Reasons Windows Is Going in the Wrong Direction
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
> 8. Everything Is Becoming a Web App
Microsoft has done such a terrible job making a clear way for devs to make windows app with native UI. Should I use Win32 legacy? How about WinForms? Can I have device independent sizing in WPF? Should I use the dumpster fire that’s Maui? Can I get away with the limitations of WinUI?
I find the state of native development a real pain point in 2023 and Microsoft’s internal infighting is doing nothing to improve the situation.
I don't see anyone wanting to write Windows-native apps anymore. App development moved to the web.
Windows apps are mostly all legacy stuff like Notepad++ or $CORPORATE_WARE written in the same libs from 20 years ago, or cross-platform stuff written in QT or Electron.
I hate that this is the only practical "alternative," as OSX is a uncompromising commitment. You have to buy a whole new device and completely change your software ecosystem. Its like getting up and moving to a different country.
It would be cool if one of the OEMs finally "snapped" and started shipping Android, SteamOS, ChromeOS, or some other distro in a default dual-boot config. Then again, most are happy shipping horrific bloatware that makes Windows 11 ads look like hand written assembly, so perhaps not...
Because, at the bare minimum if nothing else goes wrong, that's what you need to dual boot Linux + Windows. Windows and Linux updates will both periodically wipe each other's entries without a very careful manual config. And if you can't set up that perfect config first time, well, I guess the user is stupid.
> are walking around without one.
Even in jest, this kind of arrogance and abrasiveness is what I really dislike about the linux community, especially at the upper levels. Especially the "What, you don't already know how to do X?" and the immature insults coming from adult developers.
Newbie-oriented distros like Ubuntu will do this for you automatically.
> Windows and Linux updates will both periodically wipe each other's entries without a very careful manual config.
Not really, on a modern UEFI system. Windows may occasionally set itself as the default, but the Linux entry will still be installed as an option you can select in the UEFI firmware settings.
Linux shouldn't be "wiping out" anything. Typically you want GRUB to be your default bootloader, and chainload from there to Windows as desired. Again, any competent newbie-oriented distro will do this for you.
Exactly. But to the first time user, their linux has disappeared, and they have to go look up what happened, then they have to figure out how to get into their motherboard's boot menu... and by now, you lost 99% of users.
And I recently had my (systemd-boot) Windows entry fail on the linux side and had to go in and fix it. Not sure about GRUB these days.
This is a microcosm of linux. Things just work if you go in and fix this little thing here and there, but most people don't do and won't do any kind of maintenance like this.
Just because you’re Willing to spend time to tinker with some obscure OS doesn’t make you smart… some would argue its a big waste of time.
Not me though, I’ve been an obscure OS tinkerer for 20+ years XD
That said, the only times I really interacted with windows was to install chrome (despite various pleading), to have it automatically bing search for whatever the screen background was when I logged in (only fell for that once), to have random news and other crap pop up, and to have to turn off the speaker because it kept making notification noises about whatever useless stuff it constantly is notifying you about.
As someone who is easily distracted, I don't know how people can work in windows, it always felt like it's not made for me, it's made for microsoft to push stuff at me. But for people who are less touchy it seems decent these days, particularly in light of wsl.
For what it's worth I find disabling all of that nonsense once, usually with a script, far more conducive to my work experience than having MacOS randomly shut off every USB port every handful of minutes and costing the organs of my first born for mediocre hardware.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
This is the first time I haven't updated my OS to 11. Not that I love 10, but I fear that 11 is going to be more aggressive with all the things I dislike about 10. Mostly around ads, notifications, and generally feeling like my computer belongs to them.
I've been on OSX the last few weeks while I'm developing a iOS app. I don't love it. But I don't fear it either.
I would love to have a linux OS where IO devices (screens, cameras, etc) just work.
My co-founder is on linux and is constantly messing with microphone, camera, etc not being picked up on linux, and having to mess around with settings to get things to work.
Even Office is terrible the way it defaults to saving your files on OneDrive. Why am I suddenly uploading all my documents to Microsoft?
That's been my experience with Linux Mint, for years now. Try it out on a Live USB and see if your hardware works with it.
When W10 runs out of security updates I'll just go to Linux. I love my ThinkPad. I just hope by that point I find a way to run Lightroom on Linux.
One thing I didn't see mentioned is that I keep searching online for how to do things via keyboard or quickly, and there's site after site saying oh there's a new Windows 11 shortcut to do that thing! But then the shortcut doesn't work for me. I seem to have like 1/10th of the shortcuts that have ever been announced. And the helpful hints Microsoft had been dropping showing off shortcuts in apps seem to have vanished.
I was trying to move apps between monitors via hotkey last night & couldn't get any shortcuts to work.
There's also the puzzle-game required to turn on good features now. Go look for an article on how to do something, and there's a sizable chance you need to go download vivetool & know some magic id number & enable it. For example, I wanted a hotkey for adjusting volume or at least opening the mixer, and yup, there's a vivetool id to enable for that! I think I have done like 4. Vivetool has a /query command to show you the status, but it's many dozens of entries & at best you have a super brief ProgrammerCodeWords for the feature to tell you what it is. I feel like trying to use this OS is like being locked in an escape room. https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-11-now-has-a-dedicated-s...
Accepting a paid OS showing ads at all is unacceptable.
https://www.geekbits.io/how-to-completely-disable-widgets-in...
On a fresh new installation with defaults I'd likely need to spend almost an hour playing with settings and would miss some. For example almost every single subsection within "Personalization" now has ads settings turned on by default:
- Background: Windows Spotlight
- Lock screen: Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen. Also Windows Spotlight again.
- Start: Show recommendations for tips, shortcuts, new apps, and more
- Taskbar: Widgets, Chat
- Device usage: Every. Single. Setting.
That's not my experience at all. I don't have to do anything after updates except learn the changes. They keep changing Terminal, Notepad and Paint, but I'm ok with that. They're better.
I thought that I'd disabled everything that leads to ads, but there was one that kept showing up through the notification center (which I thought I'd disabled). It took far too long to figure out how to stop that one.
So have been moving over to Firefox. Much better! And bookmark synch works great, across different Microsoft logins.
10 vs 11? I like that in 11 the windows don't blend into each other like a giant mush, so I greatly prefer that. I'm on 4 monitors - three wide, one on top, aluminium profile mounted.
I've turned off what I can of the web content and it generally doesn't get in my way. Things like monitor sleep actually seems to work, unlike in 10 where one of my myriad USB devices tend to block it no matter what I do with the `powercfg` command.
I love WSL but what does it do that cygwin didn't? I guess let you use the distro directly including package manager. But a VM can do that. And WSL2 is just Hyper-V virtualization, that's all it is.
So it's nothing really new here, if you want this on Windows 7, then just install Virtualbox/Hyper-V/whatever, create a Ubuntu VM (with shared folders), configure it to launch at Windows startup, and create a launcher shortcut to SSH into it.
- Consider the ads and popups thrown in my face while reading your article.
Edit: Source on Microsoft https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
I don't use Windows more than probably a dozen times a year, but when I do I choose Windows 7.
I think that Vista will historically be called the "Death of Windows" at which point all real men abandoned ship for Linux.
(I have no particular dog in this fight, being a Mac user since the Mac Plus era—I'm just genuinely curious.)
Edit: they are much more spatially friendly, especially since you could resize the tiles to make them easier to hit.
No, not the WSL. Although, WSL is a good product IMO.
Linux, thankfully, is GPL rather than MIT. Microsoft trying to defy Linux's license would result in the easiest lawsuit ever won by the EFF.
Just because you're annoyed they put some roadblocks for freeloaders, doesn't mean you get to distort facts.
What Red Hat is doing doesn't damage open-source. Open-source is meant to guarantee the end-user (ideally a normal person, not a tech giant, at least for me that's the only person I care about) has the freedom to use/modify the software they paid for. Everyone can still do that.
What's gone is the abuse of the GPL for systematic, automated cloning by parasites like Oracle or Cloud Linux Foundation, simply for the purpose of using RHEL without paying for it.
If you need RHEL on your systems, use one of the 16 free RHEL licenses they give you. If your app runs in a Docker container, the RHEL images require no license to use. If this isn't enough, switch distros (I hear CentOS Stream is pretty close) or pay for RHEL.
I simply don't see legitimate users being affected by this.
Edit: Based on sibling comments, you probably meant a desktop Linux distribution, which Flatcar is not (as far as I understand).
My next OS will likely be Genode[2] in a year or two. I've been watching their progress for half a decade, and it looks almost to the point I can grok everything. I look forward to actually secure general purpose computing.
You have a choice between spending $2k-3k on a machine from Apple to get decent ram, storage and io specs, or getting a Windows laptop that basically comes loaded with so much Microsoft backed spyware, forced output of telemetry data, and interfaces that force you to use their different cloud services like Bing and OneDrive that it just gets in the way of using your computer.
What is the lesser of two evils? Do you pay through the nose for your computer, or try to scrape off all the crap they've put on top of windows.
"Type your password". "Sure, once again, my dear Linux". "You can not write that file". "Oh, sorry, my dear Linux, for looking at the files of master root"
Every system finds its way to enslave the user.
Unlike Linux. Where even if you disable sudo password, it will randomly turn itself back on, and then force you to type it in for access to even your own files.
Then you get used to it. Then you start to like it. To crave it. Before long, your life feels incomplete if you haven't fed sudo your nutritious password for ten minutes. The enslavement is nearly complete.
The final blow lands when you get so comfortable with Linux that you feel bad about having to shut it down. So you don't. Great.
Until you have to edit a root file. Of course you open it in vim, because that's what master Linux tells you to use. And now you are fully, completely, totally enslaved. Because you don't want to shut down Linux and don't know how to exit vim.
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Completely unrelated aside: should one ever feel the desire to feed a troll, it is better to use healthy, low-nutrition trollfeed.
:x