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Comment by ivanmontillam | Hacker News Reader

These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).

I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).

Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!

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You are defending Microsoft.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...

I am not.

Also, I am not a VSCode user or would-be VSCodium user.

I am happily married to JetBrains IDEs. Thanks.

I don't need Electron nor WebView2 bloat on my nice, beautiful ThinkPad.

You literally said

> these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).

in response to parent's

> - creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)

and VSCode is a perfect example of that happening right now.

The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to believe, and their actions.

Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.

And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)

Then you surely have a laundry list of examples from the last 10 years where MS showed the same anticompetitive nature that they had in the 90s.

Yes, people keep bringing up VSCode all the time, but fanboys are gonna fanboy.

And Windows, that one obscure product from Microsoft that people here keep forgetting about.

I try not to drink the Kool-Aid either on Microsoft's side (again, they are not necessarily my cup of tea), but the prevalence of the people with the "Hey! Remember that Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer? Micro$$$hit!!" attitude sucks my energy dry.

who at microsoft said open source is unamerican

https://www.google.com/search?q=who+at+microsoft+said+open+s...

one of the results:

Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:

https://www.linux.com/news/weekly-news-wrapup-microsoft-clai...

from 2001.

well, gosh, I feel sorry for those American Linux developers of that time. I guess they were unAmerican, according to Allchin. if they were of this time, i guess they would have been deported by ICE.

sorry for the victim now ...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-48lNCrmqxA

Well, for starters: Linux is of Finnish origin.

Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would be there.

> Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:

Yeah, typical Ballmer-era.

> he was certainly not thinking U.S. values

Damn. I wasn't sure if you were trolling above and now it's clear that you were.

yeah!

jfc.

what a pompous, fake hipster mentality he has.

I looked him up, via his HN profile:

here is his About me section, at the bottom of his blog's main page - https://www.ivanmontilla.com/ :

I found it so funny and hypocritical that I highlighted some of the sillier phrases below - in italics :

------------------------- About me

Ivan Montilla

I self-define as a challenger of the status quo.

Usually, I question trends. Normalcy is to be avoided. Some of the greatest opportunities lie where no one else is looking. I’m more of a niche markets guy.

My interests are ever-changing, but I’m currently interested in financial markets technology. I’m also passionate for software performance.

I do develop some software, but not professionally. I’m more of a power user of programming languages. I see it as a craft, both engineering and some form of art. ---------------------------

if that's the case, you must not have had much energy to begin with.

Kool-Aid and tea can do that to you :)

Skepticism that is informed by history isn’t being hateful

Not in and of itself, but it can certainly be couched in an emotionally charged manner.

That's still not being hateful

Nadella has worked in senior leadership positions at MS for 33 years. His era began in 1992 not when he became CEO.

Microsoft continues to produce absolute garbage (except now it's also adware) and continues to utilise aggressive tactics to gain market share.

They deserve plenty of hate.

I can agree anti-consumer behaviour is still ingrained in parts of Microsoft, as a dormant beast waiting to be Ballmer-ized for a new round.

But again, why the baseless argument based on hate?

You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot.

After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.

I should have the right to have a clean Windows out-of-the-box, but de-bloating is still a viable path.

The thought that I would have to go through the trouble of reading some git repo to run a script that will debloat my OS, no matter how easy or straightforward might be, makes me feel tired. I don't want to fight my OS, I want it to work with me. Between searching and learning stuff for my job and searching and learning stuff for my personal development or hobbies, investing time in tinkering windows of all things doesn't exactly feel me with excitement. I would rather switch to Mac or invest time tinkering a linux distribution that actually respects me.

You really don't. It just requires messing with some group policy and settings. I did this 5-10 years ago and haven't had to really mess with it much since. I've never used an OS that did not require some effort to get in a state I like.

Your last statement is correct.

Spending time to configure your OS to your liking is one thing. Having to actively fight all the crap that the OS vendor has jammed into it is quite a bit different.

I don't think the two are equivalent, since one has a much more adversarial flavor to it.

Having run Linux for many years in my experience there is a lot of configuration that is not because it's "to my liking" but rather because X broke and now I need to figure out why. I don't mind it, because it's definitely worth it in the end.

> You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot. > After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.

Sure you can. I, as a tech savvy person, can debloat Windows 11. If I dare to do it. If I know I can do it. If I search for information on the internet on how to do it. If I know how to search and follow those instructions. If I follow all the steps (and hope my tutorial covers everything). If Microsoft doesn’t push an update to bloat it again.

And with that, well I still don’t know how to install it without a Microsoft account. It’s so incredibly user hostile that even the insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit.

You can create an unattended answer file to skip the MSFT account.

https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

Of course I can. And when this method will not be available anymore, I will still be able to reverse engineer the Windows ISO to hack it.

(Sorry for the ça sarcasm, I know you wanted to be helpful, I already knew that but maybe someone will read your comment and discover it so thank you)

Didn't know you knew, cool. I doubt this is a method that will become unavailable as enterprises still use it. Never say never, of course, but as long as Active Directory is still around there will need to be some way to suppress the MSFT Account option.

> insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit

No, but they will lock you out of your account if you have a long gone debit card on there that you don't remember the numbers for or access to that school email your uni yanked back.

I wonder how many college kids got locked out of their iTunes account permanently after they graduated.

Not really. You can't fully remove large parts of the bloat without breaking Windows Update, and true removal of some features is invasive enough that it has to be done offline.

When you actually look at those de-bloating scripts or techniques in detail, it's clear that they only barely address the issues with Windows, and they're always chasing a moving target of anti-user bullshit.

How do you debloat Windows 11 of the built in copy of the whole browser?

Honestly less time consuming to just install some GNU/Linux distro.

Install, maybe. Configure? Maybe not.

Linux tends to tempt people to spend time configuring it, but most of that is customisation to taste that Windows users very rarely do.

You can just skip it and use everything with the distro defaults. it many even be less work than Windows as a lot more software is installed by default on installation.

I used to configure Windows, now I don't bother. But with Linux, I do because I must. Many OOTB defaults just aren't great, or some part of it requires configuration.

LoD is _fine_ but not great.

(Slackware 4.0 was great)

> but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era

Why does this matter? How does that invalidate anything? Are global companies only accountable for their actions so long as they maintain the same CEO?

>but don't be hateful!

Won't someone please think of the poor global technology conglomerate!

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