Windows needs a change in priorities
den.dev
den.dev
For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.
It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.
The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.
Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.
That said, I 100% absolutely endorse caution. The past couple years of behaviors are no indicator Microsoft will stay a societally-positive technological force. The corruption & darkness & manipulation could play back in at any moment. Already, Microsoft creating very special terms of service for things like VSCode Remote Development Plugin, having extremely fantastically proprietary implementations for the incredibly useful/popular/fantastic LiveShare are harbingers of the old ways, indicators that Microsoft just wants to force the door open, not really engage & participate.
For now though, I still overall think they are doing good work, pariticpating/not domineering (with some caveats). They learned very very very personally what happens when you violate the core rule of software, the most important maxim, not couched as such but absolutely of key vitality to computing: "Create more value than you capture." -Tim O'Reilly. Of course, all organizations forget the/their past. And I quake thinking of how many people pretend they are using/learning Linux while never seeing systemd, freedesktop, the greater Linux project: WSL is amazing but a dark & tragic small death for the real open source, & it's cheered on & fanboyed endlessly for enabling the blessed ignorant. You are right. Adopter beware.
They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder.
I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter.
They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.
Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them.
Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.
It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.
As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.
I’m learning rust as time allows.
Microsofts successful cross platform apps like VSCode and Teams ignore all of them so following suit seems pretty sensible to me.
It wasn't actually so bad at the start, it was just a poor slack knock-off. (Poor because the visual density is much lower with these oversized chat bubbles)
But now they are spending all their dev time cramming so much stuff into it without considering performance that it's become tooslow and cluttered. Now it's a wiki, a file storage thing, a video chat app, an interface to Yammer, not to mention the tons of plugins. Cool idea to have one app that does everything but performance and usability have gone down the drain. It feels very beta to me.
Oh and the choices they make are so stupid sometimes. When I decline a meeting it still adds me to its associated chat and pings me for everything that's said in it. Constant distraction and no way to turn off this stupid default.
I don't see why I should use a Microsoft GUI any more either. Once you stop using their libraries, you no longer need their OS at all. Pretty strange behaviour from MS if you ask me, encouraging your users to get off their systems.
Actually web is getting worse with anti-features and jank as well.
People pick their OS based on what software they want to run, not the other way around. And they pick from what they can buy. Go into a BestBuy and you can choose between Windows machines, Apple machines, and a few Chromebooks.
If you did manage to buy a Linux machine somewhere, you are going to be disappointed when you go back into that BestBuy to get a printer or webcam or some other accessory and the box says "compatible with macOS and Windows".
Users don't care. For them things either work or not. Users are not going to e-mail Brother or Nvidia or Microsoft to fix their issues with printers, video cards or Onedrive. How is that so hard to understand?
The solution was Google Cloud Print, IMO. That was a great idea. Who cares what you run, as long as it can connect to the internet you can print. I don't know how in-depth it got with the various crazy menu systems
I was quite surprised when I switched my main dev machine to Linux and the printer not only appeared by itself, but worked out of the box.
Linux is great for doing things on your own. Where it fails is when you have to sync up with other people's proprietary norms.
For example, I'm a researcher who gets funding from the US government. I can do my day-to-day technical work in Linux. But I'm forced to still use Windows to present PowerPoint slides over Teams to my funding overlords, because that's what they use, and I have to conform to that. Linux ports/knock-offs of those products just don't interoperate with proprietary MS systems well enough for me to rely on them. Unless the US government (or at least the relevant parts I deal with) ditches Microsoft products, I have to keep a foot in MS-land to carry out the accountability parts of my job.
But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at least 90% of the time doesn't cut it. Free instead of paying a few hundred bucks for the extra percentage points isn't even a question worth asking from a business perspective.
Linux has great software, sometimes the best available on any platform, in certain areas. Developer tools is an obvious one. Servers is another. Some of the multimedia stuff is good. The picture for running games is getting better all the time even if most of them are still ports of some kind rather than truly native applications.
But as much as I hate to say it, the reality is that in most areas that most users are going to care about the Linux ecosystem is still lacking in both quality and quantity. I'd bet on the evolution of web technology disrupting Windows long before the Linux desktop does. But that is hardly a solution to the phone-home and forced-update problems that a lot of us don't like about modern Windows.
However bad Linux is at package management, Windows is even worse. So I'm not sure how your argument convinces people that Windows package managers are superior?
On an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U
My main travel laptop is still an old Thinkpad X220, because of the great keyboard.
It lasts considerably longer on Ubuntu 20.04 than in Windows 10 $LATEST. In Windows, it runs too hot to have on my lap, and the fans run constantly.
In Ubuntu, it runs cool and I rarely hear the fan at all.
Check your firmware is current: that's step 1.
We're more likely to see people going back to dumb-terminals with GUIs being streamed to their ChromeOS from a server running linux than we are to see people using Linux.
AppImage and Flatpak are making inroads to eliminating this foolishness, but I still routinely run into software that isn't yet on board with that.
Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Sadly, while some parts of the Linux Desktop have come a long way since the 90s, many others have not.
> If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.
Presumably people use software to do something, and many times there simply isn't alternative software that does what you want to do and you're stuck with it even though it is toxic.
> Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.
I am a long time windows user who recently switched to PopOS.I'll say its getting better. This was one thing I was worried about switch back to linux. After I got fed up with what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, I decided I had it and switched. So far it has not been as a pain in the ass as much as it used to be. There are a few things I still have to tweak to get my work flow back to the way it was on Windows.
This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:
- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.
- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.
- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.
- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?
- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.
- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.
- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).
- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.
- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.
I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.
On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.
Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:
• GNOME Shell. No thank you.
• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.
• Cinnamon.
I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.
So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.
Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.
Nobody is kicking MS off of that pedestal, and unless we get some significant anti-trust legislation, we aren't getting that on Linux.
> Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
There's the challenge.
Who cared about "hardware"? Jony Ive and Jobs perhaps?
Who cares about OS performance? Linus Torvalds. I'm sure there are MS insiders who we don't know.
Who cares about the desktop? .....
The funny thing is the desktop was a solved problem with the mother-of-all-demos, and everything else is sugar on top, and yet there has to be this continual awful rebranding. Ok we went from VGA, to HD, to 4k HDR, but the underlying design and UI doesn't have to change so poorly each time.
The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago.
Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.
Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks.
WSL2 is just Linux in a VM which has been around like forever.
By the way it also put my system in a boot loop (blue screen on boot). I tracked it down to a buggy Lenovo driver but when I removed that it crashed on something else and I got sick of it and gave up.
WSL1 was really interesting, but ultimately Microsoft needed a flagship product to demonstrate the capabilities of Hyper-V and WSL was the perfect project.
Using it with the new terminal app is nice. It will load and unload the ram for the instance immediately whenever you pop open a linux shell. IMO opening and closing virtualbox/hyper-v takes longer and is clunkier. Overall it reduces friction.
In 2028, we'll be reading news articles about how the Year of Linux on the Desktop never really came, but the Year of Anything But Monetized Microsoft Windows sure did.
If I were making a list of companies and software packages that should be focusing on long term value rather than trading short term value for everyone hating your product, Windows would be a strong contender for top of the list. Microsoft may not want to depend on Windows, but throwing away so much user value for so little money is a stupid decision.
I just can't hammer on this point enough. There isn't that much money in advertising. The best advertisers in the world are looking at ~$10-20 per user per year at scale [1]. Advertising makes a lot of money because there's a lot of those users, not because they make that much per user. (That's why all the plans to "share the revenue" with the ad consumer are just hopeless. The money can't support it.) Windows ads can not necessarily jump to that level of performance right away, either. I really don't see how they could possibly be making enough money in their OS ads to make up for the goodwill they're pissing away. They're trading a money stream that still has at least a good decade in it, quite possibly more, for short term gain that isn't even all that impressive. Who is pressing for all these ads? What kind of analysis is being done internally that shows this is worth it? I find it hard to believe. Even a Windows in decline picking up licensing fees on new computer sales should be bringing in vastly more revenue than advertising possibly could. Ruining your 2025 sales for not really all that much money right now seems a very bad decision for a product coming up on 30 years old and still making lots of money.
[1]: You can do better for very targeted things like mesothelioma ads, but at scale, that's what Facebook is looking at.
When XP came to be, when Vista was released and DX 10 was vista only, when Windows 8 arrived, when all the talk about WinRT started, .... now Windows 11 with these issues.
i really recommend trying out wsl2. you now can install it from the window store.
I'll live with a dedicated VM for now.
WSL2 inside the virtual disk should be very fast.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste" -- Steve Jobs
Yes, the UIs Apple make are no longer anywhere near as intuitive as they were in Steve Jobs’ days, but Apple definitely still have their soul. You don’t even have to look further than the latest iMacs.
Really? It's all so painful sterile. Even their attempts at deviating from that coldness feel like someone with a spreadsheet calculated they should increase the brand-safe fun quotient in sector 7G by 4%.
I basically lost the reason for having a windows touch+pen input screen:/ and nobody has found out how to get the killer app back.
I suspect that only pre-windows 8 good features will be retained over time
It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble.
Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.
But it's easy to copy-and-paste a bit of Powershell and just uninstall them anyway:
https://www.techsupportall.com/uninstall-built-apps-windows-...
There are 3rd party tools too: https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10...
Some random examples:
Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure.
Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox.
Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR.
Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows.
To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ.
There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.
It's a pig of an app especially on Mac (haven't tried Linux enough to verify) but it runs.
On my Mac it takes a minute to start (fast M1 system), randomly crashes or hangs and often uses more than half my memory. But it is supported :)
I feel a lot of responses here are missing the point. Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to. Linux is a bad tool for my required workflow (a workflow that isn't all that uncommon), so I keep Windows around because it's a more suitable tool for that.
I'll repeat what I said: Linux is a great tool when you're a junior individual contributor, but it sucks when you're responsible for external communications with MS Office organizations.
> Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to.
Is an entirely deliberate outcome that Microsoft has pushed hard for over decades (as you'd expect, since losing that monopoly is an existential threat to them).
I have no idea why you would say this. VS Code is an incredibly popular and well-liked product.
For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.
For example, instead of making improvements to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), Microsoft marked it as deprecated and "forced" everyone over to Visual Studio Code, whether they like it or not. E.g.: it's the only Microsoft IDE with PowerShell Core (pwsh) support.
Despite being the only supported Microsoft PowerShell IDE, VS Code does not play nice with PowerShell. For example, if I open Code, it opens three(3!) PowerShell terminals for unfathomable reasons. One of those starts with errors, the other works, but the third one is the default and crashes if you look at it sideways. Tab-complete just... stops. Even when tab-complete "works", it'll often start mid way through the list, hiding all of the relevant items and showing your random garbage like "quick start snippets" that make zero sense in the given tab-complete context.
I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Then there's always the smart-ass that explains patiently that this is all my fault for not "customising" my VS Code experience with JSON configuration settings that are seven levels deep and documented only in some blog article from three years ago. Meanwhile, I've never had to customise anything in Visual Studio. It "just works" the way you'd expect a Windows application to work. Not some Linux-Windows hybrid intended to be the "embrace" part of the unholy "embrace-extend-extinguish" trio.
I've spent most of my career in Visual Studio, I have a great deal of respect for how it just works, nobody's forcing me to leave it and yet... I'm mostly done with it. I'd rather use VS Code for C# development these days; it nails a lot of speed+UX things that Visual Studio doesn't.
I guess though if you're coming from raw notepad then that is a step up.
And with anything "browser based" like VS Code you're going to always spawn a ton of processes to do even the simplest things.
Sure, if your entire usage is the stuff that VS does well (which is a very narrow range compared to Code), and you are used to VS, it's probably an annoyance.
> I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Almost none of the things I do with Code I would have done with Notepad before. There are lots of non-IDE programmers editors that existed before Code. It may not be as good as VS or some IntelliJ variants for the use cases those IDEs are best for, but it's better for almost everything else than almost anything, and even for the things those major commercial IDEs specialize in, it's good enough for lots of specific use cases that when you need to do that plus other things, the context switch of using the commercial IDE for some tasks isn't worth it.
Similar "well liked" very often really means "the only product I've used" or "the only product I know well" :(
Win32?
Now I admit it is a bit more complex than calling C functions, but only if one insists in calling COM from C.
Win32 was the one and only GUI framework. If you wrote your app for Windows, it would look like Windows. This was true for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and XP.
Then Office got the Ribbon UI but they decided not to let anyone else use it. Then Vista got the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was a lot like HTML, but used XML and had a more powerful styling+templating system. At one point they even tried to make JavaScript Windows applications a thing over a decade before it unfortunately did become a thing (Electron).
The problem is that WPF, like HTML, allowed nearly "anything". You could style any control any way that you wanted. So WPF apps looked somewhat... random.
Worse, it turned out that WPF was just too slow for applications, to the point that Microsoft themselves almost never used it. Instead, they used incompatible bits and pieces of it with C++ so that they could have something reasonably fast. But this wasn't WPF, and didn't look the same as user apps, and wasn't even internally consistent!
Now there are something like 10+ UI frameworks from Microsoft alone, not including third-party ones that can run on Windows.
This is why the Windows 11 interface is such a mess.
Hot reloading with C++ outside Visual Studio? Good luck with that if not willing to shell out some bucks for Live++.
Other frameworks are still relearning the ways of WPF and Blend tooling.
Many things make me angry how Microsoft management is dealing with them, yet the alternatives are even worse.
Only the Java ecosystem is a sound alternative to MS tooling, regardless of their current misdirection.
Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.
Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced.
I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things).
Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.
It will eventually get to the point where it will take more settings-twiddling to make Windows do what you actually want than Linux does.
Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use, where you get your choice between "up to date but frequently broken" rolling-release[0] or "several years out of date but probably stable". To me, the idea it is considered reasonable to expect a user to set up a dev environment and compile software from source is ludicrous, but until relatively recently that's been the norm[1]. Thankfully, AppImage and Flatpak have been gaining popularity and making that much less of a problem.
Now the two biggest things keeping me from switching immediately are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane[2], and my Oculus isn't supported at all[3]. Still, I'll go to Linux before I go to Win 11.
[0] which still often has out of date and missing packages
[1] for anything not packaged by the distro or if you need a newer version
[2] thanks Bitcoin Idiots, LLC
[3] and from everything I gather no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
Re the second, I haven't built an app from source since about 2005? or so.
I've had to build apps from source - but these were free extras, not things I needed for basic functionality.
>I have an Nvidia 1080ti
Fwiw, I used Linux with an 1080 Ti for years; it was the first card I tried Linux on. The only hitch is having to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Distros with GUI tools for drivers (e.g., Manjaro) make this easy.
The only problem was actually my G-SYNC monitor. It was one of those super expensive ones with G-SYNC hardware in it. It turns out those just go black if you're not using an Nvidia card && aren't running proprietary drivers.
At some point, I gave it and my 1080 Ti away and got an AMD card with FreeSync monitors. Funnily, the FreeSync doesn't actually work. (Luckily, I don't care that much about tearing, and it's less noticeable at >=144 Hz.) AND, with AMD, you don't have a nice GPU settings panel like Nvidia provides (as basic as it is compared to its Windows equivalent). I've noticed no other differences. Nevertheless, having the open source driver in-kernel and not worrying about installing it out of band is nice.
>no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
Yep, probably; tech is too new. I don't even try stuff like that until it's 30 years old and mainlined. ;D
>GNOME
Yeah, I don't know how anyone sane likes GNOME, and it's insane to me that KDE isn't the default DE instead. I reckon it's a combo of inertia, the fact that the GNOME faction were the GPL purists compared to TrollTech back in the day, and (enduring?) convergence/low-tech user adoption hopes.
I have the opposite feeling: installation by search engine and speculative .exe downloads feels so dirty. There's the Windows store but it doesn't seem to actually work very often.
Then again, following StackExchange or blog posts to add keys and deb repos for Ubuntu is no better. The AUR is also similar, but I trust that a bit more than a random blog post since at least there's a flagging mechanism.
FWIW, I rarely have issues with rolling releases on Arch, certainly fewer issues than I have with Ubuntu repo package versions.
As mentioned, I've been using Linux for ten years as my only system and I installed at time over the twenty years before that. At worst, twenty years ago, I would contact people and got "I ignore your bug 'cause you don't have the very latest thing everywhere". In my current experience, I've never had to "talk" to anyone. It's not without hiccups but it's not "abusive" in the sense of Windows 'cause no one is fixing one thing to break another or gaslighting you about bugs.
If you're worried about support for the Nvidia 1080ti, I've found no problems with the Nvidia drivers for a 1050, a 1060, and the 1650 I'm currently using now. If you're just wishing to upgrade and would rather go the AMD route because of binary drivers, I get it. If you're worried about bad Nvidia drivers in linux, I've found them to be very good lately as long as you keep them updated.
WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor? https://github.com/google/gvisor
Others have done it.
Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx
The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator
As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
I can imagine that there are many departments that have to continually justify their existence and management tries to find the one-hit wonder that gets users engaged. All these departments try to have their dejure product integrated into Windows to have a chance to pump up their KPI.
You should be able to tell an operating system that it is not allowed to phone home. That is not possible in Windows, on the contrary, they have increased their spying dramatically. It has been a adversarial relationship for a long time by now and I don't see any attempts to change course or anyone that really cares for the platform. Their corporate integration and PC gaming keeps Windows relevant for now, but people will look elsewhere.
Me (but not Windows), my three grown children, my sister, at least one brother in law. At least half of the people I know personally. Half of them using laptops, the rest desktop machines. All of them have smartphones, and sometimes tablets, as well.
I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either.
It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads?
I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need.
And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".
"As a user I want to XYZ"
vs.
"As a product manager listening to what I think a user said, they want to ABC"
That's what happens when developers in large companies are not allowed or do not want to talk to users.
So every new install is a crapshot, I try to go local account only, but something gets in the way and I end up creating yet another one for that specific device.
It's madness.
A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery/safe mode and take a look.
But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn't work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it.
I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse.
If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?
Its just too much effort.
Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need.
(except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)
Specialized audio/video equipment? Probably, and of course the vendor will only provide them for Windows.
Needs a touchpad driver on both Fedora and Pop?_OS, I'm not sure if this is still true or not. I don't really care, since I can fix this.
I use all the major operating systems.
Yeah well, then you are among the lucky few, or you are not aware of the difference a good driver makes.
Right now I cannot get my linux workstation to do screencasting with hardware encoding(with OBS). On windows no problem.
And the laptops. On ALL my laptops I owned (6+) I tried linux, but experience was always worse, or even impossible. That includes tweaking, messing with grub, tlp and and in one instance even compiling the kernel. Still way worse battery life, performance, standby resume issues, freezes and dont get me started about touchscreen. I hate windows. But I have work to do.
But if your hardware is over a year old, the Linux experience tends to be rock solid.
Manjaro is way better than Ubuntu; KDE is way better than Xfce.
Debian is way better than Manjaro; i3 is way better than KDE.
Pop!_OS is way better than Debian; Gnome is way better than i3.
Microsoft has always been, and will always be an enterprise company, they do not care about Consumers, and they do not care about SMB business. they care about Large Enterprise.
I have seen it countless times in my career, SMB space and can be complaining up a storm about a problem for years but until some 20,000+ employee CTO has the problem MS will not give it the time of day.
It is all numbers, and if you are not a government or Large corporation Microsoft does not give you the time of day
The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed.
And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.
Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?
Not sure. Macs are not that available and, in some places, are prohibitively expensive. Others would love the everything-integrated experience while using software that runs only on Windows.
I'm not sure Microsoft even has that "core customer" as neatly defined as Apple (or Linux). Getting a Mac or a Linux box is a deliberate action, whilst, for the end user, getting a Windows box is the default when you get a "generic" computer.
One group I can think of is the corporate administrators, who want to deliver a locked down set of functions to corporate workstations - VPN settings, firewalls, blocked websites, custom update schedules, and so on. That same crowd also orders Macs and Chromebooks with the same goals.
What Microsoft can do is to offer tailored experiences for specific groups - people who want everything to just work (who'll be happy with Skype logging them on on boot, with OneDrive backing stuff up...), gamers who'll definitely not want Skype to interrupt them and who have nothing to back up to OneDrive, but, sometimes, want to record and stream their games, Windows developers who'll spend most of their time within Visual Studio and the MSDN KB (am I dating myself here?), and so on. I'm very sure they have a list of personas already built for that.
At least considering the product policy that Microsoft currently applies to Windows, I tend to doubt that. ;-)
I expect, want in fact, none of these things on my Windows PC. I do not trust Microsoft with my data, and this was before the last year of them being owned. It may not be right or even logical, but I imagine a ton of other users fit this same archetype. To me windows is the spyware ridden OS I use to pay a handful of games, and it basically always will be.
How do you know you aren't regularly running one (or more) of those? Or at least some stuff last updated sometime between W2K and W7?
It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.
Click "Add..."
Click "Finish" with "Microsoft Access Driver" selected (no, you're not finished)
Click "Select..."
Wonder if it can be found anywhere else. I did try the old progman.exe (via x86 compatability), and while it worked, it uses the modern API for the file dialog.
It's hard to tell for me to be honest, but are we (e.g. HN crowd) just a minority of power users that are in our own echo chamber complaining and making us happy doesn't really move the needle for MSFT?
I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards.
- Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click.
- I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical.
- All apps are not readily accessible from the start menu; I have to click another button to get to them.
- I have a 2-in-1 laptop, and turning it into tablet mode is wonky.
- I can't choose to not have grouped buttons on the taskbar.
- The context menus UX is horrible. Some context menu items are now two clicks away instead of one. Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding?
- The stacked notifications is confusing, and always shows the calendar when I open the notifications panel.
- Lots of crap pushed on me, like chat (aka Teams), widgets (which require a Microsoft account), 3rd party apps that look like they're installed but actually get downloaded/installed on first use.
I was able to fix a lot of those issues with ExplorerPatcher [0]. However, one day after a Windows update, Explorer didn't start at all after login (black screen, I thought Windows was hosed). This has since been fixed. But I decided enough is enough, and finally "upgraded" back to Windows 10.
The only good thing about Windows 11 is wslg, which provides out of the box support for Linux GUI apps (not available on Windows 10). But I can get the same result with an X server and some work.
[0] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features
The people who worked on the design use Macs. Seriously.
The way I usually describe Win11's UI is as the worst of GNOME 3, MacOS, and Windows bundled up in a wrap of spyware.
They've spend the last few decades undoing all that work piece by piece until nobody actually knows how to use it anymore.
But it's hard for a company to justify "paying to leave shit alone" so even if a maximum was reached, it will recede.
Or they focus on new users and not on the amount of things people have already learned.
They killed the butterfly keyboard in 2019 (almost 4 years after it was introduced), and they killed the touch bar last year.
Yes, it took them some time, but they sorted these things out.
Or the ever more locked down environment, or the iOS style dumbed down apps they prefer now..
I think it was pretty much downhill after leopard :(
Yes, Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatability, so you might have to update your application so that it runs on the latest macOS version, but there’s no way around it.
You either have a gazillion competing frontend APIs to maintain compatability with shit that was written for Windows 3.1, or you don’t care about any of that and end up with almost entirely consistent visual styles across the entire OS.
I personally believe the reason that chrome/edge/firefox and apps in general have become so resource hungry is because all the devs have been given beefy machines to allow them to compile on-device and this has lead to the devs basically ignoring the app's resource budget. The ultimate "it works on my machine" shrug. imo windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram, let them optimize their code for that experience.
And slow HDDs. The gains of going from an HDD to an SSD have been squandered. The time it takes my computer to boot to a usable desktop feels the same as the bad old days with spinning HDDs.
I remember when SSDs where new and YouTubers were making videos of booting into Win7 with Office, etc. open in seconds. WTF happened?
And it has even less configurability than Windows.. Add-ons don't count because they often break.
The borders don't seem that much bigger than the ones in Windows 10. As for the extensions, I've been enabling those via extensions.gnome.org and have no problems so far on Buster or Bullseye.
This is the one that makes Gnome useable for me:
Cinnamon suffers from the same problem, FWIW.
edit: google says "british". In fairly common use in Australia.
- Word, PowerPoint, Excel, all one style - Teams, different style - Notepad, different style - Paint, different style
That's just within the MS ecosystem, leave that ecosystem and you rapidly find the same style mess that you get on Linux. It's basically due to the many different GUI frameworks, not the OS itself, hell MS supplies a whole list of frameworks that look different from each other.
Even MacOS/iOS which are _really_ good at having a cohesive UI style suffer from this problem.
I'd argue that if this is a valid complaint with Linux DEs (be it GNOME/KDE/what have you) then it's an equally valid complaint for Windows.
The only thing Windows has going for itself is backwards compatability.
I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow.
So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".
It's also the bane of its existence, because it means that they can NEVER retire anything, because by doing so they would break backwards compatability.
And that's actually how we ended up here. They can never get rid of even Win16 GUI (let alone Win32) because it would break shit written for Windows 3.1 (yes, there are still some dialogs in Windows 11 that use Windows 3.1 file select dialog, namely the ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit)[0].
So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Win32 isn't being used for anything they are making now, but it's used by other people, and more importantly it's used by all the old apps.
So now they have to justify ETERNAL support for an essentially deprecated API. Which they obviously aren't doing, which is why we're here.
> I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Unless they are extremely domain specific, surely there are modern alternatives?
Yes there are probably alternatives, but that's the point, I like the way it's working now - I don't want to find new equivalents and then discover what's missing from them.
But I'm not sure what the existance of win32 has to do with anything - it's not like it stops win64 from working.
So I switched to Rectangle, which has optional Spectacle-compatible keybindings. https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
I also add RightZoom: https://www.blazingtools.com/right_zoom_mac.html
With them, window management becomes basically as good as any other desktop I use, and delivers most of what I like from tiling WMs.
Plasma Gnome MacOS Windows
That would be my pick top to bottom of best UIs
Windows is a shambles and it mentally destroys a piece of me everytime I use it
Same with Windows Explorer. Finder in macOS is still terribly crippled compared to it:
-It can't even perform folder merges in many cases, only allowing you to "Replace" the entire folder.
-You can't pause/resume file transfers.
-Cancelling large transfers is like canceling a print job in the 00's - it might cancel, but if it does it will be when 95% of the job is done anyway and you're screwed.
-You aren't shown metadata of any files you are prompted about.
-Batch management of file conflicts/actions not possible.
Most of these features were added to Explorer all the way back in Vista 15 years ago.
I keep telemetry enabled in Firefox in the hope that they see that I use all of the features that they later remove anyway. It seems like nobody is using metrics to prove that it's not safe to remove a feature. Or they say "oh, it's only 1% of users using that feature", not realizing how much 1% really is.
Not working well so far.
Windows 8 -> Windows 10
Windows Vista -> Windows 7
and even before that:
Windows Me -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP was a pretty solid chain that shows it over three releases (personally I think XP was buggier, I don't know what the idea was there other than to make some more money?).
This isn’t a transition which existed.
Windows ME didn’t get replaced by 2000, they were both released around the same time.
In terms of OS evolution, there were two separate branches, Windows NT and Windows 95.
On the 95 branch: 95 > 98 > ME > Discontinued
On the NT branch: NT 3.5 > NT 4 > 2000 > XP > Vista > 7 > 8 > 10 > 11
Non-business users were originally only ever on the 95 branch, then when it was discontinued they were transitioned to Windows XP, but the neutered home edition, which has been the model since.
From a technology stack side I realize you are right, but I did not experience the UI of Windows ME as a successor to 98 and instead experienced it as a proto-win2k. I'm talking about the UI evolution more than the kernel, which I realize is more subjective.
I do think there is a "paid forced beta -> better after overton window shift" pattern from for instance Vista to 7 and 8 to 10. Those were extremely obviously intended to be the same UI, the first with an extremely questionable UI and the second with a stabilized UI.
From a UI perspective, in the context of a useful work computer, Windows 8 was an absolute failure. Windows 10 I only tolerate because it's gotten most of the bugs worked out and Windows 7 is no longer getting security updates... I fully intend to skip Windows 11 and wait for the next one if I can possibly do so.
It will I'm sure still have a UI mess that makes it even less pleasant than Windows 10, as (in my opinion) Windows 7 was better than Windows 10 and I would have preferred they just keep fine tuning that UI.
I just want my OS to be an OS instead of an experience, and for things to just iterate better rather than see massive overhauls for what they must know is mostly a business OS. It's such a strange approach, I guess they're just worried about going the way of Sun or IBM by not adopting the latest trends. Or maybe they have a business team and a home computer team and the latter is trying to keep up with Apple while the prior is begging them to stop...
Windows me - bad
Windows xp - good
Windows vista - bad
Windows 7 - good
Windows 8 - bad
Windows 10 - good
Windows 11 - bad
For a bad release windows 11 is pretty good. This gives me hope that windows 12 will be their best ever.
This is why it would have been smart of them to stick to windows 10 like they planned, but like picking at a scab they just couldn’t let go of the idea of rearranging the deck chairs and rechristening the ship as windows 11.
Nice idea but it just doesn't fit.
Windows 95/98/Me were all poor.
XP was widely panned when it came out because existing hardware wasn't quite good enough and it was riddled with security issues. Rememebr SP2?
Where did 8.1 go?
Windows 10 is full of the stuff people are complaining about in this thread.
95 good. 98 bad.
2000 good, XP bad (for me), Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 better but not great, 10 OK, 11 bad.
As always: https://www.badscience.net/wp-content/uploads/complicatedcov...
("I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." -- Ben Goldacre)
...and for a good release Windows 10 is pretty bad.
Despite all the flak it got at the time, Windows 8.1 (plus StartIsBack to hide metro crap) is still the best Windows released in the last decade.
The Win9x/ME (please read as DOS based) series of OS was intended for home users.
The NT/2K was intended for business users.
Only as an example most games at the time would not have run on NT/2K, and Win9x/Me was essentially single-user only.
For some reasons with XP the good MS guys decided to force down the throat of pro/business users (that were very, very, very happy about Windows 2000) the bells and whistles and graphics they didn't ask for and force down the throat of home users (that were very, very happy about Windows 98, not so much about ME [0]) the complexities of the NT, user access, permissions, NTFS, and other things that at the time made no sense whatever.
Basically they (the MS guys) unified the two branches into one and the result was (of course) a compromise.
[0] I know it is hard to say this, but ME, beside some quirks that there was no time to fix, was not as bad as it has been depicted, as a matter of fact the "best" bastard retro system you can make today is a Windows 98 with selected components of ME integrated/backported or a ME with some features of 98SE brought back, the failure of ME (not entirely unlike the later Vista one) was greatly induced (IMHO) by two factors, underpowered hardware and issues with drivers, both - if you want - essentially the responsibility of OEM's.
I wasn’t aware that XP was meant to be an upgrade for 98/ME (home users) as well as for 2000 (business users). Talk about posing off both set of customers at the same time.
I personally didn’t mind ME and liked XP, but then it was as a student who didn’t do anything serious with computers so it doesn’t count much.
I disagree somewhat. The 9x family didn't handle multitasking well and had driver issues, frequently leading to lock-ups and BSODs. The architecture didn't handle isolation well, but NT did. Windows NT mostly stayed out of people's way in XP unless they looked for those menus. It was a huge problem for Vista, though.
1) free (in the sense of included in the price or their new PC) a somewhat unstable OS with lower requisites (particularly about RAM) where most software somehow ran (including games)
or:
2) a more stable, paid (costing if I recall correctly more than the equivalent of 2-300 US$ of today) OS needing double the RAM (think of 128 vs. 64 MB), definitely slower, where they could not run many games
for some reasons many chose #1, and BSOD's (on the 9x/Me) were so common that it was perceived by many (that had not any occasion to experience the stability of NT and of 2000) as a "normal state of things".
This is literally the first thing I do on a fresh install. What the hell were they thinking
> start menu further ruined
but whyyyyyyyyyyyy
I honestly never had a problem with Microsoft Windows over its UI decisions until Windows 8.
Windows up to and including Windows 7 were actually ok, because you could put the start menu on the side, switch to classic UI, turn off the graphical embellishments that your shit laptop didn't like, and so on.
Windows 8 became very tabletified, but with options to switch to classic UI, and Windows 10 is the same but arguably a bit more bizarre.
Neither UI was really consistent or knew what it wanted to be, and worst of all, the user can't decide what it should be.
But whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Windows 8 became very
tabletified, but
with options...
Windows 8 became very
tabletified, but
without options...That is just a huge WTF. Since the very earliest versions of Windows there has always been the option of a dark (or white, or rainbow, or ...) theme, where you could adjust the colours and sizes and fonts, and everything using Win32 would follow it. Here's Win95 example:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5...
Yet if I'm understanding correctly, in Win11 that stopped working completely? It really sounds like the Windows team has no one left who knows what used to be possible but isn't anymore, being replaced with probably younger developers making constant excuses to "modernise" by rewriting and breaking stuff. To use an analogy, they're not just reinventing the wheel but making it square.
I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.
I agree almost, but not quite 100% with that. My tiny disagreement: The decline set in a bit earlier, not after but some time in the W7 era: Up until some point you could set window border width to 0 in the Appearance control panel applet; after that this input field was apparently made read-only for the user. For a while after that you could "hack" that by editing a Registry value, but AFAICR they disabled that, too. (Or rather, if not exactly disabled Registry editing, made the display driver ignore it.)
And then rounding the corners of the said ”wheel” :)
Gnome/KDE still offer proper themeing that works with proper native apps but even there you've got web browsers and electron apps that ignore it.
You pay 145€ for the Home or 259€ for the Pro Edition and they treat it like it's freeware.
I want my computer to support me in achieving what I want to do, but Windows just keeps grabbing attention with intrusive ads and never-ending notifications.
I can see why Microsoft are trying to explore other revenue sources. If they give Windows away they make a huge loss but if they charge for upgrades nobody will upgrade and it will become a support nightmare.
I’m dead serious - unless you have a specific business reason like most do to use this POS, I can’t imagine anyone actually choosing to use Windows over the alternatives. What a seriously awful piece of software.
https://www.getblackbird.net/ helps a lot and it's one of the first things I do to Windows installs when I need to use them, but it can break stuff if you're too aggressive with it (e.g. Windows store / Xbox stuff, which for some reason is how to record screenshot videos in Windows... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/record-a-game-cl... ).
The article also didn't mention the Microsoft Store and how awful everything around that experience is, especially compared to macOS, where the worst part is how signing apps works ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se... vs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/package/signin... ).
edit: Then again, that tool does seem to make it quite easy to damage your Windows installation.
(edit: from throwaway as a protective measure)
It’s a kind of thing where the usual growth metrics “looks fine”, so it’s hard to justify big initiatives to fix it, yet everyone knows it’s broken. One day, those metrics will start looking bad and then they will try to fix it, but by then it would be too late.
The OS features that are getting attention, such as VS Code and WSL are ones that have synergy with the more important businesses and help them sell. Things like fixing the safari park of UI conventions don't have that synergy, so the resources that could improve them go to the other businesses. The ads and forced sign-ins are also part of this; in the long-term, they'll drive some users away from Windows, but right now, they funnel money and users to places that should matter more to the company in the long-term.
MS aren't listening to Windows feedback - and the internal feedback from people working on the product is usually part of it in these situations -, because what's good for Windows isn't what's good for MS.
Or do we need to get Enterprise?
I wouldn't get my hopes up. Microsoft seems to be introducing new UI frameworks -- each with their own slightly different appearance -- at an ever-increasing rate. If current trends continue, by 2030 there will be more Windows UI frameworks than developers using them. :)
Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.
UWP was burdened with sandboxing+packaging requirements that made it very difficult to use, even for first-party software. They eventually figured that out and have made some attempts to lift UI stuff out of UWP (XAML Islands and WinUI 3), but they're both train wrecks (and not staffed with nearly enough people to put up a fight against Chromium).
...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it, when it's already started saying things like this a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198
From what I understand, the thinking is something like:
- There currently aren't any great alternatives for an attractive, touch-friendly, modern-looking UI framework. UWP applications generally feel pretty good to use despite UWP's problems.
- MS already has to support UWP apps forever (once something ships with Windows it's immortal), so they might as well take advantage of that support guarantee.
The Windows team is currently investing heavily in Chromium/Edge/WebView2, but it's still fairly early days. I'd bet good money that within the next 5 years, web UI in some form will fully replace UWP for new first-party development.
And I'm not installing this shit. It's a skin. It's Windows 10, but retvrned to rounded corners, and with a tenth of the customizability. It's an attempt to put Mac in Windows by people who don't understand either and, if previous HN threads are true, who don't dogfood the result. It has no serious improvements at any level, and every change they have made at first glance is a step backwards. WinUI 3 is already in Win10 and the Android emulator will be ported when it actually comes out. And most damning, I hear report after report after report of backcompat issues with games, which is supposed to be Windows's flagship feature. So what's the point of upgrading? Why would I ever? It's like Windows 8 all over again, but this time they're not even replacing old stuff with new stuff, they're just fucking up the old stuff.
Stopped reading here.
Would really appreciate if I can get in touch with you on some other chat based social platform. Thank you in advance!
Honestly, and I know it's a joke because of the very nerd-tastic dancing, but it was for this:
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/#software-a...
Basically they give you every version of Windows so you can test your code. So 10 LTSC is in there. I run it in my VMs because it uses so little memory and CPU compared to the regular one.
I don't know which flavor of subscription you need to get it. I got my sub free as an MVP.
No? I installed it in a VM just fine without it. During initial setup there's a "domain join" option, but all that does is create a local account.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...
Although I haven't figured out how to ...install the latest version, it seems more complex than the one before.
I always have a laugh when I see this logic.
A product costing more than $200 and not available in the consumer market without some hoops to jump? Of course someone would resell it for $20 (including their profit) totally legally.
LTSC is often hailed as the solution for privacy but when I last tried it it was just regular Win10 with a bit less bloatware (and the long term support of course). Didn't seem very different from Win10 on the privacy side at all.
One thing I forgot to check is if you can choose to delay updates to whenever you want. Obviously this is a big miss in Win10 and as LTSC is meant for mission critical systems I assume this is possible.
I don't recall which version it was exactly, but it was the latest I could get about a year ago when I tried. One of our colleagues in industrial automation got me a VM in their lab to try it out.
There is this more recent attempt, Win10 explorer.exe with Win11 kernel: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o6ytuw/so_i_replac...
It's too late for the Windows ecosystem.
The installation process was so difficult, I will never play again.
There are some quirks that will drive hard-code Minecraft players nuts, but it's not that bad overall, especially if you like the building aspect of MC.
And that's not even getting into the mess that is the licensing that was Minecraft Alpha. That was changed even before Microsoft took over, when lawyers took one look at the license and realized that players getting "all future versions" [0] would include any sequels, spin-offs, platform ports, etc.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20101214061702/http://notch.tumb...
Wonder where that went hmmmm
The mind boggles.
I bought her a Minecraft account via my Microsoft one, getting her the necessary permission for multiplayer took an hour to do so, parsing through cryptic microsoft documentation which essentially consists of a maze of links that loop back to pages you already visited.
The funny thing is that one of my brother told me before I started that I could just download the pirated client, that way I wouldn't have to pay for Minecraft for the 938th time and the pirated client just works out of the box contrary to the official version.
It'd been years since I had to interact with anything Microsoft, I thought he was exagerating. What a shock when I realized pirates actually do a better job than MS at making their own products accessible.
Spent hours flailing with the Xbox store, Microsoft store, Mojang and Minecraft accounts, resetting passwords, etc. Eventually got it to work but I have no idea what fixed it.
EDIT:
Reminds me of what happened years earlier when we turned on our XBOX and had to update. Basically, it took an entire day of logic loops in the login/verification system, which required several hours of being on the phone with MS.
It was a forced upgrade, so otherwise we would have ignored it.
So, this Minecraft stuff is nothing new for MS.
It's been 15 years since Vista and this hasn't been fixed. It's difficult to find people to actually just deliver on basic stuff apparently. This is why the commandline works. Becuase if all else fails there is 1 interface. I don't think this is unfixable but it requires a lot of gruntwork.
That's exactly the problem of each iteration on Windows. New overlay on top of the old one that always misses the one thing you need, and you either get lucky and find the right menu right away to get to the old screen that gives you what you want, or you get into hell.
The new network screens are notoriously bad, and it always takes me 5 minutes to find how the hell to get to the adapters screen again.
The slogan "Where do you want to go today?" is dead. It's now all "This is where we will let you go today!"
We have employed a generation of PMs now who idolize Steve Jobs' mantra: "Users dont know what they want until you show it to them".
EDIT: We does not mean I am employed by Apple. It signifies the general trend for companies to enable product development by PMs
just because a bunch of dumb PMs are pushing hot garbage to the user doesn't mean that statement is false. There almost always IS a way to improve and innovate a user experience—a new experience that the user hasn't thought of before. Its just that the PM incentives aren't aligned with the users these days.
Innovation is the act of giving the users something they didn't know what they want.
But that's not what these anti-user dark patterns are. They are the end result PMs trying to hit their KPIs by any means necessary. And those happen to not track things like users satisfaction and trust.
But then Microsoft wants to give their users the same conveniance as Apple users get with their "just works" setup and people call it user hostile and malware. It makes perfect sense that users would like a way to call other windows users in a way that doesn't involve installing things and fiddling around with more accounts/configuration.
On top of that the way things are integrated always looks and feels forced. Like going into lengths to hide control panel in windows 10 even if it's still there and while the settings app which replaces it only has a fraction of the functionality.
But the power users on this site would rather we have some kind of advanced configuration page where every single feature of windows should be opt in. While simultaneously praising the Apple “just works” system.
Because included into that "just works" system is just leaves you alone.
Maybe if the "helpful" Windows feature wouldn't nag all the time, as you put it, the power users wouldn't complain about it and look for ways to turn it off.
I've been using a Mac for more than 10 years now without an iCloud account. It asked me once whether I wanted one, when I bought the computer new, I said no, and it's left me alone ever since. And I went through I don't know how many "major" upgrades. Windows bugs me all the time.
So there's really no reason for me to complain about FaceTime, or whatever. I don't even know it's there if I don't go looking for it specifically. Whereas Windows, it's in my face, all the time. So there's a direct benefit for me to look for ways to shut that crap down. Maybe, just maybe, if Teams isn't installed it will shut up and leave me be. At least until the next update brings it back...
There's practically no easy way to get rid of Edge or silence it; not only is it forced down your throat, there's active investment in trying to prevent you from switching to something else.
It doesn't excuse the constant nagging from OneDrive and Teams but, at least for now, they're not detecting that you're on Slack/Discord/Dropbox and trying to force you to switch.
The other day, I installed Win 11 on a work computer to give it a try. I figured since it's gonna be domain joined and whatnot anyway, might as well go all in. So when it asked for an account, I plug in my Office 365 account, and got all kinds of weird errors, such as wrong password, etc. In the end I gave up and created a regular account. Now it asks whether I'm sure I don't want an MS account, 'cause it's so much greater. Right. Except it doesn't work... Then I try adding the account manually in "accounts". Same issue...
In the end, I managed to add the account via OneDrive, which installed a separate OneDrive. But at least it did it on its own, no intervention needed. But I do have two "one drive" folders in the explorer for some reason, and I can't remove any of them [0]. I don't remember iCloud showing up multiple times in Finder.
Later, I find there's Teams preload. Good, let me just log in. Strange, I added the account, said it was OK for other apps to use, but it still wants me log in. I type in my credentials, and the odd account errors are back. Turns out, that's the wrong Teams! It's teams for the plebs, apparently I needed Teams "pro" or something. At least, Skype had a somewhat different name, as in "Skype for business" vs "just skype".
---
[0] Yes, I know it's possible to change the "shortcuts" or whatever they're called from the registry, but the point is that it's half-baked, it tries to be "helpful" but it's actually a hassle. If I don't want iCloud in the Finder, I can just pull it out of the sidebar. And it stays that way, as opposed to the Explorer shortcuts which have a tendency to come back after updates.
If I buy an iPhone then it is so that people can call me on it. The Mac makes it easy that I can also receive a call on my Mac if I am working on it. It's an additional convenience feature. It's not like the Mac is forcing me to do this. The call would still happen on my phone, I'd just have a much harder time to respond to it if I didn't get the smooth integration on my Mac whilst working on it. If I didn't have an iPhone then I also wouldn't get random calls on my Mac. Besides, if I don't want this feature to work then it is very easy to disable it form a very self explaining settings app and that setting will persist during updates.
It literally couldn't be more different to how Windows operates.
Also, perhaps Apple makes things enjoyable in how they work, which is maybe why less users have a desire to disable these handy features. It certainly feels more straight forward, down to the point, no dark patterns and very obvious as a macOS user. I can't say the same about Windows.
People actually complain. We’re past the point where everyone only has one set of devices, a single apple ID, and everything is simple.
You might not want your iPad to receive the “family” account Facetime. You might not want your second phone to register for iMessage. You might want these services from an ID different from the device’s main account.
There’s optout ways out for all these services, but following the 80/20 rule, I think there is a “20” part with circumstances that make the blanket “turn it all on” grating and tedious to get rid of.
Not defending, but I do recall the ford quote of “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’”
The goal is now growth, not even profit, and control over users is strat.
What comes next? Jerk(2nd derivative of speed, rate of acceleration changes)? — the speed at which users conform a platform?
Capitalism is so ripe for disruption, or innovation, it seems!
Nowadays getting a bespoke dark mode for applications is an advertisement worthy feature.
Even when the intrusion is small, it is ridiculous because it is not required for the software to work (e.g. in the iPhone SETTINGS app, nothing about tweaking settings ever requires the user to view a stupid ad, and yet there they are, crappifying the UI).
And as I get older I am telling myself “this isn’t what I signed up for”: I want useful software that is free of garbage, especially when money is exchanged, and most certainly when a LOT of money is exchanged.
So tell these bean-counters to get the hell out, and let us make computers “only” useful instead of ad-spewing machines.
Think about say, Microsoft Word (only word, not office). Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version. But, where would all the "product development" arm of the Word application go if they declared it as such? The only required people would be "project managers" to manage bug fixes projects, and the development chain (programmers, QAs, etc)...
But these people have to eat, so they keep adding crap to an otherwise good product, they keep shuffling things around and "experimenting" to maintain their job.
Lived on Windows for over 2 decades (completed work via a Linux VM). Windows 8 was horrid and Windows 10/11 is hostile towards user experience (etc, etc privacy, but mostly user experience).
Used MacOS for half a decade after that and loved the Unix terminal and tight desktop experience but underpowered and overpriced hardware had me running a hackintosh for over half of that time. The move to M1 (and general difficulty maintaining a Hackintosh) means that MacOS is off the table for me.
I am currently daily driving Gnome 4 on Fedora and loving it. It has some user application UX issues (like Google Chrome mouse scrolls slowly) and some questionable desktop environment design decisions - but overall a nice place to land.
Not quite as nice as MacOS but it gets the job done.
It's sad that after 30 years on computers, my user experience has gotten worse - Gnome 4 came along at the perfect time to catch a bunch of MacOS and Windows refugees and I pray the developers push it in a direction where it becomes the most ergonomic desktop environment available on the Desktop - at least for engineers.
I’m hopeful the next MacOS shakeup is similar to the recent return to sanity in hardware.
Apple hardware is finally recovering from Ives’ fever dream. The OS needs saving next.
The last decade of desktop environments feels like a march backwards, or perhaps even vertical, into some kind of alternate reality where the UI is designed to get in the way instead of enable.
Modern desktop environments are a painful death by a thousand cuts.
This is a rant but a desktop environment is my hammer. It is the tool I use more than anything else. The experience is sacred. And yet it is defiled annually.
I never feel more helpless than the first moments after a MacOS upgrade. Like all my power has been stripped. It hurts.
I can't understand why people would want to make windows full screen in ordinary situations. It seems to be something I would only want to do on rare occasions, given that you lose quick access to the menu bar.
Magnet/Rectangle are third-party fixes for the former. But it's a basic function that should be built into the OS.
The ability to snap to fill the screen may be useful on tiny screens but with Mac hardware shouldn’t be as important because the real estate (pixels!) should be there to use and arrange individual windows. Even multiple windows per app.
Modern MacOS (post OSX) got away from the classic MacOS (<=9) workflow and now occupies an awkward position of having the worst characteristics of Windows, Gnome, and OSX.
Similarly, if I want two apps side by side, it's even more awkward. Ideally I would want to avoid wasting pixels by having unfilled areas, so it's a lot of finnicky dragging to make sure they align up. In Windows, it requires two clicks.
Agreed snapping would be nice. Windows does this well out of the box. MacOS leaves way too much quality of life to third party apps.
Try the "Chromium Wheel Scroll Smoother" extension. It's a hack, but I've managed to make scrolling as fast as Firefox is, which I much prefer.
KDE on manjaro here.
From everything I've seen I dread upgrading to Windows 11 only slightly less than just figuring out how to convert it all to work on Linux somehow. I imagine like everyone I will put it off until the last possible second.
No need to reply about how you can do everything on Linux now, until wine works perfectly with $100k equipment that only works with Windows software from 2004 100% of the time it's too risky ;-)
The point is that I understand how much of a pain it would be to convert to using Linux and still think it could potentially be worth it compared to upgrading to Windows 11. I would never consider it at all if it was just an OS instead of an experience... what are the odds that the software works on Windows 11 perfectly anyway, my experience going from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was pretty miserable and that was 3 years after Windows 10 was standard.
Linux still barely works in 2022 (and if one distro will become really popular, with a big investment of money like Ubuntu did once, they will ad ads, like Ubuntu added Amazon), and MacOS works just on Apple HW (and has ads for Apple services baked-in too, just less obnoxious).
You can use ChromeOS! Which is literally ad tech.
Pick your poison.
I have had zero problem running linux as my daily driver for the last 10 years, care to explain your comment? The only problem that I have is that video games don't always work because the developers don't care.
does anyone actually use those? i've always thought they were a stupid gimmick
- Hardware support - if you don't have any special needs, it tends to work well, but as soon as you go into exotic stuff like digitizers or DP daisy chaining, GPU switching, or you are just plain unlucky, expect a world of hurt
- UI Papercuts: There's a ton of these - like extracting files in GUI is by far the least intuitive under GNOME compared to other OS's, no thumbnails, pdf reader can't be set to exactly how I like it, and made to remember it, etc. - every DE has its own niggles. The fact that every DE has its own set of apps - if using GNOME it comes with its own pdf reader, god forbid you use a third-party one, creates a strange culty feeling among app devs. Also, closed source, monetized apps are reviled, even if they solve a problem better than anything open source.
- Development experience: Ironically terrible. Binary compatibility is nonexistent, compiling stuff generally involves apt-geting (or equivalent) packages and hoping you have the right versions in the repos. Some of the stuff in the repos doesn't even work (insta-crashes), due to being built wrong.
Ubuntu keeps forgetting the sound devices output I set, and I have to config it every single time the machine comes back from sleep (I’m using sound via hdmi on my monitor, I’m guessing it has something to do with the monitor sleeping in different way).
And the usual, sleep/ suspend doesn’t work. There are 50% chance of my 4k monitor doesn’t come back up after sleeping, and I have to unplug and replug it in for it to work.
Hardware support.
Broken UI experience.
Poorly designed subsystems. See PulseAudio.
Cognitive overload. Thousands of distros with tens of desktop environments using different toolkits. Each desktop environment has its own suite of software. So instead of having a solid set of great working apps there are tons of poorly made apps.
If you need to use Visual Studio, Photoshop, Lightroom, 3d max, Autocad, Premiere Pro, Ableton Live, Mathcad etc., you are out of luck.
(Let alone the dozen of small KDE issues we've had over the years. It's really easy to get that desktop in an uninteractible state if you click the wrong things.)
the gnome filepicker has no thumbnails
My GPU is no longer supported and I couldn't revert to last working Nvidia drivers in Manjaro because things were changed. Not sure how the open source version is capable of rendering 3D or compatible with Lutris/Wine.
It's not the "barely works" in my case but there are issues around that are giving me a feeling I'm using Windows 98 and ME again.
What do you mean by this?
And about 90% of phone users use Android, which is (distantly) based on Linux. That's a lot of users!
I actually have to use office quite a bit and settled on freeoffice (which is freeware and not open source). It works perfectly for my needs. The Teams client is crap but I've always dodged it.
Evolution suits my needs (O365 connectivity + a host of other personal email accounts). We still need a better Linux email client, I'm seriously considering it making it my lifetime hobby project (I'm imagining a server + client implementation to make it easier to decouple the UI as I'd really like both a TUI and GUI).
The only thing for which I spin up a VM every now and then is for graphics editing (I use the affinity suite which is amazing for its price but just doesn't work with Wine).
Really the only people who can't use reliably use Linux are those who use proprietary apps that don't work on Wine (which there aren't that many) and designers. If you're a power user I'd definitely recommend you give a spin. You might like what you find.
I use Visual Studio, so that is not my case. And besides working I use Photoshop and Lightroom a lot. And some gaming, which I can't do on Linux.
Apart from that, even not doing anything else in Linux but browsing the web is a poor experience for me.
You're getting a lot of comments about "what do you mean linux barely works" but I switched to Linux full time in the middle of Windows 10 and know exactly what you mean. There's a lot of stuff in Linux that's simply _different_ than Windows, and general infamiliarity means that some things that you know how to do on Windows seems to be impossible on Linux, until you learn how Linux and your particular distro chooses to organize things
But then Windows has the same problems as compared to Linux. I switched to Linux for programming purposes, and there's a lot of things that Linux does that I don't know the easy way to do in Windows[0]. Ultimately both OSes are simply different, and once you get used to one the other starts to seem really weird
That being said, a lot of things in Linux do take a lot more effort than in Windows. Part of it's because Linux is made by programmers for programmers. In MacOS, it either works or it's not possible. In Windows, it might work out of the box, it might take tweaking some registry keys, or it might simply not be a thing you can do (the latter category is fairly rare). In Linux, it might work out of the box, or it might takes you a couple of weeks of chasing down weird issues and compiling random patches from GitHub gists to fix something that really shouldn't be a problem in the first place
[0] For example, "search all files in this directory and its subdirectories for this particular phrase" is `grep -nR phrase` in a Linux terminal. In Windows I think I'd probably open the folder in VS Code and use its search tool. In the Windows case I can then click around to look at the results, or in the Linux case I can pipe it into a file and open it in vim and be able to grep my grep. They might eventually accomplish the same thing, but there's just different ways to do it, and I think which one is better depends heavily on what you prefer and what kind of work you're doing
Though honestly, I do think you can just install ripgrep and use it in PowerShell.
To the former: I never use them and they literally never push themselves on me.
To the latter: Apple's hardware is far and away the most pleasant to use. Every windows machine I've used in the last decade (bought an XPS 13 in 2019 out of necessity) is just wonky. Feels less polished on the hardware side, and fighting with drivers and bloatware is not what I want to deal with. Like, does a laptop really need some stupid, custom audio interface to be able to control whether I'm using a headphone jack or built-in speakers? On the XPS, you do. It's absurd.
And Valve/Steamdeck is really just creating even more Windows dependence. Because of Proton everyone just assumes you don't need to make cross platform games anymore, so game devs are just happy making Windows only games.
Yes, occassionally there is a problem. HW incompatinility (new laptops), missing drivers (rarely as I am explicitly trying to buy well-supported HW), won't boot after a bad update (messed up ramdisk or config file) but easily fixable. You have to get used to couple of annoyances. But KDE DE is awesome, KDE Connect for Android too and lots of software works perfectly and let me do jobs I daily do. I have zero need to switch to Mac or Windows (used both before as well) and I enjoy having more control over my computing, updates, configuration. I can pick almost any HW I want on the desktop. I am not limited by a single range of badly-built, heavy and easy to dent macbooks, etc.
But people are different with different needs. It is not for everyone. Though I am really a happy linux user and do not plan to change that and I don't care about any M1 marketing bullshit, truetone or windows defender, cortana or whatever. Those may be nice-to-have, provide couple of fancy slight conviniences but in the end the actual hard work is done by all your skills, not the machine or OS.
So make all features modular with advanced user being able to remove and get a lean and mean OS.
We want less, we want speed.
P. S. It is about time to upgrade the File System. It is too slow...
It's one of the two reasons why Linux isn't ubiquitous on the desktop. (The other being open source doesn't provide enough incentive to do the boring unsexy work)
Fragmentation kills support. Imagine non technical users searching for help on an issue. First finding articles on Windows, then version X, then getting 'only applies with piece X, Y, Z installed'. That's already a problem and the suggestion of making Windows less 'batteries included' would make it harder for the mainstream users, who are the bulk of users.
Fragmentation also kills products, it increases development costs, reduces velocity etc.
Microsoft knew/knows how to make a better product, they just don't choose to because they evaluate they can make more money by screwing consumers over.
In my opinion we need regulation regarding anti-features. It's not perfect but it's the approach that is the answer in the non-digital world.
The OS has gone to shit, but people keep right on using it and complaining about how bad it's getting. What is your lame priority for sticking with it? Don't tell me gaming - get a console or VR headset, or steam on Linux. If you're that hung up on one game that doesn't run anywhere else then again you need to change your priorities. If it's using Excel or Word with a bunch of customizations that won't work in LibreOffice, again you need to change your priorities or approach to solving the problems you did that to solve.
What about basic users? They don't care whether they should be using KDE Plasma or a Gnome-based window manager etc - maybe they want something that 'just works'
There are Linux distributions and MacOS that "just work" a LOT better than Windows these days.
Tell me you're not a gamer without telling me you're not a gamer.
The desire to play with mouse + keyboard is reason enough to stick with a PC. Wanting to play in 1440p @ 144 fps is another. First-class support for Discord. Steam sales. I could go on and on about reasons to play on PC.
Steam on Linux is getting better, and the success of the Steam Deck might convince developers to offer greater Linux support, but it's still not at the level it needs to be. Not to mention this argument completely ignores non-Steam games like League of Legends. It kind of works on Linux...sometimes...and with a lot of configuration and work.
Also, the suggestion to just get a VR headset is absurd.
Adobe and Autodesk products.
>If it's using Excel or Word with a bunch of customizations that won't work in LibreOffice, again you need to change your priorities or approach to solving the problems you did that to solve.
Only because MS is hell-bent on destroying their ecosystem. As long as Windows 10 is still receiving security updates, I can keep getting actual work done instead of investing a ton of time into things I care nothing about. I have no interest in developing office/photo/cad software, only in using those things.
I don't really care about the telemetry. For some reason, I don't see the in-UI ads people are complaining about. Yes, sometimes I'm annoyed by it. I'm even more annoyed when I run Linux on desktops. So what?
And don't get me started on just how condescending it is for you to be telling people their priorities are wrong because they are not yours. There's nothing wrong with sticking to Windows because that one game you're hung up on doesn't run on Windows. There's nothing wrong with using Excel or Word because that one extension you're using doesn't work or doesn't exist on LibreOffice. Telling people to "get a console or VR headset" for gaming instead of their Windows rig with the latest AAA-games that won't run on Linux (yet)? That's just obnoxiously ignorant.
There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what they want.
You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.
Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from you, so Excel won't be available. But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information.
>But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on spreadsheets that you need to send to organizations that heavily rely on MS Office.
Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.
Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document. I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.
Is the WASM "untrusted"? Sure, I guess, all code you haven't written yourself is "untrusted" by default. Why would a native application shipped via CD or download be any more "trusted"?
Oh and it's soooo slow :(
However Excel Online breaks down quickly with large file sizes, loses formatting and struggles mightily with complex macros.
[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...
This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because you can customize things right down to the kernel level and generally get the result you're looking for in a pretty direct fashion. I now have it set up so that it detects the model of keyboard I plugged in and redirects specific models to specific macro layers - a seemingly obvious two-keyboards use case that can be a serious hassle on Windows without resorting to a hardware solution.
And that browser more likely is owned by oogle...
For example: right now, it's impossible to edit a document online with Track Changes without showing all the changes (which makes documents practically unreadable). And you don't even have pages online, documents are shown with a continuous layout where it's difficult to know where pages start and end.
When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway.
On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.
And also, can’t you just disable Secure Boot?
[1]: "On Ubuntu, all pre-built binaries intended to be loaded as part of the boot process, with the exception of the initrd image, are signed by Canonical's UEFI certificate, which itself is implicitly trusted by being embedded in the shim loader, itself signed by Microsoft.
On architectures or systems where pre-loaded signing certificates from Microsoft are not available or loaded in firmware, users may replace the existing signatures on shim or grub and load them as they wish, verifying against their own certificates imported in the system's firmware."
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot#How_UEFI_Secure_Boot...
I've not done it personally as most of my machines I just disable Secure Boot, but it's an option if you know about it and buy carefully.
I see what you mean now, I screwed up reading your first comment.
Even though Secure Boot can be disabled on most hardware afaict [0] that's still a step consumers won't take so the point still stands easily. Especially with the amount of "you will break everything and kick a a puppy" that manufacturers throw in there to disuade anyone who manages to get to the menu.
[0] worked at a repair ahop until 1.5ish weeks ago, have disabled SB on a lot of hardware.
IIRC I read an anecdote a few years back that if MS ever lost the code to their office products they couldn't re-implement it 100% compatible again since they don't completely abide by any standards like the Open Document Format.
I will always continue to harbor hatred for MSs Office products since when I had to write a big piece of homework for 9th grade in school (a "Facharbeit", kinda like a mini Bachelor's thesis as an intro to scientific writing) I then had to transfer the file from my computer via USB drive to my fathers' PC to print it out. Naive as i was, I didn't think to double-check the formatting after the transfer since it was the same software on the same version on the same OS etc. Ended getting a "1 (very good)" for content but the formatting grade was so bad it dragged the combined mark down to a "3 (satisfactory)". Since then I'll only print documents after converting to pdf and double-checking everything is ok and will never voluntarily use an MS Office product ever again.
Linux would kill it if it made it trivially easy to run Windows inside a sanitised and privatised container or VM that prevented telemetry and all the other nonsense.
I suspect a lot of people would accept a modest performance hit if that were possible.
She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders.
There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.
> There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
I'm not aware of any generation for which being comfortable with those things hasn't put one in, at least (I'm being very conservative), the top 20% of computer literacy. Most people are bad at just using a computer—given how long it's been a problem, there's either a lot of essential complexity there that cannot be mitigated or avoided to improve usability, or we as an industry have just done a terrible job designing desktop operating systems for regular people. I don't think tablets et c. have much to do with it.
Edit: Defacto above meaning, when I go into best buy, that is what is pre-loaded. Or I go to walmart, that is what comes on the computer.
Edit: 'there is probably a good future where Chrome OS' typo or poor wording. Meant to say something along the lines of, 'there is probably a good chance that a Chrome OS future happens'
That's even worse, because as the saying goes, those who never had freedom (or ownership, for that matter) won't miss it.
https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/chrome-os/chromebook/228534/....
I noticed chromebook getting big in the education space and really getting into the hands of kids 7 years so. Your business executives I assume are old enough to pre-date chromebook's big debut in eductaion? They likewise are probably most familiar with Windows and that is why they hand it down as the required bit of software? or probably a sweet business contract, that also plays a factor.
A lot of it is security hardening but the problem is I have to give all control to Apple. There is no way for me to change anything in the read only OS part without the whole rigmarole of booting into recovery mode and blessing my changes with every update. There should be a way I can sign my own changes. It's the Apple way or the highway. And I'm running into more and more issues when the Apple way is just not good enough for me.
I'm really so happy with having options again with KDE. No more opinionated software for me.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...
If you have to remove a load-bearing pillar to install a light-switch, the design is poor, to say the least.
- root access - doesn’t disable SIP
- Disabling SIP requires you to go through many contortions.
People didn’t need to disable SIP to install Chrome. They were doing it for other reasons.
This morning I was reminded, my work Mac has a dozen daemons trying to contact things I don't want, such as icloud, itunes, google, etc. A fraction of these are ostensibly useful, but I had to resort to Little Snitch to block them because the OS is read-only, i.e. insanity.
Even the user-hostile mess of Windows allows me to turn off the worse services... although even that is dwindling.
But 100% agree that they have got to kill treating windows as a marketing channel to advertise and arbitrarily making edge hard to customize to avoid being pushed the Microsoft narrative. Telemetry I'm not as concerned about, but it should be easy to turn off, and it should ask you before using windows if you want to turn it off. I'd leave it on. But obscuring this stuff just loses peoples trust. Trust is the battleground at the moment, google, facebook, apple, microsoft are really burning their bridges in this area. You don't get that back easily, people are still angry at Microsoft for stuff they did 3 decades ago.
1) UX teams who have to change things to jutify their existence. None of the problems in Windows 10 imho were related to major UX problems, just things that should have been fixed like the stupid search function which can't find "Explorer" when you type in "Explore" 2) UX people who think that the world cares as much as they do about the fact the UI looks a bit "dated" and needs to be refreshed otherwise people will leave! Apple haven't massively changed MacOS and people still use that. 3) Strategic people who are trying to pre-empt or force a different way of interacting with the OS so that things like AI, blockchain, or whatever will work more naturally. 4) Development teams who have decided that the programming model is wrong again and therefore they will make a load more changes. If I was a Product Manager at MS I would be depressed and embarrassed by the number of inconsistencies in the platform. It would be understandable if "windows 10 apps will start to look different" but this is so random, it is annoying. 5) Finance people who can't accept that a paid-for product should have exactly zero adverts and the whole premise is obnoxious and stinks of greed when it's not like MS are struggling to make money. 6) Cloud everything even when those experiences e.g. Office365 are noticeably worse in the cloud. Also, they are charging you the same/more even though they can now manage everything centrally with no deployment costs. 7) The whole security accounts eco system is another disaster. "Log in with MS account", "Is it a work or personal account?". How should I know? It's your account. "Do you want to link all these devices?" "No", "Well we will anyway because we have assumed you want to and we were only asking to pretend it was your choice"
Microsoft, Microsoft, we love you but we need to talk!
MS is annihilating the good will they get from me via VSCode, Terminal, VStudio etc...
1) The ads, my god, the ads! Even normal, non-tech, people see this stuff and make a sour face.
2) "Lets finish setting up your PC" : Excuse me sir, its been set up for 4 years. Stop trying to get me to link my phone! I don't want O365 at home! I don't want to switch to Edge (it is not terrible but have made another choice.) I better be careful ant not mis-click or god knows what settings will be changed.
The UI stuff i really don't care a wit about.
Suggestion: Whatever, fine leave this garbage in 'Home' edition but let 'Pro' mean PRO and stop fighting me.
People always talk about google dying. Yeah, how about Microsoft goes dying, how are they even still in business I just don't get it..
Sure, Apple has a different workflow. Pro-Apple peeps insist I should 'learn it'. Why? I know the Apple workflow. In my eyes, it is inferior to the one offered by Windows, and KDE on Linux. Everyone has their opinions of course. I respect people who can get stuff done on a Mac, but I'm not one of those people. I grew up on MS-DOS, Linux, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, etc. I'm left-handed and use alternative inputs.
I also don't care about the UX design. It's a step above Windows 10, that is all that matters.
Both Apple AND Microsoft could learn a ton of stuff from each other. For Apple: Don't dictate user workflows. For Microsoft, consistency is key.
That is all.
Have you tried other desktop environments on linux?
Glutton for punishment I see. Seriously, I used WSL2 under Win10 for a year as a (very) poor man's linux for $dayjob. Recently switched to a Mac. I do keep pressing on getting Linux laptops, having run them for work for the last 22+ years ...
WSL2 is garbage. Pure and simple. Even on an 8 core 16 thread 64 GB monster with Nvidia graphics. My view on it is that it is an attempt by MSFT to staunch the flow of developers off their platform. To say "hey, see, we do linux within windows". But then you use it. And get bitten in the behind, repeatably, by the memory compaction bit, even after tuning the overall memory usage of WSL2.
I was able to get a rough linux desktop by using MobaXterm, single root display, and then running Xfce4 (which I had to build myself, as our corporate approved WSL2 distro was/is broken in so ... so many ways). This setup regularly crashed WSL2, and often windows.
When I mentioned this in various fora, windows fans claim that the OS isn't buggy, it must be the hardware. Many BSOD, many hangs, crashes, etc. Couldn't be the OS. Had to be hardware. Or drivers.
Yeah. About that.
I believe that feature was also recently removed in Windows 11
I'll also try to avoid any job that requires MS Office. Nowadays I have to "Save as" to easily navigate to a local folder, otherwise it takes quite a few steps to move away from the OneDrive default folder. Windows 10 is bad enough, but whatever I heard about 11 seems to be much worse.
MSFT has made the decision to suck money on Cloud, which is fine. I'd like to remind you not to fall into the WSL trap. Use a standalone Linux instead. Once you are getting used to WSL you are probably getting sucked into Windows anyway.
A list of freq games:
1) Baldur's Gate EE Trilogy (And their EE cousins)
2) Quake I (this I'm sure can be played in Linux directly)
3) Diablo 2 (Also think there is a Linux version, they even have a MacOS one)
That's pretty much it, and TBH I don't really play them frequently, maybe a few times a week? So yeah I can probably move into Linux right now, and the only "obstacle" is that I removed most bullshits from Windows 10 Pro and it is now usable, so I'm kinda lazy to change. On the other side, since I want to learn sys programming, that's some incentive to move to Linux...
Diablo 2 doesn't have an official Linux version but there is a source port called OpenDiablo 2. Diablo 2 also runs well under Wine.
I think wine is doing a more important job than MS at allowing windows to die
I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others.
I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaints of Linux "still not working" in 2022 effortlessly glide over the obvious: you're already making it an unfair fight when you adopt an OS to a non-native machine.
If you don't own the OS what's the point of complaining? MacOS and Windows will never have the best interests of the user at heart because that's not where the capital incentives are. It's really as simple as that. Are you going to develop a patch for Windows that makes Windows do as you want? If you do, who at Microsoft is going to take your PR? No one?
This behavior should be blindingly obvious to anyone who thinks for a second where the incentives are. If the incentives are not aligned with yours, it's time to a. consider paying for a volume license for LTSC so you can get the experience you want that you pay for and vote with your dollars or b. use an OS that isn't abusive.
C. moan and complain isn't actually a productive strategy because the money bundled into your OS cost is neglible to the value of your metrics and pushing a subscription to Office that actually makes Microsoft money. People keep smashing this button in the vain hope something will change. Stop and think. Follow the money. Do something about your situation that doesn't enrage you so often.
I did as well, an Asus 1215B netbook, remember those?
The wlan still has issues to work properly to this day, the graphics card should be able to do OpenGL 4.1/DirectX 11, yet the AMD driver only does OpenGL 3.3.
Good that it was shipped with official Linux support.
I'm expecting a Framework soon, which touts official support for Fedora so looking forward to yet another bug-free experience there.
XPS 13 Developer Edition you say?
https://medium.com/@AlexMichelOrg/like-linux-then-dont-buy-d...
Have you owned and used an XPS 13 Developer Edition? Because now it just looks like you're driving around the internet for examples of things that prop up your argument.
I have one I use every day and have for the three years I've owned it. It works great on Ubuntu and Arch Linux. No complaints.
It is always the other people's fault that Linux doesn't quite work, but "my system works just perfectly", when in reality keeps being the same hit and miss as always.
What I am saying is that most people looking to make comparisons should start by comparing Linux-shipped machines for a baseline standard. I've just told you that everything on my XPS 13 Developer Edition shipped fully working, without any user intervention. Am I the lier and your Medium article the true arbiter? That's up to you to decide. But maybe go out there and give one a shot yourself that isn't ancient, like a Framework (Framework is Linux-supported but not shipped; other alternatives include the Star Labs' line, System76, and Tuxedo) and tell me your experience. You can always install Windows after.
My anecdotes are also based on hardware bought with Linux pre-installed on them.
While System76 and Tuxedo are good options for technical users, the best buy audience will never get to them, at very best they will buy an Android or ChromeOS based device.
To buy one you'll need to go through a Microsoft Partner as detailed here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/how-to-buy/how-to-...
Searching the web for "buy ltsc license" is also fruitful.
And if I just want a single Windows machine and not 5?
Suggesting switching to an entirely different OS to someone who's complaining that their habitual OS no longer behaves as it used to isn't very useful.
>I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others. I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines.
You don't understand because you're failing to empathize with what people are saying, because it's not a problem you personally experience. Let's see if this works: suppose you find a shoe manufacturer that makes these really neat shoes that you love. You love them so much that every time they wear out, you buy the next model from that manufacturer. Each model is slightly different from the last, but you like all of them better than the competition. As you've gotten used to them, you've started to develop certain habits with these shoes, such as a technique to tie the laces that makes you do it very fast. But over time, the manufacturer has started to change the way it makes the shoes, such that they're not as comfortable as they used to be, or some of your habits no longer work with them. Now, you don't want to buy from a different manufacturer. At this point your feet are accustomed to the way these shoes fit, and other shoes feel completely different, even if in some ways they're objectively better. You don't want shoes from a different brand, you want the shoes this one used to make, which used to be so much better than this.
TL;DR: Something can be worse than it used to be, and still be better than the alternatives.
To be clear I support my wife's LTSC install and use Windows 11 with WSL and WSLg for work.
> I don't think even the LTSC edition avoids the UX problems discussed here.
I think it does but please highlight which problems it doesnt avoid.
> suppose you find a shoe manufacturer that makes these really neat shoes that you love.
Do they respect me as a user? What are their capital incentives? If not aligned with mine why do I love them? Can I change my purchasing habits so their capital incentives align? If not, I should probably do something less rage-inducing for my own health.
I've never used it, I was guessing based on my understanding of what LTSC is.
>Do they respect me as a user? What are their capital incentives? If not aligned with mine why do I love them?
The thing you love is the shoes, not the shoes' manufacturer.
>Can I change my purchasing habits so their capital incentives align?
Can you, as in, is it possible for you at a reasonable cost? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the user. "Would you?" is the real question. If we're assuming that your shoes fit you best, why would you switch to a different brand that would fit you worse? Are you implying that the natural tendency of a product is to get worse until it's no better than its competitors?
Yes! And I'll get a little philosophical here but if we really take an eagle's eye view on the source of this problem it's that capitalism insists on growth to keep the machine of prosperity running. On a microcosmic scale you can see this at work inside companies, which must pursue new growth streams as existing markets become saturated. With single digit growth in OS licenses, Microsoft pursues cloud/Office/SaaS to continue offering investors big returns. This leads to the inevitable downward spiral of the quality of former core products and desperate moves to monetize essentially a delivery vehicle to sell SaaS products.
Stepping outside Microsoft for a moment and looking at Apple we can already see this emergent behavior in Apple's pivot to services and the marketing of those services inside its SaaS/subscription delivery vehicles, such as iCloud+, Apple TV, Arcade etc.
Returning to Microsoft, this is why we see Windows licenses now being sold basically for free and Microsoft removing virtually all burdens to a user running an unlicensed OS. It no longer matters to their new core business.
Given this duopoly of OSes with a new service fetish it behooves a user of these OSes to either pay so much money to Microsoft for respectful OS editions they can't help but notice (volume licensing LTSC) or explore alternatives that aren't beholden to these vicious imperatives.
>> UX Consistency
Check
>> Widgets & MSN
Check
>> Unnecessary Cosmetic Changes
If we're strictly talking about OP's grievances, current LTSC doesn't have them but next LTSC based on Windows 11 will.
>> Customization Lock-In
Same as above
>> Telemetry & Microsoft Account
LTSC provides one extra level of telemetry setting but even set to that level it's still chock full of telemetry.
So, why Microsoft shouldn't use the exact feature they have built so painstakingly? Also, forcing these older UI toolkits to render the same as the latest iteration would break many many things.
We're talking about an OS which includes almost complete copies of its older versions and some patched installations of InstallShield to begin with.
I have no words for ads though. This is really very bad.
>The API to render a Windows 11 native context menu does not exist.
My comment was about the paragraph starting with:
There’s a meme about how there are at least ten different design conventions in Windows 11 and it’s very much “in your face” once you start using Windows 11 on the daily.
> There is Windows Forms, WPF, MAUI, UWP, WTL, WinUI, MFC, and I am sure others that I am missing.
During my regular Windows user years, I used to follow Redmond's side closely too. From my understanding, there are some factors contributing to current state.
The leading reason is "backwards compatibility at all costs", including but not limited to how programs behave. It's known that until Windows clamped down on security hard, older Windows programs used whatever functions they can find from .dlls, and also used "bugs" to achieve what they want. So, any changes which might affect how an older program look or feel are strongly frowned upon.
Windows is a gigantic codebase, and until semi-recently, Windows team didn't know what depended on what (the biggest revelation was printing support needed GDI, which brought all UI toolkit in, hence building a CLI only Windows was impossible). So, I'm guessing they're not entirely sure which parts of these applications are used by 3rd party applications. So they leave in, as-is, so nothing breaks.
The latest layer is the Microsoft's culture of "no polish, just new features" mentality. There's a very revealing writing by someone in Microsoft NT kernel team who said that "We can optimize something, but the change will be reverted, and you'll be berated because new features are much important than improving existing others, because new features are which make headlines and bring more revenue in".
Personally, I don't think that Windows team cares much about UI consistency and some other excellence. It's just a cash-cow and enabler of other applications, that's all, and while I'm not a Windows user, I find it sad.
I'm not stating whether it's a problem or not, just iterating/expanding on what the author have said.
> I know this is not a popular opinion
So much telemetry stuff running in the background, so many unnecessary updates kicking in, heavy CPU and memory usage and the general perceived slowness of the OS have all immediately pushed me back to Linux. There's no bloat, the difference in performance is night and day, and I have to never worry about any privacy-related stuff.
Long live Linux Desktop.
Oh, cool, a recent high-end laptop that works well with linux. Could you share the model?
Above all, I think the problem is in priorities - Notepad and Task Manager _should_ be consistent with the OS. But when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS, it's fair to start raising some questions.
Do you have any evidence that Notepad and Task Manager required "so much focus"?
The new Notepad's about as bare-bones as the old Notepad, it just happens to use XAML Islands for the UI. It would be surprising if it significantly detracted from other efforts.
Yes, I am fully aware of the fact that different teams do different things at a big company, but funnily enough when asked about high-priority issues the answer is almost universally "We don't have enough time and/or developers to tackle this right now." But there is magically time for MSN toolbars and Notepad tweaks.
Microsoft’s ad revenue is $10B (1). Allowing advertisers to send ads based on user profiles is a major feature of digital advertising. Collecting telemetry data improves the user profiling.
These types of changes have a direct positive impact on one of Microsoft’s fastest growing revenue stream. This will lead to meaningful revenue growth.
(1) https://digiday.com/media/microsofts-ad-revenue-hit-10b-and-...
That is not the case, its best thought of as a batch of little companies that band together to create a product. These companies may compete for resources and attention internally and so each one will optimize for their own benefit.
Ads in Edge? That's probably a decision made by some Principal Program Manager with director support on the browser team. The metrics that get tracked for that event are likely how many people click through the ad, rather than the over all impact to the OS.
The OS Core team doesn't have the influence to say no, or stop the browser from showing those ads. I recall internally when I (a paying customer for O365) got a toast (that is what a popup ad is called internally) for O365 and I decided to raise an issue.
Some PM II (mid-level PM was running the campaign, and they were showing metrics that more people signed up for O365 as a result of the campaign, so per them it was good. I was not in that organization and since that director had OKRs that required signups, he told me to go away.
The core OS stripped down has none of these things, but at integrated build, lots of stuff gets put in, and when one team says no to something, often another one will say yes. A good example is that Office has its own update infrastructure and tooling outside of Windows Update. Why? Office wanted to deliver updates on weekly basis and Windows Update said no as that would be too impacting for users, so Office simply said ok and built their own.
These issues rarely if ever get surfaced to an executive, as by the time the metrics get up to a CVP generally they are showing broader trends, like adoption, or game breaking bugs, or as you note, the line going up. Executives do not get these problems (such as inconsistent UI) to them. Those things rarely rise above a Group PM or Engineering Manager level, and those people often do not care about the complaint as for that metric helps them or is part of their strategy.
Windows, the product team cannot do anything about it due to political problems internally at MS and that is not the engineering team behind Window's fault. We (as that was a team I was on) hated when a product team would do something obnoxious and if we could catch it prior to release would often bluntly complain. More often than not we would get told that we were the platform and to stay out of the other teams business.
Anyways, there isn't some mass company dark pattern strategy or other conspiracy, just a bunch of little factions that are all optimizing for their own interests. Office is probably the worst offender of the batch (Skype, Teams, OneDrive) and Windows can do little about it.
I tried to move a file in Explorer using the context menu and I couldn't confidently tell Cut/Copy/Rename icons apart because they are just abstract lines that represents the file operation.
I started looking at ways to get the original Context Menu back, and then I just decided to rollback to Windows 10.
Your priority as a user are different, but, sorry to say, your voice doesn't count. The year-end revenue and KPI is what counts, because you and 99% of other companies will still be buying and using PCs with Windows preinstalled and paying Microsoft for licences. You say so yourself, you're disappointed with the direction Windows is taking, but you still use it [for very legitimate reasons].
Why should Microsoft sell Windows for $199, when they can earn $199 + $x/month/user from ads and create more value for its shareholders?
Very simply, the money lost because some people have left Windows for greener pastures is being offset by the increased revenue.
And yet... I was once griping about one or another of the many tricky ways excessively-clever web designers abuse javascript to impose their concept of a "user experience" on me when I would deeply prefer they simply left well enough alone, and my listener replied - "but what if I want the experience they're offering"? - Well, that thought had never occurred to me.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/18/22940517/windows-11-pro-r...
Ads in apps? Pioneered in Android. Tricking the user to log in using Microsoft account? You can't make much use of an Android phone unless you sign in with your google account. Also, Apple requests having an Apple Id.
I wonder what if someone at Apple, Google, Microsoft decides at some point that you shouldn't be able to use your own device, bought with your own money? They can disable your account at one push of a button. Or maybe a state agency decides you are one of the bad guys.
This depends on the phone. Samsung phones aren’t terribly bad, I’ve been using one without google account for a few months now. For instance, the built-in web browser has a command like “setup an ad blocker”.
I bought a MacBook recently after switching from Mac OS X to Windows and Linux 13 years ago. After booting for the first time I opened the settings app do do some changes and was expecting to google a lot and I didn't have to. The settings still have the same layout and it generally worked the same as on macOS 10.4. The same was true for the preinstalled system apps. They were in the same place, had the same names and generally functioned the same expect some UI changes. There are additions to the UI that replaced some old features like multiple desktops, the control center and the widgets but they didn't any of my usage patterns and it was pretty easy to integrate them into my regular workflow.
If you look at it from a normal users POV Apple has much better backwards compatibility than Microsoft, if my software is being maintained by a dev and I'm willing to update to the newer versions. If I want to keep using a program that was released 20 years ago not so much, but Microsoft has been breaking a lot of these programs in the last 5 years as well.
Imagine Windows doing to their OS the way they did with their browser, forking opensource code and rebranding it as their own. I could see them deciding to take some flavor of Linux (or maybe even something esoteric like Google's Fuchsia), and just slapping on their bloat & spyware.
I don't think this would damage Microsoft's marketshare as much as some people think. Sure, they no longer have "their own codebase", but I don't see the benefit in that. Hell, they could go lower & build off the actual Linux kernel and then build there own distro off of that. That way they can still enforce certain structures at a low level.
I would deeply enjoy this, although I would not use it (sticking with Linux). But imagine Microsoft embracing & advocating for AppImages/Flatpaks/Snap packages, Vulken, WINE/Steam Proton, etc. Imagine building for only 2 platforms to get your app running on (nearly) all devices. Imagine having Linux on the desktop get the same treatment it got with Linux on mobile.
Again, I understand this sounds like I'm predicting pigs will fly, or it'll rain cats & dogs, or the government will be efficient, but I'm serious, I can see this happening. Maybe not soon, but the next decade could be very interesting to see how this fabled "new" Microsoft moves & behaves.
That's neither a hot take nor a new one. People have been predicting it since the 1900s. If anything, more people believe it than doubt it.
But sadly, after making these predictions, and being proven wrong, year after year, no one sits down and asks why it didn't happen.
But I did. So let me try to explain.
The short version is: "The Linux kernel licensing model is hostile to the Windows hardware ecosystem".
What does that mean? Well, the Linux kernel licensing model is GPLv2. But it's more than that. It's actually "GPLv2 plus the interpretation of the kernel developers". And the kernel developers have tried to enforce their interpretation using technical means. Specifically, if you want to compile closed-source drivers into the MAINLINE Linux kernel, they make it difficult for you. Only one company fights this difficulty. That company is Nvidia. How hard does Nividia have it? Nvidia has to ship their kernel driver as two parts. A GPL-compatible stub (which is compiled into the kernel), and a closed-source blob (which connects to this stub).
"That's not so bad" you say. Well there's more. The GPL stub only works for one kernel version. You know, 5.17, 5.18, etc. When the user updates their kernel (which they MUST do in order to get security fixes!), the GPL stub may stop working. Why is that? Because while Linus Torvalds mandates a stable _userland_ API, the internals of the kernel, including drivers and other kernel modules, changes ALL THE TIME. Seriously, stuff is changed and refactored all the time. So, Nvidia must release a new driver each time the kernel updates. That's more work. That means more employees for every hardware vendor. That means every hardware vendor would need to push those costs on to consumers or accept lower profits. That means every hardware vendor would scream bloody murder at Microsoft to not do this.
Not so bad now? But there's more. How do you install the new driver version? When you update the kernel, hopefully your distro is smart enough to grab the new version of the nvidia driver and install it for you also. If that somehow gets out of step, you get a kernel panic. That's an ugly error for Sam Sixpack or Deb McBusinesshuman to deal with. They're certainly going to call their IT department, who is going to call Microsoft and complain. But that's not so bad...
But there's more. Antivirus. Once Linux is underlying the most popular OS in the world, it'll need antivirus. But, antivirus companies will need to release a new kernel module each time there's a new Linux kernel update. Or, they can rely on eBPF. Maybe. eBPF is still untested for that purpose.
"So why can't hardware vendors just release their drivers as GPLv2 and upstream them into the kernel?" Well, that's a possible solution. But companies are generally averse to giving their code away for free, and it's not the default, so the legal departments will have to check it over, and MBA types will have to grok the idea of open-source. Many will push back on Microsoft and ask them to not do this.
"So why can't Microsoft just fork Linux and remove all of the restrictions, give it a stable closed-source driver API and/or make it capable of running Windows 11 drivers natively, and just give the bird to upstream/Torvalds?" Yeah that's very possible. But at that point, is it really using "Linux" or a kernel based on Linux? Why wouldn't they just use BSD instead and avoid 90% of this trouble?
They've never had "taste". Even their attempts at modern flat design are a total disaster.
Security for the longest of time was an afterthought, an entire industry was created to fill this fundamental gap. Even "internet" was an afterthought.
Another issue is that Microsoft does not see things through. They start various seemingly random initiatives and then just give up halfway through. They suck at execution. It's been 10 years since Windows 8, and the UI is messier than ever. Same for their various attempts at a "light" or mobile version of Windows.
I could go on, but the way I see it, Windows is the "people's OS". The use case for it is...all of them. It runs the combined use cases of billions of people, every niche you can think of. Most of these users do not see Windows as particularly enjoyable, nor do they enjoy Microsoft's mismanagement, they suffer in silence because it still somewhat works, and there's no realistic alternative.
Windows is not cool and not high growth, which is why I think Microsoft is doing an "Adobe". It's a platform to sell cloud products and soon will be a cloud platform/subscription in itself. Windows as a service. The writing is on the wall.
a) UI design. It was either a DOS box or a Win 3.11 style window
b) file sharing, simple and intuitive
c) integration with browsers. Browser was standalone. There was no integration.
It's strange to me tat the company during the xp-7 years had very solid and firm understanding of conservative UX design and seemed to take pride in it (essentially enterprise quality even for the end user), that ship seems to have sailed and instead acts like a hybrid of Facebook, Google and Apple worst practices.
I believe the reason users still pay is so the price can justifiably be multiplied in bulk corporate purchases, otherwise they'd give it away for free to get more of that sweet, sweet data. So they can copy Google, poorly.
Why does this story sound so familiar as a Linux desktop user...
Slowly I've just stopped doing those things until eventually, now, we're talking like, a dual boot I use a couple of times a year for things like running exam software or whatever.
Why would they change a winning recipe? Millions (billions) are perfectly happy with their shit sandwiches.
I only support Windows and macOS as a masochistic exercise in extreme cross-platform support, and even then it's only CLI applications and programmatic API's, never GUI bother.
> breaking from the legacy is hard for the sake of backwards compatibility
Generally yes, but in case of Windows the hard part of the problem is already solved. I think it was just the wrong priorities. Specifically, Windows SDK could do following things to enable new styles/controls/behavior:
1. Require new apps to call an API to switch to new stuff, like InitCommonControlsEx
2. Require new apps to include an XML manifest with some flag or version number, like they did with high DPI support
3. A nuclear option — implement new userland, write new apps against that one; NT kernel supports multiple subsystems at the same time, Win32 is one of them.
A good example of that option is the way they did Linux support in WSL1. Not exactly a new subsystem but technically pretty close. They could do something like that only with GUI, and not based on Linux.
BTW, I still use WSL1 every day. Too bad it’s deprecated, WSL2 is VM based, borderline useless for me.
You really can't even blame any of them for being that way, the public could have a multitude of free alternatives with a bit of effort and yet they rather spend 200 on an upfront abusive and honestly highly flawed OS, pay google to store their photos (and scan them with emerging AI technology) and use Facebook for whatever reason people even use that for. Why shouldn't they find the edge of what the public will now accept, since its changed so much. Such is the nature of organizations interacting with a market or the public (in the case of government agencies which operate the same way just less efficiently). As my dearly departed great grandmother said about this sort of thing between drags from her Lucky Strike unfiltered cigarette while tending her rose garden, "Ya gotta get it while the gettin is good!"
(I do support Ukraine but this user interface is bad.)
Windows 11 doesn't seem to justify its existence in any way, and since the decision to require a microsoft account, I've decided I won't be upgrading to Windows 11 for any reason.
When windows 10 reaches EOL I will find an alternative. If its osx, ok. If its linux, ok. But Microsoft seems to continue to make their product worse and worse and pretend they're upgrades.
Windows has always been an inferior OS, but I don't worry or complain about it. It hasn't been on my radar for over 15 years. I've spent that time learning *nix patterns instead of dealing with Windows quirks. That choice has paid massive dividends.
That probably isn't a good thing. Not without firing up some kind of explicit emulator.
I have and can run Linux binaries I had compiled (statically) from the late 90s. Doesn't mean that I should. If you are running ancient games, run them on the ancient OS.
Using this as a reason to dismiss Mac and Linux? Not the best thought out argument. Kinda makes the opposite point than the author intended.
The results for searches firstly did not make sense, some files/emails found but most not.
I resolved the indexing of files by finally finding the right settings page after some time. The only feedback that I had done the right thing was seeing the “number of files indexed” incrementing.
For outlook, I was expecting some settings page within the app that would explain why emails were not being found. After some more time I found that the settings page was outside of outlook! I cannot remember where or how I fixed the issue but it was complete bullshit.
Every once in a while I have these experiences and and wonder how most people live with their computers and the amount of stress and time wasted on stuff that you would expect not to have to deal with in 2022.
Even though I have a soft spot for Microsoft, I abandoned their flagship product, the operating system, many years ago and was probably one of my wisest choices.
Just like I don’t use Google’s flagship product - I just hate it when companies ruin something near perfect by adding shit to please everyone or to milk it so much for profit that it becomes just a pile of trash.
A lot of this appears to be changed just for the sake of it. What I don't understand is - it takes effort to change something. Why not keep the basics the way they are? Start tiles got a reskin I think 2 years ago, and while it changed the visual look (positively) it kept it functionally identical. The current changes... are not. Despite windows being the OS I'm most familiar with, I'm quite certain I'm going to go Linux with wine/proton after Win10 EOL (2025 iirc) - almost every Win11 article gives more reason to hate it, despite me wanting to love it. I'm setting up a server and I think I'll start dabbling with Linux from now itself so the transition is smooth.
I remember that Qt was a big thing though. They had this CSS like capability that would allow you to style your application after the fact. You could also just change the rendering backend at build time.
Is Qt not an option anymore to have all the various GUI details right?
Windows XP, Windows Vista. Windows 7, Windows 8. Windows 10, Windows 11.
After each successful release Microsoft pull a bunch of crap. Users aren't happy and they rather use the older version than upgrade to the new one. Microsoft comes to its senses, release a better version and the cycle repeats.
So we should kind of wait for Windows 12.
The part about Windows that bothers me most is that I have no control regarding how windows behave. I am typing and suddenly I am typing in another window! And there is no way to know what just happened. I could be pressing the ESC key while a window for another application just came in focus. Gone! The window and my text. WTF? Or it could be a window with a default button and I just pressed ENTER. Gone! What just happened? Impossible to know. DO NOT INTERFERE WITH MY FOCUS! If I am typing in a window, DO NOT EVER DISTURB ME. I am operating in a context. MY CONTEXT. Not Cortana. Not some app that wants to do something on a schedule because of some enterprise policy. I am working!
My theory as to why that is is kinda like The Color of the Bikeshed Theory. New management hires want to make a name for themselves and want to work on something that's visible, that they have an illusion they know something about and something that they can use to climb up the corp ladder. So with each iteration some new idiot comes along and wants to start over. Two years later, when the thing's half finished, they move on and a new person comes along...
So it seems that craziness will save me from the other MS craziness
edit: https://archive.ph/q8ayE
These performative acts of shoving politics where it doesn't belong doesn't do anything to change the situation, they just make people like me angry.
A lot of what we are seeing is most likely due to Microsoft's eventual transition to Windows as a subscription. I suspect that's inevitable. As long as I can play my games and read my gmail ... meh.
For that specific change, the Windows Developer Blog post “Extending the Context Menu and Share Dialog in Windows 11” (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extend...) hints at the designers’ reasons.
I haven’t switched to Windows 11 due to the many other complaints I’ve heard, but based on various statements in that post I can imagine good reasons for changing the context menu:
# Saving menu navigation time
Having a long menu that contains every option is not free: it requires more time and effort from the user when they locate and click on the common items they use. Depending on how often the prioritized items are clicked and how big the penalty is for, the tradeoff could be worth it.
I don’t have the data on how much menu navigation time a smaller menu saves in the long term, but since Microsoft forces telemetry on users, hopefully they did at least collect such data while they evaluated the new design.
# Encouraging API upgrades
This change also encourages app developers to upgrade their context menu extensions to the latest API by “punishing” them if they don’t, by making their context menu items slower to access. While it’s understandable that developers of such apps would feel annoyed at this increased pressure to upgrade, such a policy might be an effective way to helping end users by solving the last two Windows 10 context menu problems listed by the blog post. That is, this increased pressure to use a newer API might:
• increase the numbers of apps the user uses whose commands are attributable to that app
• increase the number of apps the user uses whose extensions of the context menu have a lower risk of performance and reliability issues
However, I do see the potential for this backfiring if developers of Windows apps think that Windows is requiring too much upkeep for maintaining their software on Windows to be worth it.
The list is missing the old Win32 API? Microsoft never cared about continuation between UI libraries and HIG. Neither application programmers. They just add another UI when they feel the need. While Gtk is puting a lot effort in compatibility and consistency and they're blamed anyway. Usually for theming which Gtk actually doesn't appreciate. And for Qt compatibility is a business model.
You don’t need to care about old binary compatibility because you don’t have old binaries, only old source code. If your modern compiler doesn’t like it, just build the old compiler instead.
Good luck finding a matching libxyz though, for your git checkout —before 10.years.ago. Friendly reminder to vendor in your third party dependencies alongside your source code.
as a user it makes getting help when something is not working (which is often) very difficult and borderline impossible
not to mention completely infuriating
if i could boot directly into a launcher for my games i would do it in a heartbeat. get the OS out of my way please
The reason of limit of change default edge new tab is simple. It is just due to adwares. The adwares changed the dawn new tabs instead of the users changed it everytime. The popularity is so high that there is no benefit to allow users change it by default. Because users won't do it, adware will.
While I get the point, that is not as true as it sounds. E.g. AFAIK running Tomb Raider 2 is easier on Linux via Proton/Wine than it is on Windows.
Ok, I think this person hasn't tried to run many old games.
I now believe that you can't like Windows because of exactly this. Linux gives you choice, and if someone wants to create a competitor OS from the Linux kernel (or even from another OS) they can. That is incredibly healthy and sustainable.
It's a GOOD thing! The more people that migrate off of Windows the better the world will be because then companies can (hopefully) focus their software development on non-closed, cross-platform ecosystems.
Microsoft is long overdue for a market correction. Hopefully the OS market will diversify, bringing a cambrian explosion of life into the market.
https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf
At least in apple, it just works, I don't think I've ever felt super frustrated that I feel like I want to find a way to report a bug. Sure they've got a feedback form / assistant that may or may not be answered as well, but I don't remember the last time I want to report something in apple. Community forum is good, apple support is 1 click away for hardware related. You just feel the definition of "it just works".
Sure its hard to manage 2 of the biggest tech companies in the world. but when will MS ever learn?
Task Manager's Startup tab?
This is not my experience with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Worked flawlessly with Proton but it didn't even launch correctly on Windows 10. It's a hit-or-miss and not a silver bullet.
0 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...
It is a godawful shame, as Windows has the potential to be quite a good operating system for PCs, with just a bit more engineering effort and a bit less filthy gunk it could be great.
Basically neither Microsoft nor Apple have any pressure to make life better for users.
I'm not really sure about this. Games like Vampire the Masquerade comes to mind.
To this end, I find it somewhat funny how people still believe Microsoft has a redemption arc.
ditched windows (and its apparent organizational brain damage) 18 years ago and have only ever looked back when forced to in employment situations.
strongly believe that if you normalize broken computing by forcing developers to use broken platforms, then they'll produce broken software.
As far as I can tell, our best hope is for Linux to improve at the same rate or faster as it has over the last 5 years for at least the next 5. Only then will Microsoft start to face any meaningful competition in operating systems.
It's easy to point out the consistency issues -- and yeah, they are really bad, and everywhere making Windows 11 feel like an early beta, not a full fledged release. More than anything even basic stuff that's worked well for years or decades has regressed to a point where so many things are barely functional or even recognizable anymore. It's like some designer had MacOS described to them verbally and decided to redesign Windows to look similar. Unfortunately, the latest versions of MacOS aren't all that awesome either when it comes to consistency or usability. In so many ways the design decisions in Windows 11 feel like solutions in search of problems -- they certainly don't make my experience using it any better -- all they do is make me appreciate Windows 10 more than ever (never thought I'd have that sentiment). I keep hoping Windows 11 will get better but even on the latest Insider builds I see very little in the way of improvements to things I really care about so it gives me little confidence.
The article brings up a some great points about how there's no "one" UI framework and the difficulties for developers to make their applications look consistent -- and this is totally true. There's so many different UI frameworks from Microsoft with different levels of maturity, abandonment, usefulness, usability, and use. I'm a big fan of WPF and I think it's one of the best desktop UI frameworks out there -- and sadly it's largely been left to rot which is a real shame and it doesn't support many of the newer aspects of Windows without a lot of hacks. UWP is simply awful -- I swore it off after using it for one project. WinUI and MAUI have huge problems of their own and still feel beta. It makes you wonder what are you supposed to use for new projects when you're stuck with either a great framework that seems dead , or a bunch of new ones that don't feel production ready. This nearly 20 year old blog post from Joel Spolsky is just as relevant and prescient as ever: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
Over the years there have been some changes: So, we have new hardware, some HUGELY important new communications standards, a huge effort on computer security, etc., and it is crucial that Windows has kept up with the changes. I like that. And I like that I can still run my favorite old programs: Since I do all I can with plain text, my most heavily used program is my favorite text editor KEDIT. And I really like hierarchical file systems so really REALLY like Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system) and do a lot of tree walking, searching, copying, deleting, etc.
But Microsoft went for an unstated philosophy of a graphical user interface (GUI) where (a) there is a metaphor of direct manipulation of desktop objects and (b) commands and operations are to be learned by experimentation without documentation. I can see some utility there, otherwise I still like command lines because the documentation tends to be better, it is more clear just what is going on, and I can script, automate some of the operations.
And I get to write software, e.g., in .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET for my Web site startup and whatever else seems worthwhile. So far, I like .NET. I do wish Microsoft had explained, just explained in simple text, just what the heck .NET CORE was. By now I've come to a guess that .NET CORE is irrelevant to me and I should f'get about it -- would have been nice to have had some EXPLANATION.
For the future of GUIs, that seems to be just Web pages, i.e., HTML.
For me, the above is the view of Windows I find most important. For the future, I hope that Microsoft does not mess up that view. To have me a happier customer, Microsoft should concentrate on one word, DOCUMENTATION.
I can understand that Microsoft has some middle managers who want to add things to Windows or change Windows to improve it. Now, for changes such as I mentioned above, SURE. Otherwise, please sit down: Each new version of Windows I find to be, in one word, a pain. The changes are not improvements but PAINS. E.g., with the old version of Windows, after hundreds of hours of work I finally learned and documented for myself how to get routine things done. Then with the changes, I have to invest many more hours just to be able to continue to get routine things done and for no gains at all. Sorry Microsoft middle manager: To me you are like TV producers, what they try for, I don't like; what I like, they don't try for.
E.g., as far as I can tell from a command line window
Examples:
> runas /noprofile /user:mymachine\administrator cmd
is wrong. Just wrong. It doesn't work. First, set aside that from this "example" can't tell what is a constant and what is a variable. So, try all possible combinations. Second, still, nothing works. Nothing. Go for 1, 2, 3 hours trying everything. Did I mention, nothing works? This is grotesquely bad computing. Just awful. Want to make things better, fix things like that.
But it's worse: Go out on the Internet and can find lots of documentation of that command. Some of the documentation has lots of double quote marks. Nothing worked. Hours; nothing worked. We're talking mud wrestling here. Eventually I got the software to request my administrator password, but that was as far as it went.
This isn't my work. Yet my time, effort, energy are soaked up, repeatedly, over and over, by such system management mud wrestling documentation problems.
Eventually I guessed some of what was going on and found another path that did work. It's not fully clear just why that worked, but it did.
Documentation? I took some good notes, and apparently they are better than anything from Microsoft or readily available on the Internet.
The main bottleneck in my startup is the bad documentation that leads to wasted effort in this mud wrestling. What fraction of my effort goes to such stuff? Essentially 100% -- I can't get back to my real work due to a continuing list of such disasters. They are taking up ALL my time, just mud wrestling from bad documentation.
For Windows, Firefox, Acrobat, etc., sure, important security updates and otherwise I'll consider updates in functionality maybe twice a year, maybe once a year, or once each 2nd year. Except for security, bluntly and quite broadly I don't want your updates but will consider some, say, occasionally. As you force updates on me, I get TORQUED, become a VERY unhappy customer.
E.g., Adobe went too far, essentially taking over my PC, at startup, with updates I don't want, with popups, with "Do you want to ...", and yesterday I deleted everything from Adobe now "Dead to me.". Firefox will read a PDF (portable document format) file, at least the ones I want read, a little better than Acrobat. Adobe, with me, you went too far and BLEW IT.
I have big hopes for the future of computing for myself, Microsoft, the computer industry, the economy, and civilization, but I want do to my part, get on with it, and there is no room in that work for me to click "NO" tens of thousands of times to popup windows stopping my work until I answer some "Do you want to ...", and there is no excuse for the system management mud wrestling from bad documentation.
At one time Microsoft was very interested in "developers, developers, developers!!!". Well, I'm trying to be one. Then I hope to be a good customer for Windows Server and SQL Server. And on Windows XP and Windows 7 I got 100,000 lines of .NET code running apparently as intended. But now I've lost YEARS of time in system management mud wrestling from bad documentation.
I can't be a good customer of Windows Server if you have me stuck in a mud hole wasting time.
I would say that .NET Core is certainly relevant to you and shouldn’t be ignored.
As for a simple explanation, another user on this site wrote this which I found extremely helpful. https://dusted.codes/dotnet-basics
https://dusted.codes/dotnet-basics
.NET Basics
Microsoft, this document is HELPING you a LOT with me. Did I mention, my view is that the biggest problem in my software writing, startup, Microsoft, the US economy, the future of computing, and progress in civilization now is in just one word, DOCUMENTATION that is missing for Microsoft's software. This is not funny or a joke but very serious.
Okay, .NET Foundation, through version 4.x, was for writing software only on Windows, and CORE was for writing software on nearly any operating system. Now at .NET version 5, Foundation and CORE have become the same thing.
Okay. I suspect that with CORE/.NET version 5, my old code written using .NET 2.x and 4.x and ASP.NET and ADO.NET will still run as before, mostly or entirely except maybe a lot faster. Okay.
I would make some suggestions about
.NET Basics
(2) Say that jargon is a word used with a meaning not in a standard dictionary and used with a narrow meaning in a narrow field. Well, the document would be better defining more of its jargon. Same for acronyms.
(3) Apparently software can run "on" a platform or "under" the CLI or CLR. Using both on and under makes no sense -- stick with one or the other. Since software stack is so common, maybe stick with on and drop under.
(4) The description of interpreted software is nothing like what I have long understood. The document seems to claim that interpreted software is much the same as just in time complied software; here there is a new sequence of machine instructions generated (the instructions are not new but the sequence is). In total contrast, my understanding is that interpreted software is having a program, the interpreter, run the user's software simply by directly doing what that software says. It is like a human reading the software and doing what it says -- no new sequence of machine instructions generated. A good example of interpreted software is the scripting language Rexx. I'm fairly sure, and due to computer security certainly hope, that JavaScript software is executed interpretively.
(5) It seems that the document is claiming that for writing programs with .NET it necessary to use Visual Studio. Gads, I HOPE NOT! I just checked and see that I wrote 11 million bytes of .NET software, and I never used Visual Studio. I fully intend never to use Visual Studio. Instead, all my software source code is just simple plain text I type in with my favorite plain text text editor KEDIT -- ALL of it.
NO WAY do I want any usage of Visual Studio. I tried it once: There was a LOT to learn just to consider writing the standard "Hello World". And for the initial project to write Hello World, I got some huge file system tree with maybe 50 million bytes of I don't know what the heck. And when something went wrong, I'd have to work through 50+ million bytes of undocumented I don't know what. I see writing the software for my startup on Visual Studio a threat like my being lashed to a railroad track with freight train at 80 MPH 100 yards away coming right for me. NO WAY.
I just checked: The way I got my .NET code compiled was just run as a command line the .NET VB compiler EXE program
Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\vbc.exe
Worked fine. Got to "Hello World" right away. Worked fine for 300+ .VB programs. Used TCP/IP, ADO.NET, etc. -- just fine. The compiling on a very cheap AMD processor with a 1.8 GHz clock was really fast. I was a super happy camper, thrilled, and NO Visual Studio in sight.
Debugging? Didn't have any problems a little print tracing didn't easily solve.
Documentation for using .NET objects? Put the tree name on my disk of the relevant Web page I'd downloaded from MSDN in my source code, and with one key stroke my editor would run a macro that did a little parsing and displayed the MSDN Web page. Worked great. No problems.
Now, however, that macro won't work: Somehow Firefox now floods me with popups about "safe mode", "Do you want to ..." and refuses just to display the Web page. So, will have to revise my editor macro to use the old version of Google's Web browser Chrome to display the pages. Firefox messed up, big time, and is no longer qualified to be my "default browser".
A lot of people with famous software have convinced themselves that it is really good NOT to do the work the user is requesting but, instead, to stop the work of the user, refuse to do the work, and put up various windows, popups, video clips, etc., lots and lots of stuff other than the actual work involved. Of course I avoid such software as much as I can. Adobe did that with Acrobat, and now there is NOTHING by Adobe on my computer. Firefox did some of that, and now Firefox is no long my default browser. This popup and "Do you want to ..." stuff is a really good way to get OFF my computers.
THANKS again for the reference. Remarks (1)-(5) aside, the good stuff in
.NET Basics
In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account.
Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit..
It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.
All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.
At this point I’m thinking of deleting my Windows partition altogether.
Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.
The whole OS market is pretty rough right now.
This is my feeling over the past few years. No OS is in a great spot. But I have hopes for Linux being better supported with Valve using it on the Steam Deck. (Not the highest hopes, but more hope than I used to have)
Windows 10 is stable for me too though I was hit with the eTPM stutter bug (I use my Windows box exclusively for gaming, in particular VR which I didn't feel like figuring out in proton). But the windows dark patterns are surely there and I hate them. But as it's only my gaming machine I can deal with it.
And Mac... Well I moved away from it because Apple is locking down too much and I've come to hate opinionated software. Still they seem to be doing nice things with M1..
I've also played FFXIV and Path of Exile extensively in Linux.
The only thing left is Adobe products which is honestly a matter of time. Just really takes hammering out some market share until Adobe relents.
A lot of the best kernel, driver, and gui shell improvements have only really hit their stride in the past 24 months.
Things are coming together rapidly.
Could you elaborate on that?
I've been using desktop Linux almost exclusively for the past 24 years (ouch!), and recent years seem pretty average to me. Things work great, most of the time, like always.
Unless you're talking about gaming. I'm not a gamer (or i wouldn't be such a long time Linux user) but I hear there's enormous progress on that front.
If Linux based gaming continues on the current trajectory, I could imagine a world in which a great chunk of the consumer market switches from Windows to Linux.
I assume by
> using a window manager for ever
I've used WindowMaker as a Window manager for decades. Only recently did I decide to switch to Mate because I wanted a taskbar at the bottom with useful things like applets to show and switch Wifi/network, volume control and often-used icons/launchers.
TBH, if I could get things like tint2 and yabar working with the mate applets, I'd probably switch back to WindowMaker in a heartbeat.
Pnmixer for Pulseaudio, NM-applet/connman...
I don't run Linux anymore (not natively, for everyday use, in any case) -- like most people in this thread I also think the desktop is a shitshow these days but it's a particularly bad shitshow in Linux, and I was using Linux in 2003 so I know what a shitshow looks like. But when I do still need to touch a Linux machine, WindowMaker is still my WM of choice. It's really good.
Apparently it's not great at WiFi but I don't use that on my main driver (NUC).
On Linux I use docker a lot, and while FreeBSD has its excellent jails, it doesn't have the whole ecosystem around them. So that's why I use Linux on the server side more.
I never use the Windows box for anything else. No files, no coding, no internet browsing, no music, etc. No cameras, microphones, bluetooth adapters, etc. are installed. I turn that thing on every few weeks or so.
This has worked well, and is a compromise with which I can live. Try it, it's blissful!
Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't work very well today (I have hope that we'll get there soon). Windows VMs work a lot better on my Ubuntu desktop, but a lot of our dev tools have mostly macOS users, so getting them to work with Ubuntu takes a bit of massaging at times. macOS is hard / unsupported to virtualize, so I basically have to use macOS when developing macOS software.
If we could run macOS as a VM, I'd choose Ubuntu / Pop!_OS for most things.
Eg https://kb.parallels.com/en/125105 and https://osxdaily.com/2021/07/15/how-install-macos-virtualbox...
I recently got a windows pc just for gaming, and god DAMN it's annoying. Even worse than Vista. Nothing is consistent anymore and everything is always trying to grab my attention for irrelevant shit. What the hell happened :/
However, it's ironic that the author has now given up on Windows, for the problems the script attempts to solve.
As a long time Windows and Linux user who recently got a MacBook Pro, I find the UI incredibly weird and confusing compared to what I'm used to.
The hardware is however more than good enough that I'm willing to put up with MacOS until I get used to it.
As someone who grew up with MS-DOS, Windows used to be really good until Microsoft started getting desperate and started shoving crapware down your throat... ads for Office, preinstalled Teams that starts up by itself, Skype, stupid Defender scans, nonstop UAC warnings, won't let you use a password instead of a PIN... all these dumb, user-hostile decisions. Zero respect for their users.
Apple has a bit of that now (iCloud logins, OS level notifications, bundled apps) but not quite as bad.
If Linux had Adobe Suite and MS Office I'd probably switch in a heartbeat. Need those to collaborate with other non-devs in the office.
Ctrl+d, like in emacs
> no home
Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.
Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.
> Login screeen does not remember the language
It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.
> animations come back after every update
Yeah, that's fair.
> Muscle memory
That's not.
> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me
I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.
I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.
However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.
My experience is that the only apps that use actual Ctrl on macOS are GTK apps, like Inkscape, and terminal apps (because Ctrl-C should be quite different from activating the menu item corresponding to the Cmd-C shortcut). Unfortunately, if you use non-native apps, you're going to get a non-native experience.
It's like this since it became clear smartphones were going to become the bigger market, so around 2012 or so.
Investment into desktop everything went down: OSes, apps, games, etc.
Heck, you can see this even for Open Source desktop stuff. There was a flurry of releases of cross platform Open Source software around 2009 or so: KDE4, better support for GTK on Windows, etc. All of that has slowed down or frozen in time.
Mobile has sucked all the money and hype from desktop development.
Only game that hasn't worked with Proton is Oneshot and its kina understandable considering the games context... It did have a linux version that mostly works out of the box though!
So mine last Windows was XP.
All?
My experience is that 90% work fine, 9% have weirdness, (for instance, voices in Skyrim are out of sync with mouth movements) and 1% of them have game breaking bugs.
Any time it happens to me, it's usually low resources because of something. Most often some chrome tab (or 3) that are going crazy. I also discovered that one of the apps that I thought was using hardware acceleration actually wasn't. The CPU usage made it pretty clear that the CPU was doing a ton of work.
The only annoying bug/problem that I have actually, it's that Dolphin could have a erratic behavior if I had mounted a SMB folder via an VPN and I end the VPN before un-mounting the SMB folder.
Could be a GPU thermal issue, happens to me with old games that have no FPS limit, then the GPU does so much work that it hangs for some reason(Nvidia GT970), I am not sure if is my GPU broken/dusty, the driver bugged or Xorg, Windows users only see a game crash not a full system crash.
I'm not sure how that sort of behaviour isn't a clear violation of all kinds of privacy laws in 2022.
I guess we need higher fines to get the message across.
That's been the case for 4 years now, none of these fines have occurred. The total amount of fines across all companies over those 4 years is barely above 1Bn.
> The limiting factor at the moment seems to be a lack of resources for the regulators that are responsible for enforcing privacy rules
Not just resources but also willingness. I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this and campaigning for doing so is a politically-risky move, as not only does your campaign rely on the same companies that would be fined, but those companies now control the majority of humanity's social fabric and can trivially restrict even organic sharing of information/links about your campaign.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR. Hint: if an industry making a huge chunk of its profit based on non-consensual data collection complains about data protection laws, it means the laws are actually working as designed. Most likely, this insanity will also go ahead, if it didn't already.
The largest fines so far have been approaching 9 figures, far more than the "couple of million" in the comment I replied to above.
That's not pocket change even for a multinational and of course there has to be reasonable due process before handing out that kind of penalty. If anything I'd say the fact that several eight-figure penalties have already been handed down is reassuring.
I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this
I'm genuinely curious about how you formed that impression. Here in the UK our data protection regulators have been fairly consistent in their public views on these issues under multiple Information Commissioners now and have handed down some significant penalties, so I don't really buy the conspiracy theories about corruption and so on.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR.
As someone who is both a strong proponent of privacy safeguards and involved in running businesses that actually have to comply with the GDPR, I have very mixed feelings about this.
On one hand I don't like the idea of weakening important privacy protections and I have no faith whatsoever in the competence of the current government here to understand the technical or social implications of these policies.
On the other hand I also don't think much of the GDPR as written. It's full of ambiguity and it is unnecessarily difficult for a good actor to comply with it, particularly smaller organisations that don't have dedicated staff to deal with this kind of admin and also don't have any interest in doing things with personal data that most of us here probably wouldn't like. People like to focus on a tiny number of points that we'd probably agree are positive steps or at least well-intentioned, but the GDPR is roughly a hundred pages long and that's before you include supporting materials like official guidance on interpretation from all the different regulators. There are a lot of small and a few big problems in the rest of those pages once you look past the headlines. Not coincidentally those areas also tend to leave loopholes that some bad actors are relying on to escape the trap.
I have multiple experiences dealing with the UK one, spending unreasonable amounts of time raising complaints for obvious breaches of the GDPR with no outcome. I've summarized my experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662905
Not to mention, this high-profile incident which they are themselves proud enough to announce on their own website: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl... - so you've got a company whose entire business is to manage people's personal data and is large enough to have the resources to understand & comply with the regulation, and you caught them red-handed misusing data that people outright had no choice in giving up (I don't know any bank that allows opting out of CRA reporting even if you never actually intend to take out credit) for a purpose that's definitely not in the data subjects' best interests, and the outcome is a letter?
What message do you think the above sends? To me it sends that breaching the GDPR absolutely does pay and you should absolutely do it at least once because even getting caught brazenly breaching it (considering the size & resources of said companies, number of people impacted and the fact people had literally no choice) will lead to just politely being asked to stop with no monetary penalty nor having to compensate the affected users.
The response to every legal argument is "yes, you do" as long as you have enough money. Lo and behold, Microsoft is swimming in it.
I'm not even sure it's possible, I've tried multiple approaches but gave up after almost having to do a clean install.
Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.
That expends to MS Office subscriptions as well. I once bought one through (stupid, I know) GoDaddy as an extension to my domain mail service. It never worked, not once. I still paid for it, so. The user account didn't even exist on MS's end. Only way to get rid of it was to cancel the credit card behind it. MS stopped bothering me after two months of unpaid subscriptions...
Really? For me, when I install Windows with a Microsoft account, it makes my username just something like "nyusz" rather than "nyuszika7h".
I will occasionally log into my personal Microsoft account when accessing a Microsoft website when I am on Lunch to work on some personal projects.
At work last week, I was upgraded to Office 365 and as a result I started downloading the latest versions and trying it out in various ways. One of these was upgrading my old OneNote into the latest version (2013 -> 365)
Saturday morning, I booted up my own different PC at home and notice in the "Recommended" section on the Windows 11 start menu "Work 365". This is the name of the OneNote I created at work when I upgraded the document. I do not even have Office on my own PC. Hovering over it would show that it was located in my Works One Drive folder.
I must have been logged into my personal account on OneNote and it somehow meta-data? links it between the work and personal accounts.
I am now in process of removing all traces of my personal account from Windows on my work laptop as the very last thing I want to happen is to see personal files appearing in the Recommended section of my works laptop!
I had my young son with me at the time so I didn't investigate it further. What would have I seen if I clicked the More > button in the Start Menu - would there have been more leakage? Have I logged into my work account on my personal PC at some point? Why did it only show the OneNote file but not any others? What happened if I actually clicked it and tried to open it? Did I simply make a mistake when using multiple accounts in one OS?
There are numerous questions I am asking myself that I don't have an answer for yet.
As far as I can see, I have removed all traces of my personal account off my work laptop now but I am hoping (not sure this is the correct wording in this context) that I can see still the file in my Recommended Section when I get home.
I really would like to know exactly how it can happen.
I can’t, in theory, access my work’s OneDrive from my personal machines, due to a required SSO on top of Microsoft’s, and a VPN requirement. But somehow there are some of my personal files in my work’s OneDrive.
I don’t know how this happened. I can’t log into our VPN as it’s machine-locked (it checks before allowing you on) and therefore OneDrive is supposed to stop me accessing it.
I keep getting emails from Microsoft about an Azure Enterprise agreement that they have decided I have power over, along with a group of people from a random company that I’m not related to in any way. Someone did a typo and included me by accident? Not likely as I have an email address that’s difficult to accidentally use via typo.
Microsoft are taking people’s responses to the group as authorised instructions as to what to do with their enterprise agreement. I’ve responded several times and said I am not related but they keep emailing about it. I know a lot about that company’s people, structure and agreements with Microsoft now!
and then you try to look at a picture of your kids but it's a HEIC file from an iPhone so Windows says you have to go to the Store and download Microsoft HEVC decoder which for some reason wasn't bundled with Windows but hey it's just a dollar oh that's nearly free we just need your credit card details and e-mail and make a user account and would you like a free newsletter with that LOOK OVER THERE whileweswitchdefaultbrowsers and check out what else is on sale today
Not sure it’s possible anymore though or what an alternative might be now.
- Oh, you want to format your hard drive? Purchase in store :-)
- Checkout our file utilities bundle, 50% off today!
- Congratulations on formatting your hard drive, here is a free loot box!
- Share your hard drive formatting experience with our award winning app instaclip!
- Subscribe to our feed and give us a thumbs up!
I'm sure MS can get the job done and kill off their OS with just a few more years of obnoxious bullshit forcefully shoved into their operating system!
When I worked at apple I wasnt the only person who ran office in a windows vm. It was a supported config.
But between the overwrought UI and the bugs MS never seems to fix, Windows is becoming a less and less attractive platform with each revision.
macOS 12 cannot maintain a USB 2.0 connection. Not by dongle. Not by dock. Not by monitor. Not with 3rd party. Not with Apple-approved hardware. No way, no how. This is known, reported and totally Apple's fault (some of the earlier macOS 11 builds work fine). And this is the standard problem with Apple, "It just works--until it doesn't. If it doesn't, sucks to be you." I'm done with that.
Windows 10 was already bad enough with "Please, sir, can I have some compute?" with "I say thee NAY! I will now upgrade for the next 40 minutes. Hah!" Add in even more telemetry and inconsistency and I just gave up.
The whole point of Windows and macOS was to NOT have to dork with my OS and just get my work done. If I have to dork with my OS to make it not suck, I should be on Linux! At least then, when I figure out how to make my OS not suck, I'm helping instead of contributing to Microsoft or Apple profits.
So, yeah, I'll maintain a Windows desktop for the few times I need it (Fusion 360 and some videoconferencing stuff), but otherwise it's been Linux full-time for me. And Apple can just go pound sand.
It's quite absurd, really, because while the Linux desktop environment is certainly good for novices and advanced Linux users, anyone that falls between those categories (and that's a lot of people!) will definitely struggle when they try to switch to Linux. You're either content with the default setup, or need to dive into the terminal at some point, and the fact commercial operating systems are making their UX worse than Linux would be impressive if it wasn't so disappointing.
For what it's worth, I've managed to get Fusion360 running on Manjaro with a script a friend linked me online. I can't remember where I got it from exactly, but it involved auto downloading a bunch of Wine requirements and then just running the setup.
If you're not interested in tweaking your system, feel free to skip over the rest of the comment. If you're willing to give it a go, I've got some experience with Windows stuff on Linux that you may be interested in.
I barely use Fusion360, but the few times I used it, it worked pretty well in Wine. Even had decent 3D acceleration, though you can probably get a lot better performance with more trickery (DXVK etc. to enhance the 3D acceleration for example). Lutris (https://lutris.net/) has an install script (https://lutris.net/games/autodesk-fusion-360/), I recommend you give it a try. Lutris can help enable performance tuning tricks for productivity software quite easily, even if it's originally developed for playing video games. Might work for you, or it might not; if it does, it might just cut down on more unnecessary reboots. If it doesn't, you'll at most lose the time it takes to download the installer and remove the failed installation.
As for the video conferencing, you might be interested in Cassowary (https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary), a tool to run Windows executables in a Windows VM through RDP, with suspend/resume of the VM on demand to cut down on resources used when you're not using Windows. It requires a bit of setup, but the guide is quite comprehensive in my opinion. You can forward your webcam to the Windows VM through USB forwarding to get it to work with video, and modern RDP should just be an RDP stream so there shouldn't be too much quality loss. Even if the Cassowary setup doesn't work, you can probably use the VM anyway.
Windows 7 was actually pretty bloody good.
If you want a computing environment that is responsive to your needs, you need to step away from products of those autocratic organizations.
Mainly what I want is to not think about my tools at all, and just pick them up or put them down whenever the need arises, without worrying about whether I'm making a secret catastrophic error or that my tools are pretending to be my tools, while actually their master is somebody else.
I gladly sacrifice control to Apple the same way I sacrifice control to my doctor or to my sanitation engineer, or, if I had a car, to my car manufacturer.
I'm not a teenager exploring the universe of options anymore. Now I just want to get from point A to point B.
If I agree with you that Apple sucks, then you were right that Apple sucks.
If I say most of Apple's design and philosophy decisions are the best option for someone like me, then you were right Apple sucks because I'm trying to convince myself otherwise.
The only version of my experience you'd believe is the one you believed already: that Apple sucks.
Clearly almost all Apple fans have to be in the former group. It is just possible you are in the latter, instead.
It is the same, BTW, for political parties.
Backward compatible is not what people want, they want ways to move forward just like how Apple did with Roseta2
We are moving in a world where energy consumption needs to be optimized due to climate change
I found the mac setup experience to be even worse than Windows 10 (both of these done in the last 6 months). I haven't even tried Windows 11 and have no intention of doing so. In both cases I made choices during the setup process that were not the default, and I believe that it broke some things, at least in the case of Mac, where most of the users do have another Apple device to use for 2FA, or do want to use iCloud for backups (or OneDrive - I'm sure some people use these services but I have absolutely no desire!)
Anyway, it's very frustrating to watch the user experience getting worse and worse from organizations that have an amount of resources to work with that we can't even fathom.
Edit: to say I'm not hugely invested in either Windows or Mac's longterm success. There are no personal or professional computing needs that I have (or predict) that can't be satisfied in Linux, and my usage patterns reflect that.
This is false, at least as of macOS 12.3. However, the install process does encourage signing-in. Unlike Windows, though, it doesn’t require non-obvious shenanigans—like disconnecting from the Internet—to bypass it during the installer. Reportedly, the latest Windows 11 Insider builds do not provide any means to create a local account in the installer.
> Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account.
This is also false, I presently have an Apple account with no CC and have downloaded (free) Mac App Store applications using it.