Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows
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In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing lately, but Windows is a glaring exception, it’s getting worse and worse at an alarming rate.
In the last two months we had two consecutive updates that broke basic functionality for users who disabled web results in Windows Search (which is a very common setting among those who care about privacy) https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-1903-microsoft-deta...
Now, MS is trying to force upon customers this cloud login garbage, which is obviously not acceptable if you are privacy conscious.
I build my own PCs and have spent hundreds of dollars in Windows 10 retail licenses, I pay for the service so I don’t want to be the product.
I’ve always assumed that I’m locked into using Windows but after all this crap I’m starting to look into alternatives even though they’v got shortcomings on their own.
(Edit: replaced Amp link with real link, sorry I didn’t realise it was Amp)
A. Being able to use some proprietary software not available on Linux
B. Being able to self build so I can select the HW that works for me
With Linux I lose A and with Mac I would lose B. I’m thinking that a combo Mac Mini + Tower PC with Linux could work, but using two OSes at the same time, even with shared NAS, KVM switch etc., would not be the best in terms of UX
(Edit I had mixed up “A” and “B” in my sentence)
What software is this? Perhaps it runs under Wine?
Use latest PS and Lr.
So here’s the thing. Even if you’re right (and not confusing some older version as the latest.. that often happens in these discussions... what do you think is the latest version of adobe CC?), this is a terrible support story and not something that most pros that rely on adobe tools want to mess around with.
One of the winedb reviews says this:
“adjusting parameters in some effects such as lens blur makes program unusable (must kill app)”
Wonderful.
playonlinux is dead last two years, authors decided to rewrite it.
> what do you think is the latest version of adobe CC?
2019.
About 1star reviews - guest mostly people are confused about installer, it doesn't works for years.
Additionally what of the various bugs that are filed and comments about missing or broken functionality.
This is not something that most professionals want to dick with.
Also expect learning new things and spending several evenings trying. Compared to hackintosh, installing Linux on random hardware is a walk in the park.
I've been a Hackintosh user for the past decade.
I've not done it yet, but the next time I need to do a brand new Hackintosh setup, I'm planning on using ESXI. It seems perfect—you're getting very little performance loss in exchange for a setup which is (kind of) officially supported by Apple.
Maybe when I actually do it, I'll discover some terrible downside, but it seems incredibly appealing.
Wrt ESXI - are you aware, that with ESXI you will lose local console (and all the GPU-goodness)? After ESXI boots, it has only text-mode notice, how to connect remotely and that's it. You will be stuck with remote access. For things like build machine or test-runner, that's fine, but if you want to run something interactive... well, let us know about the experience ;)
By the way, it doesn’t support discrete GPU, but Nvidia GPU performace in the XPS 15 is horrible due to heavy throttling anyway.
I’m interested in a new XPS 15 but prefer Mac OS.
I know there are plenty of things that don't work with wine, but realistically, how many of them does each person need to work, and how many are "defaults"? For example if you spend 90% of your time in illustrator, do you need excel specifically, or "an app with text in cells"? And if you're crunching market data in excel all day, do you need Adobe, or just something to draw an arrow on a screenshot?
"The test results for this version are very old"
"What works: "Basic editing of the slides (inserting and formatting texts, images)""
"What was not tested: "Advanced functionality""
----
Nobody has tested it recently, nobody knows if "advanced" features work, and they think it's PowerPoint. What does 'Gold' mean?
Whatever worked is highly unlikely to stop working. You can expect better support than in past test.
> What does 'Gold' mean?
New to software development, are we? That is such a laughably bad assumption that I’ll assume what I think you meant to say is not really what you meant to say.
But I’m glad to know that editing slides works just fine in Excel. From the link, “Gold” means: “Works as well as (or better than) on Windows with workarounds.” The test results say online login crashes. That tells me their certification program doesn’t mean shit.
And yes, it is what I meant. For software like wine, if something works in version X, you can expect it will work in X+1. Sure, there will always be some regression from time to time, but wine's whole existence is based on the idea that they support Window's APIs. These are not random features they'll decide to remove from time to time.
Anyone that expects this is setting themselves up for disappointment.
My actual experience with this has not matched yours. Wine is extremely fragile. There is a reason why things like winetricks and using dedicated wine prefixes exists, for one.
This is not a knock on wine really, but the complexity of the problem at hand.
> These are not random features they'll decide to remove from time to time.
Emulating windows APIs is extremely complicated. Even with the best intentions of not breaking something it happens, quite a bit.
You are extremely naive.
* No, I don't consider having to search bugzilla 'documentation'.
Edit: Note that I'm talking about Wine here. When wine is wrapped by people who know what they're doing it works well - Crossweavers/Proton etc. - for the specific subset of programs they're tuned for. Otherwise you have all the wine-typical issues outside that subset.
Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere are not “defaults” on any system I know of. If you need to draw an arrow on a screenshot, there are ironically more free beer and open source programs available on Windows to do this (even gimp). If someone wants to pirate adobe that isn’t an aspiring designer (which is sort of a rite of passage), and has it just to collect that’s cool, but irrelevant... but I assume if someone has the CS on their machine it’s to do actual work with industry standard tools - that certainly is the case for me.
There are plenty of things to do in Excel that are best served by excel and not crunching market data. I have tried libreoffice calc multiple times in the past. Google sheets is also cool for certain things, but no excel killer.
And here’s the kicker: If you need to just put arrows on screenshots or an app with text in cells (and you’re not a dev), then you don’t need a desktop running Linux or windows... you can do with an iPad.
And https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
A garbage rating for the latest installer also means that even if you could run things, the workflow is not seamless.
You can get very far with Gimp and or Inkscape. I'm going to suggest that the majority of Adobe users will get by just fine with Gimp.
> I'm going to suggest that the majority of Adobe users will get by just fine with Gimp.
Well, frankly, your suggestion is useless. Not even the maintainers of gimp have the temerity to suggest that Gimp is a suitable replacement for Adobe photoshop. I don't care about the "users" of Adobe that pirate it. The tools are expensive and people pay for it. The majority of people that pay for Adobe Photoshop have very good reasons for doing so.
You are clueless if you think Gimp can replace Photoshop. You can do a little research to see why, it's well documented. Morons have been suggesting Gimp as a PS replacement since the late 90s and there is now nearly 20 years of responses for why that is untenable.
Edit: besides the VM, I hear Wine supports many apps nowadays so it’s worth trying as well
I'd like to achieve sub 10ms latency and I feel running in a VM would make that very difficult?
Did USB passthrough for MIDI devices work well?
I've considered bitwig for Linux production but a big issue is you end up losing a lot of VSTs that aren't native to Linux (Serum and Massive, both wavetable synths, are a good example).
iMac for everything, including development and music production; Windows and Linux virtualised and resumable in a few seconds if needed.
If you do this (as I did in the past) you're now juggling N Windows VMs to avoid ONE Windows host system..
You're right. One VM could work for office and other utilities. Unfortunately for me it grew into a mess of VMs, fast.
Ayup. Win10 finally broke the camel's back and I started the process of figuring out how to transfer as much as we can to Linux.
The hardest part is that our embedded development stuff is all Windows. :( I've been trying to get VSCode, Segger, and embedded boards to play nice together. I haven't been sufficiently successful that I could start pushing it onto the dev team yet.
Your overall point is stronger than you think: Xilinx's FPGA toolchain [1] has official Linux support, and their embedded software toolchain (based on yocto and gcc) actually depends on Linux!
[1] Xilinx is the market leader for general purpose and high-performance FPGAs. The situation is slightly different for space-grade and very low-power FPGAs, although Microsemi has been supporting Linux for many years as well.
Source: buddy worked as sw QA for xilinx.
Vscode is available as an official snap (on Windows you need to download and update it manually), Segger tools and openocd are fully supported. GCC cross-compiler and even some flashing tools are part of the distro and just an apt-get away.
This also means that everyone get the same tools (same version, same bugs). Which makes collaboration much easier.
>on Windows you need to download and update it manually
you don't need to update it manually, it will show a popup that an update is available and will update itself once approved.
Everywhere I've worked solved this by having the toolchain available via a network share that you would mount/copy, or checked into p4 so that everyone would be on the same version and you would know what compiler version was used to build a particular release. I suppose you could achieve the same thing by building in a Docker container..
This is kind of the idea behind the hermetic environments that Bazel enforces, and is essential if you want bit-for-bit reproducible builds.
We have used Docker images in past but it gets really annoying with large code trees and access permissions for programmers and debuggers...
That's because Windows Division does not exist anymore as a separate business unit within MS. It's now a part of Azure. And Azure doesn't really care all that much about making desktop excellent. It'll just keep it good enough for you to buy more Azure, but not more than that.
Desktop OS and apps won’t go away for the next 10 or 20 years by sheer inertia of the corporate market, and the halo effect on home users. And I guess the past month/years issues don’t affect business users (corporate managed desks will have any problematic feature disabled from the start)
“Everyone” migrating to OSX/linux won’t happen for many many years, even if they keep screwimg up home and hobbyist market. Corporate market is also their strong point, so money wise they’ll be fine with that.
Some of that software is Windows-only. There are quite a few good products that run on Mac. Relatively little runs on open platforms like Linux. And for now, macOS has its own issues for long-term professional use, starting with Apple's reluctance to give any sort of concrete guarantees about support longevity. So that can be quite a barrier to migrating away from Windows for businesses.
It would be nice to think that in time Linux or other free platforms would fill the gap, but it's a chicken and egg problem. As an interesting contrast, within a very short time after Adobe went cloud/subscription with the dominant package of graphics/publication software, we had several smaller and more agile competitors entering the market at much more attractive (and non-subscription) price points: Sketch, the Affinity products, etc. We don't know to what extent any of these might already have been in development before and how much they were motivated directly by the shift to Creative Cloud, but we do know that the closest OSS equivalents have been around for years and made negligible impact, which doesn't bode well for the viability of Linux desktops as an alternative platform for "normal" business use (as opposed to, for example, specialist work like software development).
The sheer intertia in businesses of all sizes using Excel will probably never completely go away. It will fade out over decades.
And proper excel (excel 2007!!!) is not on Mac OS , Linux or in the cloud.
On the other hand, IME this is more of an enterprise-scale thing. Smaller businesses tend to be less firmly tied to existing software packages, and do less heavily customised work with Excel specifically, so there's likely to be less of a barrier for them to migrate.
Would you see a future where gamers would embrace linux in enough numbers that it becomes a main platform ? I see their communities as willing to bear with some level of technical complexity as long as there are clear results, I was seeing the driver issues as the only real showstopper to have them move out of windows.
Windows still claims nearly 80% of desktop market share, while OS X has less than 15%. Linux is around 2%.
Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires it. Google requires it. Amazon requires it. Xbox Live requires it. Facebook requires it. Sony requires it. People are used to this. If you think this will affect Windows in any way, you probably read too much HN.
macOS does not require a cloud account. Technically you don't even need one for iOS, but most people will create an Apple ID for the App Store (and I hope this distribution monopoly on iOS will eventually be broken up).
Neither Mac or Windows really requires an account but they make it an inconvenient path.
Well, kind of. It seems to prompt me once per service, more or less. If I keep closing them, I've found that macOS does eventually shut up.
Isn't that more for security reasons? Apple doesn't want users enabling the root account unless they know what they're doing, so they make it hard to find. (And, really—coming from someone who runs with SIP turned off—there's very little reason to enable that account.)
The corporate "reason" is that a new CEO must be seen implementing dramatic changes (activity > progress).
In this case I'm not sure if Satya the Saint [tm] started this roadmap, but for sure he managed to associate himself with it and take credit for it.
As others said, a new CEO can easily reverse the whole process in order to have a "new" little triumph.
It is all meaningless...
To be fair to him, from a business perspective, look at Microsoft's share price since. As long as the cloud hype continues and no-one is looking too closely at where Microsoft's money is (and in some cases now isn't) coming from, the stock is likely to keep going up and he probably has free reign to do almost anything he wants. What is anyone going to do about it?
I'm still a little surprised that none of the other IT giants appears to have identified the Windows 7 EoL next year as a rare opportunity to grab a significant chunk of the desktop market and been building a credible competitor. Even with the current trend for shifting things online, local computing isn't going anywhere any time soon, not least because many people and businesses want a level of security, privacy, longevity and reliability that online services simply don't offer. We've seen many times that a new, significantly different platform with enough "killer apps" to gain a foothold can then grow and do well, from mobile devices to games consoles and of course the whole world of cloud computing and SaaS, all of which have disrupted traditional desktop/laptop/server markets significantly while creative very lucrative new industries in themselves. I was wondering a few years ago as the intended strategy for Windows 10 was becoming clear whether an Apple or a Red Hat or even a traditional heavyweight like IBM might have stepped in. I guess no-one thought the cost/risk was attractive enough.
Who, exactly, would be positioned to do that? Apple's not interested. RedHat/IBM I guess I could see, but their customer base is very different.
They have relatively little skin in the game in terms of online services. They have credibility in both mobile and laptop markets. They have at least some expertise in related areas like server, workstation and networking products. Perhaps more significantly, historically much of their success has come from making big plays that created new markets, and their current golden goose is looking a bit tired.
I could have imagined them offering an antidote to cloud-everything for businesses, particularly smaller ones that have more flexibility and less lock-in with their current brands, that wanted good centralised management of both static and mobile devices under in-house control.
I could also have imagined them offering some sort of home networking hub where everything from your Macbook to your iPhones and iPads to your TV and media streaming could talk to a centralised box that offered media storage, a controlled way to use online services for things like backups and media streaming, and even some sort of remote/VPN access so you could connect into all your normal facilities over a mobile network while out and about.
Given the pressure they're increasingly coming under with their traditional strategy of trying to promote expensive, high-end mobile devices and a closed ecosystem, I wondered if they might see an opportunity and commit some serious resources to making a play for that hybrid/combined/in-house market. Apparently not.
I also wondered whether there might be some sort of grand coalition among the big Linux players, which probably means Red Hat, Canonical and possibly Valve. There's probably enough money and enough potential upside there to fund the creation of rival "killer app" level software for Linux desktops. And again, then you have both client and server side expertise and some experience building custom hardware as well, which opens up a world of possibilities if you can generate a critical mass of interest.
Then you have the likes of IBM, who have been riding the waves of changing infrastructure and local/remote pendulum swings for many years, and certainly have the resources to build a viable new platform if they wanted to. It's not as if they're strangers to either corporate strategy with enterprise customers or building a solid desktop platform, after all.
And finally, there's always the chance of a dark horse. There are a lot of people out there who used to work for big name companies that are no longer with us and who have developed solid products that ultimately didn't make it for mostly non-technical reasons, and there is a lot of VC money around. I didn't think it was inconceivable that someone would put together a credible executive team and raise a lot of early funding with a prize this big at stake.
App Store, iTunes Music Store, iTunes Book Store, iCloud, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, etc.
Apple has been making as much of a PR stink about becoming an online services-focused company as Microsoft has. Arguably Apple has been doing even better in direct-to-consumer online services than Microsoft has in the same time period (their app store underperforming; their recent shuttering of an eBook store; etc). Apple just doesn't have (or seem to have interest in) the "big iron" side of Cloud services like AWS/GCP/Azure.
These are generally not the kind of SaaS online services that compete with desktop software, though. Rather, they're primarily ways of delivering software and media content that is then used locally. That actually fits very well with a model of promoting local devices, local networks and centralised access to online services, which is one of the reasons I thought Apple might make a move in that direction. The notable exception is iCloud, but if you consider that this one is primarily about sync and backup facilities and if you're promoting some sort of office server or "home hub" to centralise storage and connectivity to things like offsite backups, again that would fit quite neatly.
But still, if all those .9 billion Windows users still decide that FOSS is too hard, who am I gaf?
Dont get fooled. They got better because they have competition. The company is still mostly a marketing firm longing for the days when it could abuse positions of monopoly.
There has been no changes in their structure that would change their core ethics.
Hit a key combination, GUI launches, you type.
Different (key)strokes for different folks.
So, have you followed the advice in the support document? Did it help?
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-fix-start-menu-and-search...
[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3183922/how-to-temp...
Come the 2nd update that borked the start menu, I suspected that it might be because I restored the cache and so the "fix" was not applying correctly. I then proceeded to wipe the cache altogether and it simply rebuilt itself.
Protip: If trying to delete files using windows built in tools throw up errors (mostly permissions related. this will not help you delete a file whose file handle is locked though.), trying using rm from cygwin. Works every single time.
Since (I don't think) you can join Windows Home to a Domain, is that true? Is the option for a local account now only available in Windows Pro, unless you install Windows Home disconnected from the Internet?
(You should still be able to force an offline account by disconnecting for the internet during install, but, that requirement is terrible.)
This is terrible.
It doesn't. It means, or at least it should, join the PC to a Active Directory/NT4 domain.
It doesn’t normally mean “create offline account”, but domain accounts are not the same as Microsoft accounts, and domain accounts are a normal part of enterprise deployments. So it does normally mean that you can create a non-Microsoft account. Yes, it’s stupid. Not defending it, just trying to explain what “join domain” means.
I’m not talking about people who happen to use Windows in a professional setting. I’m talking specifically about people whose main job responsibilities include Windows administration.
Given that your stated alternative was home users, you seem to have excluded just about the entire world of small businesses with that definition. They might not have dedicated IT staff, but they still need to be able to administer their systems and in many cases a designated person will still be responsible for doing so. They just need to be able to do that as well as fulfilling whatever obligations they have in their primary role. Issues like privacy and security apply just as much in this context as in a large enterprise deployment with a whole department of dedicated staff to run it, but they need simple, transparent mechanisms for setting up the office network, deploying updates to the OS and installed software, etc.
> Is there anyone that even knows what "Domain join" means?
And the answer is, “IT specialists supporting Windows in corporate environments.” Generally speaking. I honestly cannot understand the motive or purpose for the rest of your comment, which seems to be about the needs of small businesses, which is not germane.
> Given that your stated alternative was home users, you seem to have excluded just about the entire world of small businesses with that definition.
Right, because I am specifically talking about IT specialists, who “administer Windows professionally”. This is the usual definition of “professionally”, that you “profess” to do something. If I talk about people who “write professionally”, this also does not include people who happen to write emails, memos, and other ordinary correspondence at work.
But this doesn’t really exclude small business, since it’s common for small businesses (and medium) to contract IT services.
That's why MS renamed the button.
> or care
They do, else MS would not need those dark patterns.
No, typical end users do not care what “domain join” means. They only care about creating offline accounts. “Domain join” isn’t supposed to mean “create offline account”, it’s supposed to let you join the computer to an AD domain. Or at least, that’s what I’d expect.
Some of this I guess is semi-intentional dark patterns [1], but it's also a complex space where explaining the trade-offs to "typical" end users would involve a ton of wasted space and increasingly local/offline accounts aren't what a "typical" end user wants, because they aren't an IT Admin and don't understand the trade-offs and probably don't care to. Given no one seems to have a good name for them other than "offline accounts" or "local accounts", which would imply "can't connect to the internet" to "typical" end users, it's hard not to feel that it really probably is a Power User feature and it's as much an unintentional dark pattern simply because we don't have a good name for it and no one wants to explain the trade-offs to "typical" end users.
[1] Though I'm more willing than most to ascribe at least some good intentions to it: settings synchronization is more useful to typical end users than local sandboxes and devices that don't roam basic settings. The ability to recover logging into a device when a user forgets a password is also a huge necessary deal in 2019 because passwords are broken and typical end users have far too many of them. Microsoft also wants to kill the password as a thing in lieu of other factors. Getting end users out of daily password input would be good for us an industry.
(Yes, yes, I know the next three commenters will complain that it's all just for telemetry and surveillance, and I understand where y'all are coming from, but you are also not-quite-correct and it's a debate I'm tired of. Windows 10 has been increasingly better at allowing you to explore all of its telemetry collection and better with each update at providing tools for opting out of individual telemetry. Windows 10 and macOS/iOS are at the same levels of telemetry collection and accountability of such today. The telemetry debate is increasingly not productive nor interesting in the comments on HN and elsewhere.)
Still none of this really justifies burying the option deep and using vague terminologies to hide this feature. Case in point: I had to google search the procedure to create a local account when I wanted to create an account for guests/others that use my laptop.
The pain point about telemetry is that Windows is a paid product and there shouldn't even be such a thing in a product that people pay for. And although there might (now) be settings to control telemetry, what good are they when Windows updates reset all settings regularly?
You have a higher opinion of the "typical" end user than I do. "Local" invites the question "local to what?" and "as opposed to what?". When the other option is "online account", then yes even "local" leads to "can't use on the internet" to certain types of users.
Burying a power user feature to avoid confusing inexperienced end users is justified. The argument over whether or not "local accounts" or "offline accounts" are a power user feature is a more interesting argument. I do think that if we can't come up for a name for them that isn't confusing to inexperienced end users, than that's at least one indicator that it may be a power user feature.
> The pain point about telemetry is that Windows is a paid product and there shouldn't even be such a thing in a product that people pay for.
People want data-driven improvements in paid products, too. (Would you rather Microsoft just blindly make changes? What are the alternatives? Go back to waterfall and nothing but overly detailed and over-engineered specs of what some PM thought was a good idea because they heard it from some rich Enterprise client at a tech conference three years ago?)
There are tons of paid products with telemetry. It's been highly upvoted advice here on HN, to do things like A/B testing, and metrics-driven development. Lots of paid products have telemetry (including Apple's and Google's).
"Paid products" is another amusing double standard I'm going to add to my list for telemetry complaints. "What's good for the startup goose, is not good for the old tech gander." --HN commenters, probably
> And although there might (now) be settings to control telemetry, what good are they when Windows updates reset all settings regularly?
There were always settings since Windows XP. The only thing Windows 10 did was change them from opt-in to opt-out by default. Microsoft then responded to arguments that the settings weren't granular enough, so now there's dozens more settings with pages of documentation each (and an explorer tool to log and examine collected telemetry data, if you wish).
The resets were bugs in the upgrade process that have generally been fixed since. Microsoft has been taking settings resets seriously, and absolutely considers them bugs. The way in-place upgrades work, migration scripts missing settings is a problem. Microsoft's "Beta" program (Insiders) is sadly not setup to find telemetry reset bugs because they need the telemetry most of all in Beta testing, so I feel it's understandably unfortunate that so many telemetry settings reset bugs have made it into production.
Local accounts aren't a "power user" feature either. I bet every person/household has guests over who might have to use the device (for work or something else). Whose Microsoft/Outlook Account should be used for such use cases? I hope you see the issue with considering local accounts a power user feature.
As far as changes to OS goes, MS should listen to customer feedback first and foremost. A minimal non personally identifying diagnostic information gathering would be fine too but instead you have this with Win 10:
> "This data is transmitted to Microsoft and stored with one or more unique identifiers that can help us recognize an individual user on an individual device" [1]
> It's been highly upvoted advice here on HN, to do things like A/B testing, and metrics-driven development.
Neither A/B testing nor metrics-driven development require overzealous collection of personally identifying data. You would do fine with anonymous data for such testing.
> Microsoft has been taking settings resets seriously
Not seriously enough it seems. The issues have continued throughout lifetime of Win 10 well into 2019 now. If it's a bug, it's easily longest running Win 10 bug now. My own settings were reset after the latest feature update. A google search shows that I'm not alone. I shudder thinking about the poor souls who disabled telemetry and failed to notice how an update reset their settings.
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468236/diagnostics...
In the era when everyone has a computer already in their pocket? In the era when a Windows 10 laptop can be bought at Wal-Mart for $200 or sometimes less?
We're in an era of single user devices. Statistically the "household computer" is gone, the Desktop/Tower a legacy form factor used mostly just by gamers now, and most "computing" people need is just done on their phones they keep in their pockets. The need to borrow someone else's device today is mostly just to throw YouTube videos on entertainment center screens to share and we've got Chromecast/Apple Cast/Miracast dedicated tools for that today.
Having more than one account, itself, on a device is a power user feature in 2019. Having a distinction between types of accounts and whether or not those accounts are backed by cloud accounts, is probably no less a power user feature than having multiple accounts on a device is in the first place.
Yes. The form factor of a mobile phone is not at all conducive to productivity. You wouldn't buy $200 walmart Win 10 laptop for every guest that would like to work/create a word|excel|powerpoint doc/play games on your computer either.
“User account in Microsoft's Cloud”.
Or something similar. Not all that difficult.
The point I included was that Microsoft has changed the wording on it more than once because they don't have a good idea what to call them.
It's actually quite a helpful option to have, but it's completely absurd for the only way to create a local account to be via the domain join option.
You think that joe mechanic who just bought his daughter a new machine has any of this lexicon.
Whomever is responsible for all of this bullshit at MS should be hit in the face with a shovel.
Recently, and I’ve been in tech since 1997, I bought an office lic at Costco because I needed excel on a machine...
You know what a pain in the ass it is to install office on a generic factory machine with the new bs. They want to tie that install to an outlook account.
Nope. I just want excel this machine won’t even be connected to the internet. But MS says fuck-you-because-thats-why.
To print barcodes and labels in serial with an ODBC connection... so libre won’t work
I have a bug filed with them where if you build a thing in google sheets and export to xlsx and attempt to connect to that data source it crashes.... (but if it is native xlsx it works fine) hence my need to install excel on that particular machine, as the bartender software can take tabular input for varying data for each sticker printed ( cannabis compliance labels, which I have now mastered)
They are a great company though, and bartender is an amazing program. I suggest everyone download their free version and learn it.
Some would consider this one a dark pattern, I would agree in this case.
It would mean the death of Windows.
Not necessarily. Remember that Windows is an Azure product now. They want employees in the cloud paying for Office 365 anyway.
I bet some companies will end up doing exactly that. For others there will probably remain an exception that will cost extra.
(I may be saying this as if it's normal, but I need to turn up my cynicism quite a bit to fit this reality.)
Not that it makes it better.
Edit: the HN comment I’m talking about is this one, you can see from the timestamp it's older than mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104074
Under "Domain join instead", I would assume that I could enter an appropriate domain credentials and the computer would join the domain. Essentially the same thing, that the OOB assistant in RHEL8/Fedora does, when choosing Enterprise login.
I think this is worth thinking about for a bit. The trope is that if you're not paying then you're the product.
But it doesn't follow that if you are paying you are not the product. That depends entirely on business decisions that customers have little visibility into.
For any product you pay for, there may eventually be a decision to extract additional revenue streams by monetizing your data or attention.
The fact that this happened with cable TV and advertising before the era of the internet indicates that this is far from a new pattern. I expect to see it a lot in the next few years.
Look no further than TV manufacturers, the moment one of them decided to substitute below market prices with selling people’s data the others had to follow to stay competitive!
If anything, by now I'd say "smart TV fatigue" is setting in, much the same as "smartphone fatigue" a little while ago. Enough people have had these devices for long enough to see all the a-bit-too-clever software get out of date and stop working, and then they start to see the bundled online services and so on as a negative and start asking their more techie friends and family for advice on how to avoid the problems next time.
I can plug an Xbox if I want, or a shield, or a Roku, or an Amazon fire stick/tv, or an Apple TV, or a chrome cast
Just add a bunch of ports and KISS.
I don't understand why the same manufacturers/distributors offering these products don't also pitch them as TVs with well-defined specs and no junk, probably with some sort of "expert"/"pro" branding that makes them look like a high-end choice.
You could pitch one of those, a basic 2.1 home sound system or the like, and maybe a small control/switching box that everything plugs into and that also accepts your source feeds, and you've got a mini home-theatre-style arrangement that could be quite attractive to those who value decent gear but don't have the budget and/or space for a full home theatre setup that would cost at least 2-3x as much for entry-level equipment.
That used to be an obvious possibility, but recent products in this category tend to run variants of Android/Tizen/webOS complete with Wi-Fi to support remote management. There are still a few relatively "dumb" models of commercial displays out there, but they seem to be a dying breed.
The problem is the principle that it's OK for your devices to monitor you at all without your explicit knowledge and consent -- or even with those things, if the market leaves no reasonable alternative and so the consent isn't really consent at all.
I think the change we're starting to see among my group now is that the built-in software is starting to get out of date and not necessarily being maintained by the provider(s) of the service(s) affected, meaning from the user's point of view, the TV just turns on one day and can't connect to service X any more, with no way to fix it.
I'm not sure privacy has much to do with the discontent, because as you suggest, I doubt many people are even aware of the kind of tracking that is going on. When "smart" TVs or related devices get updated firmware and start doing things like injecting ads it really upsets people, but until they have some indication that any of this is happening, of course it doesn't really affect them or their opinions.
Whichever corporations are paying for these revenue streams of monetized data and attention, they can (and do) easily outbid whatever a human customer is willing or able to pay for software or services that don't track you.
It's pretty obvious when you think about it. All the incentives for commercial software / services / sites anywhere are stacked against the user actually paying with money instead of data.
There isn't even a good infrastructure for getting/passing this money, unlike the giant system of ad networks passing tracking data back and forth.
People (complete idiots, IMHO) have been saying this is the transaction, you're paying with your data for the "free internet". But for starters, there is no choice. Also, nobody asked me. I've been "paying" with my data without consent for YEARS, even though I try not to.
And now we see it's not an either/or question. They can just make you pay for the service AND extract your data and track you. Because why not both? Again we don't have a lot of choice.
This makes no sense. Someone paying £43 a month for Sky TV in the UK is only worth another £5 a month in adverts. Maybe that works out fine, but I don't pay for Sky because of this. London Underground brainwashes millions of people every day. They spend £4.50 on a ticket, but TFL want an extra 15p from advert income. Passengers then spend the cost of that advertising and then some on products they see being advertised, a cost they wouldn't have born without the adverts.
Some businesses may make the bulk of their money from advertising other companies, but most don't.
Anyway, it was this comment, they explained the idea better than I did maybe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988742
Indeed. When cable TV started, it didn't have advertising. The premise was that you were paying for the service, so they didn't have to show you ads. That situation lasted as long as ice cream in the Nevada sun. Cell companies were capitalizing on tracking data we were providing them -- despite the high cost of cell service -- long before the general public got wise. Microsoft just took longer to get to the same idea.
Microsoft is going to double down on this, and make the consumer version "free" by way of explicit advertising. If they lose customers, they won't care. They've got corporations around the globe by the short hairs for at least another generation. Maybe two. They've been losing the consumer space for years, and they're just going to ride it all the way into the ground.
If you have the money and the space for a second computer, use the computer with Windows for that specialized task and use a real* computer for everything else? We've been whining about this nonsense for over two years now and I think we need to take a hint.
* that does not force you to restart at its whims
I prefer buying a 2nd flash drive and dual-booting across different drives entirely, so that Windows / Linux don't even share the same bootloader. Its not like $200 for another 1TB Flash drive is expensive, and apparently I need the space anyway.
It's actually a tiny industry with a revenue of Oracle.
Amongst people most likely to care about the concerns raised here, the proportion is likely even larger.
Although the trend appears to be changing with the likes of Proton, the lack of Linux compatibility for games keeps these people tied to Windows, and keeps them from adopting Linux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhwOgTaxJTI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr_dVP_bV14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ATaLC4ixE
I'm something of a security expert, having consulted on architure implemented by several of the largest anti-virus distributors and retailers in the world. My honest opinion is that people need a dramatically better understanding of how domains work. If they want the increased privacy they should need to understand how to setup and use a local domain well enough to find the new location for creating a local account.
For those who cannot do this, their device security and therefore personal privacy is far better served by registering a microsoft account.
Any privacy concerns stemming from trust should be addressed by laws governing the acceptable use of user data. California is already pursuing such laws, and we should be supporting those efforts because they are addressing the true root cause of most modern privacy issues.
>I’ve always assumed that I’m locked into using Windows but after all this crap I’m starting to look into alternatives even though they’v got shortcomings on their own.
Yeah, I really wish there was an alternative I liked better.
I think following the money shows part of why this is true.
It used to be that MS had three cash-cows: Windows, Office, SQL Server. Everything else, even Exchange, sharepoint, etc, on their own, made relatively little or a loss but were part of the larger ecosystem and therefore used to sell the other three.
It is now the case that the cash-cows are Azure (including AzureSQL), Office, SQL Server (on-prem). Windows is very much off the top list and is there mainly to sell the rest of the ecosystem and the fact that dumping it (or even just de-prioritising it too far) would look very bad.
That MS ecosystem is increasingly OS-agnostic and going forward this is going to continue to be the trend. SQL Server runs on Linux too now. VSCode is cross-platform and either that will continue to grow more of Visual Studio's features of VS itself will start to become cross-platform. Office has online versions which while having many notable feature gaps are pretty useable for many tasks and are getting more so. Much of what runs on Azure is not Windows either very much so (i.e. is running on Linux in VMs) or effectively so (running as app services where neither the dev nor the admin cares about the OS underneath as long as the right APIs are available).
Given the amount of effort desktop Windows must take, I'm sure they'd be happy to dump it sooner rather than later: let someone else deal with all that hardware compatibility faf and all those "real" man-on-the-street demanding-but-clueless end users on the desktop and all the security issues that come with them, keep server Windows going for Azure/similar (where the range of virtual hardware can be nicely constrained compared to real hardware variance and the security surface can be easier to manage too), and support other OSs in VMs as well as possible to make running them on Azure resource as friction free as it can be (aside from the friction of needing to pay!).
Here’s a true story that happened to my family. My son is the only person in the house who uses Windows. For his game machine. He set up a Microsoft online account. It got hacked - someone set up a fake family and managed to get my son’s account listed under it as a child. As a consequence, he couldn’t install any new software. I’m not sure what the point of this particular hack is, but that was the result.
So we called Microsoft customer service. It turns out that there is no way to get an account removed from a family once it’s listed there. The Windows rep we talked to had a recourse, though. He proposed that we, the three of us, attempt to reverse-hack the fake “dad”’s account over the phone by trying to guess his password. I had to explain to the gentleman that, even though we were within our moral rights to do this, a) it was almost certainly illegal, and b) doomed to failure.
He didn’t understand the issue. Eventually we had to agree to disagree, and hang up on him. We never got my son’s account back. We wiped his computer and installed Windows via “use offline account”. I’m glad this was last year and not today, I guess?
This is no reflection on them personally, this is by design of their job role. They have metrics hanging over them to close calls as quickly as possible, without escalating. They are expected to handle dozens or hundreds of calls a day. There is no slack to actually try to resolve the user's problems in any way that requires more creativity than sticking to the SOP script, and moreover, they are usually mandated to stick to a very standardized procedure, with defined suggestions and language that they have to use, in a specific order. A good first-level support person would spoon-feed you the right incantations to get escalated, in a way that their cutthroat metrics aren't negatively impacted.
It's a fucked up system, but this is how call-centers work.
I'm not convinced that their offline security is good, either.
I sometimes will pick up my Surface Pro 4 and disconnect it from the charger. Disconnecting from the charger usually (but not always...not sure what determines it) wakes it. It then turns on their equivalent of Apple's Face ID, and tries to log in.
Sometimes I don't actually want that yet, as I just picked it up to take it somewhere else. So I'll hit the power button to put it back to sleep. The screen blanks...and then sometimes it quickly comes back, logged in.
The thing is I've sometimes had it do this when I've been careful to have my face out of view, holding it so I can only barely see the screen around the edge to see if disconnecting power will wake it up and I'll need to hit power to put it back to sleep.
This doesn't happen all the time, but it has happened several times, leading me to wonder if there is some sort of glitch if you interrupt a face-based login attempt at just the right time via the power button causing it to think it logged in.
Anyone else seen this?
If they have physical access to the device there isn't much you can do anyway.
Windows will otherwise use hsm to store your key (as evidenced by eg face unlock working) - it's not at all clear how that could possibly be secure if an attacker steals your device?
Booting an alternate OS, or removing the media will result in the HSM not giving up the key, and rendering the drive unusable for all attackers except those able to physically probe the HSM chips and extract keys. (theoretically)
For example i have trouble trusting pin login against brute force when the attacker has unrestricted physical access - including the possibility of replacing/manipulating the ram chips etc.
And now you’re forced to use that as your computer password too, which you probably have to type multiple times a day.
(Okay, thankfully local account is still possible.)
For local login you can use a PIN, or set up windows hello, if you don't want to type in the long password every time.
I'm talking about the Microsoft online account, and I stand by my statement that I was limited to 14 characters until relatively recently (maybe not earlier-this-year recent, that part I'm not sure). Looking at my Microsoft password history, I've changed it five times since 2012 (when I started using a password manager), each one is 14 characters long; the last change was done in 2016. I've been using 32+ character passwords wherever possible since 2012, so the only reason I was using 14 characters for Microsoft was because of the artificial limit imposed on me. And I did check a few times after 2016 to confirm the limit.
Anyway, I just tried to change the password again and this time I was warned that my Microsoft and Skype accounts would be merged if I carried through with the password change, so something did change after I last checked.
> For local login you can use a PIN, or set up windows hello, if you don't want to type in the long password every time.
I'm aware, but I don't consider a PIN secure, and I don't think Windows Hello is an option for most desktop workstations.
It was 16 chars. And it hasn't been true since 2016.
There's something weird and shady going on: I did created MS account to get this "marvelous" free Windows 10 offer once the update was smuggled on my Windows 7 installation and in subsequent buggy releases I had to reinstall the OS from scratch. So I had to login to activate this thing but I choose to not use the account later switching to local one (I did created an offline one during OOBE) and yet, Windows is still holding credentials to the online account somewhere because Activity section of the MSA Privacy page is still registering OneDrive activity coming from my desktop. I am not logged anywhere in OS, credentials manager is cleared out, OneDrive application is removed but still, it happens.
Shouldn't be able to happen, of course, but given it's Microsoft we're talking about, who would swear it couldn't?
My MS account had my desktop's Win 10 Pro N (the one with less crap) license attached to it. When I bought a new laptop with Win 10 Pro (regular, non-N), my desktop would suddenly claim that its license was invalid. Great. Called support, but nothing they could do except recommending to reinstall Windows. No guarantee the other system would then not go into that "your license is invalid state" if I use the N license again. Solution: Screw them, I'll install kmspico.
I'm probably lucky I use that sh*tshow of an OS only for gaming, and Linux for everything else (including work - we're essentially a Linux company even though most of our customers (embedded devs) still use windows.
Not sure what you mean by "less crap". The only advantage of the N versions is that it doesn't have Windows Media Player. You need enterprise to set telemetry level to lowest, and enterprise LTSC to not have Windows store (and a bunch of other UWP apps) installed by default.
However, it did give me a Business Idea; (this is for some hungry 20somethings out there):
Sell a machine image which is basically a windows VM on top of Linux with support, which can handle and navigate all this bullshit that MS is throwing at common users, instead of trying to force the population to become sysads themselves.
At the very least, it signals that Microsoft really doesn't want users creating offline accounts. Which is troubling, because their TOS for online accounts is quite onerous, and includes a couple of problematic restrictions, including a mandatory arbitration agreement.
If I was a Windows user who relied on local accounts this would be very worrying to me.
Just how reddit now prompts you to enter an email when you register but it's not marked as required and it doesn't say optional either.
(And the redesign is truly a shame)
Evil pattern.
This is something I really can't see the average user doing honestly.
If you don’t want to use iCloud you’re not forced to by virtue of being internet connected, and there’s a clear option to not allow your iCloud account to be involved in auth or password resets.
I thought what Microsoft is pushing people to do is to use a single identity for both their PC and their Microsoft account, just like Google does with Chrome Books.
My concern with the single identity model is not just privacy. I worry that if something happens to my online account I might lose access to my local data.
At least on Chrome Books this is something that can happen. Not sure about Microsoft's approach though.
And enforced as such - just like you cannot have your macOS password be the same as your Apple ID password.
Huh, yes you can? http://osxdaily.com/2015/03/24/use-icloud-password-as-mac-lo...
I didn't know you could later enable it.
Sure it's not. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist/is not possible :)
Thing is, what Apple is trying to achieve with iCloud is exactly the same as what MS is trying to achieve: bind you to a single account which will allow them to transition to a more service based business model. It's just Apple does it smoother.
Although, some system settings already require ms account.
Utterly useless dark pattern, and many thanks for sharing.
I imagine the end game is something like you pay Microsoft so much a month on a subscription, receive hardware that is preconfigured with and tied to your Microsoft account details or your company's Azure AD configuration and locked down with InTune, unhackable with properly implemented Class 3+ UEFI and Secure Boot, etc. You then purchase additional software subscriptions, such as your Photoshop, etc., through the Microsoft store, with Microsoft taking a cut like Apple.
If your computer breaks, pay the $50 or $100 insurance and receive a new one from Microsoft, if it's not folded into your monthly "Microsoft Technology Subscription."
So when Microsoft completes its takeover of the PC, what's the platform and OEM landscape going to look like? This endgame clearly puts companies like Dell, HP, Asus, etc. and the companies that provide parts like Intel, AMD in a subordinate position to Microsoft. They probably won't like that.
Will they give up? Will they try to start to make hardware for Apple? Will these companies embrace Linux and provide a third way?
I'd like to say selling operating systems to non-technical people doesn't work, but I'm not sure it's ever really been tried. The bulk of Microsoft's OS sales have never been to end users, but to OEMs and companies on Software Assurance.
Now technical people are certainly involved where an IT department builds systems for companies, but I think Microsoft wants to eliminate that too.
I work in the graphic design industry, and I've got news for you... people do not enjoy Adobe's move to subscription pricing, and on the contrary still complain about it.
Anecdotal evidence, I suppose, but seriously... I haven't met a single person who prefers Creative Cloud to just buying the suites.
I personally had been holding on to Windows/Mac through college til this subscription model. Since I really only do photo work now, darktable and RawTherapee are great FOSS alternatives. Krita and GIMP get way more flack than they deserve.
A stripped down installer for Windows might also be the way to go here. Of course updates would pose a problem.
Some additional story that I recalled: in the past - around 2003 IIRC, OpenOffice was sold in Poland by some small company so others could use it freely as an alternative to MS Office and fiscal control wouldn't have a reason to give you a fine for using unlicensed software. Luckily, in 2005 some sane people at Gdańsk tax office "figured out" that free and open source software is ok to use and made GNU GPL legal.
While that makes a lot of sense will it remain a requirement if/when it's simply not a choice with any major vendor?
Can smaller vendors still provide that choice and meet all the necessary certificates that such industries often also require?
(Serious question, not trolling.)
I am reasonably confident that RedHat will continue to cover this ~forever, if it comes to that.
Oh, you want to properly administrate your Windows? You can't unless you buy another Windows! But a more expensive one!
You are unable to wade through our byzantine licensing maze? Buy another Windows to manage that!
Expensive Microsoft solutions for problems created by Microsoft. And then there's this entire army of sods that think this is the best thing since sliced bread, telling you "Isn't it fantastic that Microsoft provides this wonderful solution?"
I wonder though whether this optimization hasn't created a brittleness in operations, where shocks due to security lapses or outsourced provider probls become unrecoverable.
One thing I definitely wouldn't run if I could help it would be email, going O365 or gsuite saves a ton of effort that doesn't contribute to the bottom line and has significant security advantages. But 'everything azure' or 'everything aws' has its own challenges.
I wonder how Apple would respond to this move by MS, since Apple is also shifting towards services. Maybe they will let people install macOS on their own machines (which pass certain requirements)? Will they remove apps made by MS from Appstore? And what will Google's reaction be to all this? Are they going to advertise Chrome books as cheaper alternatives to MS Windows? Or will they remove MS apps from Google Play as well?
Interesting, yet dark, times indeed.
There will likely always be the DIY solutions for folks who prefer that. And that's good too.
Apple provides managed and unmanaged. Microsoft appears not to provide unmanaged in the near future. This would remove the entire Windows PC bracket from the list of unmanaged options. That would be an enormous loss, and not just for some "folks who prefer DIY".
Like App Store? Or are we talking about "for varying degrees of 'everything'"?
For example, if I need Wireguard VPN client, I must install it from App Store. It is otherwise open-source app, but without the signature from App Store, it won't work.
Elsewhere you mention a VPN client requiring you to download it from the App Store - well take it up with the app developer then because I've used tons of VPN clients on Mac (currently using ExpressVPN in fact) and all were straight out of DMGs.
For Xcode, there is another way - it is downloadable from the developer pages.
We've been hanging on to Windows 7, including side-loading drivers into the installation image for modern hardware, because this kind of stuff that Windows 10 does is in these cases simply unacceptable (random tip: Go for AMD, their Windows 7 support is way better than Intel, do not use Intel chipset series 300).
I can't have PCs bogged down downloading updates or randomly restarting when they're controlling endurance test rigs designed to run 24/7.
Driver issues with Linux, no real vendor support and (believe it or not) stability was the reason Windows prevailed in these applications. And MS threw that all out the window.
Oh well, I'd get paid to rewrite the control software in Linux, I'm not really complaining, I just hope there's enough driver support (looking at you, National Instruments...).
PC's setup in a corporate environment are tightly controlled, even with Windows 10.
It used to be perfectly reasonable to run light industrial and test equipment on Windows.
Reading up a bit on it here[1], and again, I'm appalled. I don't want to waste time and money cherry-picking Windows versions. There's IoT Core, Mobile and Enterprise, and then there's Enterprise LTSB, apparently with year codes too, what gives?
Nah, all this time and money wasted doing that can be invested in making the jump to Linux, because unlike Windows, chances are, that that will be indeed just a one-time investment. Linux also has a plus of making ghosting hard-drive images much easier, since there are no licensing issues to consider, and therefore could also be done completely offline (PCs are hooked up to local network for remote VNC connections, but are blocked from the Internet).
It may be wishful thinking, but I hope that just like servers are 99% running Linux, the same may one day be said for industrial applications... looks like I'm on the front line, lock and load!
[1]: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/86c34...
In the enterprise where Red Hat and Canonical dominate licensing is becomes an issue again when you use their paid offerings.
So don’t get me wrong. I want people to switch to Linux but we gotta be realistic that it’s not a panacea.
Linux? I'd just treasure that one (non-licensed) ISO I used, and that's it. Once I got a working setup, it could probably run for a century. EDIT: ...or at least until 2038 ;)
EDIT2: It's also not really an embedded system, it's a control PC. Embedded PCs are those in ATMs, BK's product screens, running car washes, what we have are full-fledged PCs that just happen to be operating test-rigs. These of course have fail-safe shutdowns (run by actual embedded hardware) if that PC hangs or faults, but they're not actually intended to be embedded.
...whatever's truly true and factual in this case, I don't know, but I'm simply pissed that there's ambiguity about this. And that's just one of the reasons I avoid Windows 10 like the plague.
Watch windows 10 try to force an update during a live streamed esports match https://clips.twitch.tv/BadPlumpStarLitFam
In other words, as a business, you now have less choice in distributors, which will increase the investment cost for an operating system. And then there's the whole privacy issue on top of that, too.
It's just a mess, and the customers are intended to take the brunt of it. I want to say "No, thank you" and I'm currently figuring out if that's viable, i.e. Linux.
But - if you can swing it - LTSB/C is the only thing that I would prefer for any sort of automation etc.
Standard Enterprise comes with forced updates and mandatory restarts, yes?
The ONLY reason I run Windows machines is to do automation on them - I have zero tolerance for the OS.
Edit: the comment section has shifted and I'm less disappointed.
You can see this with Google, Facebook, and all the others which release huge amounts of FOSS; they are not in the business of selling software either.
This new exec team is sleazy and trying to give a "good face" when the reality is that they are as bad as they have always been. But people get flashed with the new & shiny open source crumbs that are given.
They are funneling you into their cloud services. They are changing purchase models into subscription models. They own your operating system and can do what they want with it including kicking you off. And they also partner with law enforcement freely. Where thoses boundaries start/stop who knows but there does seem to be more underaged porn arrests with a single image found. Didn't microsoft develop some image detection that the police use? Perhaps scans are happening locally.
Facebook will polute your feed with personal ads. Google will polute the web with personal ads But microsoft will destroy your life.
Not sure who's better but why do we trust large brands?
The main reason they open-source stuff is mindshare among the developer community, which helps with recruiting, influencing discussions in the public sphere, and so on.
* 2 of the top 7 programming languages in use on GitHub are Microsoft created and maintained.
* Jockeying for top place among companies contributing code to projects on GitHub, for 4 years running.
* Top 5 contributor to the Linux Kernel
* Massively popular IDE in VSCode
* Enormous contributions to Kubernetes and the entire community around it,including creating/maintaining Helm.
* Big parts of Azure are open source, including their kubernetes implementation, ML toolkits, IOT components, and even the infrastructure underneath the whole thing, Service Fabric. (Demonstrably capable of orchestrating the varied workloads and scale of the second largest cloud provider in the world).
* Owner/maintainer of GitHub, which for better or worse is the platform for the vast majority of open source.
I don't like windows, I don't like office, and I don't like this move... But let's try to maintain some intellectual honesty here. Microsoft is not anywhere near a "basic" contributor to open source.
What do you use instead of Google Backup and Sync client? I haven't found something that works like that. The "best" thing I've found is the FUSE Ocaml filesystem (https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse) but still it is a "mounted" over network filesystem and not a sync-on-change solution. I tried InSync but could not make it work and it is not free, and also the Gnome "mount Google Drive" option, but it is also a "mounted" over network solution.
Other than that and some of the rough edges (random bluetooth issues, random issues after updating, completely broken Android ADB support), I like Linux Mint a lot. I do all my work and play (CS:GO, NFS, Cities Skylines, Hitman) on it, even for games that are not supported by default.
On the other hand I've had plenty of problems of Insync. And the open source solutions are all garbage.
Hetzner doesn't seem to be listed there, but they offer Nextcloud as a service too: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
TLDR selfhosting a NextCloud server on a raspberrypi and sync data between all your devices. You can also sync calendar/tasks/contacts etc
https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download.html
Personally, I have the stuff I want synced in git (at work, mostly just text files) - and look to combine that with zfs and zfs send - with the new pricing at rsync.net that is looking very attractive.
But that's different from Google drive sync.
Sometimes, I have to wait for a linux port, but the games usually are on sale by then anyway ;).
For periodic filesystem backup snapshots I use Restic.
Atheros also has good support for Linux.
I just looked it up, and Intel's best chip the AC 9560, with 2x2 1.73 Gbps WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 is <$20.
It's an easy swap on desktops and on most laptops too.
Isn't everything soldered these days - including RAM in some cases ?
Unfortunately not the sp4: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+4+Tear...
Now pop in the $18 Intel card you ordered last night and landed a hour ago.
Your done !
Oh wait ! NOOB, you forgot to replace the screw !
What's the right choice in 2019 for a power desktop user who wants video drivers to work,for a 7 year old hp machine?
Fedora is my personal preference, but it is aggressively up to date, including updating to the latest kernels. Good for new hardware, possibly not as good for a 7yo machine, especially with Nvidia graphics.
No experience with Fedora, but of the other distributions that I have tried (Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, CentOS...), Mint is my suggestion for beginners. Now though I like Manjaro for its rolling releases of the newest software.
Have you tried Libre Office? I'm not a power docs user but it gets the job done for me. Opting for Google to replace MS on principles is out of the frying pan into the fire.
Before Nadella, Windows wasn't nearly as user-hostile as it is now. There was no mandatory telemetry, there were no forced updates, end users weren't treated as betatesters and QA wasn't non-existent. And now they are taking away the ability to use Windows without Microsoft Account.
Of course there are also many other problems with Windows 10, like the UWP fiasco, but they're minor in comparison to what Microsoft is doing with user's freedom and privacy.
I always preferred Windows to Unixes, but at this point I think it's time to give up and switch to some Linux distribution. It's clear that the situation will only get worse.
Windows 10 really does work great. Seriously!
It's basically the good enough option that most people would use.
The Linux / Windows world offers more performance for significantly less money, if you're prepared to learn about hardware.
I find it so much fun, although sometimes frustrating when things like bios bugs interfere with normal voltage levels - need to be more hands on these days than before.
Steam's Proton is amazingly good. I recently switched from an iMac to a PC, and was expecting to use Windows for games and Linux for development, but Proton has run everything I've tried with excellent performance and stability.
Everyone has their own values but...
I have more games than I can reasonably play in months installed and available to me already, with more coming out all the time.. there's no one game that would make me compromise everything just for recreation.
2019's Stackoverflow report for OS usage put Windows at 49.3% for "Professional developers" with MacOS at 29.2% and Linux at 25.3%.
I happen to have a few tech courses on programming and Docker and none of it requires writing Windows specific apps. Just general web apps. Over 50% of the people who take my courses are on Windows. Windows usage for Linux based development is real.
In an ideal world I would be running native Linux but I had trouble with some audio gear not working and my favorite video editing tool doesn't run in Linux, nor do some of the games I play -- so I use Windows because that's what's available.
As much as I hate to say it, Windows is a pretty good environment to do every day developer things + more.
For example I spent 95% of my time in WSL using tmux and terminal Vim to write code full time (with fzf and everything you would expect on the command line). It's really fast. The wsltty terminal has almost as low input latency as xterm on native Linux (which I run on my modified Chromebook). While developing all sorts of web apps (Flask, Phoenix, Rails, Webpack, etc.) inside of Docker the volume performance is fast enough where I never once had complaints even on 5 year old hardware.
Then I'm a hotkey away from opening any program with command line launchers, switching virtual desktops with other hotkeys, running VMs for testing server deployments, recording and editing videos and playing any games I want without having to think twice about it or dual boot.
Other than bullshit telemetry and forced updates, Windows 10 Pro is not that bad from an all around "I use my computer to do stuff" perspective. I think that's ultimately why Windows is so popular. It also helps that you can put together a beast of a machine for about $750. But with that said I would instantly switch to Linux if all of my Linux problems were suddenly fixed.
In the mean time, if anyone is interested, I have a bunch of blog posts and videos showing how I set everything up in Windows. It can all be found here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i-use
I keep thinking about the eventual replacement for my MacBook Pro. Every time I hear something like this, every time I see MS's open source contributions, etc. I keep thinking about Windows as a replacement.
At the top of the list of reasons why that's unlikely to happen is shit like these dark patterns to enforce invasive telemetry. I don't care how good WSL is, I don't want to be spied on or coerced into allowing spyware to run.
The rest of the list is mostly: I don't believe/agree with you. I've used chocolataey (ugh), and I don't want to do all of my development in a VM. I recently set up a Win 7 VM to get a small C# library built. Turns out it was easier to build it on my Mac and copy it over.
Other than bullshit telemetry and forced updates
Let me stop you right there. I'm not going to consider anything with forced spyware and forced updates. Until those are fixed I don't care about the rest.
use scoop instead.
I do like scoop, but of course the selection available is much smaller than Chocolatey, at least for now.
Come to think of it, it's kind of strange that Microsoft never created a packaging system for Windows (aside from the Store; I mean for non-UWP apps).
All of what I mentioned is documented on my site and in a lot of cases I've recorded and published unedited videos of my WSL (v1) / Docker based dev environment.
You are free to believe what you want, but I'm not lying. If it were not as good as a claimed I wouldn't be using it for full time development / video creation.
And if I have to run Windows, its from a Qubes DispVM, with whitelisted network configuration.
Now expand that over the years and you'll get a clear downward trajectory:
2013: 60.4%
2014: 57.9%
2015: 54.5%
2016: 52.1%
2018: 49.9%
2019: 47.5%
Note that they haven't asked about the OS in 2017 and that the numbers I've found here[0] for 2019 are a few % smaller than yours. I've also used "all respondents" instead of the professional ones because they didn't make the distinction until 2018, but quite frankly, that works in Microsoft's favor since professionals are relying on it even less.
[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019/#technology-_...
Can't wait for WSL2 in 2020 with half second Docker starts++.
I have used WSL a lot, and now I use VS Code Remote to develop on a Debian 10 VPS. It's glorious.
Being able to build a custom computer that I can do work on, and that I can play games on, and that run the Adobe suite of software, and not pay through the nose for high specs is wonderful.
After 10 year of using Apple and OS X, I felt patronised having to pay double the price for performance. The nail for me was when OS updated were forced through their Apple Store.
Windows 10 updates are far more seamless.
They have moved away from that now, updates are managed through preferences again.
It's OK to admit you're wrong, you know.
I tend to run it on the "Happy Path" only make a few changes to keep some notifications from bothering me. And I don't buy machines from vendors that try to "add value" by putting crapware or shovelware on the machine. (I buy Supermicro-based boxes from Thinkmate, and use Surface Book notebooks.)
I write software all day long in Erlang, F#, and CUDA/C++ and have to write software that works with popular film and audio production software (which runs on Windows platforms)
I have trouble understanding this perspective since it's hard to see what critical functionality Windows provides, that you can't get with Mac OS or Linux. If they wouldn't be materially different experiences, the metaphor doesn't hold water.
But my Mac Pro from 2010 still gets nvidia driver updates and cuda support. In the unlikely event someone will pay for a new Mac Pro for me I'll be able to stick a 2080 in it.
You can stick an nvidia card in a PCI-e chassis and it will work on a laptop or Mac mini, but yes it isn't optimal.
Ah, the joys of finding quirks in PCIe enumeration when you have PCIe switches and expansion bridges.
With MacOS, your choice of hardware is very limited, and you have to pay way over the odds for it. You also can't run a lot of games on it.
With Linux, the desktop experience is, IMO, not as good as on Windows, and neither is driver support. Things have improved a lot here, but the UX is just not as polished as Windows. I do love Linux though - for servers, I wouldn't use anything else.
I really like Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise (apart from dick moves like this, of course). I can build incredibly powerful desktop or laptop machines, in terms of RAM, CPU and GPU - and everything is more or less guaranteed to "just work", and be stable too. You get excellent multi-monitor and high-DPI support, good accessability features, Hyper-V for running VMs, Sandbox coming soon, WSL for a Linux-like experience - and WSL2 will soon make it even better. And of course your gaming options are much better too.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/privacy/configure-w...
> Activity history helps keep track of the things you do on your device, such as the apps and services you use, the files you open, and the websites you browse. Your activity history is stored locally on your device when using different apps and features such as Microsoft Edge, some Microsoft Store apps, and Office apps.
> If you've signed in to your device with a Microsoft account and given your permission, Windows sends your activity history to Microsoft. Once your activity history is in the cloud, Microsoft uses that data to enable cross-device experiences, to provide you with the ability to continue those activities on other devices, to provide personalized experiences (such as ordering your activities based on duration of use) and relevant suggestions (such as anticipating what your needs might be based on your activity history), and to help improve Microsoft products.
> Not all personal data processed by Microsoft can be accessed or controlled via the tools above. If you want to access or control personal data processed by Microsoft that is not available via the tools above or directly through the Microsoft products you use, you can always contact Microsoft at the address in the How to contact us section or by using our web form.
Same source.
Linked here:
Data shouldn't leave my devices unless I opt-in on a very specific case-by-case basis.
Giving personal data (like browsing history, identifying information, etc.) should not be a requirement for using technology, which has become a fundamental aspect of participating in society.
Privacy concerns apart, it gets the job done and the battery life is over 14 hours. I’ve migrated from Linux, which is also pretty good as a desktop, but feels a little less polished than ChromeOS.
However, I’m evaluating using that new IDE from Eclipse (I think it’s called Dirigible), because it seems to have more mature Go support.
However, I hate stuff like this. You are right, it is user hostile.
Windows 10 under the hood is solid, but this kind of thing really pisses me off. It’s the same issue with ads or bing in the start menu, you literally can’t turn it off anymore (you used to be able to with the Registry Editor or GP).
I use MacOS as well regularly, and you just don’t get this kind of crap from Apple (just different kinds of crap).
But I use Pro and Enterprise editions - I would find it really irritating if my Start menu was spammed with ads and apps I didn't install.
And disabling local accounts (or at least making it even harder to use them) is a scummy move.
What Microsoft is doing with this dark pattern is bad for everyone, but we must accurately represent the situation.
I have attempted to disable those "for real", and the lengths that MS has gone to in an attempt to stop people from doing it is extremely disturbing; there's half a dozen different services and scheduled tasks with various names which are involved, and if you don't disable all of it quickly, it all comes back. This Hydra-like persistence is something that hitherto was only seen in malware.
I too preferred the Windows GUI, and have been a Windows user since the 3.x days, but the gradual destruction of options (especially in appearance preferences) and increasing user-hostility has pushed me towards experimenting with Linuxes and BSDs more. I've always liked the Unix CLI and filesystem layout, however --- sh/bash is so much more powerful and consistent than COMMAND.COM/cmd.exe (and PowersHell feels more like an overengineered obese clone of the Unix shells), and the "everything is a file" metaphor and single-rooted filesystem is very elegant. I guess my ideal OS would be a combination of a Linux/BSD kernel with a Windows GUI.
KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE will get you close right off the bat.
Gods, I miss the good times of XP, Vista and 7 where it was possible to control updates and avoid potentially dangerous patches.
I've been using Plasma since the KDE 3.4 days, although I've dabbled in other desktop environments. I love it. I honestly miss the experience when I'm using other operating systems on machines other than my own personal ones.
And other Linux desktop environments are also honestly pretty good. Plasma's just my favorite, not the only good one.
I hope some people do try Linux on account of stuff like this and find a happy home in it. It feels really good not to be insulted, deceived, or bossed around by your OS.
IMO, Unintuitive interfaces (e.g. Gnome shell), forced package management (as opposed to decentralized distribution of apps) and lack of care for graphic design are the biggest things keeping the masses away from the Linux desktop, because in other areas (speed, robustness, privacy, control) it just blows Windows out of the water.
All of these are highly controversial opinions, many Linux advocates think they are not problems, but I think they really are.
I do see efforts being made towards capturing desktop users.
If your hope is to appeal to the masses, there are in my view two cardinal sins in OS naming:
1) Don't put "OS" in the name. It's an automatic "nerd alert." macOS is an exception because you don't have a choice to install it, and Apple is...well, Apple. They're often an exception to many things.
2) No punctuation marks, symbols, etc. Just letters.
Pop_OS! breaks both of them, and one of them twice, and it drives me nuts, because it's a nice distro.
My wife now uses PopOS. It may have been easier to convince her to use it if the name wasn't ridiculous. She likes it now, though.
There are many things that XFCE does even better or just as good. Window snapping works great. The start menu is back-to-basics simple and fast. Searching in it doesn't search the internet or my whole hard drive by default and it just works and finds things faster. The taskbar is also better IMO because it has way more useful options (such as middle-clicking) and less anti-features. On Windows, I have to use some unsupported 3rd-party thing called 7+ taskbar tweaker to add the same features and remove some anti-features. I am a minimalist and I loved the classic taskbar. I hated some new Windows behaviors like "preview window-content on hover over taskbar item", jump lists and grouped taskbar items - some of which you just couldn't turn off in Windows without that 3rd-party tool. So, after years of fighting against that I figured if I have to hack my DE, I might as well run the one that's free and gives me all the power. (I also have to modify macOS to make it even bearable to use...way more than Windows even, with third party hacks. And Apple certainly gives you less control than Microsoft, so I'm definitely not using that!)
Some things I'm missing on any Linux DE though: GPU acceleration in Chrome. Games.
However, I'm now even doing Microsoft-specific work with dotnet core, VS Code, SQL Server and Azure Data Studio on my Manjaro workstation. For work, I don't really need Windows anymore unless someone gives me some Windows-specific thing to work on, for which I have one machine on standby to do.
Overall, I like how much control I have in Linux. However, Windows is still more stable than any Linux desktop in my experience. For instance, I've lost desktop settings/icons a crash after an update. Wifi stopped working after an update once. But things are/were easy to remedy so I'm staying.
I also read some description of the state on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state...), and it seems that there are too many hoops to jump on Manjaro.
I was just this minute looking at .NET Core 3.0 as well because I had such a good experience with 2.2 on a recent job. Your comment actually alerted me to the fact that I can't get it yet :)
I was off of .NET for years doing mainly Node.js/Angular/React and I'm kind of excited to be getting back into .NET - I'm so glad my 15 years of .NET experience won't go to waste because ASP.NET has been looking very good in web server benchmarks. Plus, C# and .NET are much nicer to work with than JS/TS and Node IMO. Everything is just cleaner.
Anyway - good luck and I hope you have a lot of fun on your Linux desktop adventure. One of my favorite things about the switch over the past year has been the fun of being a sort of hobbyist again, exploring and figuring things out. At this point, I have setup 4 different desktops and I even got advanced touch gestures working on my cheap Acer E5-575g laptop. Can't wait to setup Xubuntu next! So, thanks to you as well!
* The default theme no longer outlines which ui element you've selected when pressing tab to jump to the next element. Made it very hard to navigate program menus
* Some windows don't respond to keyboard commands, ie: minimize or move to side. If memory serves spotify was one of the programs this didn't work for but every window I've tried works without issue in Cinnamon.
* Mouse keys has no options provided under accessibility. You can customize the speed and startup delay to make for a nice experience, but the options were simply not there. I googled how to do it through the terminal but all of the top results wanted you to use a package that I couldn't find in the software store. I gave up.
The default speed for mouse keys is unusable. It takes minutes to move from one end of a 1080p monitor to another. Even Windows provides options for this, though the gui options are better in Cinnamon (best in KDE).
* I like pressing the windows key and launching an app by navigating with arrow keys. You have to type to do a search in Gnome?
Perhaps I'm just not familiar enough with Gnome, but I've people say that it's good for use without a keyboard and that's just not been my experience.
The only hope we have of the MS Windows / Apple OS X duopoly on the desktop to break up is if the trade war escalates and China starts working towards getting a third ecosystem going. -- Problem is that you'd expect the Chinese to care about privacy even less than the Americans.
What??? This isn't true at all, you can install deb/rpm packages you download from the internet if you want, there's nothing stopping you. The truth is that you're strongly encouraged to install your applications from a trusted central repository because it's safer and more convenient.
I'd also note that this is not unique to Linux. Android, iOS (this one is actually restrictive), and macOS all use the same model too. Windows also tried it with UWP and their store, and mostly just didn't succeed for legacy reasons.
Come on - downloading random binaries off of random websites and running them is a bad idea. It's always been a bad idea. This is the reason casual people get infected with random trojans, adware, malware, and so on, and the main reason Windows desktops tend to be such a cesspool.
You can still do it on Linux, but it's an exception to the rule not the other way around.
What's forced here? I can use others on ubuntu. I can add alternative repos/PPAs to the default package manager. And what's even the issue? The default package is (as far as I know) entirely open source and/or GNU. "Package management" is not even a concept on windows at all.
Is a great advantage over windows and is now common place with android, iOS, chromeOS and even windows (store, chocolatey) and macOS are trying to go in that direction.
It wouldn't be shocking if in 10 years you need a Microsoft account to use windows on a computer you don't have root access to that isn't allowed to run a non ms os or to distribute software that ms gets a 30% cut.
If it isn't so it will be because they don't think they can get away with it.
That's basically how the SurfaceRT worked, isn't it? So they've already attempted this once.
This will break that work-around, and this is universally bad.
Maybe some MS dev hasn't cottoned on to the string count starts at [0] lol
Now it looks like one has to install offline to prevent getting adware and all kinds of other things, what amazing progress.
As somebody still stuck on Win7 I'm dreading the change, sadly Linux is not really an option because I like my PC gaming.
Any good resources on what to look out for when installing Win10, what to turn off and when to stay offline when setting what things up? I keep seeing/picking up small tips all over the place, but I have yet to find something comprehensive.
This is changing and very quickly with Valve Proton. I would advise you try your gaming collection in Steam on Linux. It is getting to the point where one can purchase a game and it will likely just work, with the exception of a few DRM nasties.
1) Indie games;
2) Big studio releases (some of them);
3) Competitive online 3D shooters.
My experience is that 1) usually work well on Linux and the small studios these days usually make sure it works on Mac and Linux, which is great.
I do not know of any games in the 2) category that really do work on Linux (Activision, Ubisoft and EA simply don't care) and this actually impacts me in 3) -- unless I want to play a 7 year old CS:GO, I am out of luck on Linux.
(Just to be clear, I am saying this as a person that has Linux at work & on my laptop and who would really love to get rid of my Win 10 on my gaming desktop PC. For gaming lovers with different tastes, I think the situation actually is not that bad if you are willing to have a console at home -- you can cover 1) and 2) this way, just not 3).)
If you're into those things 3) is an issue due to various anticheat systems that don't yet run great on wine.
For me, I am lucky. Wine and Steam Proton run basically anything I'd care to run anymore. I use only Linux for work, as well.
I hope it's really worth it for them, because I've probably passed the last time I will ever consider running Windows until I'm in the ground, at this point. It's annoying, vexacious, constantly regressive, and almost literally never improves on this. From forcing you to have Candy Crush to switching your browser to Edge every update, Windows 10 is a piece of shit.
They can just enable these functions on free version, and make enterprise version configurable.
I guess if they still keep this practice, the office will start to change to mac instead.
The difference is that I cannot even set a password, it asks me to set up a PIN number to log in. Of course you can set it to accept letters in your PIN, so it can function as a regular password.
But what the hell is the point?
(In fact, I didn't set any PIN the first time and at the next reboot I had to log in with my Microsoft account password, which is decidedly more complicated that the not-very-secure one I use to log in my PC. Thank god I have a password manager on my phone.)
Having worked in large enterprises like this, I can also picture some small team, or loud individual with a super ego, pushing for this kind of stuff as if it is a good idea.
For every... say 20 PM/Product Manager/Lead/Devs that actually listen to customers and want to create great software, there’s always Some Dunning Krueger clueless individual who pushes for stuff like this. Often they’re the loudest in the room, while everyone else is suffering from imposter syndrome and afraid to speak up.
[soapbox off].
Sorry. My rant for the month.
The "best" sorted comment says:
> They have not removed it, it just is not visible by default if you are connected to the internet. Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account.
Even before this change you have to navigate out of your way to pick an offline account. It would be easy to think "oh, a large percent of users don't want local accounts" just looking at the telemetry data.
When really that's a given because the option is only going to be found by someone who knows beforehand that they want an offline account and fully expects it to be buried multiple menus deep in an advanced setting.
Microsoft was doing really good to gain developer traction with things like WSL, VSCode and the upcoming WSL2 release. But if they ever really do require a real account to use Windows, well... that's enough to cancel all of those things out to the point where die hard developers might just throw their arms up in the air and move to Linux even if it means making sacrifices for certain things.
And would those programmers develop software that's not written for Windows only? I don't think so. As much as I hate Windows and advocate the idea of moving to other operating systems (even macOS), at the end of the day, developers don't have enough discretion in choosing which platform(s) to write programs for; it's the management that decides it.
It's a crazy thing to say, "start the installer without a network connection and you'll suddenly get a new option in the installer." Or, "when the installer asks you for your email, keep spamming invalid responses until it gets frustrated and unlocks the ability to skip the prompt."
That doesn't sound like a sensible UX flow, or even a UX flow with consumer-unfriendly prompts and directions. It sounds like a video game cheat code or easter egg.
Trying again without network access is actually one of the first things I'd try, but yes, it's undiscoverable for most people.
That's not entirely true. When you get to the 'Let's connect you to a network' screen just click the 'I don't have Internet' link in the bottom left corner [1] and then choose 'Continue with limited setup' [2]. This will take you to the local account creation step.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3409788/how-microsoft-made-i...
Microsoft’s May 2019 Update (version 1903) appears to be much, much friendlier to local accounts.
[1] https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2019/07/1903-wirele...
[2] https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2019/07/1903-nag-sc...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3409788/how-microsoft-made-i...
On the other hand, I don't mind Microsoft getting some more crap thrown at, at all. Higher chance that their much eager marketing/PR team will take notice.
I might install cinnamon next time he brings it by
I’d recommend not running VMs when it is being sluggish for Windows Update because the VM is going to feel sluggish too.
Older people have already spent so much time on learning new stuff that they feel spending even more time to learn something they already know how to do is a waste of time. I'm slowly moving into this category myself. Why do you have to redesign something that works just fine? Just because you want to get paid more is not ok reason.
I work on macOS, but I have a Windows partition for gaming. Simple as that.
Other people need it to work. You might not like it, but it's a perfectly productive environment.
In my opinion there's no other IDE that's even close to VS.
I've been using Visual Studio for many years, but it still needs the ReSharper plugin to be truely great. As much as I love VS, I've always found it to be a little buggy, and I grew tired of listening to my laptop fans whining constantly.
I switched to Rider, and I love it! It took a while to find a theme that worked for me, but I have it setup perfectly now. There is honestly very little it can't do that VS can, but that goes vice-versa too. I don't recall it crashing even once in all the time I've used it, and it uses far less CPU than VS.
I don't want Mac for I prefer cheaper handpicked hardware.
I want to believe in Linux, so every now and then I get fresh Ubuntu installed.
Now last time with 18.04 it would get blank screen immediately after logging in, which I was only able to fix by manually adding NVidia apt sources, and installing the latest driver from command line (which you have to google how to do on another device).
Second thing I faced is trouble getting a tiling window manager (oh irony: I made my own for Windows after reading articles about Linux's ones). Turns out, when you are trying to use, say, Awesome, it replaces the whole desktop environment. Which in default configuration makes desktop work like shit (personal opinion): you are no longer able to use Win key to search like in Gnome, window buttons are non-existent or look terrible, and window managing is actually very much non-intuitive (if it supports mouse resizing/moving at all? you could not tell without reading manual). On Windows custom managers rarely replace the (perhaps not ideal but intuitive) default behavior completely, so are much easier to use. There was a mode of Awesome, which was supposed to replace only Gnome's WM with it, but I was unable to make it work, and gave up.
Finally, JetBrains Rider still turned out to be worse, than Visual Studio for debugging. Which I could probably live without if not for the other two.
Basically, I want to work, and not waste my time on debugging the OS core components.
Also, there is some really neat software built for windows and it comes pre-installed on virtually any computer you intend to buy for an office that people keep it as their main OS. So if you intend to write a service that runs on a client's computer, it almost certainly has to be usable on windows.
When most of the business world relies on Windows, more and more software gets developed for it which in turn encourages even more people to use that shit. Seriously, if you want to stop this madness (Windows), you should start at the top of the pyramid and persuade businesses to switch to something "sane".
I use Linux for pretty much all my work, though, preferring a Linux VM to a Windows-native setup. I have tried to make Powershell usable, but the console is terrible (and the replacements are equally bad) and the language itself isn't that amazing. (Their "curl" equivalent requires you to open IE once to activate some setting, for example.) I also hate putty. Never in the history of computing has a program made it so difficult to use the same font for every server you connect to, or to talk to something on a serial port, etc. The way Windows deals with serial ports and the like is so silly that I just have an RPi on my desk for interacting with USB devices... I ssh to that, and then don't deal with Windows anymore.
Last year one of my friends had windows update remove their graphics drive so machine ran with vesa graphics. Their description of it was something along the lines of "everything is big and slow and I don't know why."
You want to play games without hassle? Install arch and play the stuff in AUR. Honestly compiling everything is less hassle than dealing with the misbehaving blobs programmed by the changing whims of manipulative corporations.
Ask my mortgage company.
As a gamedev, for my actual work machines, I rely heavily on windows-only tools, and I want to debug on the actual target platform customers would use (so, windows again.) Gamedev generally uses windows for even it's build servers. Maybe with a token mostly ignored linux box. Or a couple of mac minis if dabbling in mobile.
Microsoft is turning everyone's PCs into internet nodes that collect data and stats. It's a way for them to get more social and behavioral data on their incredibly large market.
I sure miss Windows 7. Microsoft ruined things with Vista, which 7 fixed. They ruined 7 with 8 and 9, which 10 sort of fixed. They're ruining 10 by including all of these "modern" features like an AI assistant, and having an "account" on their backend.
There needs to be an alternative to Windows out there that actually uses Windows apps and drivers. WINE in Linux is not good enough for me yet.
They just released a new version of ReactOS and I haven't checked it out yet. If it can run Google Chrome and run MS-Office and Visual Studio I might just switch to it.
So what I'm saying is... Who out there is willing to make an OS at a $xxx/license price point that will just fucking do what I want? Any takers?
Actually, I installed the latest mainline kernel and managed to get my desktop to resume once, but the second resume locks up the whole system.
So now I just do a full power off every day when I leave.
The laptop is System 76 and comes with PopOS pre-installed and I still have issues whenever I have external monitors attached.
Linux as a daily driver is a frustrating experience, though I do really appreciate the customization (I love i3).
They have not removed it, it just is not visible by default if you are connected to the internet.
So it’s just a UI issue
Just how is that supposed to work if I unplug the internet?
By letting you create a local account, of course.
The same way implicitly-ticked "I agree to receive spam^H^H^H^H your newsletters every week" are "just a UI issue".
Yes, it's implemented through an UI element, like most computer-related things today, but let's not pretend it's not a dubious move that's done for the benefit of anyone except the people who paid for the damn thing.
Chrome OS or Android devices require Google accounts? No problem.
Windows requires a Microsoft account? So angry!
I think there's also something to be said for the ubiquity and usefulness of these accounts outside of the OS setup. I don't really feel that I need a Microsoft account in my life and I can't say for certain whether I have one or not. I definitely have a Google account which I use many times per day.
Never had a Chromebook, however at least in Android I know that you can skip the Google login on setup and it does not use any dark pattern (just click Skip when asked).
Some might say that whining about these things is counterproductive. I disagree. I don't want Microsoft to fail. I don't want people to hate Microsoft. I want every company to make good products and expend its employees' efforts in a productive way. I believe filling out feedback forms is not the best way to go about trying to change the curremt state. I think that once enough people in our field know about those issues and voice their concerns, we can somehow push Microsoft back in the right direction. And even if that's a pipedream, our comments might help people forced to use Windows at work to go about it somewhat more securely and conveniently.
When it comes to my personal experience, I've recently had Windows: force me to update (gave me 20 minutes to save my work); install some software I don't need during the update and then prompt me to log in (namely, MS Teams); break bluetooth drivers (they work now but not as well as they used to); make the machine get stuck in the boot process (I had to reset it and pray no data was lost); change the wallpaper.
I just want to do my job. I don't need updates for that. I might need the security ones, but trying to install Teams on my machine and breaking other stuff in the process while all I need is Visual Studio and a working OS really grinds my gears.
EDIT: formatting, minor errors
I have a surface pro with dock for extra screens. Every time you undock-redock you now have to rearrange your windows .. no workspaces? Does anyone at MS even use their stuff? Why would it not show a "docked view" and "undocked view" automatically?
As for the lack of "keep above", and nevermind "focus follows mouse but don't raise", ... argh.
You can install apps to fix these things (some AutoHotKey based, for example) but as a daily work tool it seems awfully deficient; and of course our IT people won't allow installs.
It doesn't seem feature complete for the basic task of window management.
The HN audience and generally programmers are usually pro-Linux which makes sense, but they keep forgetting that apps like Office, Adobe, etc are only on Windows / Mac which Linux has to resort to fiddling with hacks like Wine which is not enough for an out-of-the-box experience with end-users.
The mindshare, user experience of Mac and Windows just prevents end-users from bothering to try, fiddle and learn Linux just to do serious work for anyone that is not a programmer these days.
I don't think any user would be bothered in attempting to install Ubuntu to replace Windows unless they are 'tech-savvy' enough or a software engineer. Such users would only see that as a double negative in losing their apps + UX mental model just to get things done. They first have to unlearn Windows/Mac and then replace their missing apps just use the selected Linux OS (Ubuntu, ChromeOS, etc) which just isn't worth it.
> I recall many a nightmare of getting drivers working on Windows back in the day.
Yes, Windows is a nightmare for getting drivers working, but I have heard worse stories of Linux users complaining about X11/Wayland bringing down their desktop plus the graphical issues Wine has when running Windows apps and games.
>Yes, Windows is a nightmare for getting drivers working, but I have heard worse stories of Linux users complaining about X11/Wayland bringing down their desktop
In the last 10 years? This is no longer a problem.
>plus the graphical issues Wine has when running Windows apps and games.
The "average user" doesn't care. They want to read Facebook. See my previous comment.
Realistically the "average user" has better things to do than to install Ubuntu or another OS these days just to get work done. It's even better for Windows users thanks to WSL which gives them less of a reason to switch to a Linux distro or even to buy a Chromebook. Android is a good example of what the mess of the Linux distros should have been but for mobile.
> In the last 10 years? This is no longer a problem.
Well you brought up an anecdote about Windows as so did I for Linux. But as with both graphics cards and their drivers, this is still an eternal issue on the majority of Linux distros, especially those who keep using NVIDIA and Intel.
> The "average user" doesn't care. They want to read Facebook. See my previous comment.
Exactly. Why should the "average user" bother with all that trouble in switching/migrating if Windows / Mac users have everything Linux has to offer but with a sainer environment and established support and ecosystem.
I tried with Windows 10, and widows server 2019. The end result was that Windows 2019 is super fast to set up, and literally compiled the same c code in half the time it took in Windows 10. The user interface was a lot snappier, and just felt nice, like how xp felt after disabling all the eye candy.
If it weren't for the insane pricing, server 2019 would be the ultimate windows os...
I’m sure that many of you use long complex passwords for your computers but I don’t for my home computer. I have to type if often to login and the environment is not a high risk area. I do use longer and more random passwords for accounts with a wider exposure.
I guess I'm trading convenience for ...?
Is there any computer vendor that does not call the mothership or need these special vendor accounts?
ChromeOS <-- GalliumOS Windows <--- ? Apple <--- ?
Where do I buy a decent computer these days that respects user privacy without jumping through legal hoops?
Or is the last operating system, GNU/Linux - Linux that respects the user?
System76? ZaReason? puri.sm? <-- very small marketshare
Back in the day, my Apple //e never used to do that. Times have changed.
in MacOS, the Apple account is about syncing the iCloud stuff with your Mac.
I've been holding off upgrading to Windows 10 as I wanted to see how Microsoft would handle the cloud/cortana/ad/telemetry nonsense. I'm glad I waited; It'll never run on my home machines. My Linux box is seeing more and more use and my laptop is now running Alpine Linux.
My only gripe is I work in industrial automation, a field who unfortunately embraced Windows as a platform to build their tools on. This is a huge ball and chain that I'd rather not drag around anymore. So I'm still stuck giving my money to these schmucks.
Sigh. Go away Microsoft. Just leave us alone and stop chaining us down with your bullshit. It's been 20+ years of whining about stupid draconian Ms bullshit. I'm so fucking tired of this.
If they go to a services model their Windows marketshare will plummet. As soon as users have to directly pay a monthly fee, all the Linux UX issues will seem meaningless.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3409788/how-microsoft-made-i...
A friend of mine came over, with his kid, and I offered to let him watch TV while we talked. 2 minutes later the kid is bawling is eyes out... He couldn't figure out how to make the TV work without talking at it. I handed him a remote, and it was like ancient Egyptian algebra.
Anyway, terrifying glimpse of what's to come. Consumers that don't know how to push any buttons. Who find even using a mouse to be too complicated. Scares me a bit because the tools to create content aren't in that space... by making usage so silly easy, we diminish opportunities to build skills that help turn users into creators.
Its become one of my favourite OSes.
It doesnt come with any shit on it (windows store, xboxlive, cortana etc etc.) MS have also promised It will not receive any updates that change its functionality but will receive security updates, for 10 years. You can only get it if u buy in bulk tho. Or, u can just get it from tpb.. Considering MS are intentionally not selling by far the most user-respecting version of their OS to regular folks, it behooves us to pirate it.
There definitely should be an option to encrypt it like the in the pro version, but then you could also just buy the pro version (then you can also disable auto-updates...). It's not really expensive in the EU.
Edit: oh it’s not gone, it’s hidden
If there is no way to use an offline account any more I'm certainly not installing. Bye, Windows, it has been amazing 25-yr-long adventure I've enyoyed, thank you and bye.
I tried to contact Microsoft support to get this fixed but they were totally useless, and that's when I gave up. Not going back.
I still have an installed copy of Win 8 for special use if need be. However, I am avoiding the use MS products if at all possible.
Can you still activate an iPhone or iPad without providing a telephone number?
But I have never run Windows Server
OnlyOffice is an open source office suite that has native support for Microsoft Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). There is a desktop version that works offline and an online version that integrates with Nextcloud. There are also mobile apps (closed source).
Home page: https://www.onlyoffice.com
Download: https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx
GitHub: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors
WPS Office (previously known as Kingsoft Office) is a closed source office suite that works on Linux. The software is quite popular in China, and the Android app has over 100 million downloads on the Play Store.
Homepage: https://www.wps.com/office/linux
Download: http://wps-community.org/downloads
Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.wps.Office
FreeOffice is another closed source office suite for Linux.
Homepage: https://www.freeoffice.com/en
Download: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/download/applications
(I only have pro license's to hand, maybe its diff with home licenses, EDIT: Just got a home license. I'll test with that for the shits and giggles off it. But honestly, we should be installing pro for people so we have easier control via group policies anyways BRB testing more now i'm back home.)
First test: I installed a fresh copy of Retail Win 10 Pro 1903 downloaded today from https://microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10iso (Note: unless you fake your UA to be something other than windows it will redirect you to the media creation tool download. Say you are an iphone for example it will happily let you download the raw ISO without the media creation tool) During install it gives me the option to use an offline account in the bottom left [0].
Second test: I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro 18970 insider build from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsins... downloaded today again it gave me the option to use a local account in the bottom left [1]
(note: the two pic's will look the same, but they were taken from the 2 diff iso's - granted it will try its hardest to get me to change my mind during the rest of the set up but the option is there.)
Third Test: I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Pro with obv a local account, I then upgraded 7 pro to 10 1903 pro using the media creation tool, I selected the option to keep my existing files and apps and allowed the upgrade to take. Told setup NO to all the extra's (location, personal ad's etc etc etc) and the install took using the existing local account and didn't prompt me to "upgrade" to an MS account.
As for real hardware I upgraded a friend of the families laptop 2 weeks ago from 7 to 10 using the media creation tool and it again upgraded without pestering for an MS account. (And I'll be upgrading another in the next week or two when they are ready for me to do it. They would rather have the process hand holded for them incase of any oddness during the process, so I'll be able to report back then)
I'll bash MS as much as the next person but I'm unable to replicate these findings. I know they try their hardest to push an MS account onto people (I run the insider build on my personal rig and every major update I get a prompt about all the wonderful things a MS account brings... But I am still able to say Nope, local account thanks :-)
[0] https://cejack.tk/2019-09-29_10-07-10-552.png
[1] https://cejack.tk/2019-09-29_10-21-05-939.png
EDIT: Fresh install with home and they moved the offline button. Typed in some random numbers in the account bar [2] and it gave me the option to use an offline account on the next page [3] which then took me though the process of creating a local account [4] - Is it an annoying dark pattern? Yes. Did they remove local accounts? Nope.
[2] https://cejack.tk/2019-09-29_17-32-57-607.png
Windows used to be a fucking operating system. That’s all I want it to be.
There have been startups before trying to do this, a famous one being Lindows. Never got anywhere.
Desktop Linux has many uses (it's my main OS right now). But the reason it hasn't caught on widely is perfectly obviously that as technology for the regular consumer, it's bloody awful. Many Linux enthusiasts admit this perfectly readily, but for obscure reasons some insist on clutching Linux to their chests as an identity totem. This is probably less harmful than nationalism, so I guess I shouldn't object too much.
90% of this planet is not capable, nor will ever be capable, of dealing with something that is not a fully fledged, 'stable' mainstream OS, either Windows or Mac OS. That's not good, it's not bad - it just...is. Better get used to it, or come up with a better strategy for changing it.
And I'm writing here as (currently) a Linux user - it's the main OS on my work laptop because the things I like about it (stellar performance, notably from the filesystem, fantastic developer tooling) are more important to me than the difficult things. But the difficulties are numberless, and I accept that many things I take for granted on Windows or OSX just will never work well. Most of them could work, but I'll never have time to track down & absorb all the Arch wiki, SO & manpage resources I'd need to sort them out.
Everybody should Install Gentoo.
it's nearly out of beta
i think it has games
For instance, I'm a musician , teacher and producer and I do most of my work in a DAW called Cubase. It runs on Windows or Mac, and my main workstation is on Windows. I've been banging on about how great it would be to have it running on Linux for maybe 20 years, but it'll never happen. I'm sure people will suggest switching to something like Bitwig (which does run on Linux), or any of the free options, but either they don't do everything I need (free options), or I just can't get used to using them and they still don't work in a way that I'm comfortable with after nearly 30 years using Cubase.
Why Bill Gates has paying to MIT thru Epstein ?
Hahaha.. yes hide me, give me minus.. no worry!
1. Windows 10 always prioritized account creation with an online account simply because it was more feature rich.
2. Windows 10 always had an option (dark) to create account connected with no online account. It was hidden. And discouraged.
3. Windows 10 still offers offline account creation through user control panel within an existing account.
4. Imagine being able to go to any computer and logging in with your account that is based in some other machine.
5. Imagine going to a computer without your account that also prevents others from logging in because it is password protected. And being able to log in anyway through your online account.
Stop freaking out. This expands options nicely.
Edit: it would be nice to be told why the disagreement.