"enhancing security and user experience" -- what a ridiculous, bold-faced lie. Bravo Microsoft.
The idea that you need to confirm you're connected to the internet and that creating a Microsoft account is merely for that purpose is preposterous on its face.
Not that I was ever a regular on windows, but I think I've at least found there to be a necessity to be on windows for certain desirable games or for PC apps. So I've always kind of recognized a necessity, but I do think I can't imagine myself ever intentionally signing up for this. The Linux-based gaming experience is now so advanced, and there's nothing I truly need on Windows. I know it's a cliche indulge in a kind of performative version of a goodbye cruel world post so I don't want to go that far, because I think I would considered the contract to have been broken a while ago, but I don't think I have ever considered myself forever away from Windows, perhaps until just now.
I'm convinced Windows is mainly for people that buy computers at Best Buy and corporate IT that are unfortunately funneled into the ecosystem (hats off salute to all you).
Dev experience is usually at worst the same as Linux when you use wsl as you don't really need more than the terminal
For wsl, it's just a normal VM that's integrated with Windows. Maybe it'd get in the way of I did development that needed to work closer with the hardware, but I don't at the time
You can still choose most things, but they will keep asking and twist your arm as much as possible.
Unix-likes are far more productive environments for what I do.
From what I remember only the c/++ toolchains were a problem on windows but the couple of times I needed them they were either managed by some other build process and ran fine or I could just compile and run in wsl
I have a semi-complex app I've decided to port to Windows (it's so far on Linux and MacOS and configures/debugs/tests servo motors on serial and CAN busses), and after a couple of days I've been unable to make any sane workflow work without installing three seperate half-assed copies of Linux userspace (Git for Windows w/ its bash install, cygwin and wsl2) and choco on top to install more Linux/Unix-originated stuff. It's a lot like MacOS and needing to fiddle with homebrew, except worse and you need four of them.
Let me give you an example: I have a serial device connected to an SBC mini computer that I want to interface with from my dev PC, so I want to proxy that serial port over tcp to Windows and make it available as a COM port. On Linux this is trivial to do using socat, or ser2net+socat.
On Windows, plenty of similar tools exist. Usually you need two of them, one to make a virtual pair of COM ports, and another one to pipe a TCP socket connection into one end of the pair. So far, so good.
Except all of the utilities, drivers, etc. I've tried have just plain not worked, and I've tried a good half dozen. Often their last version is from somewhere in the 2007-2012 time frame, and something no longer works on Windows 11. I think a lot of devs of tools like this just nope'd out when Microsoft started enforcing signing and pushed the Store model harder, and moved to Linux or Mac.
In the end I had to write my own thing for the COM pair and run socat in cygwin.
And I've jumped through a few hoops like this.
I'm sure if all you do is need a place to run npm from and the rest of your stuff is all in the browser, the OS barely matters. But for native dev, Windows feels dead and barren, and fully reliant on the Linux ecosystem to be productive at this point. It's where all the reliable and well-maintained stuff comes from, whereas Windows-native tools are a ghost town of abandoned, frequently closed-source binaries.
The many years Windows couldn't make their minds up between the managed code .NET stack and native C/C++ APIs, and one was incomplete while the other bitrotted away, have really taken their toll, I think.
If you're really missing something, then great, get a console to go with your Linux desktop or laptop setup. Still no need for Windows.
Hypothetically if I were to switch back to linux as my main OS, I'd rather just dual boot windows than buy a console with an OS that is, in my opinion, even worse than windows.
>Is it behind the times to prefer an OS where literally every single game I've played in the last year has booted with no issues?
You're copying the manner of my phrasing while turning it into a rhetorical question about a different topic, you're not being responsive to my point about it being behind the times to claim that Linux does not offer a thoroughly modern gaming experience.
I'm pretty sure that type of non sequitur response is exactly what the Onion was making fun of in its headline: "Hippie wants to tell you what the real crime is." The joke is the familiar feeling of hearing someone go off who clearly didn't pay attention to a word you said.
Granted, I'm using Linux for 25 years now, so I may be biased. Things that are easy on Linux are often incredibly hard on Windows, if they are possible at all. Things that used to be hard on Linux, e.g. installing, gaming, are now easy. Things that used to be easy on Windows, e.g. typing into the start menu search box, installing, are now hard.
I'm so glad that I made Linux my daily-driver OS decades ago and (these days) only boot into Windows when I want to play games that have good HDR support. Valve has done so much good, effective work towards getting games (both major and minor) to work well on Linux. I hope whoever replaces Gabe N. and the other core management is at least as ethical, driven, and farsighted as the current folks running the show are.
Are these nVidia drivers? If so, there's your problem. nVidia on Linux has always been a shitshow of varying degrees (and based on my investigation over the years, I've found that the majority of the problems people say they have with xorg are problems that go away when you use AMD or Intel hardware).
Anyway, Steam works great for me on Linux, and I don't use the various cheating tools that are popular in online FPS games, so E_NO_REPRO, WORKSFORME.
If you're talking about in-tree drivers (which will be the overwhelming majority of drivers running on the system [0]), well, pull the other one, kid.
[0] Unless you've done the thing some folks coming from Windows get confused and do, which is go searching for and installing drivers that you don't need, because they don't know that the good ones are already packed in.
That sounds about right.
> In my experience, there were no linux drivers that work as well as the first-party drivers on windows
I said:
> So out of the fifty-to-a-hundred-or-so drivers loaded on your system one gave you problems... and that one was the Nvidia driver...
and you agreed.
The only thing I really needed Windows for was gaming, tax preparation and running Scrivener. You can get native versions of Taxcut and Scrivener for MacOS and SteamOS is good enough for me 99% of the time. If I really must play something that's Windows-only there's always GeForce Now which has the added benefit of only tying a Windows instance to my Steam account and no other online identities.
Sayonara, Windows.
I personally would say Linux does desktops objectively better both in the higher standard but also in the not screwing up sense but I am willing to accept that it might be a little bit opinionated about that and for some people it amounts to too much customization.
2. Once a month I have a task of checking 100k images for duplicates. Strangely, the only app that actually works is VisiPics from 2013. It does something smarter than just binary comparison, it works very fast. I guess I'll be running a Windows VM forever just for this one app, unless someone explains to me the algorithm it uses, so that I could write a more modern replacement.
2. Does it work in linear time, or square?
Office 365 is web-based and Linux accesses the web. If you're deep enough in the weeds that your survival hinges on desktop only features that can only be accessed from Windows then you're in a use case that can be resolved by getting a laptop for that purpose or being furnished one by your work.
And while your use case is fascinatingly specific, my understanding is that the paradigm there is what might be called visual hashing or perceptual hashing, which is more than mere file size comparison, but kind of hashing a more generalized notion of image similarity.
You may already know this, but from checking with chatgpt, there's something called DupeGuru which appears to be cross-platform. And also, it looks like there's some powerful Python and Perl libraries. Again, I'm sure your use case has some specific wrinkles to it, and you may very well know all of that already, so those might not help. But I suppose the interesting thing here is that the more idiosyncratic a use case is, the more closely it approximates things solved by programming languages which puts you back in the paradigm where Linux is not merely usable but I would argue the friendliest option.
There's the aforementioned DupeGuru program which is cross platform and wields a handful of algorithms. Then there's aHash (average hash), dHash (difference hash) , and pHash (perceptual hash). They each make assumptions about which subset of image data is important, pull it out, compare it, and are meant to do it quickly and at large scales. They are all accessible from within Pythons' imagehash library and require getting your hands dirty with python. My understanding is that Dupeguru uses its own custom perceptual hashing methods.
And although it seems like you need something more specific, the very very lazy choice is md5 sum comparison which is super fast but is only testing whether files are identical copies.
Online is more about convenience than security. Though with Windows, it looks more like convenience for M$ and not for its users.
Recall when Microsoft lost control of a Microsoft Account OpenID token signing key a year and a half ago?[4] I can't find a reference to confirm if attackers could have obtained BitLocker recovery keys by logging into any Microsoft Accounts with an OpenID token signed with the compromised key, but a reasonable assumption would surely lean towards "almost certainly". After this attack, Microsoft still had not conclusively determined 10 months later how the key was compromised, and no further news appears to be published since then.[5]
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip#Key_escrow
[3] https://nickvsnetworking.com/transport-keys-a4-k4-keys-in-ep...
[4] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec...
[5] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sti...
In an ideal world, that would be a triple decker antitrust problem!
They make people mad, they lose some customers... Maybe that's the whole point? I just don't get it.
I hate this practice.
So if they just removed that 2-line bat file, it's not a big problem. You still can add that entry to the registry, just with more complicated command.
Here's its code:
@echo off
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
shutdown /r /t 0