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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

In my experience the entire point of windows is to lock everyone involved, including developers, into an emaciated and dependent toolset that they can't even explain to others when something doesn't go as they expect, and on which unexpected behavior could be because of clandestine updates that enforce the whims of one of the world's most user-hostile corporations

Lock-in isn't just a strategy or a quirk, it is Microsoft's business model in every context. From monopolist strongarm tactics to lobbying for kafkaesque international copyright laws they have drafted, the goal of Microsoft is to put every human being in their little tinpot dictatorship and prevent them from leaving

We should suffer no such tyrant to live, let alone cave to its demands

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I use Win11 and I don't use Visual Studio. What lock-in, specifically?

Did you ever get rid of the Edge Browser or does it still seemingly randomly open links for you?

Not OP, but I use Chrome and Edge does not open up randomly. There is literally zero issue with it.

You conveniently leave out all the hoops you have to jump through every couple months to make sure it stays that way. Every now and then some windows update adds another shortcut to your task bar, resets it to be the default browser, and other shenanigans.

That never happened to me.

I have mac, Windows and Linux machines.

It's funny to observe HN bias against Windows.

Makes me wonder what other strong biases I'm being exposed to without noticing.

Bias is when people don't like a thing you like, right?

This is stuff I witnessed happening at work, and with relatives still on windows; the internet (not just hn) is full of rants about it, even some news outlets picked up on how Microsoft aggressively tries to shove Edge down everybody's throat. And you show up here claiming that never happened to you and that it's just HN folks hating on windows. How can anyone be in such denial?

I don't have these issues.

It does and sadly it is not random

Try opening Edge and you will realize that is has imported all the Chrome session/cookies etc and now you are logged in those sites in Edge. This setting is on by default.

Try opening a link from teams

Just found that out the other day, Teams has its own preference for what your standard browser is and somehow its edge

Opens in chrome.

In Teams Classic, Teams for Schools, Teams for Personal use, or New Teams?

I think the OP means building apps native to that platform. If you're building web or Android apps, you're cross-compiling, in which case the OS doesn't matter.

Or building containerized software. Building on windows and deploying on linux is perfectly easy. Microsoft heavily supports that.

I write in C, mostly. For Windows, I mean.

Incidentally, is there a good way to build native Android apps on Android, without installing Android Studio?

Wait, Android Studio doesn't even support Android.

You can just use the Android SDK via the command line and don’t need to use Android Studio: https://www.revelo.com/blog/how-to-build-an-android-developm...

I mean lots of people manage to get around what they want to various degrees. Your use case is in spite of their efforts and wishes, and I guarantee that were you to run into problems, vs people would do everything they could to try to steer you toward it rather than help in any other way (that's even been my experience working in general programming contexts with people in that ecosystem)

Your question is deliberately constructed to deflect any possible answer (s.a. to protect the OS you've installed).

Let me illustrate this by example: let's say you don't even power up your laptop -- it's hard to imagine that you are locked into something in this scenario. The lock-in will be ultimately contingent on what you do with the system, not on what you don't.

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