Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround
howtogeek.com
howtogeek.com
There, I fixed it
edit That’s only if you use mesa, though. Nobody has a clue what the nvidia binary driver is up to.
- When you use Windows, you consume the OS. Everything about it is given, all you do is take.
- When you use Linux, you take part in a give-and-take relationship with the OS, because the OS is attached to a community that works on it, around it.
Using Linux means that you're not going to have everything given to you on a silver plate. But you also get to make your own silver plate and pass it around.
Microsoft treats their users with contempt. And I understand it because no matter the privacy or software abuse, they keep using it.
Same reason people continue to use Facebook - they just don't have the spine to change their behavior and become better people who don't use shitty products.
If perfection is unattainable does that mean we should snap to the other extreme and set all of our passwords to "password"?
[0]: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/don%27t+let+perfect+be+...
Removing or redesigning the Control Panel would break third-party apps that rely on the existing structure; Raymond Chen's blog[0] has mentioned apps doing this.
I don't believe in a sudden revolutionary change. Linux and macOS do increase their presence on the desktop, but the curve is almost flat, so it will take decades to even break even. Nevertheless, the trend exists, and Microsoft would have to do something very unusual to reverse it.
For me personally this is very important because the PC is one of the last open computing platforms.
There's some rare expensive equipment that doesn't have Linux support (I'm talking $100k mechanical testing equipment and CNC machines) but those only need one computer each. Of course those probably won't support Windows 11 either, they barely supported Windows 10.
and unfortunately a lot of that software is simply career-making.
It's simply an arms-race that can't be won from the consumer perspective without applying adequate pressure to the companies to try and facilitate a legitimate release.
it's hard to run any kind of business software to run any kind of business when it's in the back of your mind whether or not Autodesk has pushed an update to break everything by the time you need to use the software and have actual clients and money waiting for the work.
I'd drop all my windows machines in a heart beat if those companies would consider the GNU/Linux market, but i'm not really holding my breath -- they make a ton of money on their captive audience.
Much like you, I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. It's safe to assume that nobody cares about it, but it's also still too early to say for sure. In 5 years, WINE could well be a stable development platform for third-party developers who want to focus on a Windows build but also offer compatibility with other operating systems. Stranger things have happened.
Has it come back? Because that would be wonderful!
It makes using fusion on wine really easy, and it runs surprisingly well too.
So yeah, DRM is still an issue but the tides may be turning, especially now that the audio subsystem on Linux just got a massive rework.
Could you expand on this, please? What was your experience working with Photoshop in WINE? What version / CC of Photoshop did you use? Did you use PlayOnLinux, which supports this IIRC?
Ableton Live 10 works fine though, I played around with it for a while before switching to Bitwig (which has a native Linux build), and I really didn't have any complaints besides the CPU usage being marginally higher than native Windows. I haven't tried it recently either, so the situation may well have improved.
EDIT: just reinstalled my copy of Live 11, it works out-of-the-box with WINE installed and no configuration.
I can't go around making claims that it's perfect, but it's pretty damn close. You may as well see for yourself, all the software (WINE, Linux, etc) is free.
[0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it.
The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc.
I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on laptops.
Again, I love Linux and have managed literally thousands of them since 1994.
To suspend, I just run "xlock & loginctl suspend" from a script being called from a Fluxbox submenu. Dumb easy.
& = puts xlock in the background so the shell can continue parsing commands without waiting for xlock to finish.
loginctl = sends the command on the right to the login manager.
suspend = self-explanatory.
Thus, upon waking up from suspend, your machine is still locked up by xlock. Simple.
That at least for me were worse than inability to hibernate.
In all seriousness, until about a year ago when I got a discount on a Macbook and changed to that, I had been running Linux for about a decade across different laptops, and feel that since ~2017 the desktop experience has improved substantially. I bought a new laptop in 2017, installed Ubuntu on it...and that was it. I spent exactly zero minutes installing drivers or mucking with configurations, multiple monitors with HDMI audio worked out of the box, and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. Granted, I'm a bit of a Linux veteran at this so maybe there were a lot of things I was tweaking that I just don't remember since I do them so often, but I do not think that was the case, since I got my wife (who is not a software engineer) using Ubuntu as well for awhile.
I think part of what made it better was using AMD hardware for everything. The drivers are just included with the kernel, and they work great out of the box, at least for me.
I realize that telling everyone to shop for a computer based on the drivers that will be available isn't exactly a great sales pitch for Linux for the average consumer, but I suspect if you frequent HN you probably have a reasonable ability to differentiate video cards and whatnot.
And "not going to sleep upon the lid closing" just works, too! I tried this when I hooked my laptop up to the TV. Closing the lid did nothing. It only went to sleep when you closed it and unplugged the HDMI. I really really liked that, despite it being a tiny detail.
I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly.
I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.
Nor me. A lot of it has been small things in my experience though, like this trackpad being terrible, or GNOME crashing once in a blue moon. I've definitely not experienced the level of pain you had with Optimus, or the rendering issues, which seems like a good thing. Although... on the subject of rendering issues, Firefox doesn't like it when the system is woken from sleep and has a really weird glitching effect until you maximise and restore the window.
On this laptop Linux hasn't been that bad, honestly the worst thing for me is this genuinely bad trackpad driver that has massive jutter and is hilariously broken. I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I do agree on your last point(s). It's got substantially better, but as always there are little things that majorly hold it back (trackpad!) when the rest of the system isn't actually that bad. I'd much prefer it to Windows, despite its flaws.
I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
> I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I've thought about that too. If I weren't on Apple now I probably would have already started on that, but the closest thing I've done to any kind of "driver" has been to make custom FUSE mount.
Ahh, interesting! Not sure why, but it seems that some people have a horrible experience with the trackpad on Linux, while others have a great time (from a quick observation, anyway).
As a dumb guess, maybe it's due to different drivers being used? It's exactly the same on Wayland and Linux, so I'm guessing it's happening a lot lower in the stack (I read something about libinput? Not sure where that lies at the moment.) Grr, so much to think about! Perhaps one day I'll have a much better trackpad...
> I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
Ahh, what graphics card is that? I'm guessing it's not NVIDIA.
In regards to the graphics card, it was an AMD card, in an Asus ROG laptop. I sold that laptop off a year ago so I don’t remember the card version.
Boring old Ubuntu with some DE customization works totally fine on a laptop, though. I don't know why I tried to do this hard-mode for years.
I think the newest versions of Ubuntu are great. They've started to give me everything I like about macOS [1] while being FOSS(ish) and portable to any computer I want.
[1] Not comparing Ubuntu to macOS directly, but more of a macOS "feel" in the sense of how I use it.
I first set it up with a Ryzen 5 3600 and Radeon HD 6750, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because I thought I didn’t really need that much processing power. After un-blacklisting the driver for such an old GPU, I discovered I was using upwards of 80% CPU and dropping frames while streaming at 1440p, so I decided to upgrade.
Then, I tried a Ryzen 7 5700g with integrated Vega 8. First, I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 for such a new GPU, and then OBS Studio was randomly crashing while switching between scenes. Also, hardware video encoding wasn’t working well, so it was still taking upwards of 80% CPU while streaming at 1440p. And the video outputs were finicky, sending windows to the wrong screen on power up. Random crashing is unusable, so I switched to Windows.
With Windows 11 on the Ryzen 7 5700g, the hardware video encoding works well, so the same scenes are taking less than 50% CPU while streaming at 4K (2160p) and not dropping any frames. Now I can do other things on the stream.
I used OBS when I was on Linux and it worked exactly as I wanted it to, but I’ll concede that I 1) wasn’t gaming and b) was using software encoding.
Nah, Steam deck got delayed to next year. I plan on going Linux then. :)
Windows is always getting worse, too, but still basically works on all hardware. I've been thinking of switching away, given how bad Windows 11 looks to be and how irritating Windows 10 has been. But then, Windows XP, Vista and others were also known to be terrible but still mostly worked.
On balance, I'd say that Windows is likely to continue a user-hostile decline but still mostly work and Linux on Desktop is likely to always have a lot of effort involved if you want everything to work well. But there's probably no point at which Linux will work well on all hardware or Windows will be less usable by default.
Yep, no question here. While Linux compatibility has gotten a lot better in recent years, you're definitely rolling the dice a bit in driver-land if you don't research beforehand.
That said, since pretty much every big distro is free, it's not necessarily a bad idea to just download it and try it out, at least with a Live USB Ubuntu image or something. If it works out of the box, then maybe you should install it, and if it doesn't, just unplug the flash drive and restart the computer and stick with Windows. It's entirely possible (and even likely these days) that it will Just Work (tm), and that might influence your decision in switching.
> But there's probably no point at which Linux will work well on all hardware
Yes and no; I think Linux tends to do exceptionally well on older hardware. I've been able to breath life into decade-old computers by just installing Linux Mint with MATE desktop [1], and generally by the time a computer is designated as "old", drivers on Linux are often better than they are on Windows, and due to how stupidly customizable Linux has become, you can get extremely lightweight desktops that require basically nothing to run (e.g. LXDE, MATE).
On newer hardware? Eh, as I said, you're rolling the dice a bit. Generally if you stick with AMD hardware, you are fine, as I said, but that's by no means guaranteed, and to me getting WiFi to work out of the box is the scariest thing, since if you cannot get connected to the internet, it's difficult to fix any of the problems.
[1] I did this for my grandmother who is still running an old AMD64 single-core computer. All she uses it for is browsing the web and checking email (not even YouTube) and she refuses to buy a new computer. Linux Mint has been a godsend.
I'll concede that if you're talking about the trackpad, Linux is disappointingly bad compared to Windows. It's really really shaky, scrolls up and down with a shockingly massive jitter. You start to wonder if the trackpad itself is malfunctioning. Sadly, the same trackpad works so much better on Windows.
This is mainly about the pointer / trackpad drivers to be fair, but it's still a freestanding issue that has the potential to really bug someone using Linux on a laptop. It gets so bad I have to carry around a mouse.
That's my experience with Windows as well though. On Dell xps on windows my external monitor goes blank sometimes and sleep randomly causes overheating and fast battery drain. On the other hand Linux handles it just fine. Win is not consistently better anymore.
It’s either rocket science to get monitors to work flawlessly or it’s the B team working on it. Probably the former given that it’s also a problem on Linux and windoze.
Part of it is the laptops are developed for windows ACPI interpreter, for windows wifi drivers, for windows system level hack drivers etc. It takes time for Linux to figure out individual workarounds. At least for XPS Dell seem to be developing also for it to work on Linux.
The only games that I really ever struggle with are ones that have anticheat. And EasyAntiCheat is going linux friendly so something like 95 of the top 100 games on steam will either work natively or via proton.
And with Valve pushing the SteamDeck is see that number going to 100 soon.
[1] https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases
At least I upgraded Windows 7 to Lubuntu
_Look at it as opportunity_ Other platforms have other ideas about how things should work. Instead of trying to replace Windows, take the time to realize that it's not the only way to solve problems. The Unix world has a pretty different idea about what's the way to work, which is often foreign until you realize there is a method to the madness. If you want opinionated and guided, MacOS is designed to have very strong "you won't have to worry about that" goal. Linux is the opposite and very flexible. So, you'll want to look at a lot of different distributions, as they all have particular goals in mind.
_Reconsider your current software_ Look at your current software and see if you can find replacements that are cross platform. This can mean software that runs on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc). This can also mean switching to cloud/self-hosted software. The software I use I choose through the lens of "if I have to give up my current platform of choice, does this go with me?"
_Sync your environment_ It can be daunting to jump ship to another OS if all your stuff is stuck on a different machine. I highly suggest SyncThing. It is a multi-platform, self-hosted synchronizer. Get a new machine (Linux, Mac) and sync your important files from your other machine. Now, you try out working on the new machine without loosing your work. Install some tools. Try getting stuff done. When you feel you've been held up for too long and need to get some stuff done again in Windows, all your stuff is magically sync'ed. Eventually, you'll find you're doing most of your work on the new machine, and you'll decide what to decommission from the old one.
_VM/Wine/Proton_ Windows support under Mac and Linux has come a long way. Maybe you still need a very specific piece of software. That's fine, just plan on taking time to figure out if you can still get it to work on your new platform.
About 12 years go I jumped from Windows to Mac and about 4 years ago I started working with Linux, as well. And, so can you. Today is your first day to start making changes.
In that time we've seen Microsoft concede the mobile market to iOS and Android and the server market to Linux and Google Docs manage to take a major chunk out of MS Office.
Microsoft is still extremely profitable, but it's not because of Windows anymore. Which is why they're now comfortable risking defection by screwing over the Windows customer more than ever. But that's what happens at the end, not the middle.
I notice a lot of OEM PCs, for example, come with an Office 365 trial install. I'm sure the OEM deal is "Windows is 30 cents cheaper if you include the trial."
But if the OEM is already installing Ubuntu or whatever, they 1) no longer need to negotiate to shave pennies off the Windows license and 2) have an office suite pre-installed, potentially capturing a large number of the easy customers who'd click on the first thing available.
How does Microsoft keep that sales channel open?
I can't imagine them going the road of the shovelware antivirus vendors and outright paying OEMs for presence. But I could see them packaging up a cut down "Linux Subservices for Windows" product. This would be basically a blessed virtual machine package, which OEMs would be willing to include-- or maybe even pay a token sum for-- because, well, people still want to run their games and legacy software. More importantly, it's a way to get millions of people to install a MS-provided package on their desktops, which could include cross-promotional offers and telemetry. (Yes, there will be the inevitable shut-up packages from third parties, but they have those for Windows already).
A normal office worker wouldn't have much difference whether their desktop is Windows, Linux, Chromebook, etc.
Office workers follow breadcrumb trails through tech. As long as somebody gives them a document explaining how to follow the breadcrumbs, they don't care about anything else.
On the other hand from what I read,
XP - good
Vista - Bad
7 - good
8 - bad
10 - good
11 - bad
I don't have any experience in any of those so I'm not how true it is, but if it is, I guess hope that 12 will be out by EOL of 10?
And each 'bad' always brings to it a horrible UI change. Vista brought the window manager and those weird transparent windows and was generally ugly and buggy. Win 7 cleaned up the UI and made it flatter and simpler.
8 brought a full-screen start menu (!!). 10 went back to a 7-esque vibe (mostly).
11 is where we are.
2000->XP, forced online activation, if you moved from ME->XP they finally broke a lot of dos era apps. That isn't to say that XP is that far from 2000 which IMHO remains the best windows MS ever released (particularly after SP3). The only significant thing of value MS has added since XP, is 64-bit support, and that is questionable if you consider there was a 64-bit XP.
vista->7, this one is harder, maybe the biggest ding is, that this is where they started to remove all the classic mode UI paradigms that were in place for 15+ years. So, while vista was such a mess that going from XP->7 was a shock, even on a PC 2x+ faster the UI still lags because much of the win32 graphics stack and sound system is now emulated on the processor rather than handed off to the graphics card driver.
Win8->win 10, even more ad's, forced updates, can't permanently disable the virus scanner that eats 50%+ of the disk IOP rate, the list here is endless.
In the case of 10-11, I don't think anyone would really have cared if they hadn't decided to screw with the start menu/task bar again. That is the one thing that raises the ire of windows users, yet they seem to always screw with it. I think secure boot/etc is less of an issue for people than it was 15 years ago (and IIRC someone already has a workaround).
Vista tried a lot of new stuff, most of it was meh, then 7 came along and reined it in a lot, then we got 8/8.1, again, changing a ton of stuff unnecessarily in the name of updates, then 10 tried to strike a middle ground. Now we have 11, with its exceedingly aggressive hardware requirements and forced changes. With 12 we'll probably be back to MS trying to compromise so people move on from 10.
I think MS's issue with OS planning is that they really don't understand "don't fix it if it isn't broken", after every successful Windows version they get overly ambitious, change too much and push users away. Then for the following release they have to consider the fact that a large portion of their userbase hasn't upgraded, so they actually pay attention to feedback and try to compromise between what people want and what MS wants.
They're on a bad streak.
I have no hope of win12 being anywhere near good and will probably switch to about anything else.
Windows 10 doubled down on Metro and much of the core functionality isn't available in the old control panel anymore. Even with OpenShell, it's a lot more janky than 8 is.
Everything works except everything that doesn't work well. Fractional scaling is a mess, integer scaling is not much better. YouTube on Firefox can barely play 1080p videos. Scrolling is anything but smooth, and the system doesn't appear to be doing much drawing on the GPU at all. When connected to an external 4k monitor running at 1.5x scale (how I use it with Windows and macOS) the system gets really slow.
Wayland is better performance wise, but at 1.5x scale (the best overall balance for the screen size and resolution) all electron based apps, which rely on xwayland, are blurry, and these days that's a lot of apps (including Slack, VS Code, and Zettlr which I run on all my systems). Kernel and driver support is mostly there except for the frequent regressions, so some features will in one version will break on the next kernel version, but it's fixed in the next next version, and that is not good enough. Power consumption on use is decent, but battery drain on sleep is atrocious even if you enable "deep sleep" which makes the machine take 5+ seconds to wake up.
Meanwhile Gnome insists on hiding as many settings from you as possible, so to set up CalDav contact syncing, which is managed by Gnome, I had to install an additional email app I won't use because the Gnome account manager doesn't bother to expose a UI to manage the account directly. And if I screw up the settings in the mail client Geary, which otherwise works well and is what I use, I have to delete the account and start over because there's no UI I can find to view and edit the server settings. It's completely ridiculous.
So the Pop!_OS team has built a really nice looking UI and a pretty good overall user experience (best I've had on Linux over the years), but it's all on top of a big pile of half working garbage. So it's simultaneously a really nice UI compared to my Windows 10 machine while being entirely frustrating to use.
Tumbleweed, like Arch, is a rolling release so unlike the Debian based distros you'll always have the latest drivers and updates (development progress on Linux moves fast so why be stuck on outdated packages? I really can't in good conscience recommend PC users Debian/Ubuntu distros for a great experience), but unlike Arch, it's without sacrificing stability since its packages are tested so it's much less likely that an update will break something.
The developer of Gecko Linux Rolling, takes Tumbleweed and makes it desktop friendly by including non-OSS repos, non-OSS fonts, and non-OSS codecs plus other tweaks and creature comforts that turn make it easier to have a pleasant experience after the installation.
Trackpad is still not as polished as Windows or Mac but that's universal on Linux except Elementary OS.
Who'd have thought that 2021 would be the year of Linux on the desktop. Not because it has gradually improved (it has), but because the alternative has declined so much.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150284
> As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop, even I feel that soon Microsoft will have succeeded in making Windows so horrifically awful and user-hostile that the Linux Desktop will start to look good by comparison.
Also, not everyone wants their files in the cloud. Although that's getting harder and harder with Office too.
In fact I welcome my evil Microsoft overlord any day before I use something from Google. I see MS as the lesser of two evils.
Microsoft is doing it too:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/423165/how-to-turn-off-windo...
There's still Linux.
And if you really need offline editing, you can still have all the pros of Linux + office if you install a Windows VM escape hatch just for Word.
The distribution fragmentation... I'm expected to install flavour X or Y of Linux not actually knowing before I start that my hardware even supports it? Brain = explode.
Joining a community (Linux) that stomps all over people that have a dissenting view (I actually like Windows - have done since I started using it in 1990) is philosophically not a community I want part of (Stallman is an exception I have a lot of time and respect for).
A VM adds complexity - why would I do that when native Windows is pain-free and just works?
And no, I don't "need" offline editing, I just want it. After all the cloud is a computer just like mine - that happens to belong to someone else. The cloud introduces a risk of data theft and complete data loss. And yes, probability is low, but impact and exposure are both very VERY high. I don't run that risk at all using my own hardware.
> ODT files don't play well with MS Office
Can't you save in docx format from within libre office?
> Linux doesn't work on my hardware, and Visual Studio doesn't work on Linux.
Could you elaborate on these two points?
> The distribution fragmentation...
The downside of a strong open source community is that you are spoiled for choice, yes.
> that stomps all over people that have a dissenting view
Not Linux specific I'd say. There are people like that everywhere.
> why would I do that when native Windows is pain-free and just works?
If Windows works perfectly fine for you, then yes, Linux + VM doesn't make much sense. For the rest of us that are not fans of how Windows runs things, it's usually a last resort option and very few people use it.
> I don't "need" offline editing, I just want it.
Sorry, that's what I meant, more like either/or want/need.
> And yes, probability is low, but impact and exposure are both very VERY high.
Definitely, that's why you'll find lots of people in the Linux community that run their own NAS at home and have lots of fun with it.
All your points are noted. Importing ODT files into Word makes a mess of formatting and layout. I've wasted many hours fixing documents. Linux doesn't like my graphics card, and on my previous hardware setup wouldn't recognise my ELP web cam, my Windows Phone, and for some inexplicable reason, my Ergodox keyboard.
Visual Studio is software for Windows - it won't work on Linux (I see no benefit in virtualising when I have so many other issues with Linux, plus the real or imagined perf impact of virtualisation - at age 50 I'm way past the place where I spend a week on a PC build just to see if I can - I know I can, I no longer want to).
Yes, there are vocal people behind every technology. I guess I'm just tired of hearing "Linux" as the panacea for all things Windows or Microsoft. I know Microsoft's history. Better than many, having used their stuff starting with MS DOS in '84, maybe '85, and having actually worked there.
You wrote - If Windows works perfectly fine for you, then yes, Linux + VM doesn't make much sense. For the rest of us that are not fans of how Windows runs things, it's usually a last resort option and very few people use it.
You're absolutely correct in that statement. My problem with Linux isn't that. My problem is what a5aAqU did in his reply to my first comment. He suggested Linux even though my post made my preference clear. This happens almost every time I mention using and liking Microsoft products and technologies.
It's not something I'd ever consider doing to anyone saying they use/like Linux. I love when people get along, regardless of... well, anything. Diversity is beyond value. It's how we grow.
Apologies again, I did not mean to offend.
> I did not mean to offend.
None taken! Happy that this turned out a healthy discussion.
I was just a bit surprised finding out that there's hardware that doesn't work on Linux. It's been almost the gold standard for hardware support (ignoring nvidia of course). Thanks for enriching my knowledge on that one.
Ah and I seem to have misread "visual studio" as "visual studio code", apologies for that. Yeah most Windows software will always be tricky to get into Linux, that's definitely true.
Your post just made me realise that when I find myself in a OS discussion, instead of starting to list out pros and cons of Linux, I'll just ask if they're happy with their current OS. That should probably clear up a lot of things from the get-go.
Once again, thank you for your post and I hope windows keeps treating you well. If not, you'll always know where to find Linux.
Have an awesome day!
I wasn't suggesting that you switch to Linux. I was just pointing out that you can't escape the keylogging by using Windows. Linux is the major platform where you can fully control your computer, but it still might not be the right platform for you.
It's great because it gives the kids a computer that's 'theirs' but I can manage their freedom to the level that they're ready for (access to internet etc). And the oldest one (9y) already started to meddle with shell scripts so the experiment seems to work =)
Linux is much faster, like a lot! Specially on older hardware. And not only the filesystem and that stuff. With recent gnome versions the interface is much more fluid too.
(Well, for programming too of course but a 6c / 12t mobile CPU might not be good enough for a main dev machine. We'll see.)
So yep, my sentiment is exactly like yours. I'll start slowly but seriously work towards ridding myself of Windows forever. It has been on a downward spiral for far too long to ignore anymore.
Linux is not all sunshine and rainbows either but at this point I am willing to take the plunge and create my own Frankenstein monster of scripts and workarounds so that it can work perfectly for me. Plus, if more people start doing it, desktop Linux will eventually improve (lol; but who knows?).
With software from github or f-droid, I look forward to updates and check frequently, because I trust the developers to make good software and I can revert if necessary. With software from microsoft or google, I dread updates and disable them, because I trust the developers to make bad software with no practical means of reverting.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...
So any 12th generation Intel build will greatly benefit from Win11 scheduler over Win10.
Intel just had a major change between gen11 and gen12, so its the most obvious technical reason that warrants an update. But AMD Zen4 (or whatever happens for Zen5) could also need a similar scheduler update... or if not, maybe some other I/O change.
-----------
If your hardware never changes, you can keep using the OS from years and years ago.
But as hardware details change, it only makes sense to update the OS with the hardware. Just as Linux 5.x has all sorts of updates over Linux 4 or Linux 3, so too does Windows need to change to keep up with the pace of hardware changes.
Kind of waiting for Zen 3 with 3D V-Cache or even Zen 4 next year
The somewhat-underground far-East communities have made weird chimeras of different Windows versions. I've seen Windows XP explorer.exe running on a Windows 7 kernel. No idea how stable or usable that is, but it's been done before.
That's about it.
Browser overrides like this are definitely in the negative UX column, but better bluetooth controls, a new consolidated settings panel, and smoother window management are all positives for me. FWIW I haven't hit a situation where I've been forced into edge (yet).
I didn't mention the other two things because they aren't available settings. I mentioned the one that is, because I thought it might be helpful.
Aside: Why do people jump to snark so fast?
Now the aside being put aside, I have no idea why you have a setting and I don't, as I'm on the latest updates. Could be that Microsoft is doing some A/B testing? And is the left positioned taskbar working fine for you? I still won't switch until at least drag&drop comes back but it would be a glimmer of hope.
- More snap zones and ways to trigger snap
- Snap zones can be pulled up or switched to as a group
- More things moved in the Settings app
- Settings app is now uses a more traditional left pane navigation instead of a list of large boxes for touch
- Window layouts better remember and adapt to monitor changes (such as unplugging from an TV)
- AutoHDR
- Separate wallpapers to different virtual desktops (makes remembering where you are easier)
- Defaults to the new Windows Terminal
Some of the other changes (mica, new start menu, new context menu, rounded window look, new themes, taskbar tray area changes, variable Segoe UI, new Store, widgets) I'd call a wash. They are there and changed but overall I can't say any have been particularly noticeable or helpful like the above items.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extend...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/shortcu...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/127365#issuecomme...
Serious question: why didn't they just do this in the first place? It can't be hard to check if the user has a touch input and dynamically resize buttons / list items, then size them back down when the user is done. They do exactly this for "Tablet mode"[0] in Windows 10.
This, and the pitch black dark mode that honestly looks dreadful on non-OLED, makes me think they don't really take customisation into much consideration.
[0]: https://www.howtogeek.com/221973/what-is-tablet-mode-in-wind...
Regarding dark theme the dark app background is 12.5% gray and the lighter offset backgrounds are 17.5% gray. If it appears pitch black it's not because the theme is made for OLEDs rather your displays are miscalibrated and completely crushing blacks. If you enable transparency effects the color of your background will blend with these and raise/lower them accordingly.
Hmm, are you sure about this? From a quick search, I'm able to find plenty of people complaining about the dark background being pitch black[0] (there's also a Feedback Hub item linked in there, not able to open it as I'm on Linux). I might be wrong, but I am fairly sure my display is not mis-calibrated, as I actually spent a lot of time calibrating it when it got here (have only had it a handful of months). The only downside of the monitor is that blacks really smear when you move them around, whereas dark greys are substantially better.
That's one of the reasons I really dislike the pitch black mode, anyway. It also just looks horrible on anything that isn't AMOLED, IMO.
> If you enable transparency effects the color of your background will blend with these and raise/lower them accordingly.
That's only for surfaces with blur enabled though, like the sidebar in Settings or the taskbar. Non-blurred surfaces are pitch black.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/6nzs34/any_way_t...
As much as I'd like to be able to claim to be a color expert that can eyeball HSL values with enough certainty to give the answer in decimal percentages the above numbers are from color picker readings of a screenshot of my install.
> I'm able to find plenty of people complaining about the dark background being pitch black[0]
I can't speak about what was true 4 years ago in a preview build adding dark theme, or Windows 10 at all for that matter as I don't have a current install anymore, but for Windows 11 today the above are the measured values.
> That's only for surfaces with blur enabled though, like the sidebar in Settings or the taskbar. Non-blurred surfaces are pitch black.
For that particular preview version of 10 perhaps, in Windows 11 there is also a new opaque material called Mica used heavily throughout the interface as it has less of a performance hit (no blur/transparency) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/m...
When Windows ME was released, it was little more than a reskin of Windows 98 that removed or disabled much of the 16 bit capabilities and support for the ISA architecture in favor of 32 bit and PCI. It couldn't be installed on most existing machines and was highly unstable on those that it would run on.
Windows Vista wasn't much different. It was a crappy skin and a new desktop composition paradigm requiring better underlying graphics hardware than Intel was providing at the time. Many systems couldn't upgrade to it and those that did had stability issues due to immature graphics drivers.
Windows 8 was similar, it introduced a newer kernel design that fully extracted Win32 out to userland. It also introduced Metro and other modern elements that weren't bound to IA32/IA64. It was primarily targeted at modern single screen touch enabled devices and didn't work well as an upgrade or on desktop PCs. They eventually shipped Windows 8.1 which was largely a refinement of 8 that was arguably the test bed for extending Windows 8 concepts to the desktop.
Very little of this is true. Windows ME runs all the 16-bit code you can throw at it and supports all ISA devices identically to 95 and 98. Windows 9x were just as 32-bit as ME and supported PCI just fine.
The only thing they removed support for was booting into real-mode DOS, and started ignoring your autoexec.bat and config.sys files for the most part. You can hack that back into the OS pretty trivially, it's purely cosmetic and has nothing to do with the underlying architecture. They probably did this in an attempt to hide its creaky MS-DOS roots, and to get customers more used to not being able to run pure DOS before the inevitable shift to NT.
Windows ME was a product even Microsoft seemingly didn't really want to make -- nothing but a last-minute stopgap measure until they got XP ready. No one liked it at the time as it was basically Windows 98 but worse. There are some good parts, though -- improved USB support, for instance -- and therefore there are now projects that "backport" features from Windows ME to Windows 98 so you can get the best of both worlds.
No it doesn't. Windows ME didn't just remove support for booting into real-mode. It removed support for VxD drivers.
In Windows 3 Microsoft introduced virtual device drivers (VxD) that allowed applications to share hardware, these VxD drivers actually just mediated access to a real-mode 16 bit driver. This allowed hardware manufacturers to write one driver to support MS-DOS and Windows.
In Windows 95 they allowed you to implement VxD with true protected-mode drivers that lacked backward compatibility but with much higher performance. This was supported right up through Windows 98SE. Technically though a manufacture only need to ship a real-mode VxD driver to support MS-DOS, Windows 3, and Windows 9x if they didn't need high performance benefits of a protected-mode driver.
The WDM driver model was introduced with Windows 98 and it simplified driver development but was only compatible with operating systems >= Windows 98. So apart from sound cards that benefited from the WDM driver model introduced in Windows 98, a vast array of hardware only supported real-mode VxD drivers.
There was actually an issue that plagued Windows 9x where if the OS detected an instability in a protected-mode VxD driver it would put a flag in the registry to permanently stop the OS from attempting to load protected-mode drivers and your system be stuck running real-mode drivers resulting in significant performance issues with IDE devices.
IIRCC Microsoft announced the drop of support for VxD in Windows ME like 2 months before it went Gold. Because most modern hardware was PCI based and using WDM, this resulted in a lot of ISA/16-bit hardware just never getting ported to Windows ME and a lot of hastily written and inherently unstable WDM drivers for a few products that did.
This impacted a lot of folks, I remember Creative Labs having issues with WDM drivers on their sound cards for years.
No, it really didn't. Windows ME supports VxD drivers just fine.
This significantly reduces your threat model at the cost of backward compatibility.
They developed the Metro Start screen specifically for Windows 8 ARM but shipped it across all OSes using that Kernel for consistency.
I think it was starting with Windows 8, all GUI server tools were just a UI running powershell underneath. So you could scrap Win32 and still have full control of the system.
So I installed Explorer patcher to get the old taskbar back https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
Other than that the only feature of 11 that I have used is the snap zones. And I guess if I want that I can install the power toy it is based on.
Ach, that's a deal breaker for me too - it's one of the first things I disable on a new Win10 install.
I didn't know about this, so thanks for giving me another reason to stick with 10!
I don't want to excuse taking options away from users, but there are workarounds.
On my 10 machine I use it and find it so much more pleasing than the default desktop.
Too bad ctrl-click means new instance on gnome, I'm bound to confuse the two now...
I coworker runs his windows box with about 100 tabs iOS. Sometimes. Just close some shit.
But obviously, to each their workflow!
New stuff is cool and all but Xfce has been so boring for so long I keep forgetting I've upgraded.
One time tho, the buttons on dialog windows moved to the top (GTK thing?) - yea, took like a week to get used to it.
* Cmd+~ from a fullscreen window does nothing, and non-full windows of the app cycle only among each other. If I have fullscreen windows anywhere in my setup, it breaks my flow and (afaik) makes me mouse to the Window menu. I feel like MacOS's fullscreen paradigm is more to blame here, because it violates a range of other behaviors I'd expect.
* Unlike cmd+tab, cmd+~ doesn't give me a visual overview of my windows (how many? what order?). I can see why, since cmd+tab shows only icons and app names, which isn't enough to differentiate between windows of the same app (unlike alt+tab on Windows, which shows thumbnails, paths, page titles, etc.
* Cmd+~ also cycles in a static order, not most recently used. This feels like fallout from the second point, in that if you're not showing thumbnails it could get confusing.
The first one in particular took me a bit of time to realize; before I did, it just felt broken and made me not rely on cmd+~ at all.
I've always felt like multiple desktops (on all 3 OSes) have untapped potential, but like you its never worked for me. But hope springs eternal - I try it again every now and then. I'd like to hear more about how some people use it.
Heard good things about Rectangle. I'll check it out.
UX does differ somewhat between, Linux distros & WMs (and Chrome OS, to the extent you consider it Linux proper), and between releases of all three OSes; but within families they maintain broad continuity. I use multiple variants - again daily - and my point stands that all have untapped potential.
But I doubt you supposed otherwise, nor honestly think I'm unaware of other OSes... so why take the time to ask? Pedantry? Did I slight an OS you favor?
You’re also right about lack of visual feedback, which is disappointing given the various stuff that I think is still currently branded Mission Control, where obviously the fundamentals are already there.
Cmd ~ isn’t statically ordered though, it’s either application specific or based on recent use in a weird (easy to confuse) heuristic. It follows a similar (maybe identical?) pattern to recent use for cmd tab, and even app switching on iOS.
Makes sense, since cmd+~ immediately switches on key down to the next window; cmd+tab (like alt+tab in Win) lets you keep the selection open and choose an out-of-order app, which alters the MRU. How would you do that here? The only way I've affected it is creating/killing windows at points in the cycle. Using cmd+shift+~ for me just goes backward in the same static order.
I’ve seen this most consistently in apps where I commonly have too many windows open, VSCode iTerm and Chrome being the worst offenders. Edit: my worst offenders, the apps don’t do anything unusual here.
Maybe you need some more time, maybe you need to surrender to the ~ or maybe it's not your jam and that's ok too.
I had to create a new app to scratch that itch: https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd
I think the consistent shortcuts for switching between tabs are Cmd-Shift-[ and Cmd-Shift-]
It worked in all applications I used so far.
I do tend to have multiple terminals (local tmux session, remote tmux session, tmux session dedicated to my text editor), which I launch with custom app_ids so that they all have their own separate keybind.
Just to let you know you can probably get something pretty personalized outside of macOS as well!
It's excellent, except I wish the mouse interacted it on click instead of mousover. Still better than the default.
(another tool along those lines I use is uBar, which is a Windows-style taskbar for macOS)
I really can't figure out what your issue is after reading this several times. If the last active window was a different app, you hit Cmd+Tab. If the last active window is from the same app, you hit Cmd+`
In windows it doesn’t matter whether I switched from a Chrome window to a Firefox window or from one Firefox window to another one.
The cognitive load is way less.
Also, CMD+’ is way more ergonomically inconvenient to hit.
> Also, CMD+’ is way more ergonomically inconvenient to hit.
What fingers are you using for Cmd+tab if that's comfortable but not Cmd+`? It's exactly 1 key above tab.
If you do treat it like you would CMD+Tab, the odds are you would hit CMD+1 fairly often.
It's on the side of the keyboard. If you're on tab, you just feel for one key up.
Also there is this https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
Now I'm a big fan and find it disorienting to go back to Windows but I've been here for 10 years. CMD + ~ all the way.
Switching between recently used windows, regardless of app, is bound to control+f4 by default. [Cmd+tab/~ is clearly their preferred method.]
You can switch it to something more ergonomic in 'System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts' – 'Move focus to the active or next window'.
Also on big screens the centered taskbar is great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...
I prefer the taskbar on the left and the fact that a vertical taskbar is not supported on W11 is one of the principal reasons I haven't upgraded from W10.
So all in all the main reason I use 11 is for better mouse support in terminals that finally puts Windows on the same playing level as macOS or Linux for me. I still hate the OS, but at least it is usable after countless hours of doing other fixes.
The github page still says it requires Windows 11: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
Though I suppose it's possible they've also pushed it to the insider builds for Windows 10.
Within the "Target:" setting, for a shortcut, just "wslg.exe /some/program -args". No wrappers, no setting DISPLAY, no calling /bin/sh -c "whatever", etc.
Eventually we'll be there, but there's no incentive to get there right now.
I say this as a Linux user who doesn’t use windows except for some Win only programs that VM and wine can’t run.
I have two machines: windows for gaming and work, Linux for everything else. My Linux machine is wonderful, sometimes even for gaming, but my windows machine won’t stop doing web searches via bing when I try to use the search bar, and won’t stop trying to swap my browser, and keeps reverting my privacy settings
Not great: - new taskbar is meh - preferences are still all over the place
"As it turns out, Microsoft slipped the update into the final patch Tuesday of 2021 for both Windows 10 and Windows 11."
Most of the time the HD grind is caused by Chrome scanning my files, but still, I wonder if all the verbose logging and tracking that Win 10+ does now is what made them recommend upgrading to SSDs for the OS'es.
I'm also pretty sure that Win11 has a lot of structural changes made to eventually inject ads into everything as a back-up MS-Revenue Stream plan, so I'll wait for the usual mandatory to update anyway, after there is no longer a choice.
Maybe it's their devs not having HDDs anymore. Who knows. I'm pretty sure it's not the volume of data being read/written. Just a lot of more smaller reads/writes or less attempts at latency-hiding.
Be it the anti-malware, less carefully written system apps or whatever. I think especially XAML stuff had terrible start-up times on HDDs. I remember filing a feedback item because after booting up my laptop it took more than 40s to open up calculator.
There's always Linux ;)
I mean, at some point they converge to the featureset of Windows 7, and then Microsoft has no business model anymore when it comes to stability and time-of-life; which was the previous reason industries chose Windows over alternatives.
And if MS would want to play it rough and start blocking hook DLLs with permission barriers, make this API patcher a kernel module.
You mean an unsigned one?
They've already started down that road with s mode, which is default for new installs and not a separate SKU (anymore) that you can avoid.
Are you sure that's true? When I was using my MacBook a year ago, I used Chrome with no problems. Set as default and never had to look at Safari again.
One of the points I've made against Microsoft doing this is not even control freak Apple goes this far.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sof...
1. I can't ungroup the taskbar windows. So now I have to hoover the taskbar to see multiple instances of the same software;
2. Who the hell thought it was a great idea to couple all the commands like WiFi, power energy, etc under the same menu? On Windows 11 I needed to click the WiFi icon, select WiFi menu, select a WiFi to connect to. Whereas on windows 10 I just click on the WiFi symbol and choose the WiFi. I don't like my computer auto connecting to the Internet so I manually connect whenever I want and use this menu multiple times a day.
3. Speaking of great ideas, now all the right click useful stuff is behind a second menu... Pure genius move.
I know I can hack my way around these issues but I don't see the point of installing sketchy software or messing registry hacks to fix this mess. I will use Windows 10 until its end of life.
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker-on-windows-11-wi...
I've been using 7taskbar for years, it's rock solid. ExplorerPatcher is a new requirement, works great and adds tons of features.
I don't have these issues with my Linux installs.
And, besides, a lot of people don't run Ubuntu, perhaps to get away from snap, perhaps to get away from systemd, or perhaps just because they can..
You never install more software in Linux? I certainly do, it’s why I got it. You can use this to make Windows “distros”. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
I’m not a Windows user but it’s not fundamentally different, Linux can come bloated, Windows can be stripped or another version like LTSC can be used.
There's not a single popular Linux distro these days that isn't systemd by default. Even """hardcore""" distros.
I like systemd and those are the only cases I remember being surprised the usual commands didn't work.
Linux has various distros designed for specific professional domain (such as security, music, networking etc.). Windows doesn't have distros (unfortunately, it would be game changer if MS allowed for this) so you absolutely need to tweak it to your preference unless you use it only to for trivial stuff.
I customize the heck out of Windows with couple of PowerShell scripts. So to get my own "distribution" I need no more then hour or two wait and almost zero effort starting from default ISO install.
I usually have:
1. Recursive windows updater (handles updates and restarts until no updates are available)
2. 50+ Chocolatey packages ( cinst git pwsh vscode docker-desktop dbeaver dngrep everything doublecmd copyq signal slack viber autohotkey premotem flameshot paint.net krita conemu googlechrome thunderbird foobar2000 ... )
3. Run debloater that removes junk services and apps, everything from start menu and taskbar. This also kills Windows Defender.
4. I run ShutupW10 with almost all settings enabled.
Its basically done from there. Many of those tools also download their own settings on first run, such as vscode getting my config and extensions.
Such Windows environment is as productive as any Linux one for me. The only thing I really miss is decent window manager like i3 on Linux.
What things?
I'm realizing how detrimental this is to my emotional well-being, but I still genuinely can not imagine what would entice me back to the Microsoft stranglehold. The fact that you even need to run a debloater (that removes most of the user-facing crud), add a package manager, and empathically tell your OS to shut up... I just don't see the point.
It's adversarial.
Why do I want an enemy for an OS? and even if the OS was friendly, Microsoft certainly isn't, and so: why do I want an enemy's snitch for an OS?
I do this for almost anything. I was doing the same thing when I was actively using Ubuntu, Arch or MacOS as a daily driver. Only I can say what is the environment I work in and its by definition impossible for anybody else to get it right.
> Why do I want an enemy for an OS? and even if the OS was friendly, Microsoft certainly isn't, and so: why do I want an enemy's snitch for an OS?
Why are you skipping relevant bits to confirm your biases ? I was fighting all OSes all the time, I fight Windows only on initialization, and other OSes every freaking week. Why would I want that ?
You don't seem to have healthy thought process around big coorps - I don't work for them, and I don't care about ANY of them. When I switched from Windows to Linux it was because I couldn't see that direction where MS was going was good and OS sucked. I was happy with Linux and learned a lot, but I had frequently to do non-trivial job to get trivial things working (like USB). I returned to Windows few years later when they started their FOSS era, and I am now more than happy.
The truth is, I don't care for ANY OS. I don't care for their desktops, shiny init apps, stupid windows managers, control panels. Fuck all of that. Give me kernel, terminal and browser and let me be, I can take it from there. So basically any OS I use looks the same and uses the same x-platform tools.
I miss Windows 2000 Pro, it wasn’t bloated, pretty fast, didn’t crash and had the fewest problems.
ahem, gnome, ahem
That every request made through the edge browser for a non local user is associated to his/her live ID is pure coincidence ;)
Sometimes when I look into my dns logs, I cry a little bit inside too.
but firefox has different dns requests going to their servers as well.
If you want to block it from things you don't trust to have such methods (or always listen to them) you'll have to upgrade to a firewall that can filter outbound connections to IPs the client hasn't received a DNS response for or require use of an explicit HTTP proxy for outbound connectivity.
Just blocking DNS can be a good middle ground for reasonable effectiveness without as much effort.
Even if that works, it'll likely get patched out eventually with a forced update.
If you do insist on using Windows, an external firewall is the only way to be sure. But even that isn't foolproof since another update may decide that your Windows license isn't valid unless the analytics server is reachable.
A few of them actually do make sense for a normal user (i.e. the Wifi portal stuff). But you can disable it if you spend some effort on it or you can also use an alternative build of Firefox without it. Not great, but also not terrible imo. Sorry, that I have no English source.
They did lay off their QA teams a while back.
I don't believe for a second that EEE is gone from Microsofts culture and strategy.
On the other hand, Windows, which is absolutely dominant among end-users, is the one employing dark patterns because they know it isn't under threat. These aren't coincidences.
I'm on Arch, so I find I tend to have fewer issues than with Ubuntu (due to the latter always being on some ancient version). Seriously though when I switched from Pulse to Pipewire... I rebooted and I've never had any issues since!
Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering, and display management is a little painful. But those are largely self-imposed because of i3. I haven't tried switching to Wayland yet because it's good enough for me.
At this point, it's been years since I've used a Windows PC for work and... I'm so damn happy about it!
Some common things have wayland native replacements but it might be jarring.
Redshift (automatic Color temperature change) -> gammastep
Dunst (notifications) -> mako
Rofi (launcher) -> idk I just used kitty+fzf with some special options.
Will look at wlsunset too, maybe it’s a better UX. :)
Worth a try.
I've started experiencing flickering in non-compositing window managers on Arch a few months ago (I mainly use Openbox, although I've tried dwm too) after some update. My solution was just to run `xcompmgr &` at the session startup.
sudo sed -i 's/groovy/devel/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgradeI still use PipeWire because routing app audio is cool (and not possible AFAIK on PulseAudio), and I can usually avoid the bugs well enough in practice. But it's not "just f*cking works" in many cases.
Take my gpu's sound support. If I run sound through DisplayPort it runs 40% slower and an octave an a half lower pitch. Over HDMI it runs fine. Oddly, if I have an HDMI device attached sound over DisplayPort runs fine, until the HDMI connection or computer goes to sleep.
My solution ended up being to get a cheap usb sound adapter and skip the gpu audio. As the HDMI would only do 4k at 30hz and DP does 4k at 60hz.
I'm really hoping with SteamOS, the Steam Deck, and the Linus daily challenge videos, the Linux desktop can get more love, but it's just not there for the majority of people yet.
It shows all active streams per application and lets you choose the correct input and output devices and streams, which makes mic and monitor devices easy to use.
Maybe all that needs to be done is change things like Bing Search to normal https URL, and maybe remove browser controls like the address bar or bookmarks so they can't be used as a "browser"?
it takes me 2 seconds to click on sign in to anything and when i close the window, everything is washed away. no more youtube building my profile.
i'm not saying this is for everyone, i have gotten used to no history so i have to "remember" the url or bookmark it.
still, this is too creepy. wittill they remove private browsing mode from chrome/chromium to protect users. smh
This is not for http://, https://, file:// links. This is specifically for microsoft-edge:// links, which I've never seen.
I think this applies only for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).
I'm wondering how many of the commentators here have actual read the article.
I've given up using Windows at home, I don't get time lately to play games so I don't miss it. But I'm stuck using it at work and I catch myself wasting time getting upset about Microsoft's behavior with regards to this and have to just remind myself not to worry about it, close the window and move on... I'm there and getting paid to work, not to mess around with stupid crap like this, despite how much it irritates me.
How did this anticompetitive BS ever get the greenlight from legal?
Why anyone still puts up with this garbage, abusive, disrespectful OS is beyond me.
It is still ultimately a workaround, but it's a possibility.
When the day comes when I have no longer the choice (i.e. I am forced to upgrade to windows 11), I may reconsider everything: should I make the switch to MacOs and their closed OS ? Should relearn everything on linux, and loose some of the professional tools that I am using ?
This is not Vista times, where you can easily get away with a bad OS generation. For the first time in about 12 years I'm dual booting Win 10 and KDE on Ubuntu, and it actually feels like a usable and practical setup.
Win 11 really seems to be hateful of users almost. Does it have a target audience anymore, or is it now designed by Mac users that work at MS? Seems like almost everyone should stay on Win 10 or migrate to Mac or Linux. The greatest strength Windows had was that developers could mess around while non-techies would always have a way to do whatever work they needed.
I gave it a week instead of a day because I'm old and change is difficult but, if anything, the productivity impacts of their design choices were even more apparent at the end of that week.
Force tab grouping on the Taskbar? That stupid half context menu that requires an additional click to reach the real context menu?
Everything seemed designed to take at least two more clicks than Win10 while offering worse situational awareness as to what was open on my workstation.
I agree, Win11 is not a love letter to users. It's a drunken 3AM rant.
I've been a lifelong Windows user, but I honestly can't see myself installing Win 11, even for my parents.
At some point, you have to just recognize that the world is different today. The general market has accepted walled garden OSes with anti-competitive behavior towards common applications.
So its still Safari underneath it all. Much like how Internet Explorer / Edge on Windows is really just a Chrome renderer / frontend these days.
EDIT: And since Google is in charge of the Chrome renderer, Microsoft absolutely has less control over internet-APIs / Javascript APIs / CSS details than say... Apple or Google does. Which is the "monopoly" bit that we're really worried about.
When you consider which company "controls the web", its Google or Apple. Microsoft really doesn't have much control of it.
Apple doesn't have that kind of market share to warrant it. Tangentially, Apple products are aspirational, so they never won't have it, that would lose the appeal. Microsoft, on the other hand, pushes their products every way imaginable, and many of their users use them because they have to.
If you're looking for reasoning/justification behind why Apple got away with something like this, blame the government agencies for not doing their jobs.
IMO, it's slightly unfair that Microsoft got hit with that lawsuit back in the day. They 100% deserved it, but it put them at a disadvantage some years later against all of the other monopolists in the tech industry who were not being scrutinized for doing the exact same (and worse) things.
When Apple does similar things everyone praises them for it.
There needs to be a serious reality check before any form of litigation could work.
Does anyone know if there's a version of the Alienware, Steelseries, and Razer control software for Linux?
[1] - https://openrgb.org/
OpenRGB may provide some relief.
And Windows too. Logitech software is an example of that, their capture software refused to recognize an older functional generation of webcam like C910. It is capable of recording 1080p60 5 years ago. Their older version software (Logitech Webcam Software) no longer works in Windows 10. Tried to use OBS to get it to 60 FPS, nope! Somehow LWS have a secret sauce to get my C910 to record in 1080p60 setting.
And their Logitech G Hub suck balls for my G600. Unfortunately, I couldn't get Logitech Gaming Software (predecessor for G Hub) working in my main computer. Kept throwing up error when I tried to install it. LGS works better for my G600 than G Hub.
- AlienFX (https://github.com/trackmastersteve/alienfx): Control Alienware lighting effects on Linux
- rivalcfg (https://github.com/flozz/rivalcfg): CLI tool and Python library to configure Steelseries mice on Linux
- RazerGenie (https://github.com/z3ntu/RazerGenie): Configure Razer devices on Linux, uses OpenRazer
- OpenRazer (https://openrazer.github.io): FOSS driver and userspace daemon for Razer devices on Linux
But there's hope on the horizon: Valve's SteamDeck is aiming to make available all Valve's games, even the Windows-only ones, on their custom Arch Linux. using Proton (which is a fork of Wine). As far as I know, this might be the first commercial product that's based on (a fork of) Wine.
If they can make all tripleA Windows games with DRM work on their SteamDeck, this will make a serious dent in Windows' monopoly on gaming. And in the process hopefully Wine will get a boost as well...
> There were no serious substitutes in the 1995-1997 time period that led to the antitrust proceedings.
Macs were just fine then, and they're just fine now. They couldn't run all important business software then, and they can't run all important business software now.
The situation has not changed much.
Whether this is the correct thing for them to do is debatable, but it is not the behavior which got them in trouble during the early browser wars.
If I have an OS and I want to deeply integrate the browser into the OS for use-cases other than general browsing of the web, why can't there be browser specific URLs to accomplish that?
Is there a complete list of microsoft-edge:// use cases? I know there is a News integration to the taskbar.
I love standards but sometimes you have edge use cases that the entire world doesn't need or can adopt. Why can't a browser have proprietary features along with URLs that make sure that a browser supporting those URLs be used?
How do you even QA or support a deep browser integration into your OS when the browser can be switched to a 3rd party one?
If those deep integrations (News, etc) also prompt you to change your default browser for general web surfing then yes, that would be anticompetitive behavior. Does it do that?
EDIT: I can't do that on my office laptop. My personal laptop isn't compatible with Windows 11.
What about something like this?https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/open-in-fi...
(I have major trust issues with extensions after huge disaster with the Chrome extension to suspend tabs which had malicious code embedded in it)
Caveat - I haven't used Windows 11 so I'm unaware if they've enhanced the number of places that these edge specific links are used. In windows 10 I haven't even bothered to implement some workaround because I never want to search the web from my start menu
According to Microsoft's documentation[0], the microsoft-edge:// scheme opens the edge browser and navigates to the specified URL.
If what is claimed in the article is implemented, it will provide a way to bypass the default browser setting. The system will launch edge even if you set another browser as your default web browser, bringing the problem of leaking MS account information that comes with the edge.
[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/l...
I hope one day Microsoft realises that their user-hostile actions are dissuading engineers from looking for jobs there. I for one never will. Hell would freeze over sooner.
Honestly, from what I've seen many people don't see the issue with this. "The code is public anyway, so what difference does it make?"
I'm starting to see the downsides of that viewpoint now, though[0]. If GitHub, and by extension Microsoft, technically 'own' the code (licensing, etc.) then they have free reign over it, leading to things like Copilot and Intellicode.
[0]: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/issues/201
Would it be a big deal for your landlord to push his friend in the door when you try to let your friend in? After all, he owns the home (you just pay for a license to use it), and he trusts his friend, so why should you care?
Let me give you a real example. Microsoft has a link to manage your Microsoft account online. This opens in Edge and thus can auto-login to your account. That is the expected and secure behavior. Firefox shouldn’t be able to hijack that.
Also you can still use any browser to check the weather. Just not via the integrated windows app.
You use any feature of the OS that would open a Web page, like Start menu searches, "help" links (that nowadays are just links to Bing searches, another shitshow I won't get into), or dynamic wallpaper info bites.
The system says "fuck you" and opens the browser that is more convenient to their economic goals rather than your explicit choice.
Is it illegal? Thank god no. Is it subversive and a complete dick move? Definitely.
I would think at most something along "systems should respect user preferences where available", but definitely not "systems should never override a user preference", since there are valid cases for the latter.
Great reference, thank you.
Whoever you are, that the wonderful, fully gaming capable world of Linux is there. We have some cookies but Valve is bringing a massive cake early next year.
But then they do shitty stuff like this, and it's a reminder of how overly anti-competitive Microsoft really can be. It's one thing to bundle, and it's another to make it so hard to switch that people finally just give in.
https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/t/howto-legally-use-windo...
Do I agree with it? No, I use Linux but it’s really not an issue that hasn’t been around and isn’t easily ignored, and many people may never encounter it.
"But can I use $MS_THING ?" Yes, if you insist. Just spin up a VM. But really, if work isn't forcing you to use a particular tool, there are better ways of doing that :-)
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu creating their SNAP store which seems like a play to get a monopoly on Linux.
Will people eventually just get worn down like last time, my guess is probably. But maybe that is too pessimistic
on the other im curious how web would look like if Google lost its browser market share
"Either the user controls the software, or the software controls the users":
A few other desktop environments also look like Windows, but I find KDE to be the most similar to Windows 10.
Should probably do it inside of work too, but people gotta eat.
Then I'd never use Mac or Windows again.
What's their goal?
At work, I can understand it a bit more, but I can't understand why anyone would still choose Windows as a desktop at home.
> Shill
> One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.
Is it "shilling" if you're a project manager recommending your product? He doesn't appear to be posing as anything other than a Microsoft employee working on the Edge team.
shill verb: 2 : to act as a spokesperson or promoter "the eminent Shakespearean producer … is now shilling for a brokerage house" — Andy Rooney
shill noun: 1b : one who makes a sales pitch or serves as a promoter
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shill
If you're going to choose to be pedantic, it helps to read the entire definition, and not just paste in the top result from DDG's "define shill"
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-re...
Microsoft's other software uses "microsoft-edge://" links which simply ignore the user's default browser choice and open in Edge. When a workaround was found to fix this (i.e. to obey the user's choice), Microsoft blocked it.
Plus Microsoft rushed out this Edge-link workaround patch to retail, while sitting on the default browser UI improvements until next year.
1. This article is about Windows and Microsoft applications forcing use of Edge, ignoring your default browser entirely.
2. Your article is about setting your default browser.
The issue at hand though has to do with other links within windows that open web pages. Microsoft had used a different protocol (not https, but, something like microsoft-edge://). I think these links are like news items that show up in the start menu, etc. There was no way to set Firefox to open these links with what Windows provided, it only opened in Edge. A program was written that listens for these protocols, and would let the user customize what program opened with those links were clicked. Microsoft has now shut that option down.
Windows 11 has a news & weather popup widget that sits down by the clock, in which you can click on the live tiles shown to take you to more info on the web. This widget uses microsoft-edge:// URI scheme so Edge is ALWAYS invoked.
Mozilla tried to hack their way around it, and it's been a few weeks of cat and mouse on it. At the moment, MS are winning.
It's like they've totally forgotten the events of the IE anti-trust stuff.
So wait... Links that specifically REQUEST to be OPENED IN EDGE cannot be overridden to open with an arbitrary program? So just don't use those links. Problem solved.
The irony here is anyone who actually cares enough to be angered by Microsoft opening links in Edge rather than their preferred browse would never use "Start menu search" or other noob features.