Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It's sad and ironic to see phrasing like "We’re proud that Windows 11 is the most inclusively designed version of Windows" when you're basically telling all your long-time power-users to fuck off. Then again, "inclusive" has already become a loaded doublespeak word in these times.

We’ve improved the experiences for touch in Windows 11 when you’re using a tablet without a keyboard. You’ll see more space between the icons in the Taskbar

What if I'm NOT using one?

Thank you Microsoft, for taking away even more customisation, dumbing down the OS to new levels, and shoving more adverts in our faces. Now people have even more reasons than before to try Linux or macOS.

A new era for the PC begins today

You're right about that --- an even more locked-down and user-hostile (all in the name of "security", of course) era begins.

As a long-time Win32 developer who started writing utilities for DOS and then moved to Win16 for a short while, the direction that Windows (and the PC platform in general) is going is really sad and horrifying to see.

"diversity" and "inclusivity" have always been the tech industry most favorite buzzwords that never ever meant a damn thing concretely, but you put them there to virtue signal to a certain crowd otherwise someone might accuse you of an imaginary thought crime. Of course it's meaningless by definition.

This is a terrible update which adds very little of value for the end user, it only turns Windows non pro into some sort of SAAS that Microsoft is going to milk forcefully.

In this context, I'm sure it's got a very diverse UI made up of many different pieces of varying awfulness, and is rather inclusive of plenty of bugs and unfinished misfeatures too.

Diversity is meaningful and when I'm looking at companies I always look at the staff page to make sure there's some diversity at the leadership level and that it's not a bunch of people who look exactly the same.

People have different values of course, when I'm look at companies I always look at the product they develop and whether it suits my morals and ethics and whether their work/management practices suits mine.

I'm not talented enough to guess people's sexuality or nationality just by looking at their pictures like you and pass judgement on appearances. Or is it because I don't care what color or sex my would-be coworkers are?

>to make sure there's some diversity at the leadership level and that it's not a bunch of people who look exactly the same.

Let's be honest here. You're looking for a specific demographic, and you're not actually concerned with the composition of the talent pool from which they were hired. It's an increasingly popular de facto anti-meritocratic movement and I don't think trading some amount of competence for diversity at social scales will actually be good for society in the medium to long term.

True

I think we are already seeing the effects of that.

I really hope it's sarcasm (so difficult to detect in these times) but in case it's not: why would anyone care about someone else's looks? What matters is what they do, it doesn't matter if they're Indian or African or Asian or all of the above. Sad truth: if you base your decisions on someone else's race, you're a racist.

Honestly, why should anyone care? Look at the old photos from Bell Labs: these guys all looked "the same." So what? Why would anyone even care about their looks? What matters is a combination of skills and passion that gives excellent results, not your current idea of "diversity."

The leader of Bell Labs at the time was so incredibly racist that he dedicated tons of resources in eugenics and “scientifically proving” that black people were inferior to white people. You are really going to use William Shockley as an example for why it was ok that everyone at Bell Labs looked the same? https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2711641

From time to time a person appears that is both intelligent and has morally questionable views. Sometimes these views stem from mistaken reasoning and the tendency to think "I was right on so many cases, I'm also right on this one." There are many cases in the history of mankind, like Descartes who advocated vivisection. This does not invalidate their contribution to science.

Shockley was a controversial figure who died alone. It is not fair to identify him with Bell Labs. Also, people gradually dissociated from him as it was more clear his views are extreme. We can find these kinds of people in any culture, it means nothing in the context we're discussing.

This might be an American thing, though. A while ago I came across an essay that basically said UNIX is racist [0]. It's hard to have meaningful conversation in such circumstances.

[0] https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-46...

- one of key quotes:

> We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must incorporate race from the outset

Nobody is arguing about contributions to science. You said, "everyone at Bell labs looked the same. So what?"

I told you exactly why people at Bell Labs looked the same and why that is a problem. If someone refuses to hire black people because they think black people are inferior, the answer isn't, "so what?"

It's fascinating to me just how poorly they understand their long term developers. I've been making a living developing on windows since the early 2000s (having been a Unix guy before that) and the inexplicable inability to produce a working GUI solution for .NET core just leaves me flummoxed. Yet Electron.NET works fine across Linux, Windows and OSX.

The sequence of events that means my main development machine is running Debian looked something like this:

1. Docker switches to WSL2, deprecates WSL1

2. My big dev box (running Windows Server 2019) can no longer test containers.

3. My laptop is running WSL2 so I'm spending more and more time in a Debian shell. All the CLI stuff works better there anyway.

4. I switch my big dev box to Debian and hey presto, suddenly Android Studio isn't a giant PITA. Let's try VS code. Oh ok, it's actually pretty cool.

5. I switch all my code base into VS Code.

6. What exactly do I need Windows for? A few games.

I now do most of my dev work on Debian and the transition was made painless by WSL2, Microsoft making Windows a bad choice for developers and the Docker people playing along. If you're already spending a lot of time in WSL2 and you do a mix of Android and .NET Core, you have zero reasons to stay on Windows.

Just curious: what to you use .NET for?

I made the jump to full time linux in 2020, finally tired of all the Windows annoyances and realizing everything I use day to day runs fine on linux. If I hadn’t done it then I would certainly do it now with this ridiculous Windows 11 rollout.

It took a little bit of work but now my linux desktop works exactly how I want now, and Windows and macOS both feel strange to my muscle memory when I have to use them.

I've been using Win 11 - preview, for development and personal stuff - for a few months and I really can't understand why people are getting mad at it.

A few UI elements have changed places, but it mostly feels like Win 10 to me.

Did you try moving the taskbar, switching the default browser, or any other feature that they just decided to make harder, slower, or impossible?

People understandably get pissed off when features they have been using for over a decade suddenly disappear in an "upgrade". They expect things that used to work to keep working, and perhaps other things that didn't work to now work, but that's not what they got.

For me, the "new version of Windows is actually better" feeling faded around the 2K/XP timeframe. Since then it has only been increasingly minor improvements combined with increasingly greater regressions.

That's not entirely true. Microsoft did fix a lot of the device driver instability that plagued Win2k / XP around when they released Windows 7. Windows 10 was a further improvement in stability but at the expense of all the adware / telemetry. I've been running Windows 11 for a while and I don't hate it, but I spend more dev time in VSCode and WSL2 so it just feels like a weird Linux distribution that gets in the way.

Personally I won't ever use it as long as it requires a cloud login.

Other than the task bar I think everything else is OK, the ui is cleaner and modern. My main issue is that it feels more like a reskin than an actual OS update. What really changed under the hood? No ones talking about that.

I haven't tried Windows 11 yet. Is the ability to use local, non-Microsoft accounts is even further marginalized?

It's a Pro feature only now.

To quote Microsoft[0]:

> Windows 11 Home edition requires internet connectivity and a Microsoft account.

No local accounts for Home edition. As for Windows 11 Pro or above:

- During Setup...

- "Set up for personal use."

- You'll see a "Let's add your Microsoft Account" screen.

- Click "Sign-In options" (blue href)

- Pick "Offline Account"

- [Splash screen warning of all the joy you'll be missing out on]

- Click "Limited Experience" (instead of "Next") on the Dark Pattern screen.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...

Click "Limited Experience"

I wonder how many people actually change their minds when they see these passive aggressive prompt options. "Skip trial" "Decline bonus offer" "No gift"

Anyways, do you know if it also stealth replaces your offline account if you sign into office, Xbox, etc? I got force signed in once trying to install flight simulator and it took me hours to remove all traces of the Microsoft account. There was literally no way to sign into just xbox to install one game without agreeing to replace my windows local account with a microsoft account, and it proceeded to auto sign me into outlook, one drive and a bunch of stuff I didnt want.

Yeah, that's very annoying, previously I was just removing cookies, now I use one Firefox container for buying Xbox games, another one for Azure, and another for work. Microsoft seems really bad at handling multiple accounts.

Do you mean marginalized as far as the first time setup? Because the first time setup sucks but it sucks on macOS too. Once you're in it's pretty trivial to create local accounts. In fact it's still the same old "Computer Management" if you do it that way.

This comment reminds me of [makro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY)

> you're basically telling all your long-time power-users to fuck off

Not just power users - any user will need to throw their perfectly working hardware now unless fits MS's artificial requirements.

How so? (I'm a mac user so a bit out of touch w windows world)

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