If they just focus instead on developers ("developers! developers! developers!") and gamers, instead of AI gimmicks, things would be more peachy for them instead of being the most hated big tech company.
Other than all installers being terrible, the only one I can sort of remember is a rant about "My Documents" and how the word "My" made no sense.
Not to mention it was under “Documents and Settings” and it was pretty easy to hit the 255 character path limit with all that as a prefix.
Where's the lie? They aren't the computer's document — they're mine! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1x7pfH8fw
Well, we're not in a communist country for them to be "Our Documents", so of course it will be "My Documents". USA! USA! USA!
I run a lab with public computers for students to use in their projects. It is unhelpful to train a public computer with student data, even if it were ethical (it is not). Again, not going to get into the issues with Recall on public PCs... but you can use your imagination when students check their email on a public Windows computer.
I set up dozens of computers in this lab each year from scratch, it actually hurts my mouse hand to have to click so many times in order to keep students' information private. Windows 11 has ~10x as many individual dialogs I have to click on than even Windows 10, and now I have to figure out how to disable even more unsafe stuff, or guess when they will silently re-enable something I previously disabled. The number of times OneDrive has reinstalled itself after a Windows Update is nauseating.
And that's a fancy Enterprise edition for a university that had the leverage to get the worst stuff removed, I am sure I was able to add/remove programs to remove a lot of things that are just impossible to disable on a normal install.
Have you looked at automated solutions for that?
If it's a cost issue, then I think even Clonezilla will let you take an image of a "golden master" (aka pc set up how you want) then deploy it over the network to image a bunch of computers at the same time.
Sure, I look forward to IS&T releasing one but it's more likely to happen if I have one to suggest they review for security.
> If it's a cost issue, then I think even Clonezilla will let you take an image of a "golden master" (aka pc set up how you want) then deploy it over the network to image a bunch of computers at the same time.
We used to do it that way with Acronis disk cloning. It is better to do PXE boot installs to avoid weird config problems according to IS&T, I didn't second-guess them on that. I don't hate the idea, just was told to avoid it.
That can work well if the network card(s) in the computers all support PXE booting.
like the Microsoft vacuum cleaner
> while others will potentially suck.
everything they actually do: Windows, Office, Teams
I thought that was either Google, Facebook, or Amazon depending on which way the winds are blowing on a given day.
Yup... Firefox, Kagi, & Protonmail get me away from the worst of it but YouTube doesn't really have a good competitor and other people using things like Google Forms (whatever the surveys are called) sometimes ends up forcing me to log into a Google account or have certain features locked out.
Most businesses run everything on Windows and Microsoft. That's their business. They don't give a shit about Windows Home edition or nerds crying and switching to Linux. You're not their market.
All three have something to offer - the "Why" of Windows+WSL.
- WSL offers a pretty pure modern Linux experience - which takes an awful lot of brew effort to replicate on a Mac.
- The windows GUI is far superior to anything Linux has to offer - PowerToys/Fancy Zones offers snapping and window control I could never replicate on Linux - despite multiple years of trying to.
- I spend 80% of my time in tmux/terminal.
- Bare Bones Windows Terminal is absolutely rock solid and high performance.
- Linux native is more stable than Windows+WSL - I would go months without rebooting my Linux system. My windows system rarely makes it more than a couple weeks.
- I use my laptop as a workstation (Precision 5560 - it only get ~80 minutes battery, even with all the discrete NVIDIA stuff turned off) - so the (significant) superiority of Mac Laptop Portability doesn't do anything for me.
If Microsoft can dial in the stability of WSL -speaking as one who has spent at least 1/2 decade on all three platforms at work - My preference for work is Windows + WSL for GUI + Linux experience reasons. If I didn't think Microsoft was going to fix WSL, I'd probably switch to Arch.
For personal use - I have a NUC11 with a Decent RTX2060 video card for Steam Gaming, and would never consider anything for a personal laptop than a macbook in one form or another.
Fvwm ? I won't comment about Windows.
Against macOS: Not wanting to fight the OS when I want to do something like attach a debugger to a program I didn't build
Against Linux: Having an NVIDIA card in my desktop
Most things end up happening in Docker regardless, but things are just smoother in WSL. Not to mention that Windows has proper Window management and multiple display support.
Meanwhile macOS has none of these things and struggles to remember my display arrangement between restarts.
Sure I can download Rectangle/Spectacle/Amethyst and solve some of these problems (while giving screen observing permission to a third party) but it’s far from ideal and not at all what I used to have on Windows.
The only advantage macos has for me is the battery life, and that's gone when the X elite drops, hopefully with great Linux support too (though I'm worried about X86-64 emulation on Linux)
That's all without mentioning the absurd pricing of Mac devices (in usable configurations, no, 8gb isn't enough).
We rather enjoy our IDEs and graphical workflows as much as possible.
With the push to the new fisher price version of unified office that benefit will go away.