De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
To be fair, Apple does this exact same thing on their operating system. On a freshly installed iPhone, swipe right at the home screen. It takes you to the widget screen which is loaded by default with Apple News showing random junk.
Microsoft deserves the flak for turning Windows 11 into a billboard, but Apple isn't immune to this either.
I think people are a bit blind to Apple's defaults. They compare a fresh Windows 11 install to their own customized iOS install with a decade of history, and conclude that Microsoft is so much worse. But the out of the box experience for a new user isn't all that different, IMHO. (MacOS is still better than Windows in many respects, but it's been steadily moving closer to iOS and comes with an ever-growing pile of Apple default apps loaded in the Dock and set as defaults.)
I dislike that they do this and Apple can be criticised for a million different things. 1) this is not it; 2) this is not what Microsoft is doing.
It has filled the Dock with (all) Apple apps the last 15+ years.
I don't quite understand why you're comparing a desktop OS to the phone OS, but I guess that can make some sense?
"Camera, Cortana/CoPilot, and Photos can now be uninstalled". Mac and iOS come with PhotoBooth/Camera, Siri and Photos preinstalled, I don't think can be removed.
"No Bing, no Edge, no upselling." You can't remove Safari, comes with upselling to Apple drive.
Apple also comes preinstalled with Maps, Music, BookReader, NewsClient, MailClient, TV app, Notes app. For all I have better alternatives so tonnes of bloat and at worse many of them can't be completely disabled. They keep popping at some unexpected places.
For that matter popular linux distros come with similar apps, though through some maze in installer you may have been able to skip them.
Apple News could be criticized for having a default list of news sources and I think that’s fair. But the news app is first party. Apple Music could be criticized for its upselling, and that’s justified as heck, but it’s still first party.
However; Safari and edge aren’t comparable. Safari seems to be perfectly content in being relegated to storage, never to hit memory or the CPU again, and I believe it is possible to remove it. Edge begs for its life when you even consider installing an alternative browser.
That’s not the topic being discussed in this branch of the thread as far as I understood it, but even if you were to take that point it’s a very large difference.
The only difference is that they have been doing it for 15+ years and during this time they convinced you that it is okay that they do it on a pocket computer, as if it was somehow magically different.
An Apple box comes with Apple software and services. It does not come with third party apps preinstalled and it does not show me ads. The one exception that I can think of is in the App Store and in their TV offer, but this is not what you are talking about.
I disagree with a thousand things that Apple does but this comparison is disingenuous.
I think there is some truth to this. But the reason people are blind to it is that, even if Apple and Microsoft are doing the same thing philosophically to a degree, Apple’s implementation of it feels less aggressive, less cheap, and more easily turned off than MS’s approach (two taps to permanently remove the news widget).
For what it’s worth, Apple News, even the free version, is actually a half decent news app if you’re in a supported area for local news.
> comes with an ever-growing pile of Apple default apps loaded in the Dock and set as defaults
Realistically, this is the direction consumer workstations are heading, and it’s the right direction. The average user is nontechnical, and less interested in customization than functionality. They want apps preloaded and preset as defaults. For those who don’t, there’s always Linux. But I think it would be a misrepresentation to suggest this is somehow a bad thing or that the masses don’t want or wouldn’t benefit from this.
Clicking on a story opens it in the Apple News app, which is also in your dock by default.
> I remember the first time I used a Windows system last year after tens of years on Linux/OSX, and it was really a somewhat strange experience: the moment I connected the ethernet cable I was instantly looking at random flashy news articles from another part of the world. Not in the browser, not in some kind of "News" app, but right in my taskbar! The most amazing part is that I did not even have to click on it – the system carefully opened it for me to delight me with some low-quality not-even-local news.
Same thing happens on new macOS installs.
It is not the same thing and it won't be the same thing no matter how many times you say it. It simply isn't!
A news widget on one is the same as a news widget on the other.
That a smartphone comes preloaded with some news app is not unexpected behavior. That a desktop operating system is not "clean" from first install is absolutely not acceptable.
I've used iPhones for 15 years and never noticed that. There's a difference between having Apple apps available if you want them, compared to things in your face when you don't do anything and don't want them.
Imagine having advertising in your own home. Ugh!
That's why people continue to use Windows Home and if you want to get pro level of ads in your OS you would use Windows Pro /s
I use a Mac for 99% of my work also and I have an employer supplied neutered PC which is generally fine.
I purchased a personal PC laptop with Windows "Pro"... What a sh!t experience. Riddled with rubbish and distractions.
You don't, commercial OS manufacturers want you to see and treat your computers as app consoles, similar to game consoles.
They successfully got you to view phones and tablets as app consoles, the rest of your computers are next.
> What also caught my eye so much is the amount of branding around – there are Spotify, TikTok, Amazon Prime, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger icons right in your menu bar before you ever need them or attempt to download and discover these apps for yourself
Microsoft desperately wants you to use their app store to run these apps on your app console instead of on the web or on their competitors' app consoles.
People really jumped head-first into dystopia innit?
Yes. Because it’s only logical. Go and watch what any person outside of tech circles do with their computer. Office, Chrome, Spotify, Steam, Minecraft. That’s it.
Saying this as a hardcore Linux and FOSS user.
Plenty HN folks cannot wrap their minds around that the world is in fact, changing once again from what they accustomed to.
This has always been the case.
What's new is how OS manufacturers are forcing profitable and restrictive paradigms upon users that will allow them to capture ~30% of every software sale and online payment ever made on any phone, tablet or computer.
Not that I'm complaining of course, but still, quite a surreal moment.
[0]: https://www.engadget.com/eu-confirms-the-six-tech-giants-sub...
The 6 companies are Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, ByteDance, and Microsoft.
The singling out of US multinationals is a bit of a myth, it's just more visible to us tech people and since the revenues are larger, the fines also tend to be larger. But they also fined Daimler, Scania, DAF, Philips, Volvo, Deutsche Bank, etc.
http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/editorcharts/EU-GOOGLE-...
Are we talking about the same EU that is currently attempting to ban encryption?
Put simply, given how large the EU market is, and how strong its regulation is, it is cheaper for companies to comply, even outside of the market.
*also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.
The tech companies don't have much bargaining power in the EU because of that.
Influencing a not completely corrupted government is not as simple as money in - laws out. That would work equally well everywhere.
Also, all highly advanced democracies have some lobbying. It is not viewed widely by political scientists as corruption.
Lobbying isn't equivalent to corruption.
While the two can get very similar in the US because US elections have no campaign spending cap, therefore politicians (and even some civil servants) have a constant need for massive political donations, in general lobbying is a lot more complex than "spend money, get law you like". It usually involves a high amount of, you guessed it, waiting around in lobbies.
In the EU, the stereotypical industry lobbyist is a guy who will invite some commission members to a very fancy restaurant and tell them "About this regulation you're passing, we've prepared a full binder on it, with different policy options you could consider, case studies illustrating the trade-offs of each option, ideas for further research, etc".
Bureaucrats know that the content of the binder will be biased towards the interests of the companies that funded it, but they still read it because it's full of industry information and technical knowledge they don't have.
There's allegedly a bit of give and take, where they expect the info to be biased, but not too obviously biased otherwise they stop returning your calls.
Good bureaucrats will then cross-reference that info with info from competing interest groups, researchers, wikipedia, etc, and hope that they end up with a balanced view of the industry. Bad bureaucrats will just copy the biggest group's proposed laws verbatim.
But in any case, calling it "rampant corruption" is just ignorant. There's a lot of thought put into that process beyond "do what the corporations want".
Too late to edit.
> *also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.
Firstly, corruption is not "rampant" in the European Union, it is on average the least corrupt political organization on this planet: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022
Secondly, lobbying is not corruption, it is legalized, registered and regulated in most EU members and at the Union's level even more so.
If interest groups cannot communicate their interests to politicians, how do you expect politicians to inform their votes, make laws, and take decisions? Should they just guess or know everything about every topic they are solicited about? Should they "Google" the answers (the irony here should strike you in regards to the original post)?
Because believe it or not, corporations are legally people and are required to obey the law. Not above the law, like in the US.
Lobby all you want, but weigh the cost of having an entire market worth millions of people denied to your business. Comply or GTFO.
There is no such thing in the EU. You can't just waltz into the European parliament and lobby (read: bribe) your way into regulations that favor you like it's the case in the USA. Once the parliament votes on something, it's done.
The Council and the Commission would like to have a word with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_trilogue_meeting
eu seem to care about its citizens it seems. so, it might be dumbfounding for citizens of nations with government who give zero fucks about its own citizens.
> lobbying
in other countries, it is called bribery. most of the time, it's illegal.
Because lobbying isn't equivalent to corruption and doesn't automatically get you the laws you want.
The European Commission had a three months comment period in 2020 where various interest groups (FAANGs, non-profits, media groups, open-source giants like Mozilla, etc) all submitted their position (which IIRC usually boiled down to "yeah, regulating is awesome, please regulate everyone but me!"). It submitted its report in December 2020, at which point most of the key points were already decided.
No doubt interest groups sent a lot of people to lobbies in the following years to discuss details and push in one direction or another, but by then the commission and parliament had a pretty good idea what they wanted the final law to look like anyway.
Looks like I will be telling Windows that I live in the EEA next time I install.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2023/08/06/you-can-install-win...
- No media codecs
- No AI recording/transcription features due to missing media codecs
- No cortana
- No Teams upselling, no Office upselling, no Skype
- No self installing games
And of course Microsoft bundles a lot of additional programs like Groove Music and Skype with the codecs in a single pack.
Jokes aside I am assuming if people are willing to go down the N route, they could probably also use tiny11 and just DIY install all drivers and codecs they need on that machine
Didn't take long to figure out and then download and install the media pack. But for a while every time they set up a new VM I had to help them with this.
Regardless of that, supposedly for this you just need to set your region to somewhere in the EU during initial installation; Though that can't be changed post-install.
(Ok, it's a joke and I know GNU is American too).
When a user would uninstall an app, would it actually be removed from the system, or just the icons and entries would be. Motivation for asking: Several built-in apps are listed in the Apps section of the settings as having just a few kB in size, which does not match how bloated in size apps typically are in the current times. I've seen mouse drivers occupy hundreds of MB. My guess is that the apps are much bigger than those kB values and the installed Apps settings section is set to let users believe otherwise.
Those few kb are probably the size of the hard links to the image.
Shared files stay until you uninstall all apps that use that
User config can be removed with an extra option
"To enable end user choice, gatekeepers should not prevent end users from un-installing any software applications on their operating system."
And
"3. The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable end users to easily un-install any software applications on the operating system of the gatekeeper,"
2.) You are allowed to save 'consent=given/rejected' cookie depending on user choice.
If I own a store and you walk into my store am I required to forget that you came into my store?
Monday:
Bill: "Hey Jane (store owner), do you have any X45 hammers?"
Jane: "Sorry Bill, I'm out but might have some tomorrow"
Tuesday:
Bill "Did hammer come in I mentioned yesterday?"
Jane: "What hammer? Sorry I'm not allowed to remember anything about people in my shop because that would be spying so whatever you said to me yesterday has been deleted from my memory"
PS: I hate spying too. I'm just not sure how to design a law to prevent it that doesn't have unintended consequences.
These rules aren’t for your dream small business. It’s for a mega corp that would literally not care if you lived or died or if that hammer hit you on the head.
* Using Quickbooks Online? they market/sell that data.
* using ADT for payroll? They market/sell employee salary information.
* Using Ring for security? they freely share video with LEO
* etc, etc. All these services that SMB's use already have their fingers in the pie.
Second: You can have analytics AND be GDPR compliant without a cookie banner. There are even companies built around this: https://plausible.io/
The way to do this (both in ePrivacy and in GDPR, despite the different legal mechanisms they use) looks to be to write a phrase like “legitimate interest” into the main text, give illustrative examples of what that’s supposed to mean in the recitals before that, and let the courts figure out the details.
In the case of cookies, they simply apply to computers and not people. Why? It's not about whether the two are operationally similar it's about whether the two are practically similar. Until every shopkeep meticulously tracks every detail of every customer interaction and starts efficiently sharing them with others, all manually, often enough and at a large enough scale that it becomes a similar privacy concern it's not really worth fretting the law be generic enough to cover the use cases. In such a case it probably even makes sense to just write a separate law which meets the domain's needs more succinctly.
To hammer your point home even further, there's also the key point that in the digital world you also have entities like Meta that track you everywhere you go because they have their little tracker scripts running on almost every website.
To bring this back to the previous hypothetical, it's more like a single person following you around with a camera everywhere you go, which is already covered by existing laws.
In your instance, I would have put a backordered hammer in my cart. I come back the next day to check and see if the hammer is in stock. The cookie that enables cart behavior is necessary to the functioning of an online store. No consent needed.
In the real world, this basically means that tracking and marketing cookies are what you are being asked about. They don't need to ask about much else.
The EU has a very good write-up: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
I think it would actually be very difficult to demonstrate that this tracker is absolutely required for the online store to function.
It doesn't seem to directly require comporting with someone's limited view of how a particular app is supposed to work
All store owners and employees should get whacked in the head every day.
Common sense and consent. Laws are not theorems or malicious genies.
No. Your head is not covered by the GDPR. It requires you to not keep a record of all your clients' personal info without a legitimate interest.
There's a Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes to buy a fancy pen at a stationery store which isn't available atm. The clerk asks for her full name and number to notify her (that's a legitimate interest) but then uses it to hit on/stalk her (that would be a GDPR violation). Presumably he also doesn't get rid of the number after their business transaction.
If the law didn't intend for users to be inundated with notification banners and consent checkboxes it sure is odd how much time they spent about writing how anything but the most basic connection cookies require said things.
I'm not entirely sure that this is true. You can implement a "shopping cart" on your site, with a session cookie without needing to have a "cookie notification", so depending on circumstance I'd argue that settings might be allowed as well. Or you can just display the cookie information along with the settings it self, it doesn't actually need to be a popup.
"Or you can just display the cookie information along with the settings it self, it doesn't actually need to be a popup." this is true, you can put the information for each cookie in every place that the UI interacts with the cookie or you can put it in a dedicated popup or however else you can figure out to do it. So long as you notify and require (informed) interaction with the associated interaction you're good.
As far as I can see, this is a resource funded by the EU, so not quite authoritative, but good enough IMO. They say:
> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must: Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies. [...]
This sounds like what you're saying, but this verbiage is based on a classification of cookies further above where a distinction is made:
> Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. [...] > > Preferences cookies — Also known as “functionality cookies,” these cookies allow a website to remember choices you have made in the past, like what language you prefer, what region you would like weather reports for [...]
So "strictly necessary" really only means "the site breaks without this", e.g. a session cookie set by a login page or the shopping cart example that the quoted article explicitly calls out, too. Presentational settings like display density, font size, dark/light mode and such seem to require consent.
3.6 UI customization cookies:
"These customization functionalities are thus explicitly enabled by the user of an information society service (e.g. by clicking on button or ticking a box) although in the absence of additional information the intention of the user could not be interpreted as a preference to remember that choice for longer than a browser session (or no more than a few additional hours). As such only session (or short term) cookies storing such information are exempted under CRITERION B. The addition of additional information in a prominent location (e.g. “uses cookies” written next to the flag) would constitute sufficient information for valid consent to remember the user’s preference for a longer duration, negating the requirement to apply an exemption in this case."
In particular, criterion A "functioning of the site" is a lot more narrow than your interpretation. It sounds like "oh, they need this to use the site's functions" but it really describes is functionality more like "you can't use the site at all without setting this cookie because you couldn't authenticate" and criterion B "for service explicitly requested" has more limitations (like lasting beyond session).
Yeah, I had to read the first version of "the cookie law". The intend was super clear, at least in the Danish version, it was pretty easy to implement and wouldn't really bother anyone... Then came the marketing/SEO/retargting assholes who had a nice thing going tracking the everlasting crap out of everyone and they did NOT want things to change. Some of these people then came up with the "hosted cookie banner" and things went to hell from there.
You are absolutely right that this should never in a million years be viewed as compliance. It mostly didn't, and still doesn't work. What should have happened is that the law should have been amended to prevent outsourcing responsibility.
But in the name of progress and security, you can't stay on Windows 10. So for me it's this weird middle ground right now .. waiting for either Windows to U-turn, die out, or for more work apps to port to OS X.
You’re right about the hassle of doing it manually, and I wish there were a global “Windows 2k mode” that ran the OS as lean as possible.
Edit: and a quick scan of the Microsoft website says that you need to "Contact Sales" still.
You can pay a similar amount to what your company pays for similar numbers of licenses across many OS's. Last I checked it was about ~500 USD a year. Sure, that's excessive for a single OS install, but if your company is footing the bill they usually don't care if you install on personal machines.
That's a pretty big understatement to be honest. I don't use Windows anymore, but I still occasionally set up Windows for other people and there's so many annoyances that it's difficult to even enumerate all of them.
Off the top of my head:
- MSEdgeRedirect to stop Windows from opening Edge even when it's not your defualt browser.
- Shutup10++ to quickly disable a bunch of crapware/unwanted features. (Some of these break things, too, so there is literally no way to make things "perfect".)
- Have to remove a horde of advertising-ridden crapware too. Groove Music, Maps, etc.
- Stopping the start menu from sending everything you type to Bing seems to be hard, too. I'm pretty sure there are multiple group policy items that sound like they would impact this, but I never seem to get the right one first try. It's kind of hard to find on Google too because it changes.
- I do not know what the current best way to get Windows to stop trying to wake up computers for Windows Update at random hours (and often failing to do so.) I think there is a group policy option, but I think there's also a power options configuration (also in the registry obviously) that you need to change to maximally disable wakelocks. This one isn't necessarily Windows 11 specific, but it seems to have gotten worse over time.
- A number of things are really hard to change: There are third party mods for the start menu and task bar, but they are not perfect at all; hacks that load the actual old start menu and task bar are limited and break with updates, unsurprisingly. You need to patch DWM to remove the window rounding behavior.
And honestly, that still doesn't duplicate Windows 7 for me, and worse, the further you stray away the more likely things are to break during updates. The best I've found is Windows 10 LTSC but 1. I don't think consumers can legally license it (lol) 2. It doesn't work with a lot of software, e.g. Creative Suite has stopped supporting it I believe. So this solution sounds good on paper but it's also not always applicable.
Lest you think paying extra for Windows 11 Pro for Workstations, just don't. It's nearly as heavy in crapware last I checked. It's kind of unbelievable that they still do that pre-installed app crap even if you pay them over $300 for the OS as if I fucking want it, but that's modern software for you. They literally won't sell you what you want at any price.
(I also strongly believe that you should try to install Windows Firewall Control or some similar firewall before allowing the machine to reach the Internet. There's an amazing amount of non-sense that gets sent to the Internet regardless of whether you consent to it. Not sure that all of it is actually a huge privacy concern, but I don't really care anymore; at this point it's out of spite.)
The trouble is keeping it up to date between Windows updates because they auto-install the bloatware.
Just run the script again after a major update. Only takes a minute. And don't let Windows update automatically. I have used this script and it works well.
Also found this in the other comments https://atlasos.net
Another big problem with a lot of these things is you run them, then later Photoshop or Winget or VS isn't working suddenly and you have to try to figure out what service or component needs to be re-enabled. At one point I just re-installed over this...
I'm a screen reader user, and I would regularly unplug my headphones when not using the computer, especially if it was stored in a bag. Of course, that meant everybody around me could hear my screen reader when Windows decided to do its thing. This woke me up at night multiple times and disrupted a few activities I was a part of. There was nothing to be done.
MS needs to make a profit on Windows. Apple can give away MacOS for free and make up the costs on hardware margins.
Windows can make money by charging consumers, by licensing to OEMs, by upselling other MS products, or by selling ads & content.
The only way MS will stop ads would be if consumers pay for Windows directly.
Or perhaps it will just turn into a self running slot machine powered by tokens earned though full screen always on top porn adverts while AI guesses what kind of work you would otherwise be trying to get done. No more subscriptions or products to purchase: Unlock 3 extra days of Excel by buying something on Amazon! Maybe workers will have to defeat n levels of candy crush to unlock Word processing for the day. Perhaps always-on PC's will become the norm and Bing will watch and guide us 24/7 - into the future!
In windows you just mash the key until the thing you want comes up.
Disclaimer: I have never used it, one of my colleagues mentioned it a while ago.
When it’s good it’s really, really good. That old laptop had a better LCD panel than you could get in any Macbook of that era, and that tower ran circles around any real contemporary Mac.
The problem is that no matter how hard you try, there’s always little glitches that are downright impossible to eliminate unless you have the chops to tinker with DSDTs and kernel extension development.
I wish macos moved to the same model and it could be just an app on a linux or windows machine. Apple is already shifting their weight to service revenue for growth, this could be a realistic direction to take.
Accidentally press the play button? Apple Music. Charge your iphone through your computer? Apple Music.
I find it pretty annoying, but it is also easy to eliminate the default behavior
I discovered the fingers on my right hand barely brush the bottomed edge of it when I make certain multi-key keystrokes. Right where the play “button” was by default. Took me forever to figure out why Music was opening “randomly”.
I ended up setting the touchbar to static, not per-program customizable, and replacing most of it with a “spacer” element. Fixed the problem.
Luckily they’ve realized they were a bad idea and my newer ones don’t have a touchbar.
Yes, you can install a dozen little extra utilities to customize your way out of most of these things... but I'm not going to. I use systems usually quite-close to stock because of how often I'm using not-my-system or how often the system is reimaged or whatever. Also it's a corporate machine and I can't be bothered to see if each and every bodge-app is permitted by security policy.
The hardware is very nice, however. I would totally buy a MBP personally if I could run Windows or Fedora on it, and swap the keyboard for something sensible.
One of the first things I install on a new MBP.
Kb shortcuts are standard - for a Mac ;). Heck in most apps you can even use standard readline shortcuts like ctrl-e for end of line, ctrl-a for start of line , ctrl-n and -p for next and previous etc. Same as in emacs or in a terminal window.
This is actually on third party app devs, not apple. Note that double-clicking the titlebar works the same in stock apps, as well as in most mac-only native apps.
Cross-platform apps like Slack often hide the native titlebar and draw their own which doesn’t implement all the native behaviors or even try to mimic them. Papercuts like this are part of why Mac users are more likely to be discontent with cross-platform apps.
For many Electron apps a decent work around is to install them as PWAs, which can be done with both Safari (File > Add to Dock…) or your preferred Chrome-cousin. Those draw proper titlebars.
I am baffled by whoever thought having icons leap in the toolbar as a default behaviour was an OK thing to do. Drives me crazy when I use a Mac other than mine. I have lots of little issues with the UX. Play button opening Apple Music -- ahh! Running unsigned apps is easy but I always get caught out by the right click thing.
> you can install a dozen little extra utilities to customize your way out of most of these things
Usually paid for too. Using mouse on Mac feels absolutely awful to me without Smooze.
I wish there was a better laptop on the market, but despite the compromises my MBP is the best laptop I've ever owned it's not even close. Just like my iPhone, I think it's a brilliant device despite Apple being, well, Apple.
Doesn't help for those who need a mouse device (cad/design/photo-editing, etc), but for what I use it for (software dev/ops work), it's great. Trackpads in a windows ecosystem feel absolutely horrendous to me, so I just use mice there lol.
Thumbs up for Smooze if you're looking to try and have a somewhat usable mouse experience. It's 20 bucks because of course it is, why wouldn't a tool to allow a need that basic cost money? It does have a trial. Maybe another commenter can recommend something free but when I was looking a couple years ago it was the only thing that did it right.
Using a regular mouse does feel like trying to push a string through sand.
i use linux and everyone is expected to be a freeloader and yet people constantly keep on churning our good/bad software for free because its the whole idea of "you scratch my back, i will scratch yours" and "i am doing this for fun. how about you have a problem so you fix this yourself and help everyone" type camaraderie which is opposite in osx where the idea is "you are rich enough, why wont you pay"
I think you may grow to like them, especially if you routinely type in languages other than your layout.
For example, I use a physical QWERTY layout, but often type in French (the latter is an abomination for programming and similar). I can very easily use dead keys to create the accents. I type as quickly in French on a Mac QWERTY as I used to on a regular AZERTY (it still requires dead keys for some characters).
If you use terminals, now your copy/paste shortcuts stay the same across apps. Trying to copy something without paying attention won't quit your running program / return you to the end of the history.
At first, I also found it a bit weird, but it has grown on me so much that now that I don't use a mac anymore, I try to bring it with me. One of the reasons why I hate using Windows at work, is that I can't get it to have a fully mac-like keyboard. I'm pretty close, but it insists on having the right alt as AltGr, which is a PITA, especially since it can't be moved. On Linux, the Mac layout works perfectly, at least on X11.
I like the macOS keyboard handling so much I even swap Control and Meta on Windows machines. Not the same, but a bit less annoying.
There is no OS where this approach solves UI hate, installing those extra utilities is the only way out
> how often the system is reimaged or whatever
there is another utility that restores your apps/configs, but of course, a no-utility policy breaks that
Windows, especially after Windows 10, has been actively hostile and repeatedly ignores the clear will of its users.
At boot time, it regularly takes the computer hostage in an attempt to coerce me to mass-enable its many spywares. After disabling then one by one, I can login to my desktop only to find that it has changed my default browser again. So I have to change that back, which is kind of futile because various parts of the OS now ignores the default browser settings anyway. After that, I have to dismiss the relentless ads and remove the crapware that keeps getting installed at every turn and corner.
This is a very, very far cry from "everything is easy to accomplish, my personal use software just works and I don't have to struggle with extra clicks and movements for everything." Both things can't be true at the same time. I have to click, click, click, go through all sorts of hoops, and finally give up and throw my computer out the window in frustration to try to achieve what I want in Windows. And what for? Out of pure corporate greed.
I feel same way about Mac users. Can't understand how people accept that turd of OS that comes with poor defaults (Window Management/Finder/keyboard), weaker customization and tonnes of bloat (Music/Notes/Messages/Mail/...) and then they pay a premium for it.
Also the fact that you chose window management as a major problem on Macs tells me that you have a strong dislike for things that's unfamiliar to you. There are some annoyances with Macs, especially if you're a dev, but window management isn't one of them. Macs have the best touchpad gestures and virtual desktop management UX. GNOME comes close these days, but Macs still feel a bit smoother.
As for your problem with "bloat," most of those are just stock utility apps. Any major desktop OS have had those since ages. You do have a point with Apple Music, but Notes, Messages, and Mail? Are you serious?
Whenever there is a major update, they put a big button for me to enable Bing and a smaller button for me to not do that, and I just need to click on the smaller button. They sometimes enable brand new features I don't want by default, but they do that to make features discoverable; in years of Windows use, all I needed to do is disable the things I didn't want.
I'm not a Windows fanboy. It's just an operating system, not a way of life. While it does have some things I don't like, I'm quite productive using it and I'm a satisfied user.
If it wasn't trivial to disable/reject these things, Bing would have a 50%+ desktop market share and that's not what we see. People aren't going in mass from Windows to Linux/Mac, what is happening instead is that desktop OSs are becoming less and less useful as people who used to be desktop users do everything they need on mobile platforms.
> Whenever there is a major update, they put a big button for me to enable Bing and a smaller button for me to not do that, and I just need to click on the smaller button.
This is not true. They're making it progressively harder to opt out of unwanted features. It's even impossible in some cases. Anyways, I clearly remember Windows booting into an unskippable full screen nag. The option to mass-accept various violations of my privacy was shown as a big blue button. The other option was concealed in a wall of text as a link, barely recognizable. After clicking on the link, I was greeted with a bunch of options that I had to toggle off, one by one. This isn't normal or acceptable. It's evil and manipulative, and the fact that they chose to do this at boot, when people need their computers the most, is beyond infuriating.
Here's just a little taste of the Windows experience:
# Privacy Violations
Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453
I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298
Even when told not to, Windows 10 doesn't stop talking to Microsoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352
# User Interference and Coercion
Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103683
Microsoft intercepting Firefox, Chrome installation on Windows 10 Insider build - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17967243
Outlook now ignores Windows' Default Browser and opens links in Edge by default - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36492329
Microsoft blocks EdgeDeflector to force Windows 11 users into Edge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251210
Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37461449
Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29579994
Last Windows 11 update changed all default browser settings to Edge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055222
Microsoft tests Windows account menu error badge when Microsoft Account not used - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35443361
Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486887
# Ads
Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964
Why can an ad break the Windows 11 desktop and taskbar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28404332
Windows 10 nagging users with Bing advertisements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27337382
Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288599
Windows 10 Tip: Turn Off File Explorer Advertising - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13835733
# Unwanted Features
Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35323121
Disabling SIP is needed for a myriad of things that aren't really that advanced, like for example, it is needed for some reason by some of the macOS "tiling WM" toys, and it's needed to even use any kexts. No joke: Discord will direct you to disable SIP if you want to .. capture audio during screenshares. It's also needed for macFUSE.
macOS also has no equivalent to WSL2. "But it's POSIX!" I can hear you say. Very fair point, but there are a lot of uses for lightweight Linux VMs, like, well, testing Linux things. Docker Desktop tries but it's slow. I really wanted to like Podman Desktop but it's similarly slow, and I had trouble with networking in a difficult-to-debug way. I strongly recommend Orb Stack here: it basically brings the WSL2 experience to macOS, except maybe even a bit better, vastly prefer it to Docker Desktop. That said, it's a monthly cost, which is definitely not ideal. There's also Colima but I have to say I don't love it either; no IPv6 support isn't a killer but it was annoying to find out the hard way.
I could probably make do with macOS if forced, but I wouldn't enjoy it. That said, I can't really take having to deal with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, so I am stuck very deep into Linux. To be fair, this is nothing new for me: Linux has been my primary desktop OS since high school. But I wouldn't say it's a good desktop OS. I mostly use it because I don't really feel like I have any other options and I already paid the cost to get deep into it anyway.
(I don't hate everything about Apple obviously, but to be honest, my desire to use Apple Silicon devices was mostly tied to high hopes for Asahi Linux)
This is a strange thing to complain about, you have to do it literally once and it takes less than 5 seconds and 5 clicks. And I would rather have a nice settings panel showing what apps have access to what, rather than the mess that is Windows privacy settings.
> I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you)
(I will admit that the phrase "keyboard shortcut" instead of something like "key binding" likely lead to this confusion, but by the time this occurred to me, the edit window was already closed.)
This hit me just recently when trying to map Command+P to Control+P. I don't know if Command+P is somehow special, but if you want to try it for yourself, feel free.
Secondly, though, accessibility permission is a really large hammer. Typically that's a high level of privileges as it usually means being able to read and interact with just about everything on-screen. Granted, this is the reality of many desktop OSes today anyways, but that's the other thing. If I have to switch all of these permissions on for many apps anyways, is this really a good design? No, of course not.
I tried to keep my rant relatively contained, because the truth is I hate macOS a lot worse. A software I used to like a lot, SnagIt, has become progressively less usable as macOS has updated over time, presumably because apps that handle screenshots and video capture have had to get increasingly tricky to function. Just about every time SnagIt starts, it gives me a laundry list of permissions I need to grant it. I mean literally it has to be like 7 things. Most of them seem to stick, but apparently after the software updates some of them need to be done again.
This security model sucks in other ways too. Like for example, you have to give your terminal emulator full disk access. If you don't, really stupid things will happen. I accidentally ran brew update in a VS Code terminal. It worked! And promptly wiped out all of the granted permissions on all of the casks it updated, because VS Code (of course) doesn't have full disk access, and as part of the security model you can't just update an app without full disk access. I really wish that wasn't the default behavior, because it was genuinely just a mistake to use the VS Code terminal for that. But even worse, I really want to grant this permission to Brew and not literally everything I run in that terminal emulator, so this is pretty damn unideal.
I haven't even gotten into Gatekeeper, OCSP stapling, and all of the trouble I have gone through trying to sign apps for macOS and have it not need to phone home to check the signature. (I was also hit by that funny bug where programs were taking forever to execute because the exec syscall was hanging waiting for Apple's servers. Reminds me that I am on a "privacy friendly" OS.)
But seriously, I'm really only scratching the surface here. Don't get me wrong, I hate other OSes too. I have an ongoing rant right next to this one about how much I hate Windows 11, and I don't think I really need to express how bad desktop Linux is from a usability standpoint.
This is untrue, there's a difference between disabling SIP and changing your security policy to "reduced."
Disabling SIP lets you modify files on the system volume along with a few other things, like a way to run executables that require private entitlements that aren't signed by Apple. The reduced security policy lets you run older Mac OS versions (there's no online signature check during installs) as well as kernel extensions from authorized developers.
Discord relies on the latter, as it uses the ACE extension for audio capture, the same one that powers Rogue Amoeba's excellent apps. There are APIs to do this natively now, introduced in Ventura I believe, but Discord hasn't yet switched over to them.
As of a few days ago, they have: https://twitter.com/advaithj1/status/1723926917286371818
I admit I glossed over the details of SIP partly because I forgot, but the point is that to get audio capture working on Discord ~~right now~~ (Apparently according to neighboring comment this is fixed, but the point does still stand anyways since this literally was the situation for users since Apple Silicon arrived afaik), you have to go into recovery and run some esoteric commands to lower the security level of the machine, and it's 100% Apple's fault because they didn't offer APIs for things that people were using kexts for before shutting off third-party kexts.
(And this whole thing feels a bit rushed, as can be seen by the issues that have occurred with the newer usermode network filtering APIs... It's always especially bad when you fuck up in a way that messes with privacy software for only your own services, even if it's truly accidental.)
Maybe this could be more clear in iTerm's UI, but the reason it needs accessibility access is in scenarios where it's stomping on Mac OS' system shortcut keys. I would expect Windows or Linux would need special privileges to do the same.
That alone makes me forget all of the Windows’s quirks and appreciate all the basic things my Windows machine offers.
It’s been like that for the Mac’s entire existence. For someone who’s used Macs all their life, the Windows way is weird.
This behavior can easily be overridden by application developers but they choose not to go against expected behavior.
Power users press Command + Q to quit an application.
I've literally never struggled with what you're describing.
You might close all windows, but still have a background task running. That's nicely represented by the app remaining on, which can ask about interrupting the background task if you try to close it. It removes the need for most systray usage.
Also the in application file picker makes it difficult to go up and down directories.
Macs have had a feature like that since the 90s called spring loaded folders. Pick up the file you want to move, then hold it over the base level destination folder for a moment until it “blinks” and it’ll open the folder in a new window. Rinse and repeat as you’re drilling down to the folder you want, then drop.
Back/forward buttons in Finder windows can also be hovered over with a dragged file to trigger those.
You can use Command up or down keys.
Thankfully I work for a company who happily allows me to continue this practice with my work laptop. My last and current work laptops have run NixOS and it's been great.
Bored, belligerent 14 year old me would have loved to get his hands on this...
[1] https://www.thespec.com/news/canada/he-says-he-works-securit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Nationalist_Party
As a fan of DBAN and as a Canadian, I am doubly disappointed.
Based! I appreciate his hard disk nuker even more now! :^)
Also, bringing that point up is as fallacious as an ad hominem in debate and is blatantly political. You are the establishment. Darik is not. I am not.
I'm just surprised it took them this long tbh. Windows used to set the standard for enshittification. Now that they're chasing cloud-based windows, I see they're returning to form.
there is vm you can do but yeah, there are options
I've been a Windows user since version 3.0. Maybe even earlier versions since I was using DOS initially.
It's sad to see into what they've turned it. Well, they'd just have to stop the spying and it would be somewhat tolerable, but that's not an option for them.
Now that so many apps have a browser version and prioritize the mobile version, the isolation caused by being on Linux keeps decreasing.
Between your phone and your browser, that’s not quite 100% coverage, but it’s very good and improving all the time.
You use your phone when you need a work app you can’t get on Linux, and if you can, the browser version of the app. And of course if it natively supports Linux there’s no problem at all.
A decade ago, being all Linux was basically untenable. Now I barely have to mention it to people. It’s been a dramatic change in a short time span.
- Multiplayer games: Steam Proton largely solves compatibility for a lot of games now, but the included DRM and anti-cheat for some multiplayer games made them unplayable.
- Certain specialist tools like Photoshop, some CAD software, etc. Open source in this space is better in compatibility.
For the rest of the time I'd do the same as you say: stick to web apps, use the mobile version, etc.
I switched to Mac this year because the M1+ battery life is best-in-class for the price, and I sorely needed a cheaper solution for work than an inverter + batteries to survive South Africa's loadshedding. That, and that some Laravel tooling is smoother on macOS than anywhere else these days.
Linux is amazing , but for a everyday machine. I've given up on Linux, I don't have time to configure it. Also every desktop ui Ive used on it isn't quite as polished as windows.
YMMV. My run-of-the-mill corporate hp-recommends-windows laptop's webcam was unsupported under Windows for approx. a year after I bought it. Worked OOB on Linux since day one.
Ditto for my other run-of-the-mill corporate hp-recommends-windows laptop's intel iGPU: it had a tough time outputting 4k@60Hz over the hp dock. Had to do a weird dance of unplugging and replugging the monitor at just the right time to make it work. Fixed after some Windows update half a year in. 0 issues since day one on Linux. Also, on this particular machine, you better have an external mouse for installing Windows, since it doesn't recognize the touchpad. Ditto for the integrated intel wifi card. Bonus points for Windows insisting on connecting to the internet (the pc doesn't have any onboard wired network). Last I tried, it was win11 22h2. The computer is a 2020 model.
I don't get the old games part. This is something where Linux absolutely shines, a lot of old Win9x games run perfectly fine on Wine, but fail on modern Windows for weird reasons. The biggest hurdle is usually DRM and Anti-Cheat, but I guess I'm lucky here because I don't play any competitive multiplayer games but more casual stuff. Also I don't use Nvidia. ;)
I just switched completely about a decade ago. Don't even remember what the final straw was. I guess what "helped" was that at the time I was very busy with life and really only had the most basic demands for my computing needs outside of work, so any shortcomings in areas like gaming didn't matter. Basically needed a browser and a text editor. When things got better two or three years down the line, well, it has already been a while since I used Windows, so any shortcomings were just part of life I guess, but also I just figured more and more stuff out over the years. I guess, and that comes down to personal preference, another thing that greatly helped was that I'm just not focused on convenience and somewhat of a minimalist, so I use i3 as the window manager and no further desktop environment. I don't use any file manager but just the terminal. No gvfs, every USB drive gets mounted and unmounted via terminal. I do use NetworkManager but only via nmcli. I guess having grown up on DOS left some impact. It just means less moving parts, so no stupid surprises after an update like "my KDE/gnome file manager suddenly doesn't show any thumb drive I plug in anymore".
I don't pretend Linux is ready for the average Joe. More and more people seem to think so, but I wouldn't even give it to my mom even though her only use case really is browsing the web and writing a letter about twice a year.
Ironically, I've had problems with things like Sublime Text crashing. But Windows games from Steam (I don't run the ones that require anti-cheat root-kits), work fairly well.
The issues she's encountered that I know of are:
- Couldn't install some specific printer drivers
- Couldn't interoperate with docx files that everyone else seems to expect
And that's it from what she's told me.
I agree it's not for everyone day-to-day, since I feel like inevitably you have to dive into the CLI to fix things with trying to get more obscure programs working.
As for desktop UI, IMO the tradeoff is that Linux DEs have no added cruft. I'd take that over Windows which to me seems filled with bloatware from MS before even the hardware manufacturer gets their hands on it. I've tried many DEs in my time with Linux, and I think GNOME in the last year or two is one of the best as a good mix of good visuals and highly customisable. KDE was closer to Windows but I've just never had luck with it being stable on various machines (seems to be surviving on my Steam Deck though).
Consumer device support is better I agree, though again IMO/IME that's more for certain niche hardware pieces or anything that has its own control app. Bluetooth is also something that I've still struggled with, especially when it comes to headsets.
Old games I can't agree with you on, but maybe that depends on your definition of old. I've had about the same experience getting old games (say from 2000 onwards) working, either with emulation or Wine supporting old software fairly seamlessly. And things have improved too. For example when I started using Linux around 2017, I recall Wine basically couldn't run The Sims 2 in a stable manner. Over the years since however, Lutris, Crossplay and Proton have taken the mantle and made games from that era work very nicely.
I’m not sure where the problem is, it could be anywhere between my window manager to the extensions I have installed, but it is too much of a pain to explore all that. Instead I switched to Pandora and then buy albums if I really like them, which works fine.
Mac has an efficient memory compression and dynamic swap system, Windows also has one, but a little bit less efficient in my personal experience, and on Linux you have to configure zRAM or zSwap and they don’t work as well. You can’t keep memory pages as compressed data in RAM what you can do in Mac and Windows. The out of memory behavior is also very bad on Linux, where it will just lock your system. On Mac it will spill swap to disk as much as you have disk space.
That is one anecdote for how Linux has a bit an inferior user experience.
Don't modern distributions come with the OOM killer? On my Arch system I didn't have to do anything to have the one from systemd.
I had a Ubuntu 20.04 VM from university with 64 GB memory and my process needed 70 GB and it did lock my system.
And the anecdote continues: I ran a 55 GB process on a 16 GB Mac and it finished without a problem and without me having to configure anything.
Also, as a curiosity, do you know how much swap there was? Usually, distros only create a limited amount of it. But I agree, as a user, you shouldn't have to worry about that.
Independently of the operating system , your 70g process might have an actual working set of 70 g, while the 55g might have had a working set of 1 gig.
Furthermore your Vm was running most likely in a shared environment, your swap partition running on shared not super fast io, etc - you may not even have had 64g of ram ( despite your Vm claiming the contrary ). Your Mac on the contrary, has what is says it has.
This is the difference. Linux has a swap partition. You fill up the dedicated swap partition (which you decide when you partition your drive and is unusable for anything else, so you want to keep it small) and boom you're out of memory, OOM starts killing random stuff.
macOS uses a dynamic swap file (technically its multiple files) on your boot drive that starts at 0 bytes that grows until your main partition runs out of space.
I wrote a small program to do some image processing, I had a memory leak that leaked uncompressed bitmaps, after a couple minutes browsing HN "why is that process so slow?", I go check, it turns out it had burned up like 200 GB of RAM on my 16 GB Mac without me even noticing. But it did actually complete without me bothering to fix the bug, so problem solved.
This also means macOS has a lot more leeway to, say, swap out background tabs you haven't touched in a week in favor of live data since it can grow that swapfile full of stale garbage.
I ´m an hpc engineer , specialize in performance work, have been using Linux since 1996, and also have a Mac. I like both. I understand these are not technical arguments, but my point is there are no easy answers when it comes to performance work. You need to measure, know exactly what’s going on, compare apples with apples, and then you can draw conclusions. In that particular case, there simply isn’t enough details to prove anything.
If the normal case is that the OOM killer just kills the out-of-control process, then I forfeit my argument.
Theory and practice unfortunately…
Isn't there a Sun Tzu saying about not interfering when your enemies are shooting themselves in the foot?
No way in hell.
If my employer wants to reduce my productivity (by enforcing Windows), so be it, he'll have to deal with the consequences.
But using Windows is from a data-privacy and security standpoint (ironically, the same reason I'm supposed to use Windows at work) an absolute no-go.
Just look at how the new outlook handles your email credentials.
Absolutely. No. Way.
I agree but the real reason they use Windows is not security, but security theater. 99% of the companies only care about the checklists in their auditing and compliance forms not for the real security. The market of said checklists and compliance forms is cornered by Windows Consultancy groups. The only real OS actor here was RedHat and this is the main reason why they became successful imo.
It's been some month and I now start emojis with "(" instead of ":" ...
... also I am surprised what a shitstorm "finding a place to save a file" is. I was amused by a former student of mine who claimed that she "only had the files in Excel!", but now I can understand that the file dialogs in Windows literally have "folders" for different programs.
With OneDrive folders, other OneDrive Folders, local folders, Application folders, Network drives I completely understand how people get confused ...
it talks to the mothership behind the scenes, it forces updates, and although the package manager should be your friend, they have sort of weaponized it so you can't uninstall their packages easily.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1434512/how-to-get-rid-of-ub...
https://askubuntu.com/questions/135540/what-is-the-whoopsie-...
Then one day WSL wasn't enough due to dumb compatibility reasons so I decided to dual boot Ubuntu.
Then very shortly after I just... stopped booting in to Windows for anything other than gaming. It was very strange. I've shitposted about year of the Linux desktop since I was a teenager but I never thought it would actually happen to me. It's not a buttery smooth transition - not by a long shot, but I'll take dumb Discord updating behaviour over random updates which make me panic that I downloaded malware from a Google ad. The time I spend on what I would consider dumb bullshit where I'm fighting the OS is about the same.
I was very pleasantly surprised how smooth gaming on Linux is. I maintain a Windows 10 install and will for the foreseeable future, just for the odd cases where I need it. But I rarely boot into it any more.
But even though most people are not happy with the recent evolution of Windows, most people will complain and then use it anyway. And Microsoft will get away with it and will take another step with the next release…
But I am not sure if I will be able to do that.
I moved to Linux Mint with a Windows VM at work for the couple of required things (Office) and while I wouldn’t say it’s painless in any way. I’m personally ready for it. I tried 10 years ago and was not.
So, I think if you can handle it, Linux, then OSX, but Windows is becoming a no go for anyone serious about privacy or security.
It doesn't require too much effort to tame the beast. Until the shit is gone, sure it's not nice - and you still benefit from taking the installer offline mid-way so that you can choose your own username and such, which is a pita.
But once sorted, it's a great and very responsive ui.
And at least with Windows 11, as opposed to Win 10, I can tell the different windows apart, with a certain level of border consistency. Win10 made it all an atrocious blur, it really did my head in (eg Teams/VSCode all blending into one black canvas of hell).
I use WSL2 (Ubuntu 22.04) for most of my work, have a beastly, latest generation PC that I built myself with 4 monitors + a stream deck all profile mounted - and am very happy with it.
I care much more about that than the telemetry stuff, but I completely appreciate that others care equally or more about the latter.
Once the crap is gone, the experience is awesome. It's such a shame they have to push it this way. I'd bloody pay extra for a lean edition.
Its also cool to have a kind of descendant of VMS being here as an alternative to a unix monoculture
If what you are doing with a computer involves the need to "know all command line switches", then you will also have to know command line switches on Windows.
A linux for the most part nowadays can be used without command line. When you jave to use it, it would be customization or installation of certain experimental software that isn't in the software center (and that is usually copy paste).
I purchased a thinkpad without any operating system on it and installed openBSD. I would not recommend this to someone coming from Windows land, but once you’ve been around the linux side for a while, you should come check openBSD out. It’s really really nice.
I was eyeing at the options available to dual-boot a recentish Surface Pro, and it was a grand total of 0. Now, it's not a big issue since WSL2, but it would still have been nice.
I own Apple products too. But for real work, I use Linux.
If I hadn't switched to Linux, I would absolutely be staying on Windows 10 until such time as Microsoft stops making a user hostile OS. The rather low threat of my machine getting owned because I can't get security patches any more is far less onerous to me than what Microsoft is doing these days.
As ex-UNIX zealot, those that during university days used M$ on the email signature (most likely still visible in some online archives), Windows is for me still the lesser problematic.
I like Apple's hardware, however I am not paying their tax, when PC gaming laptops offer me more, rather have them as work issued laptops, and in what concerns GNU/Linux I no longer have tinkering needs, been using it via VMs instead of dual boot, since VMWare became good enough for such purpose.
On laptops, even those sold with Linux pre-installed there is always something missing, or one needs to be stuck with the custom OEM distribution, possibly without major kernel updates.
News flash, outside of work and gaming, Windows isn’t needed. And even those are questionable in the future of cloud. What happens when we can run photoshop in the browser using remote resources? What happens when the Netflix of gaming emerges, what’s MS’s foothold then?
Sunken cost fallacy? I have some really expensive windows software that I'm not about to throw away, repurchase, as well as a new os/ machine. Windows fits my needs, though the constant telemetry fight etc is very annoying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player#European_...
Oh, Apple products have such an amazing usability (they are not, apparently, in 2023, if they think advertising their cloud bundle is ok).
Why is microsoft making it so hard to buy enterprise editions as a private person?
I would happily pay 5$ a month...well no i dont, but IF i had to use windows i would.
BTW, two nice apps to cleanup and shutup your windows (deinstall everything you want):
-O&O ShutUp10++
-O&O AppBuster
More here:
This is really the most disgusting thing they did, they really tried soo hard to make people you Edge that they open links from the windows search I think, no matter what default browser you have set. Strangely search is not working for me, might be because of Explorer Patcher because they are so fucking stupid the removed the ability to have the task bar on top in win11. It was a hidden setting that you can enable with a reg tweak then they completely remove it. Like WHY WTF?
I need my taskbar on top, it makes so much more sense. Window bars are top, closing windows is top, browser tabs are top ... Like how many mouse miles do you use more by going all the way to the button of your screen, I hate dumping things down, I do not mind the win11 task bar but I am forced to use a hacky windows 10 one just to move it top ...
Did I say I hate M$ already?
No-one will like the new versions and Microsoft will say to EC: see? You dumb dumb.
Same with Meta's subscription for €9.99.
Same with cookie regulations which gave us cookie banners.
This malicious compliance, don't be mistaken.