't help.

I have to go uninstall it (because yes, it's actually installed goddamn Candy Crush and other shit for me)

I'll open up my laptop and find it's decided that it'll install Windows Update right now and fuck whatever I wanted to do with the machine.

Worse, once it's completed it's screwing with my machine, it's gone and re-installed shit, and now bugs me (again) about "Hey, instead of using Chrome, how about you use Edge!" and has reset a bunch of other system options to be the way MS wants them.

I'm hardly alone in this experience - I saw at least half a dozen presenters at NDC Oslo last year bitching about this happening to them the morning of/right before presentations, and I've had it happen to me during meetings/conference calls/etc - where it's fucked off with work that I'm in the middle of.

Windows 10 is why I'm on a full-on effort to move my primary machines over to Linux after decades of Windows use.

It’s in the advanced options of the install process..............

Maybe I did it wrong, but I intended to switch it off and I still get ads after updates on my gaming machine.

Ok, which specific advanced option, and where? Are certain key combinations required? Is it only settable by putting options in a config file?

Please be specific, and/or link to any relevant documentation.

'cause I hit Advanced any time there was an option, and switched every privacy setting/tracking option off. Yet it still installs ads for Office, various other Bing shit, Installs Candy Crush, etc.

During the OOBE, one of the options is 'Tailored Experience'. The blurb under it notes that disabling it will disable ads and recommendations.

I just tried this on a the latest version of Windows 10 and with everything disabled during the OOBE I still get Candy Crush, Twitter, Minecraft, Get Office, etc. in the start menu.

How do I avoid those using settings in the OOBE?

Those I don't think you can get rid of because they're shortcut files that happen to show up in the Start Menu by default. Easily enough gotten rid of, though.

Update your complaints to match the updated situation, please.

Candy crush does get installed on fresh Win10 installs, and the person responsible for that deal was drummed out of Microsoft, I believe, and once that agreement expires, that'll stop. In the meantime it takes literally 5 seconds to right-click the icon and choose "uninstall" then click the confirmation, and it wont ever come back.

Removed applications do not get reinstalled on a patch or OS upgrade.

Turning off advertisements turns off advertisements, and it will never switch back on by itself.

> Update your complaints to match the updated situation, please.

I don't understand what you mean by updated situation? Have things changed in the last month or two? From a commenter above, that's apparently not the case.

> once that agreement expires, that'll stop

Microsoft is large enough and profitable enough that if they actually cared, they'd pay out the agreement's terms and stop it. They could actually use it as a "We're sorry, we've stopped doing this" marketing to the folks who're pissed off about it.

> Removed applications do not get reinstalled on a patch or OS upgrade.

This isn't true, I've uninstalled various Xbox, Bing, Skype, "Get Office" and other stuff a few times now on the one machine.

> it takes literally 5 seconds to right-click the icon and choose "uninstall" then click the confirmation

And to repeat that again for eeevery damn ad/preload application. It takes a damn sight longer than 5 seconds to remove the ones you can actually remove. But there's still other preloaded apps like OneDrive that I can't remove or even hide.

> I don't understand what you mean by updated situation? Have things changed in the last month or two? From a commenter above, that's apparently not the case.

Things have changed since Windows 10 was released, yes. The last 3-4 releases have honored your uninstallations; if you remove candy crush, upgrades to newer versions of Windows 10 will not replace it, UNLESS the image used to upgrade marks it for installation. The stock Windows 10 media from Microsoft does not, so stock media from Microsoft will not reinstall anything you uninstalled before you began the upgrade.

Other commenters agree with me, as well. Something situational to you is putting them back, I suspect.

>> it takes literally 5 seconds to right-click the icon and choose "uninstall" then click the confirmation

> And to repeat that again for eeevery damn ad/preload application. It takes a damn sight longer than 5 seconds to remove the ones you can actually remove. But there's still other preloaded apps like OneDrive that I can't remove or even hide.

It only takes me 5 seconds, but maybe my computer performs better than yours. If you're not on an SSD I can see why you say it takes longer than 5 seconds, certainly. You only need to uninstall the one time before upgrading to one of the last 3-4 releases of Windows. I forget exactly which one implemented the change. If you are using Windows 10 versions prescribed to you by your IT department, then all bets are off, because a lot of things tend to get customized in those scenarios and I can't know about those customizations and/or limitations.

If you use a Microsoft account, your settings for ads and other personalization preferences will persist across all devices you use that account on. You don't even need to associate your login details with your MSA, simply logging into that MSA on the account in question is enough to sync up those things.

>a problem that doesn't necessarily exist in the way that people might think

It exists in exactly the way it manifests. It's obnoxious. I paid (I _paid_ for this!) for an OS, not to be a node in an ad delivery network.

I expect the advertising comes out of the fact that Windows 10 is Microsoft's first proper attempt at a free upgrade. But yes, people have paid for Windows, so in this case it's unacceptable — but I don't think Microsoft figured out (or particularly cares to figure out) what installation is what type.

Technically yes, but realistically no. Those options are very spread out and many are named in a way that sounds different from advertising (like Cortana Suggestions).

Making a default in a mainstream OS where many people would not know how nor would care to put in the effort is basically making it forced.

I think the main issue in this thread though is that it is just not worth the hit to brand and UX compared to the trivial money it might make.

I guess the point is none of that affects enterprise users who are joined to a domain and have all of that turned off in group policy.

I use Enterprise connected to a domain and our admins have at least tried very hard to turn off all of this, and I still get ads in the start menu. Now you may well say that we just missed time setting... But our Windows admins aren't incompetent, so to me that just says that MS intentionally obfuscated it even in Enterprise.

If you get windows server 2016 and use that as a workstation no crapware is on there and it runs faster. Unfortunately it costs 5 times the price...

Not that expensive: https://ebay.us/G7Jk1S

I have not bought from that seller, but they have sold 765 of them, with 100% positive feedback.

Good old gray-market.

Selling licenses invalid in the US that happen to pass the automated checks since ... Whenever.

Yeah.

Imagine your favourite burger place packing a credit-card sized piece of plastic in the middle of the bun.

You can remove it. It's fairly trivial. You know it's there, it's too big to swallow, you pull it out, chuck it in the bin, and get on your way.

That's what advertising in Windows feels like.

It's just not polite.

Strange but accurate analogy

Advertising _is_ strange.

I'm trying to do a thing and you've put this colorful flashy box in front of it.

Imagine if people tried to "monetize" their conversations. They might claim that otherwise they couldn't afford to talk to anyone (rent ain't gonna pay itself, right).

You'd be talking about football or whatever and suddenly a different tone of voice would emanate from your conversational partner for 10 seconds whilst they talk about some Super New Product.

As far as I can tell the whole industry is impolite, rude, gauche, just a bit icky, really.

I'm surprised this was not an episode of black mirror, sounds crazy ...but that's just me in 2018 thinking that

> Imagine if people tried to "monetize" their conversations.

People do try to monetize their conversations. That's why "networking" is a different word than "socializing".

That's also why it's relegated to special events and occasions, like professional conferences. If you try to "network" when normal "socialization" is called for, you'll be seen as tactless or sleazy.

This holds true for a lot of things related to sales & advertising - if you tried to repeat the same practices in person to your family or friend, you'd get distaste or a punch in the face.

The behavior isn't different in terms of what you do. The name is different according to your goal when you do it.

Only in the sense that both involve talking and smiling. The goal is different, and that goal is shared by all parties involved. If a situation calls for one goal, but you decide to pursue another (networking on a social event, socializing on a networking event), there's a mismatch that makes people uncomfortable.

Advertising makes me angry.

I live in a city that has a characteristic mountain. So, naturally, advertisers are placing their towering billboards so that they constantly block the view when you're driving on the avenue that would have the best unimpeded line of sight.

Whenever advertising makes me angry, I think of all the free things I wouldn't have without it.

Like? You can't really know that you wouldn't have open source, p2p versions of the things you use today that you assume can only exist because of advertising.

Of course I can't prove what may or may not happen.

I just know that I do in fact have these things today because of advertising.

What free things wouldn't you have without it?

What do you think the cost would be for these free things without advertising?

The biggest downside I can think of is while I would happily pay for Google search (per search, subscription, whatever) in an ad free world, there's lots of people who simply wouldn't bother to search and learn new things.

Really though I think they have a good model for their search page, it's unobtrusive and not rude, and it made them the most powerful tech company in silicon valley, so clearly it works. Wonder why other adtechs had to get so much shittier about it.

Do you mean like, t-shirts and mugs you've gotten from promotions?

I suspect they meant Gmail and suchlike.

But free tshirts are pretty nifty.

Like Facebook?

I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree. / Perhaps unless the billboards fall / I'll never see a tree at all. -- Ogden Nash

Financial advisors, insurance agents, lawyers, and all sorts of white-collar professionals are expected to sell their firm’s services through their own networks. Of course, human salesmen are paid more for tact, class, and effectiveness that for raw impression count.

Financial advisors maybe, but that's precisely the reason I quickly concluded "financial advisors" for individuals are just a scam for pushing unneeded financial products. Other white-collar professions? How to imagine this happening outside networking events, aka. mutually-understood time for professionals to advertise themselves to each other.

I see it a lot. "Oh, your an accountant! Let's chat later I have some questions about XYZ". Those with less tact will ask then and there usually with a response to meet them at the office next week.

A french Telco provider tried this once. You could get free calls from your mobile but had to listen to an ad before being connected. It didn't last long.

On certain forums that allow signatures people are putting links to their companies/projects or affiliate links, etc. This disrupts the flow of conversation in pretty much the way you describe.

It was (maybe still is) particularly annoying on Bitcoin forums for example, where signatures can contain images.

Agreed, and the reason advertising is so pervasive literally stepping between us and anything we consume is that markets are saturated with products: too many products compared to potential customers, so that they have to fight to get the first spot between us and their competitors. People don't look for a product anymore, it's the other way around, and it's not going to stop unless we focus on the real problem which is not advertising but the monster giving it full control: ie our flawed economic system.

Yeah, but only ~20% of the population knows how to take out the plastic bit. You go to the restaurant with your family and watch them chew around the middle and throw away part of their burger.

They don't eat the plastic. They look at it, read it out loud for a laugh, buy the product being advertised, and then say they don't mind the plastic card because they can just ignore it and it's better than having no burger at all.

If it takes the powershell to remove it, your figure should be closer to 1%

Have you tried putting your burger back at the plate and lift it up again?

What's wrong with Paint 3D?

"Get Office" is nothing but an advert, and an annoying one at that considering it continues to appear after MS Office is installed. Paint 3D on the other hand is a supplemental tool to regular Paint that is actually extremely powerful once you get used to it.

I myself actually started out ignoring it, and it hasn't replaced regular Paint for many things, but I find myself going into it on purpose now and for the things it is good at it is VERY good.

People have dismissed it out of hand because of the "3D." The 3D actually refers to Photoshop style layering but you can manipulate the Z axis to generate different 2D image views, which can be output.

The main output of Paint 3D is the same as Paint 2D image files e.g. PNGs, BMPs, and JPG. Sure, you can save a project file, but that is just your source images and Z axis layering information (akin to a Photoshop's PSD).

PS - It also supports PNG transparency layers which is a welcome addition.

> What's wrong with Paint 3D?

For starters, there's that "3D Objects" item underneath "This PC" in the Explorer treeview. It's not relevant to me, and I'm skeptical that it's relevant to the average user.

If I recall, there was a registry key that could be modified to remove this item, but after I applied this modification, a subsequent update undid this. I find this incredibly frustrating.

(Below, I'm speaking to this point more broadly)

It's my computer and I should be able to use it the way that I want to. I have my own user account because others may use this machine differently, and each user deserves the ability to customize their experience based on their preferences.

I honestly don't understand how Microsoft gets to make these decisions on behalf of users. They shouldn't even have a say in the matter at all for anything a user has explicitly configured. Feel free to change the defaults, but at no point should it be considered acceptable to override an explicit configuration of the user.

OEMs are ms' Achilles tendon

This happens on the Surface line.

> Do you see Apple loading up third-party apps into macOS? No?

Well, they used to, around the turn of the century. Not any more.

The market doesn't really seem to care all that much about it. Windows is practically clean on install compared to any Android phone I've owned. My favorite in terms of pointlessness was my Samsung phone that had both Chrome and a Samsung browser based on Chromium on it, and the Samsung browser was the default. It was worse in every way than just Chrome.

Unless it does. Maybe if there was no junk they could command Apple premiums for their devices and get Apple sales numbers.

Can you uninstall Apple Music from iOS devices?

Yes. I was able to delete it from my iPhone.

Yes. In fact, you can delete almost every preinstalled app on iOS devices.

Wow. I didn’t believe you. But you’re right, I just removed my music app. :o

It's fairly recent, iOS 10 or 11.

Windows is practically clean on install compared to any Android phone I've owned

My Nexus Android phones were clean. And yes, Sony etc phones are adware, but so are Sony Windows computers.

Deflecting, excusing, irrelevant Samsung discussions...

Any large enough company can get away with customer-hostile behaviour without the market correcting it.

It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison though, is it? If you're talking about a clean install of Windows you should be comparing to a Nexus or Pixel.

Samsung is more like the eMachines or Packard Bell of the Android world as far as bundled crapware is concerned.

Recently got a new Samsung phone from AT&T. I'm not sure which one installed more crapware.

My favorite is I have 6 new contacts for AT&T, like "Pay My Bill".

And if you get an insurance replacement, they "make" you install their third party "Pro Tech" app, and ask you questions about what's on the home page (of the app) after installed to "verify it installed correctly".

> My favorite in terms of pointlessness

I heavily disagree. The main reason google was fined by the EU was their anti-competitive monopoly abuse, forcing manufacturers to bundle all their apps. While I like chrome, its market dominance in particular on android is worrisome. Since Samsung can not offer another browser instead of chrome, but only in addition, this is the best they can do in this situation. Instead of complaining about "duplication", I applaud them for their efforts.

I always wondered if personalities like Satya Nadella browse these forums under different identities to understand what the rest of the tech world might be saying? Wouldn't it be pragmatic for them to align 80% of their priorities with their core users? I guess they can still use the remaining 20% to focus on their obtrusive advertisers!

HN is not their core users.

To further this idea, while Twitter is probably paying for the privilege of being pre-installed, for Windows 10, I wouldn't be surprised if (shortcuts to download) Candy Crush and Twitter are the result of market testing and focus groups and such. Not understanding being able to download apps via the Windows Store may be totally foreign to us, but non-technical users may need some hand-holding.

HN is still a good place to quickly get a lot of_critical_ insights, which is much harder to get from core users.

HN is probably not their core Home Edition users, but I'm pretty sure it's a good window into their Professional and Enterprise Edition users, those who don't nee the crap addendum but just need to work

HN is a fucking tire fire when it comes to comment toxicity for certain segments of readers. We're no better than Reddit or anywhere else really. MS would be wise (and justified) to ignore us completely.

No, even for Enterprise software we're far at one end of the spectrum in terms of competence at using a computer. You're forgetting the vast majority of the work force who work in normal offices, using computers as a tool to get their work done.

That said, we probably articulate our issues better than some, so we're probably still worth listening to.

I would be very surprised if anyone at Microsoft in a position of power gave a damn about the user experience on Windows Desktop these days. I'm pretty sure it is their goal to kill off personal computing.

Windows 10 is a solid OS but they trash it with these awful little pointless decisions

While those are definitely irritations I would like to add something a little (IMO) more important: file path limits.

I can fudge around it in various ways, but it is infuriating: https://serverfault.com/questions/232986/overcoming-maximum-...

The 250-something character path limit was removed several versions ago. It's a 32k limit, now.

Everyone: update your complaints when the situation changes, please.

If Linux users still have to put up with people constantly regurgitating 20-year-old complaints like wifi and audio not working then Windows users should have to put up with it too ;)

For me the Wifi issues in Linux are not 20 year old. They happen to me almost once every week randomly.

It depends a lot on your modem manufacturer though.

The version currently available to us through our IT department suffers from the limit. The updates you mention are held back from us because of 2 problems: one of them being a bitlocker lock-out.

Summary: this is a real, current problem experienced in the enterprise which disrupts work. It's all very well being a lone Dev upgrading to Harvest Festival Cutename at your whim.... but the reality of enterprise updates are that Windows is cumbersome compared to Linux.

Well what do you want? You can't expect anyone to go back in time to improve your situation for you.

The 250-character path limit is gone. It's fixed. You not adopting it is a wholly separate issue.

Very accurate. Ads in windows and those games that no ones wants are a real drag. Is there no way to get a clean install, and not have it reinstall every single crazy app after upgrading. Its one of the most annoying things when using Windows these days... it takes good 20 minutes to remove everything, get rid of ads and games, and Cortana doing random internet searches - I really dont want that by default.

> Is there no way to get a clean install, and not have it reinstall every single crazy app after upgrading.

If you meant that as a question, end it with a question mark (?).

If you meant it as a statement, you're wrong. Uninstalled apps do not reappear upon upgrade to newer Windows 10 version.

The ads can be turned off. That setting is persisted via your Microsoft account, if you use one. The ads stay off when upgrading. I haven't seen any ads in the start menu (or anywhere else in Win10 except a browser) for many, many months; at least 2 years, and probably more.

If you log in with a Microsoft account instead of a local user account, all those settings persist across devices, even fresh installs where you also log in using the same MS account. It takes a bit of time for everything to sync up, and most of those things get applied to all machines when you make a change on one. The things that aren't take less than a minute, and only need to be done once. (I am unsure here, I haven't set up a new Windows 10 install in over a year, and I can't recall doing anything other than uninstalling a few apps, less than 5, on a new install. It literally takes 15 seconds, so forgive me if I don't have precise infallible memory on this one point.)

The thing that really gets my goat about people that complain on the internet is that their complaints are never updated when the situation changes. Some of those complainers think they are making valid complaints, when in the eyes of someone who has actually followed up on things, they appear to be completely ignorant and baseless complaints.

How do I report this comment?

It has literally nothing to do with the linked post.

You can downvote comments you feel are not relevant. Flag comments that are otherwise breaking rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I don't mean to sound smug, only offer a perspective. I've heard of what you're talking about, but I've never actually seen it for myself. On every Windows 10 system that I've used, including developer preview (& excluding my work laptop) is one that on which I've installed Win10 myself. During the installation process, I selected 'advanced' settings -- there was a glaring option that said something similar to "allow Microsoft to show ads in places like the start menu and apps" -- That was on by default and I turned it off in quick order. Additionally, I turned off every single setting that attempted to "learn" from my behavior and "provide" what I most likely wanted. I've only set these settings during installation, but here's what I found online. https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...

The last time I installed, they designed the installation screen so that it would be non-obvious that you could toggle those settings off. For instance, they had the link to the page to toggle those options on the bottom in small text which was a similar color to the background color.

That was a while ago, so admittedly it may have changed since then.

Regardless, when you have Windows set up, they then scatter those settings throughout various menus instead of having one centralized place where you can turn off all the advertising / some of the telemetry.

They also seem to be adding more of this as time goes on, which your one time disabling won't apply for. I turned off everything I could find, only to have more advertisements appear in my start menu months later due to what I believe was them adding in more advertisements in an update. I then had to go and toggle off.

I want to like Microsoft, I really do, but they don't make it easy. Advertisements in the operating system that I paid for is entirely galling to me.

I'm running win10 at home and with the exception of cortana conspiring to escape her banishment, I don't think I've ever seen a direct advert as such.

I upgraded back when they were doing the free upgrade, laundering a slightly questionable license in the process. Are the pre-loaded bits and pieces fairly new? Was there no opt-out on first run?

I'm not doubting they are there - it is Microsoft after all - just confused why they would choose to spam paying customers when people with keys from, hypothetically, long expired MSDN packs are still chugging along with no interference...

I did this too. But after an update they came back. Also huge banner ads for OneDrive started appearing across the top of Explorer windows.

Same reason Google TV will fail: because you will find yourself looking at ads 50% of the time.

> Microsoft do cool things like this ...

> So I go and check out a new Windows 10 laptop and the first thing I see, ..., is a bunch of adverts on the start menu and sigh.

Microsoft is not a single team. They have different products, different division owners, different managers, etc. At a company of this size you'll always find people making cool stuff and marketing trying to squeeze in as much content as possible. (and many other teams) This shouldn't be surprising that they coexist.

I'm not saying this is a good state and they do overall good work. Just that releasing procdump and embedding ads are two different worlds visible under one name outside.

As I said in another comment: does MS have a leadership team and CEO? Yes.

This is Nadella's strategy: stop copying Apple and copy Google. TBH, I liked their previous one a lot more.

On my main PC, I need a huge pile of both general-purpose and specialized software, starting from something as ubiquitous as MS office, and down to a long tail of compilers, debuggers, SDKs, drivers for strange hardware I use, and many others. Last time I did clean reinstall of Win10, maybe a few years ago, it took me a couple days to set it up.

That’s why I don’t care about candy crush or twitter. As far as I remember it took me 10 minutes to remove them, and despite I always update my PC, they never came back.

I assure you; they will randomly reinstall with a friendly, focus stealing, notification.

It’s rather disappointing. In fact; I have not used this system since (mostly due to unrelated logistics).

> they will randomly reinstall with a friendly, focus stealing, notification.

Maybe you clicked "use defaults" on some setup messages?

When a software or a web site asks me anything related to privacy, advertisements, tracking, etc., I usually pick best settings for me. The defaults are likely to be the best ones for the developers of software/web site.

This is one part of it. A good user experience doesn't require the user to solve a word puzzle to avoid getting spammed. Good user experience is having good defaults.

This particular windows 10 experience is from an upgrade method. Quite confident I toggled appropriate settings off - but I have done so many deploys / upgrades personally and professionally - perhaps I missed something on this asset?

Either way; I state my experience with the platform.

I assure you; they won't.

Uninstalled apps don't reinstall on upgrade (or at any other time) unless you have something in place that manually does it. This was a major complaint for a long time and MS fixed it 18 months ago or so.

I concur. This used to happen to my system but appears to have been fixed. The last few updates did not reinstall unwanted apps and they have remained uninstalled.

The fact that the stuff is even there to begin with leaves a bad taste in my mouth still, but glad to see the OS is now properly respecting the opt-out at the very least

I’m sorry, but the only way you are correct is if I somehow clicked a prompt to reinstall candy crush whilst interacting with a full screen application.

I, manually; removed candy crush. (Months And months prior)

Candy crush was automatically reinstalled, with a notification, without me initialising it. There was no manual action taken by me except that to close the notification (from notification centre) that it had been reinstalled.

This reinstallation happened within the last 6 months.

Happy to try review audit logs when I am, once again; logistically able.

As noted; I have barely touched this asset since (for unrelated logistical reasons - I’m about 150kms away from it, and it is powered down).. so confident the logs would exist.

I would appreciate you not suggesting it happened otherwise.

Windows 10 LTSB is really close. Then M$ decides to put candy crap + windows 10 home on the surface PRO. This puppy has great hardware but windows 10 feels like what some MS advertising exec wants everyone to use, not an actual os.

Can't buy it as an individual tho, afaik.

I recently spoke to a rep at a well-known Microsoft Partner; apparently it can be purchased for around $300, including 4 inexpensive CALs necessary to round out the order (5 licenses are required if you don't have an existing volume license agreement):

Explicit instructions for purchasing a Windows 10 LTSC license? https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...

LTSB means no WSL, no Hyper-V, no support for VStudio neither for Windows SDKs (which refuse to install or don't install cleanly), so it's not for "developent" anyway.

> LTSB means no WSL, no Hyper-V

"Have now upgraded to Window 10 LTSB build 1607 and Hyper V is fully working." https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1690823-windows-10-en...

"I just installed WSL on LTSC and it worked great." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271829

Oh, common. Of course you can stuff it on top, but beware of the risks.

Please, see: * https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1281

A random Joe says it works <--> Supported and stable configuration.

But you are right HyperV seems to be working as of 1607.

> Oh, common. Of course you can stuff it on top, but beware of the risks. ... But you are right HyperV seems to be working as of 1607.

WSL is also supported in LTSC and can be installed with these instructions from Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-manual

See https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/9r48x0/does_wsl_...

I was honestly stunned with my recent Dell laptop purchase. Windows10 pro on a workstation does not need Candy Crush Saga or Minecraft preinstalled.

I was even more stunned when I bought a Surface Book 2 directly from Microsoft for over £3000 running Windows 10 'Professional' and the first thing I see after booting it up is Candy Crush, TripAdvisor, Twitter and Minecraft on my start menu.

Not to mention after installing Office 365 I was still greeted with a 'helpful' prompt to 'Get Office'. Sigh.

  Do you see Apple loading up third-party apps into macOS? No? I wonder why.

Well, they do load up Google as their default search provider to make an extra $3 billion per year off Apple users.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/google-paying-apple-3-billio...

Sure, because search is actually a feature people want. I don’t want one drive or candy crush or telemetry data and all those are harder to turn off then changing search to DuckDuckGo on MacOS or iOS.

> one drive

Mac OS does come with a fairly deep iCloud Drive integration, and iOS defaults to backing up photos and files then tries to upsell to a higher package when space runs out. It's only fairly recently that iOS shipped with a dedicated file manager, instead making you store any documents you have either in individual apps or on iCloud Drive.

To be fair, macOS asks once about the iCloud, and when told 'No', it respects the user and never asks again, and never puts anything iCloud related into users face.

People? I?

Well, yes, people DO in fact want candy crush.

> Well, they do load up Google as their default search provider

While that's true, a browser pretty much needs a default search engine, and Google is widely regarded as the best. I'm not sure that Apple could make a more customer-centric choice.

Really? The worst privacy suck of a search choice for all of their devices is a "customer-centric" choice?

They couldn't default to the least intrusive? Or rotate randomly amongst the options?

No. They couldn't. Rotating randomly is just about the most frustrating thing you can do to a user. Also forcing your users to use an unfamiliar search engine.

Remember, we're talking about people that Google "Facebook" to go to Facebook.

You seem to imply that Apple users are less bright than the general population.

Oh come on!

Yes Safari includes Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo as built-in search providers.

That is not the same thing as bundling Candy Crush Soda in the Dock. Hell Apple don't even include the free iWorks apps such as Pages and Numbers in a clean macOS install you have to go and get them via the Mac App Store.

I believe it's this way because teams within Microsoft are not working towards the same goals. The Marketing / Business team and Development team have very different goals. This is a classic symptom I see a lot coaching smaller companies, seems like it happens in large companies too.

The Product people understand what makes a great product, but Marketing / Business people need short term fix in order to reach their KPIs, which pressures them to do what they do to the product, fill it up with advertisement. Otherwise marketing people will be out of a job.

There is a disconnect between Product and Business from within Microsoft. This is where Apple still has an edge, I'm not saying apple doesn't have internal conflicts they do, but they resolve it and when they speak they all speak the same message, this IMO is Apple's true strength.

Making the 2 teams work in a cohesive manner will take a lot of effort from the management, having understanding and patience to make Marketing and Product work together in harmony.

Just my $0.02

Nadella doesn't know that Windows has ads and spyware-like telemetry?

Either he must be using a Mac or Linux, or he's approved these shenanigans himself.

> spyware-like telemetry

Gonna need a source on that one. Not the "telemetry" part, the "spyware" part.

Edit: Because it's possible now to see all telemetry sent and even delete it from Microsoft's servers.

I seriously do not see the harm in usage telemetry...

No it isn’t. Microsoft refuses to disclose what is sent as part of the required “security” level telemetry.

And, according to the agreement, they have access to all your documents if they ‘have a good faith believe that doing so is necessary’

If I have an infected file, they can have a copy. I don't mind.

Honestly a lot of you must just have piles of questionable stuff you aren't proud of but also somehow can't stop collecting/creating, and you don't want anyone to ever see, because no one else will ever understand or something.

Not even my employer, the most risk-averse place I have ever worked, worries about the security telemetry.

Everyone has things they want to keep private. If you disagree I suggest that you film yourself walking down the street naked whilst saying your banking login details. Then post this on YouTube. Don't want to do this? Then you have things you want to be private too.

How is that action even remotely comparable to MS security telemetry?

How many people keep backups of photos on their computers? How many of those people have taken nude selfies? How many do banking on their computers?

Who keeps their own (or someone else's, for that matter) nude selfies? What fucking planet am I on? If I need to produce one (I have never needed to) then I get naked and take one. I don't keep a stash of naked selfies for retirement.

A lot of celebrities do, apparently.

Making something public and making an infected file available only to Microsoft, if and only if they have a good faith reason to use it to improve their products and services, are WILDLY different.

You make it sound like you, the user, have a choice in the matter.

You're not "making something available" and they're not asking you for permission. They taking it if they want it and you can't do anything about it.

I think that's what people object to most, the loss of freedom to say no, this is mine, it's private and I control who has access to it.

Then don't use Windows 10 if the terms and conditions are a problem for you...

If you don't use Windows, or are forced to, then just admit that you want/need something to complain about.

> Not even my employer, the most risk-averse place I have ever worked, worries about the security telemetry.

It's easy then - You simply don't work in very risk-averse environment. None of my employers in last 8 years would ever put anything like current Win10 on any computer in the company, precisely because of that.

That's an ignorant statement. You don't know where I work.

My current employer is more risk-averse than State Farm, a very large insurance company, whose livelihood requires a strong aversion to risk. I worked there for 3.5 years.

I know risk-averse when I see it.

Paranoia and risk-aversion are very different things.

Having a "good faith belief" is actually a high bar, legally.

I remain unconcerned.

And who is going to challenge Microsoft on this in court?

You lot, by the strength of the hatred I'm reading, here.

I am not really concerned Microsoft is downloading files from computers, but I am concerned if they technically have the ability to do so. If it requires an encryption key or some kind of password, these have a tendency to leak. If it is limited to a certain group of people, who's to say none of these people can be persuaded to sell your data? And would it be acceptable if the three-letter agencies can start snooping not only in the cloud but also on your own computer without you knowing?

Well fuck I guess they see all my emails to Grandma and they pirate all my unpublished anime fan fiction with the security level telemetry. Good point.

Telemetry, I think most people (given a choice) would opt-out but OK.

What I hate are all the dark-patterns, registry keys and obscure processes that you have to locate to perform the opt-out (and even don't clearly know they are disabled). I'm a bit sick of fighting the OS that I purchased to make my life easier.

Even published Group Policy seems like an arms race, every time a new Windows 10 release there are a crap-ton of new telemetry settings.

And why-oh-why does Windows Server have the XBox client installed?

Windows is becoming the weakest part of the Microsoft stack.

I understand what you're saying but it is just a poor excuse IMHO. It has been 3 years since Windows 10 came out, everyone at Microsoft knows it comes with this crap. They want it there.

I mean, that great, but I've had Windows 10 for two years and I don't even know what you people are talking about. Never seen anything resembling an ad.

I believe you must be an outlier. To get a quick understanding just Google: windows 10 candy crush

I'm using the exact same build of OSX that I started with over 12 years ago. It's been upgraded many times and undergone several machine changes and even moved from hard disk to hard disk.

Its NEVER been rebuilt. With Windows I simply had a process of expecting to do a complete clean reinstall every year or two.

Another of the many big reasons I ditched Windows for OSX.

So you never updated and missed out on security updates? Or what do you mean by "exact same build"?

He says he updates his OS in stead of reinstalling it with the newer version. He probably switched away from Windows during XP or Vista.

Microsoft reinstalls the OS when they do a new release of windows 10 and moves your files over, so on windows 10 you no longer need to do this.

I work on a Windows 10 Enterprise Virtual Machine. I keep seeing ads in the start menu for Netflix, Forza Horizon etc.

I could at least somehow understand if this was a home edition, but imho totally unacceptable to have it on an Enterprise version.

It's weird. I use Windows 10 all the time both at work and in office and I never see these ads. I'm in Sweden, maybe it's not targeted somehow.

I'm in the US. I don't see them either. I haven't for a long time, tens of months.

You probably have "Show Suggestions occasionally in Start" disabled.

These things were part of Terry Myerson's realm, as I recall, and he was sort of ejected from Microsoft. Once the agreements that put the things like Candy Crush in the start menu are expired, I expect they won't be returning.

> Not to mention how you conveniently always reset my settings to your defaults including reinstalling all your ad-crap every 6 months with a new Windows release.

I tend to wonder about that - is it done on purpose or it's because the half-year releases of these semi-annual updates are essentially being applied in upgrade process and not the old service pack way.

Also a "funny" thing from last few days: SO logged onto parents laptop with Microsoft Account credentials and surprise: OS didn't fetch a single piece of data already synchronized into their cloud but uploaded all recent changes made on that device and pushed them onto desktop.

"Feature Updates" are actually entire in-place OS installs on Windows 10. Whether it is intentional that they often fail to migrate certain settings or merely incompetence is difficult to determine.

Microsoft is large, it contains multitudes.

(with apologies to Walt Whitman)

I think the reason that this situation exists, in the face of a lot of online rebuke, is that they're heading towards a free-to-use version of Windows which will be entirely supported with un-removable crapware and telemetry, and they are testing the market.

Microsoft need to make Windows more free, not try to enclose GNU/Linux.

This is trivial to understand if you're looking at user freedom rather than just typing "yay open source! MS loves us nao!!!!" as you are nudged ever more meaningfully into the funnel for their cloud.

These Windows is really that makes Microsoft look bad. Imagine being the developer who wrote this and now the top comment is about how Windows ads and default games suck.

What they will probably never port to Linux is the real thing that makes Windows valuable - Microsoft Office.That's exactly the thing, absence of which makes Linux "not ready for desktop" (sort of sarcasm, I use Linux on desktop happily and LibreOffice is usually enough for me but many people and companies don't just because of this). If only they would I would absolutely buy it and would be also able to replace Windows on just so many business computers with Linux.

I'm quite happily using Office 365 under Linux. There's no real benefit to using their desktop offering over the browser-based one these days tbh.

Of course, they're a for profit company. And I understand they will do everything they can to undermine competition. That's why I also don't buy this "new cool Microsoft" mantra.

Try OnlyOffice! https://www.onlyoffice.com/

Doesn't you have to run a server (or use a 3-rd party server) for this?

As a Windows user who doesn't have Office installed, I disagree that Office is the only thing making Windows valuable. There are a lot of things it does right, or at least much better, than Linux, things the Linux community doesn't even seem to understand why anybody wants. Sadly, they're slowly destroying all these things because they hate the Desktop now, so the future of personal computing looks pretty damned grim.

Adding to the Microsoft/FLOSS debate: I'm extremely cautious about their current efforts. I do not trust them. At all. I don't actually need to trust them, since I've left their ecosystem for Linux some 18 years ago and I don't have plans to go back. But there is also a user base of individuals and companies who are just more comfortable using Linux/FLOSS at the moment and this larger user group is exactly what Microsoft is after. Far too many times have I seen "Windows 10 with WSL and VSCode is a great development environment" on this very site, which from my point of view is exactly where Microsoft wants us to be, on the tipping point from Linux/Mac to Windows. They are pulling every uprising technology to their platform to make the decision to move back feasible for people and companies alike and thus stay relevant themselves. In times of IBM buying Red Hat this is something I've very anxious about.

And like many others have said: Microsoft is just beginning to act like "good guys", but these five or six years aren't nearly enough to forget and forgive. I remember an OSCON keynote by Steve Yegge called "How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevent in Two Easy Steps" (which is great in itself and really difficult to get by since blip.tv went down), where, among other things, he's telling the story of Bell Atlantic, which later became Verizon. The reason for the rebranding has been a study about the time period needed for people to forget about the bad (bad service, bad technology) and associate the brand with something good (upgraded service, upgraded technology). This study's answer has been "a generation", which is roughly what I would have guessed, based on several brand names stuck in my mind. I don't think I would trust Microsoft more 20 years from now, but I might not take such a hard stance on them if they don't go beyond the "embrace" phase in that time. If they do, well, that's another generation from them to outlive.

Seems like a very Windows tool. By that I mean it's a full "application" to do what could be done in about 15 lines of shell script:

  #!/bin/bash
  set -e
  pid=$1
  if [[ "$pid" = *[^0-9]* ]]; then
      pid=$(pgrep -x "$pid")
  fi
  lasttime=$((2**64))
  while sleep 10; do
      read pid comm state ppid pgrp session tty_nr tpgid flags minflt cminflt majflt cmajflt utime stime cutime cstime priority nice num_threads itrealvalue starttime vsize rss rsslim startcode endcode startstack kstkesp kstkeip signal blocked sigignore sigcatch wchan nswap cnswap exit_signal processor rt_priority policy delayacct_blkio_ticks guest_time cguest_time start_data end_data start_brk arg_start arg_end env_start env_end exit_code < /proc/$pid/stat
      newtime=$((utime+stime))
      if (( newtime - lasttime > 1 )); then
          gcore $pid
      fi
      lasttime=$newtime
  done

This one has the benefit of being extensible to handle whatever metric you want, or execute whatever command you want, change the polling period...

Where are the command line arguments other than the pid? Where are the tests?

This one has the benefit of being extensible to handle whatever metric you want, or execute whatever command you want, change the polling period...

Yeah, you also have to edit it every time you want to use it. It’s a chunk of shell script, not a reusable tool.

Is htop very "Windows" as well?

ProcDump is a Linux reimagining of the classic ProcDump tool

"reimagining"? Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak? "Linux version of the ProcDump..." would've been far clearer and more familiar.

I wasn't aware Sysinternals had its own tool of similar function with the same name --- the ProcDump I know of was written by a few crackers 2 decades ago and very useful for unpacking: "ProcDump version 1.6 (C) G-RoM, Lorian & Stone in 1998, 1999, 2000"

> "reimagining"? Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak?

Probably because of significantly different functionality. ProcDump is cool because it lets you use system performance counters to trigger a dump precisely when a program is misbehaving, including when an exception occurs. The Linux version only appears to support a few options: CPU thresholds and memory commits.

> the ProcDump I know of was written by a few crackers 2 decades ago

That's always been ProcDump32 to me. IIRC, SysInternals' ProcDump isn't as old, but it's good for debugging transient issues with executing programs.

> Why the obfuscatory marketingspeak?

Seems like an unnecessarily hostile response.

It is a re-imagining because it has very little in common with the Windows ProcDump aside from doing a very similar task and name. For example it is a brand new implementation and many of the args have changed (M/m Vs. m/ml, or p for pid Vs. p for performance counter on Windows, etc).

If they called it a "Linux version of the Windows Utility" people would be complaining about that instead ("but the args aren't the same!"). So instead they call it a re-imagining and get attacks like this, it is a no-win situation.

Heh. I think it's because I just woke up, but when you said "a few crackers" I thought you meant "a few crazy people", in a nice way of course.

Googling promptly cleared up that misunderstanding (although I was probably only half wrong ;) ).

You're referring to ProcDump32. Googling "ProcDump32 1.6.2" seems to do the trick for finding it.

References: (don't fall in :D)

- http://vinaylimbare.blogspot.com/2010/

- https://cagglararli.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/re-building/

- http://karpoff.esy.es/manuales/topcite/archivos/UpxManual.ht... (site says it's shutting down in 2 weeks; / is only 58MB when wget -r'd)

- https://xakep.ru/2004/08/23/23546/ (a Russian article whose author completely confuses ProcDump and ProcDump32)

- http://web.archive.org/web/20010721135909/http://procdump32.... (the canonical home, but all outbound (archived) links broken)

- http://web.archive.org/web/20010721135909/http://procdump32..... (the canonical home, but all outbound (archived) links broken)

The front page of the Immortal Descendants site appears to have been archived, however: http://web.archive.org/web/20010410075344/http://www.immorta...

This takes me back... and now someone else has unfortunately "namesquatted" them.

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