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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

I want to like the Microsoft that appears to be turning over a new leaf from their “evil” days. And their new hardware is legitimately exciting. However, between the telemetry collection in Windows 10, and straight up maddening stuff like ads in the OS, I just see red.

The last time I clicked on a start menu my jaw nearly hit the floor due to all the extraneous and very much unwanted junk. Microsoft is clearly doing a lot right in terms of UX, but I lament that it feels like one step forward and two steps back.

I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled? Do most PC enthusiasts figure out how to disable that stuff or buy professional editions? My experience is limited to occasionally seeing family and friends do things in Windows, so maybe I’m just unaware of what the Windows-using technorati have known all along.

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> I want to like the Microsoft that appears to be turning over a new leaf from their “evil” days.

Embracing open source is just the first step of an old, old strategy of theirs. Maybe I'll be proven wrong on that, but you'd be a fool to forget their past. This the company that brought down IBM.

> I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users.

No real choice, unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise, but the reality is that Windows and Office run the business world. Microsoft put a lot of effort into delivering good products and keeping compatibility with old software, in addition to shady anti-competitive practices, to ensure that. Meanwhile, the Linux Desktop is still a fragmented mess that breaks every few years (at best). I really wish it weren't true, because Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

> There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?

That may be true of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, which can not be purchased individually and is expensive.

> Do most PC enthusiasts figure out how to disable that stuff or buy professional editions?

There are readily available tools to disable it, like O&O ShutUp 10.

> Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise

Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.

> Non-evangelist here. I've been running Ubuntu as my daily driver for years, and mostly it just works. Not saying it's going to take over the business world, just saying it's not worse than Windows for me in any way.

Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

I don't have a problem with people who use the Linux Desktop. Hell, if I bother to count all the desktops in my house then I use it on 4/5 PCs myself. What I have a problem with are evangelists who believe that anyone not using a Linux Desktop is doing so for stupid reasons. I can't even count the number of times over the past 2 decades I've had to listen to some Linux Desktop evangelist proclaim that there was literally no reason to use anything else, and then proceed to argue the case with no knowledge whatsoever of the needs of the person they're arguing against. It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.

It is a mindset I really can't stand about tech people: assuming that because something works for them that it therefore is the right choice for everyone else. That they are so superior to the rest of humanity that they can instantly understand everyone's use cases, and anyone who claims otherwise is just being a stubborn fool.

As a dev, but not really an OS power user: I've tried switching to Linux (ubuntu and mint) full time before and I really don't see any major shortcomings vs windows for regular desktop use - I know anecdotal evidence is pretty useless but it's all you really can get about this on here.

The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

I suspect no retail PCs coming with Linux preinstalled, and general lack of knowledge that it even exists or what it is is just as big (if not more) of a contributor to it's lack of users for non techies as UX is.

> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

Let me see if I can leverage this to help you understand why other people don't use Linux: WINE and Proton do a pretty incredible job of allowing Windows games to run on Linux, why isn't that good enough?

Now take whatever your response was, and replace "gaming" with "engineering", "audio production", "accounting", "video production", or whatever. You're viewing these things from a perspective of casual understanding and saying that Linux seems "good enough", but when you've got a deeper level of knowledge in something (gaming) you readily see the problems.

> The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.

Have you tried Steam within the past 6-9 months with Proton?

Steam is bundling a version of wine that Just Works(tm) in the Linux Steam client. Valve is claiming responsibility for all the goofy workaround configuration that accompanies setting up wine for any given game.

Native Linux games are listed alongside emulated Windows only games. This includes dx11 support. In the past 3 months they apparently added DX12 support, but I haven't tried it.

dx9 games have better framerates in Linux than windows on open source drivers. (not Nvidia) dx10/11 games have comparable framerates. Can't comment on 12. Obviously opengl or vulkan games have no issues.

It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.

> It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.

Easy to say when the OS is more important to you than the games. But when games are more important than the OS it's a different matter. Most gamers just want to click on the game and have it run, they don't want to mess with WINE or proton or Lutris or playonlinux

Anecdote: I recently purchased a laptop which came preinstalled with Windows 10. After trying 6 different Linux distributions -- Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Manjaro, Suse, MX Linux -- and none of them working (issues ranging from the installer not working to being totally unable to boot after the install to frequent freezing), I gave up and have gone back to Windows. I think I could've made Gentoo work with enough effort, but I don't have the patience for Gentoo that I used to.

I mean, maybe my experience would've been different with a different laptop, or maybe I could've put more effort in, but this is what stops Linux from being a daily driver for me. I don't want to spend all of that time just trying to find a distribution that works, followed by even more time trying to keep it working.

I disagree with Windows' direction more and more. I very much want to like Linux and use it as a daily driver -- I tried 6 popular distributions trying to get just one to work! -- but the reality of it stops me. If this is what someone who wants to use Linux experiences, how will it ever be able to catch on for regular desktop use?

(The best experience was with MX Linux. The hardware compatibility wasn't ideal; installing proprietary nvidia drivers broke the boot; power usage was kinda poor relative to Windows; but overall, I was able to at least use it.)

New laptops (or hardware in general) need a while to get going in Linux, I've noticed.

My mom got herself a new laptop while she was here to visit me, I installed Ubuntu on it, Wi-Fi kept crashing. It wasn't really stable.

Due to an unfortunate chain of events, her laptop spent another half a year with me, before she came back over to pick it up. I wiped it clean, reinstalled Ubuntu again, and now everything was working fine.

This was maybe a year or two ago.

It really depends on your dev workflow. If you're a Visual Studio user, you might find it quite jarring, but if you are, there are probably plenty of other reasons not to switch (it's switching away from your target environment).

For non-devs, it depends on how much MS infrastructure and solutions they've already adopted and have resources invested in. For a lot of companies, all that really matters is that they have hundreds or thousands of excel documents being passed around, and they can get better support and licensing through Windows.

Online versions of a lot of these reduce this to some degree, but most people would probably prefer to run Word and Excel natively than through an online app, even if they sync to shared storage and occasionally use those to view/edit something.

Add to that the fact that MS offers an end-to-end environment where you can buy something for whatever you find your needs are and find directions on how to integrate it, and there's really not much to compare.

Proton is nearly there and integrating in to wine in to Steam.

However if the game in question makes use of the Windows Video decoding APIs results are currently very disappointing; the last time I tested it (which was earlier this month) I still couldn't actually play Obduction (the Myst like game) due to none of the puzzle explanations / video data that make up the story of the game running.

Proton is improving but a lot of games still don't work or have random issues.

And for linux, forget any game that uses BattleEye for anti-cheat detection.

Yep, Proton is really good for lots of things.

Unfortunately, it's not a 100% complete solution. For example, no-one seems to have gotten Crysis (the original - and best ;) - version) to work, due to some kind of DRM thing in Crysis itself. :(

Things have really, really come a long way. I've got Centos 8 running Steam, and huge swaths of my library just work. I was not expecting that.

I recently started to change over to linux for gaming and I was pleasantly surprised by how many games work through lutris.

For gaming, as long as you're not playing a Microsoft-exclusive game, Lutris seems to work pretty well for most stuff.

> Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

I tried Linux a few times at home for 6m to a year, in this regard I missed nothing of Windows. However twice my instance was killed by Nvidia driver updates. People claim AMD has better drivers on Linux so I recently bought a Ryzen 7 3700x and 5700XT.

But after being burned and /never/ having anything similar happen on Windows, I can't bring myself to put Linux on my computer in fear of the same shit happening again...

The entire problem with Nvidia's drivers is that they aren't in the kernel, and the kernel driver API/ABI isn't stable, so potentially any kernel update could break the drivers.

That's not true for AMD on Linux. The drivers are in the kernel itself so any changes made to the kernel interfaces will include changes to the drivers that use them.

It's not the case for either vendor on Windows because Windows has stable driver APIs.

Basically, if you're on Linux and your hardware has mainlined kernel support you are not likely to ever have that kind of problem.

Thanks for the info! Appreciate it. Will definitely try out linux again.

There is one thing to know about though.

On Windows, since the vendors control the drivers, they can ship out new hardware support immediately.

On Linux, if the driver is mainlined, it's tied to your kernel. So if you have a really new graphics card you might need a new kernel also. If your preferred distro isn't Arch or Fedora (which have very up-to-date kernels), that might also be an issue. Debian Stable for instance might not have support for a new graphics card.

The other elephant in the room is hardware acceleration in browsers. Fire up a Google Meet (or YouTube for that matter) on your distro of choice using Chrome/Chromium/Firefox and watch those cores shoot through the roof, the fans ramp up, and battery life nose dive. Now, try the same thing on Windows or macOS ... night and day.

I use a linux desktop personally, but when you open up a powerpoint presentation or submit a proposal you need to be reaaly sure it looks as is intended. That means real powerpoint or word inside a real windows OS. It's unfortunate, but it's just required. I wish VMware hadn't killed the mode where applications looked like they were on the real desktop.

>It's these people who are being referred to when people talk about how the Linux Desktop community itself is the worst part of using the Linux Desktop.

Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement. Imagine if everyone whined about windows and also recommended windows. What would that achieve ? It's not like Nadella is lining up to listen to your whining either.

The license cost of Windows is less than 1hr of most people's time who post here. Focus on making Linux desktop a positive opportunity cost vs calling people whiners.

Also, Windows users tend to pay for software, Linux users less so. Guess which user base is going to be more valuable to 3rd party devs.

I have no dog in the game. Each person should use (or develop for) whatever they want. But coming to a thread that is critical of windows and still somehow bashing linux is beyond pointless. Either do something productive, or let others do their bit.

> Those people are trying to be helpful by educating people about alternatives since in their assessment it is a suitable replacement.

And that's an extremely arrogant mindset. They think because they know some tech shit that they understand all of that person's needs. I mean, they've converted an image from BMP to PNG in GIMP once, so clearly that's a suitable Photoshop replacement right?

> Ok. But it is worse for me, and basically everyone else who uses Windows and says that Linux Desktop won't suit their needs.

The irony is delicious.

Same but that's not good enough. It has to be such that, say, an IT department could deploy and manage machines to an office of 500 people with questionable computer literacy. That's the market windows has nailed down. I remember reading about some German city trying to switch over to Linux and being forced to eventually switch back.

I'm a total libre evangelist but we don't have the power to overcome multi billion dollar engineering and sales departments...

Its not worse. Not anymore. And arguably better in many desktop areas.

But LOTD is not any easier for your average non techie.

And it was never about ease of use, its about adoption, presence and marketing.

> But LOTD is not any easier for your average non techie.

For non-techies, it is actually a non-problem; they are already used to fact there are systems different than Windows (they know about Android, iOS or ChromeOS). This kind of users are so undemanding, that sitting them behind stock Ubuntu machine they will relatively quickly go their way and are able to do everything they need.

It's Windows power-users who have it most troublesome. They learned something about one platform, and to move to another platform they have to start from scratch.

> And it was never about ease of use, its about adoption, presence and marketing.

Very true. I would add bizdev there too.

Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there. Its a little ironic that NTFS isn't faster than ext3 (in fact its slower for many use cases) but Explorer is amazing - Finder is a joke and most Linux fm's are modeled after Explorer, so is taskbar and start menu.

>Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there

Last I checked, windows explorer lacked split windows and a popdown console, both of which i use constantly. Windows also lacks focus on hover, proper session restore, a simple, readable, usable applications menu, the settings were scattered between at least two different places with no real rhyme or reason. It also has built in ads which honestly kills whatever positives the ui might have.

I agree. When I switched to Mac, I missed Explorer more than anything else. Still do. It's a fantastic design. Finder annoys me still, 4 years after my switch.

> Windows file management and UI is far superior to anything out there

Ehm, no, you are just used to it. In my not-so-humble opinion, it is Finder > Nautilus > Explorer.

In Linux, the taskbar and start menus are not a part of the file manager, but part the desktop shell. The most used one is Gnome, which doesn't have taskbar and start menu.

Meh, I disagree. I use a mac, but finder annoyed me so much that I've paid for forklift. I was happy with both nautilus and explorer.

This is clearly a matter of individual preference. Personally I cannot stand Explorer, but know many people who swear by it (although many of those are in the category of "know enough to be dangerous but not enough to download Midnight Commander").

Anecdotal, but the first time I tried to use windows explorer in win10 it hung for 5 minutes trying to extract a zip archive then crashed. I also use tabs in nautilus all the time, they're far superior to opening an extra window.

The old strategy that you're referring to was called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" in their internal memos [0]

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

Wow, I never realized that phrase was used internally at MS. I always thought it was an outsiders description of their practice. Shameful.

> No real choice, unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise, but the reality is that Windows and Office run the business world.

Also mind that "professional" editions of windows contain less of the crapware than Home or similar editions...

Note however that "Windows 10 Pro" is not one of the reduced-crapware editions.

Pro has slightly more knobs exposed than Home letting you adjust behavior but it’s nothing like the corporate version of Windows, no. I use tron script regularly to cut out what I can and it does help. Reading online the true believers load LTSB or LTSC licenses instead although they give up latest-gen CPU support by doing so.

I'd really like to believe that the embracing open source is different than the embrace, extend, extinguish mantra they had. I really do see a different attitude towards developers with VSCode, GitHub, Bash on Windows, etc (long time Mac user here - not on the Microsoft bandwagon).

For the OS Ads... I also see red. But I try not to forget that a corporation isn't a person, it's a large group of people. History doesn't mean that a corporation always acts the same with the same incentive structure. Look at Apple over the years. Now corporations do have a culture derived from history (and leadership obviously). And that culture is different in different places of a large company. I believe the ads in the OS is something that is culturally wrong with the group developing that OS. And likely, knowing nothing of Microsoft's structure, the culture of the people working on the projects I mentioned above is drastically different than that team.

Point is, because Microsoft is a large organization it can be "evil" and "good", it depends where you look. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

> Meanwhile, the Linux Desktop is still a fragmented mess that breaks every few years (at best). I really wish it weren't true, because Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

In Brazil we used to say that the year of linux (desktop) was current year + 1. Because people who used it would always tell others that "next year is going to be the year of linux on desktop", only for that not to happen and then they adjust their prediction for the next year again...

Well, at least you had GoboLinux in Brazil...

We had Conectiva as well.

Linux desktops are rare because there are few companies selling them. See for example Redhat. This is a pretty lucrative business opportunity. I think Microsoft is seeking other revenue models (ads) because once they get competition prices will drop.

> Embracing open source is just the first step of an old, old strategy of theirs.

Sure if you ignore the fact that their major projects were not extensions, and they're MIT licensed. Their past tactics was to extend open standards and become the corporate standard.

>I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise

ubuntu just werks

Embracing open source may be even sincere as companies go. But being a company means that it may eventually all change without notice. Companies change people and their positions, but even people change minds.

LTSC can be purchased individually legally. But it is indeed expensive.

Luckily, there are also all those shady eBay “key resellers”. (They are all cracked of course, but they also work, so it’s worth it.)

Is there really a difference between key resellers and just cracking it? You don't have a license for it either way.

easiness

> Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

I often ranted about this: after running Linux as my daily driver 2004-2017 (and a few years before that in dual boot and since 1993 on servers) I switched to Windows + WSL in early 2018 and I am OK with it.

I use an eGPU. Now, of course, Linux does not even support changing the video card under X Windows. And I am not so sure about supporting hotplugging an nVidia card either.

And when I was running Linux I ran into problems with enterprise wifi and VPN all the time and my multifunction devices and bluetooth.

https://xkcd.com/619/ rings painfully true. Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.

I have a Linux laptop and an eGPU. I dual boot Windows when I need to use it. I didn't even try to get it to work on Linux because that's a good way to lose a week and gain nothing. Switching between dedicated GPUs and integrated ones is still barely functional after heavy tweaking, and laptops have been doing that for I don't even know how long.

That xkcd is extra painful because there are still, 11 years later, zero Linux browsers that support hardware-accelerated (i.e. smooth) video playback.

On my desktop with a GTX 1060, Chrome can play 4K60 YouTube videos without issues.

But yeah on my laptop with Intel integrated graphics (I thought Intel was supposed to be better supported vs Nvidia under Linux?) I can barely play a 1080p video without frames being dropped. It even struggles displaying a 4K desktop so I have to run at 1440p, while Windows handles it fine.

Two notes:

1) Chrome does not use hardware video acceleration under Linux. Some distributions' Chromium build does (the code is there, and is enabled under ChromeOS). Why Google didn't enable it for desktop Linux is a question for Google.

2) Intel GPUs do not have problem with 4K desktop under Linux, they are capable enough to run two 4K display at once, at least since Broadwell. It's 8K capabilities that are currently under development.

If you don't believe, choose 2160p60 on this video and see the CPU utilization under Linux:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb3EKWsInQ

>Linux is a great server operating system with a desktop badly cobbled on top.

Especially the most popular flavor, Ubuntu.

Between releases which require reinstallations to get new features, hardware support, and bugfixes (bugfixes are supposed to be backported, but fresher DE versions have worked much better than old ones for me, so I'm skeptical) and the awkwardness of PPAs, it's sad it's the go-to assumed distro which everyone writes articles for and tests hardware/software against when rolling release is such a better model (that Windows now ostensibly uses with 10).

Manjaro seems to be gaining popularity as a user-friendly, nerfed rolling distro which offers safety and fast features+hardware support+bugfixes and can use the AUR, where everything in the Universe is and can be browsed with a GUI package manager -- no PPA terminal imports needed. But so is MX Linux, a Debian-based, Xfce distro whose selling point seems to be "no systemd", which speaks to a misalignment of priorities between many Linux users and the average PC user... if "average PC user" means "vaguely technical person who games and wants fast drivers + new hardware support", which is already wrong.

But FWIW, >>Windows is a painful experience these days, but Linux Desktop manages to still be worse.

Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though; I don't even know what an eGPU is. For me, there seems to be a magical effect of using Linux for a long time and then returning to Windows. Windows doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. There's permission problems with the new 10 Settings interface when trying to access the core system apps like Device Manager. It can't connect to the Internet when I turn off my VPN, when Linux works fine on the same VPN. So many little things.

Suddenly, Windows seems like the janky, ersatz OS I force myself to go to sometimes while Linux feels like the more intuitive "home" system. But I've been on it for like 2 years now, so I'm probably brainwashed. And in 10 years Linux will get worse so I'll boomerang back to Windows like you? Or maybe something better will take over, like Fuchsia.

Funny how things go! I had been using Arch Linux for about 4 years and recently I switched to PopOS.

I never had problems with updates, but had a lot of problems with non-standard locations. For example, getting Vim to work inside of Tmux with eslint and auto complete just wouldn't work perfectly no matter what I tried.

It's a different world with Gnome and PopOS, and I really miss the AUR and Pacman but other than that I feel like I'm spending more time on my system than before.

>Between releases which require reinstallations

You got your facts wrong, Ubuntu supports updating in place no need to reinstall, maybe you confuse Ubuntu/Debian with other distros that require a reinstallation.

Ubuntu has a LTS version and it officially backports video and other drivers to allow support for recent hardware.

> Disagree. Can't speak to exotic use cases though;

Windows desktop usage is somewhere north of 80%. Consider that Linux can't even do many common use cases right, it's just that it can do your use cases.

Windows 10 LTSC is great - it doesn't have Cortana or the Windows Store and it even has a nifty search icon beneath the Start menu which says "Start typing to search..."

Not that I would recommend it but you can purchase LTSC on Ebay for about ~20 to 30$. That is where I got mine... Sketchy? Yes, but worth a chance in my book

> but you can purchase LTSC on Ebay

Doesn't sound like you purchased it. It sounds like you gave some [random] place money for a pirated (and maybe backdoored) copy of Windows.

That's likely a very bad approach. ;)

No problems yet...

Updates work just fine and are only performed at reasonable intervals

Sure. The approach seems like it works for you (so far), and sounds like it worked out well for whoever got money out of you.

But, please don't encourage others to put themselves at risk. aka fall for a scam on Ebay

I disagree, but I admit it is risky.

the keys seem to be about $2

you could get scammed or have your key deactivated a hundred times and still be ahead

That's assuming there aren't backdoors in the software. Not a safe bet to make.

At least, not without (at a minimum) having the SHA256 (or better) checksum of the ISO match that of the MSDN equivalent download.

MS provide the digests on MSDN if you have a login

and there's plenty of dumps of them kicking around if you don't

Most are MSDN license which will invalided and deactivated sooner than later.

Agreed that candy crush as default is heinous, but it feels like "telemetry" is kind of brought up as a bogeyman. Clearly, there exist scenarios where device owners have a legitimate need for no (or minimal, considering updates) communication with MS regarding device activity, but that's not generally the case for the average PC user. I want my OS maker to get stack traces from stacks so that they can fix crashes. I want my OS maker to receive actionable data on highly-used features so that they can effectively prioritize what to improve and what can be culled. (And obviously, I want this data to be treated with appropriate security.)

edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry - it's the anti-telemetry rhetoric I find to be overblown - in general what I hear isn't nearly as nuanced as the replies here, it's simply blanket opposition to all telemetry.

If MS were bound to only used telemetry in the way you suggest, it might be fine. But they specifically are not.

Here's the first part under "How we use personal data" in their privacy statement:

Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you with rich, interactive experiences. In particular, we use data to:

* Provide our products, which includes updating, securing, and troubleshooting, as well as providing support. It also includes sharing data, when it is required to provide the service or carry out the transactions you request. * Improve and develop our products. * Personalize our products and make recommendations. * Advertise and market to you, which includes sending promotional communications, targeting advertising, and presenting you with relevant offers.

So, points one and two are nice. Three might be nice, but really depends on the motivation for the personalization and recommendations. Four is full on, deep advertising.

BTW, you may want to make a distinction between your personal data and telemetry, but MS does not make any such distinction. Also, in the next section, MS notes they'll share your data with anyone they want.

(https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement)

This comment right here. Why anyone would give any corporation the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how telemetry data is used is beyond me. Especially in cases like Microsoft, where they are very clearly using it for advertising.

Talk about head in the sand.

I would be thrilled if MS (and Apple, for that matter) would divest themselves of all advertising-related business units and declare themselves explicitly anti-user-advertising, but to me that seems largely orthogonal to telemetry, despite the fact that their current legalese has put the two into a blender.

I can be anti-advertising and pro-privacy without being anti-telemetry.

Just as long as you understand MS will be using the telemetry data for advertising and marketing purposes (in addition to the more helpful purposes you are expecting).

I want my OS maker to get stack traces from stacks so that they can fix crashes

I want my OS maker to ask for stack traces so they can fix crashes. I do not want this to be a default with no way to opt out. Even crash data is my data, not Microsoft's, and Microsoft should ask my permission each time it happens the way that MacOS does.

Then again, that might make people aware of how often programs go sideways on Windows, which is not in Microsoft's interest.

The Windows Error Reporter has existed since forever. I don't understand why people are acting as though this is a new nefarious thing in Windows 10.

Because it's no longer optional. Even if you think you're turning it off, they'll just redefine or outright revert the preference setting whenever they feel like it, typically as part of a forced update.

The user's opinions and desires are not on anybody's radar at MS, except to then extent that they coincide with the company's own desires.

Windows Error Reporter doesn’t record everything you click. Microsoft Telemetry does.

Maybe consumers are simply becoming more aware.

That's funny, but they can only ask ONCE if they can always send crash data, not ask again every time the program crashes, which solves that problem.

I think it's (and should be) up to the operating system, not the vendor. When programs eat themselves on macOS I get the option to send debug information to the programmer each time. Sometimes twice if the program has its own crash reporting mechanism, too (Panic's Coda, for example).

Maybe there's an "always remember my selection" checkbox, but I don't remember ever seeing it, except once a year when I install the new version of macOS.

There's even a comment box where you can explain what you were doing when the error occurred. I like to think someone out there reads my helpful comments. I would love that as a client developer. :(

Telemetry is far more than stack traces. It includes domain names of visited websites, names of executable files you've run, names of documents you've opened via explorer, clipboard contents, keyboard logs and other privacy-sensitive data.

And switching between Basic and Full levels of telemetry in settings doesn't help too much. According to BSI (project SiSyPHuS), number of event providers for Basic telemetry level is 410, and for Full level there are 422 ETW providers.

Do you have any source on that?

Specifically, it has the option to enable a "Diagnostic Data Viewer" that shows the data it sends (as JSON). I've just enabled that, so there is not much to see, but so far it has only transmitted version information of OS software components.

(Mini-) crash dumps can contain all kinds of information but that is kind of unavoidable. As a developer, I'm gratefull whenever I get a core/crash dump, but yes, it shouldn't be automatic.

Here's a full list of data it seems to send https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-dia... (at full telemetry level)

https://www.pcministry.com/win10_telemetry/summary_stats_and...

Windows 10, when left alone for 1 year, sends about 4.5 Gb of outgoing data. There are no apps running all this time, so there are no crash reports to submit.

To me, "telemetry" is a violation of boundaries. And I don't think it's necessary to provide legitimation scenarios for not wanting that.

For decades I have used personal computers and it was my machine and nobody constantly observed what I was doing with it. With "telemetry" I'm not sure about the relation anymore - do I own the machine or does the machine own me? It's a loss of control, I'm not able to make the decisions anymore about what happens and what doesn't.

> Agreed that candy crush as default is heinous, but it feels like "telemetry" is kind of brought up as a bogeyman.

In Germany, such "spying" features are really detested; there exists a very privacy-conscious culture that perhaps has to do with the experience of two surveillance states on German ground of which one only ceased to exist about 30 years ago.

No offense, but if Germans were so focused on online privacy they wouldn't spend so much time and money on Facebook/YouTube/Amazon/$FAANGCORP.

Indeed, as native German, I observe lots of people that try to avoid having a Google account (in particular for email) (to at least separate the services that can be provided by a different vendor [email] from the Google account) and explicitly completely delete accounts of social networks (in particular Facebook/WhatsApp) if they ever had one.

To give an example: When at the regular's table of some group (details shall not matter) someone suggested to form a WhatsApp group, some people gave very direct and harsh words.

I personally observe that when I think about buying something at Amazon, I ask myself and look whether there also exists another possible vendor.

So the mentality that I described is in real - it's just not possible to avoid said "Facebook/YouTube/Amazon/$FAANGCORP" completely for now; so you look for areas where you can avoid them - step by step.

> So the mentality that I described is in real

.. but even anecdotal evidence. I says nothing about the general situation. Personally. I never felt the need for FB. For a few years now my - large - family is running Threema. All of them, even the old folk. This is good for us, but especially the youngsters have parallel installations of WA, Signal, Telegram etc..

This is also anecdotal and I'm afraid, not typical. Some months ago I became member of a Skat club (a popular german card game). All the people are very different in social beckground to me and even to each other - real estate shark, musician, blue collar worker and more - and know what?

> some people gave very direct and harsh words.

I got these words for NOT accepting WA. Eventually, we settled to Signal - but even that not unanimously and it remains a slightly frustrating communication model.

> I want my OS maker to get stack traces from stacks so that they can fix crashes. I want my OS maker to receive actionable data on highly-used features so that they can effectively prioritize what to improve and what can be culled.

Why do you think this is even needed? Every software package used by more users than nobody (by Joel Spolsky definition) has their bug report system full of bugs, and solving them would take years of doing nothing but butfixing. Your telemetry won't help prioritizing them, or even lead to solving them, but it will be mined for info that can be used to monetize your behavior.

> Clearly, there exist scenarios where device owners have a legitimate need for no (or minimal, considering updates) communication with MS regarding device activity, but that's not generally the case for the average PC user.

I find it troubling that anyone thinks that a user must have a "legitimate need" (whatever that is) to justify not wanting to be spied on. Simply not wanting your machine to send data to should be more than enough of a need.

> edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry

Oh, then we are completely on the same page. It appeared that you were arguing in favor of forced telemetry for "average PC users".

> edit: To clarify, users should be able to disable telemetry - it's the anti-telemetry rhetoric I find to be overblown - in general what I hear isn't nearly as nuanced as the replies here, it's simply blanket opposition to all telemetry.

Respect begets respect. If Microsoft gave me the choice to disable telemetry, I would probably leave it on. The fact that they don't give me that choice motivates me to find a third-party tool to disable it, if only as a way to express my annoyance.

Yes, I know, I'm not representative of the vast majority of users.

It's not only device activity. If you are a company and you have contracts that guarantee privacy for the data that you process, how can you uphold those contracts if you cannot disable telemetry?

You can't. And even if you could, the automatic updates could change things later so you couldn't.

Several governments and their regulators in the EU are currently at various stages of looking into this issue, because it may be literally impossible to be GDPR compliant if you're processing personal data on a system running a Windows 10 edition that requires this stuff. And that's just the literally-breaking-the-law part as it relates to personal data in general. You might also have contractual obligations like NDAs, or perhaps some more specific legal obligations to protect data if you work in healthcare, finance, national security, etc.

Clearly, there exist scenarios where device owners have a legitimate need for no communication with MS regarding device activity, but that's not generally the case for the average PC user

Do you really believe yourself to be the ultimate arbiter of that question, for all PC users? Or just for the average ones?

I meant that observationally, the average home user I see who is hell-bent against Windows telemetry doesn't have reasons for it that are comparable to organizations with well-reasoned processes and procedures regarding telemetry.

I didn't mean to imply that said user shouldn't have the option to disable telemetry, even for no reason at all.

> ... it's simply blanket opposition to all telemetry.

You make that sound like a bad thing, when it's not.

MS deciding they control what my computer does, rather than me - the owner - is fundamentally just not on.

The concept is extremely basic. No idea why many other people seem to not grasp it, let alone MS. :(

> but it feels like "telemetry" is kind of brought up as a bogeyman.

It is a real problem, not a bogeyman, when it's actually turning itself back on when we turn it off.

> ads in the OS,

Yeah, I can't wrap my head around why they would do that.

Is it really a big enough revenue stream to inconvenience the consumer to such a degree ?

______

Maybe it is because the type of user that uses wordpad is also not concerned with advertisements or user experiences.

I mean, for most people a computer is either a Netflix + Internet + Office machine (they live in these apps, so the rest of the OS doesn't really affect them) or a device which runs significantly worse OEM software,(in which case, good UX was a lost cause anyways.)

> I mean, for most people a computer is either a Netflix + Internet + Office machine (they live in these apps, so the rest of the OS doesn't really affect them) or a device which runs significantly worse OEM software,(in which case, good UX was a lost cause anyways.)

I really wish tech people would stop with this fantasizing that users don't have good reasons for the choices they make. This is why Linux Desktop has consistently failed for decades: the conception that it is "good enough" for "most non-technical people" because they've imagined some ultra-simplified usecase and then convinced themselves that they've made an appropriate replacement. Absolutely nothing good comes of this mentality.

It works if you have a massive enterprise sales team and a couple billions for hardware development. See Chromebook.

I don't see many people giving up their desktops for Chromebooks. Let's take a look at the stats [0]... Doesn't look like ChromeOS is significant. Hell, it doesn't even seem to beat Linux.

Granted, there might be other sources (I found this with 1 minute of Google searching), but I doubt they'll paint a much different picture. Chromebooks are just big smartphones and are not a sufficient tool for the tasks which people actually use Desktop computers for.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

ChromeOS is a joke if you are offline or need to do any local work. Their 'file browser' has got to be an inside joke its so bad.

Its a great device for browsing + youtube/netflix + FB + gdocs. Which is why its so popular in edu because they basically give it away. And its enough for most people.

> ChromeOS is a joke if you are offline or need to do any local work.

I used to feel that way until I learned that recent Chromebooks can run Android apps and come with a Linux in a VM, and I am now a very happy Chromebook user. All the software I need is a browser, Emacs, git, SBCL, LaTeX and a few standard Unix tools: I use Chrome and run everything else in the Linux VM.

(And you're right that the file browser is very limited, fortunately I only need it ocasionally to move files between the Linux VM and the ChromeOS file system).

Google has been making half hearted attempts to merge ChromeOs and Android or at least provide a proper Linux distro without resorting to chroot hacks or replacing the fw.

I'm sure they have internal builds which are pure Linux with a compatibility layer to run ChromeOS legacy. There is absolutely no reason a Chromebook can't run that - but then its just another laptop and loses the marketability.

I think I like the current Linux (Debian 9) in a VM approach: it's off by default, easy to turn on for people who want Linux, runs fast enough (for me at least), and is simultaneously fairly well integrated but isolated so you can't easily screw up your Chromebook: if you hose your Linux installation, Chrome OS is still fine and you can just delete the VM and start over.

Crostini is still an esoteric dev only feature. No user is going to use it, or even be aware. When they need to run any apps or work with files, they don't have any options.

Why can't ChromeOS be a standard Linux distro which runs apps in a flatpak (and validated by Google). That way you can't screw up your machine, you don't really lose any perf, and you have the best of both worlds.

I think I agree with you if you change "dev only" to "prior Linux-user only" (I am a non-dev Linux-user and know plenty of others).

Flatpak sounds worth exploring, although many of the cheaper Chromebook have pretty limited storage space.

You're right. Although being a Linux user I'm pretty sure you know your way around a terminal and are the equivalent of a power user.

Chromebooks are targeted at people who find even Windows too complex.

With 400,000,000 active Windows 10 users I would imagine that yes, it is quite worthwhile.

Big consumer techs offer experience, not products. The joyous Windows Experience of office work a la Job Simulator.

Windows 10 LTSC is common among some enthusiasts. No candy crush or start menu ads, but it still tries to trick you into using an online account during the install if you make the mistake of connecting to the internet when asked, and you still have to change a bunch of privacy toggles. I don't like or trust it, still, I just put it on my parents' machines since they probably would've resisted switching to GNU/Linux and Windows 7 lost support.

Out of curiosity, how does one legally get a license for Windows 10 LTSC without a enterprise contract?

Legally? No way. How do people actually do it? Same as they always have: thepiratebay.org

Got mine on Ebay

It can be legally acquired through a Visual Studio (formerly MSDN) subscription.

That + the first thing i run on a new Windows10 install (for sane defaults) is: https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script

(make sure you make a backup/test it first before applying the scripts default preset, or make your own preset.)

"I want to like the Microsoft that appears to be turning over a new leaf from their "evil" days."

What appears to be "turning over a new leaf" may actually be nothing more than adapting to changing conditions. Of course they were not the ones who set those changes in motion, other than perhaps through evolutionary pressure. What Microsoft has done in more recent times has been largely driven by what other companies were doing -- making money from selling advertising, collecting vast quantities of data about users, etc. Not to mention using open source software internally, publishing source code and giving away software, often as a means to collect more data. That is why, e.g., there are ads in WorpdPad and telemetry is on by default.

Agreed on the start menu, that's an own goal. The telemetry in my opinion is a non-issue. To my knowledge nothing that's sent is actually harmful, and no harm has been demonstrated since they started gathering telemetry a decade ago.

The more interesting point of criticism for me are the in-app ads. Not so sure on what is meaningfully different between ads in wordpad promoting word and ads in macOS and iOS music apps promoting apple music. Or, in the same vein, why it is fair to flame microsoft for integrating onedrive throughout the OS but nobody complains when apple does exactly the same with icloud (to the point where basically you have to really go out of your way not to get sucked into paying for icloud).

Why is it ok for apple, but not for microsoft, to do these things?

> nothing that's sent is actually harmful

Except for your computer's colour: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level...

>I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?

The closest you have is LTSC. No ads out of the box. Still has telemetry though, although you can turn it down to "security" level. It costs like $300 for a license[1], and they won't sell it to you unless you commit to buying a bunch (although that can be worked around by buying a bunch of cheap CALs).

[1] https://www.cdw.com/product/windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2019-...

> I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users. There must be some ultra-premium edition of Windows 10 that one can buy, where telemetry and ads are fully disabled?

Why would you think that? My enterprise loves MS. Literally everything is being moved to MS. Chat, documents, internal websites (sharepoint), all hosted by MS under their office 365 umbrella. It’s maddening.

I cannot imagine the security folks being bothered by some ads in windows or some extra telemetry. If MS can read that data they know everything already.

The telemetry collection in Windows 10 has been reduced a lot. And MS are transparent about it and give you lots of control and switches in Settings/group policy to turn it off, unlike everyone else.

Many other corps collect much more invasive telemetry and users have no clue - e.g Netflix is basically a data collection service with a side effect of video streaming. Same for FB, Google ads cookies etc, every retailer etc etc.

But singling out MS has always been popular.

The difference is, that Neflix/Google/Facebook had their services with telemetry since start. If you didn't agree to their terms, you simply didn't start using their services. They don't even have network effects like Windows has.

Microsoft, on the other hand, added telemetry to already widely-used product, not giving the existing users any choice. Is it any wonder that Microsoft is being singled out? They deserve to be singled out.

I had a windows tablet sit collecting dust for months because every day when it ran an update it installed a broken sensor driver that borked screen rotation. Eventually I gave up and installed a third party Windows Update blocker. I can't be the only person sick of my computer telling me I'm a fucking idiot who's only good for shelling out cash to keep advertisements out of my file explorer.

I have been using Windows Firewall Control (WFC)(https://www.binisoft.org/wfc.php) for some years now. I have the same laptop since 2015, it runs Win8.1, and WFC is always running in alert/block mode. If you remember ZoneAlarm from 20y ago, imagine something like that. WFC hooks on the Windows firewall but has a super-enhanced UI. I usually leave only Firefox, Outlook, and Windows Updates passing through, and my Outlook only to the mail server (no need to download all the crappy stuff that people link on their emails).

I could also never understand why explorer.exe (or wordpad.exe, or WinZip or solitaire, or majority of apps on a PC.. need to tell anyone on the internet what I am doing with my PC.

In the same spirit, I always suggest it to friends who ask me to help them setup a new W10 machine. I block almost everything that moves and this solves any ad problem and telemetry that W10 is running.

The vast majority of desktop users would be fine doing all their work (word processing, spreadsheets, email, browsing) in a browser. Thus a full operating system like Windows really isn't required. It's surprising more organizations haven't switched to this approach, it saves on costs and overhead.

> It's surprising more organizations haven't switched to this approach, it saves on costs and overhead.

The user experience with web-based versions of these things is substantially worse, though. I don't know, but perhaps that's why there isn't greater adoption.

I don't think it's substantially worse, and I'm a pretty heavy user of applications. It would be worth measuring impact on productivity compared to gains in maintenance and overhead reduction.

Fair enough, that's a subjective assessment. They tend to be substantially worse for me. The very best of them aren't substantially worse, but they are still worse. My complaints about them are the the UX tends to be unpleasant.

> I can’t imagine that corporations would allow Microsoft to market to their end-users.

They don't. It's not a ultra-premium edition that disables it. The extra apps installation is easy to turn off via registry and can be applied to new users. In better controlled corps, your apps whitelist will not allow you to run extras anyway. The ads are either not a present: if it's a corp, everyone has office, not wordpad. In a completely controlled environment, the network won't allow you to connect back either.

I've set up a win10 pro laptop very recently and getting rid of the extra apps, disabling promotions, and most of ads takes maybe 30min. I'm not saying I'm ok with them, or that everyone can easily fix it - but if you have any kind of experience with windows, you can do it.

I could maybe understand this for the home edition but people pay extra for Pro. The whole point is to not spend 30+ minutes removing crap.

Also those registry fixes frequently get reverted by updates. It’s happened to me multiple times. Even if you succeed your greeted with a start menu that looks half broken.

More-or-less. The large organisation editions of Windows 10 (Enterprise and Education) are basically a different product to the others, with most of the unpalatable junk able to be disabled. But you can only legally get them through the organisation-level licensing schemes, with all the extra cost and hassle that brings.

The really surprising thing to me is that the Pro edition -- the one that historically was aimed at power users and smaller businesses -- is basically dumped in with Home now, with little of that same flexibility even though these users probably have much the same concerns about controlling updates, telemetry, ads, etc.

So for some of us working in small businesses, Windows 10 remains a no-go area regardless of any attempts by Microsoft to promote it and demote anything else. It appears to be impossible to retain proper control of your system and the data on it, which leads to all kinds of concerns about reliability, security, statutory and contractual data protection obligations, etc. Presumably this is why various government regulators within the EU are already going after Microsoft on the basis that it's essentially impossible to be GDPR compliant if your organisation is using such an OS.

> turning over a new leaf

I think you can always count on smart companies to optimize for return on assets, including their brand.

Microsoft had some weakness on that front, but they've put significant, sincere, and welcome effort into building brand value with the engineering crowd over the last decade. Nonetheless, it's entirely reasonable to expect them to make use of opportunities to leverage their assets to build their business as well.

If you have the means, compile from source. And if not, then perhaps enlist the services of someone who does (directly or indirectly).

Microsoft put the hounds in charge of the hen-house, but they only removed a few of the foxes.

Every time the 'do better' people are busy looking at something else, stuff like this will slip through.

They've gotten a taste of the surveillance revenues and won't look back. When you install Win10 there is a nag screen to make sure you opt-in to all kinds of data collection.

It's more than one screen. And the workarounds to not signing into a Microsoft account just to INSTALL the OS are becoming more and more tedious by the month.

The enterprise version lets admin disable all the crap, but it's really frustrating to buy pro version and still see that stuff.

> Microsoft is clearly doing a lot right in terms of UX, but I lament that it feels like one step forward and two steps back.

I disagree, they should have stuck with XP and just made incremental improvements like Apple have done with OS X. But no, every few years they have to change everything.

On a few people want that, most people what the OS to get out of the way.

Not only the "ads" in the start menu but the fact that they're actually INSTALLED APPLICATIONS that are part of the update packages.

Who knows how much bandwidth and time has been wasted at my job alone with folks' computers force-updating with included installations of Candy Crush, Spotify and Disney Kingdoms.

AFAIK these apps are not actually preinstalled, they’re simply shortcuts to the Microsoft Store. But I never got any of those “preinstalled” apps even on Windows 10 Home.

I've had Pro installations where I got the shortcuts, and others where I didn't. All on OEM machines that were licensed automatically, all in the same location, and using the ISO from MS's website (maybe not always the same exact ISO so that may be it). I couldn't come up with a solid explanation on where the difference comes from.

> Microsoft is clearly doing a lot right in terms of UX

Such as? Win 7 is generally retarded as peak Windows UX, and its main feature was undoing junk from Vista/XP before it got rejunked in 8. Windows 8.1/10 main improvement was in undoing part of 8.

> Win 7 is generally retarded as...

I presume that was a typo, but it's beautiful!

All the extraneous ads, tracking, etc in Windows 10 has made it so I have never bothered upgrading from 7.

It seems like it would be a huge pain to go through and disable or blocking everything, and even then how confident could I be that I didn't miss something?

Im sure, there will be a nice little soundbook added, that allows everyone concerned to press alot of buttons and push a lot of levers, to not change a thing, but feel acomplished and back in control.

yea windows 10 really flys in the face of all their rebranding. The windows experience is enough to stick with mac for the time being.

No ads in my work machine

Did you read the article? It's a currently disabled optional feature in the latest insider build.

I think it was referring to GGP mention of "junk" in Win10 start menu. AFAIK there are no ads in the Enterprise and Education versions of Win10

But why ads at all in a $100 operating system?

because suckers are going to eat it, what else are they gonna do, install Linux?

a somewhat less cynical answer: some division head decided it would look good on their performance review

I think Win10 Pro is exempt for now - someone correct me if I’m wrong.

My install seems to have no ads at all (including on the Start Menu) and I am using Win 10 Pro that I installed straight from the Windows download page. Maybe I don't get ads because I'm on the Insiders Slow Ring.

I get candy crush in my Win10 Enterprise, each major upgrade...

I bet you actually don't and it's just an installer link to the store. Is the entry in remove apps only 16KB?

Maybe, I'll tell you next time it appears in my start menu. In either case it is not the size that bothers me, it's the fact they keep placing gaming icons in the start menu of an enterprise workstation, even after the user deletes them.

You do know that the amount of telemetry you do leave to google is an order of magnitude more sophisticated and subtile than what MS is doing?

I fail to see how that's accurate justification - just because somebody else is doing worse. Blatant whataboutism, really.

But what about whataboutism?

I mean, they're wholesale knocking off Slack, calling it Teams - Slack is dead.

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