Hacker News Reader

Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

When a clean install of Windows 10 ""Professional"" had prominent ads for Candy Crush in the Start Menu, is when I realized MS had lost their dignity.

View on HN

To solve this, they have an upgrade you can get called "Windows 10 Pro for Workstations". Costs a little over $300. Quoting the blog post on windows.com:

"You will see for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations productivity and enterprise focused applications in place of consumer applications and games. This was one of the top feedback shared with us by our partners and users and we're delivering this in our next update"

Last time I tried it, it still tried to install candy crush and such, but somehow failed, resulting in a glitchy start menu. That was a while ago, though.

> You will see for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations productivity and enterprise focused applications in place of consumer applications and games.

This means there will still be spam in the start menu, just a different kind of it? Wow.

Since Windows 7 is going to lose security updates, I have been looking at what to replace it with. My main use case being games (actual work and internet being on Debian).

What I found was that Windows Server seems to cut most of the features I do not want in Windows (Cortana, Windows Store and Microsoft accounts, OneDrive...) while still being purchasable on Amazon (although at 3-6 times the price). There are several issues (drivers and application compatibility, various settings have to be changed to match the "regular" Windows behavior), but so far I prefer it a lot to regular Windows 10.

For some reason I don't ever see people recommending the MSMG Toolkit[0]. With it, you can take a regular Win10 Home or Pro .iso, and completely gut it. Like, completely gut it. It'll stop automatic Windows updates (you can still choose to do them yourself), you can remove all default metro apps, you can completely remove the Windows Store from ever being on your system. Seriously, this thing is an absolute godsend it my opinion. Combine with the Windows 10 Privacy Guide[1] to pick up any slack that it misses.

0: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/msmg_toolkit.html

1: https://github.com/adolfintel/Windows10-Privacy

Oh my god just use wine.

This is getting ridiculous!

Sadly still not compatible with all applications.

Maybe it’s time to find alternates? I have a really hard time imagining there’s anything other than specialized control software that won’t run on Linux and is worth that.

I do not precisely disagree; I personally have exactly zero Windows machines left. But I know people for whom that transition would mean replacing the majority of the software that they use every day, and for less-technical folks that's going to hurt.

Story time. I know a small business owner who uses WordPerfect, FileMaker (database), and who needs a Java web applet that interfaces with a hardware device and backends into a government database in order to do their job. Now, I would 100% be thrilled to move them from WordPerfect to LibreOffice, but they have 20-year-old macros that we'd have to port. Then FileMaker: I guess something could be done with sqlite? But now we're talking custom software solutions to replace something that a non-developer could drive before. And the Java applet... well, that's gonna hurt regardless, but it talks to hardware which means that it'll need drivers, and the government isn't going to support anything but the bare minimum, so that may never move.

In my experience, 90% of software is totally possible to port or replace. Unfortunately, that last 10% (games, drivers, business-critical app written for MS-DOS 6.22) tends to be what makes or breaks the migration.

I just realized my message was wrong in the context. The price was not 3 times 300$ but 3 times the regular price of a Windows 10 Family license. Basically, the price I am seeing on Amazon is 345$.

I wonder what engineers working on vscode and wsl feel when they run into people working on OS monetization in the company restaurant...

What do you need to say in your interview to be assigned to the latter team?

What do they feel? What about being thankful for being a revenue stream, it allows us to work on more free (as in beer) and open source developer tools

It's almost like paying for an operating system should somehow be the payment itself.

I'm not saying that this is a good revenue model nor that I support it.

I'm saying that employees of a company probably don't antagonize the others like that.

Seems similar to being thankful that the mafia’s criminal acts help fund its philanthropy in the community.

Its not free if we sell out with our data and attention.

There’s a company restaurant?

Just use LTSC. No Cortana, no Store, no Edge, and obviously no Candy Crush--in fact, no Metro apps to speak which, not even the Calculator (instead you get the one from Windows 7)

How do you get a license for that? As far as I know you can't easily. You need to find a reseller and there's a minimum amount of licenses you need to buy so you can't just buy one.

I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this. There's basically zero effort involved in setting up a credit card payment form that gives out product keys, and there'd be at least some demand for it.

>You need to find a reseller and there's a minimum amount of licenses you need to buy so you can't just buy one.

AFAIK you can get around that requirement by buying a bunch of cheap CALs.

Because they know that it'll be incredibly popular and will force them to continue backporting updates. They want to move forward and users want to stay on one place. In the past users managed to keep Microsoft from moving forward. Now they want to force users to move forward. Nobody is happy in both cases, it seems.

What I don’t get is that as a company, money should be their objective. They have people asking to pay money for a license, why not charge whatever it takes to make backporting updates profitable and call it a day?

>Because they know that it'll be incredibly popular and will force them to continue backporting updates.

I don't get it. How does popularity have anything to do with how much effort is needed to backport updates? Those editions already exist, so they're already committed to supplying updates. Might as well make some extra money by selling it for $300+ retail.

I had to go to Ebay to obtain a license.

But can I get that on my personal laptop?

You can pay for Windows updates by having ads, or by paying for Enterprise edition every year. Or realise that you should have switched to Linux already. Or overpay for your hardware and get a Mac, prepay for 5 years of OS updates today!

I pirated it.

I really hope you didn't harm anyone on the boat.

>To solve this, they have an upgrade you can get called "Windows 10 Pro for Workstations". Costs a little over $300.

At that price point you might as well get the LTSC version instead, which has none of that and has 10 years of security patches without needing to install feature updates.

I don't get this kind of comment. I bought a surface pro 2 years ago. I had to turn off the promoted apps and uninstall a few commercial games. But since then, no commercial ever appeared on my start screen. Not saying it's good to bundle commercial app. But its not hell either, like Google pushing you to their services every time you use their search engine or YouTube... And I think it's really bad practice to use scripts that break standard behavior of windows and nothing that should be encouraged to non technical people

And I don't get that kind of bootlicking mentality.

Google services are (mostly) free. Advertisements come with the territory. As for 'pushing', I'm using the search and youtube daily and I don't even have a google account.

Windows 10 Pro is 200$. In what world is that acceptable to bundle spyware, crapware and advertisements with it?

>And I think it's really bad practice to use scripts that break standard behavior of windows and nothing that should be encouraged to non technical people

"Don't ask questions, just consume the product". Keep enabling that shit, and in a few decades it will be illegal to tinker with your own fucking computer.

It's 200€, and my computer that is 10 years old can be kept up to date. Upgrades are really fast. I really think that it is a rock solid operating system that opens up a lot of possibilities for developer while offering long term compatibility and stability. At least windows leaves you the possibility to remove any promoted app or suggestion. But like I said. I still think they should stop that ridiculous behavior. Just saying that the os is nonetheless great.

I agree. I wonder if Apple put a little tile up to show the new Mac Pro, or of Red Hat put a little widget up to show Red Hat cloud suite would we hear the same complaints.

It's just a little tile that shows a Microsoft product.

I run Windows 10 out-of-the-box on all my machines. I don't run any special "cracks" to remove features, but I may have turned off a few things from Control Panel; I don't remember.

It's a very good operating system. Rock solid. Runs 64- and 32- bit Windows programs, Linux Programs, and anything I want in a VM.

Candy Crush is published by King (which is apparently owned by Activision now?), and has always gave an impression of being slightly sleazy.

I don't mind the OneDrive and Office ads as much (though I still turn them off).

There is a registry setting to turn it off.

See:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Barnacules/status/118578397794198...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com