Bing is now Microsoft Bing as the search engine gets a rebrand

I used to use Docker to meticulously duplicate my staging/prod environments on dev machines, but honestly don't bother anymore. My CI/CD environments would catch any of those issues, and I don't run into them much anymore. Having first-class support for Linux containers is great, though.

Yes. I would also say it's part of the fun for some people.

I used to be obsessive about optimizing my workflows using customizations that are only possible on FOSS nix systems, but eventually I got other hobbies. Now I just want my OS to disappear in the background and "just work".

> Which one do you use?*

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 (recommended by other HN users, but would be interested to know if anyone has any concerns about it)

Personally, I think the "mean tweaking time" of an average Linux is very low now. I spend almost no time forced to tweak things, except maybe a bit after installation. In concrete terms, for me it's usually a few hours of work spread out over the first 3 weeks. It might be 3-20 hours tops, but some of that might be setting up cool new fancy fun things rather than necessary configuration. From then on I rarely have to touch configs for years.

That being said, I do read of some people having really painful bugs that take forever to fix. You can mitigate this by using mainstream distros on well supported hardware. Ubuntu and Fedora are your best bets for stability.

A decade or more ago, tweaking and maintaining felt like a constant Sisyphean struggle. Now I can throw Ubuntu on a laptop and 90% of the time it's fine after installation.

>Even basic stuff like Wi-Fi and the login screen often doesn't work correctly and requires more tweaking.

I haven't had wifi troubles on Linux in over a decade. Nor any login screen issues. Maybe things are better now, or maybe you've had bad luck with the hardware you're using. Ultimately it boils down to your individual setup. I know how frustrating these issues can be. Anyways, good luck!

Just because many of us purposely installed chrome, doesnt disprove that Google used many dark patterns to get people to click buttons or bundle it with other installs early on. Back then, Chrome used many of the same tactics as Yahoo and Ask toolbars, and even today the google.com home page warns you as if google doesnt work right in other browsers.

Office 365? The thing that a whole host of businesses rely upon for email, spreadsheets, presentations?

MS has just as much of an opportunity as Amazon does for spying on its cloud customers through Azure too.

Google is more consumer focused. MS has a good split between consumer, business, and gaming - those combined will rival Google.

Well, it advertises to you in its start menu and even has scummy ads in its built-in browser homepage. And it makes you log in with a Skype/Outlook/Windows account to install Windows 10 (maybe you can bypass it by avoiding wifi during installation? I didn't check).

Whether or not it needs these for its survival doesn't seem like much of a distinction, and possibly even more of a fuck-you that it doesn't need to do this for its survival. In fact, that it does this at the operating system level is worse to me than it being done when I use applications that work by talking to remote servers because you simply can't escape it. Meanwhile I can simply avoid Google products.

The HN discourse around Microsoft these days really just shows that Microsoft's attempts to buy back goodwill with things like VS Code must be working. Often we talk here as if Bing is some indie underdog.

Never seen either - I use Firefox as my primary browser and 95% DDG, 5% Google for search.