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Comment by madduci | Hacker News Reader

Windows has reached the point where it deserves only to run in a virtual machine for some needs.

Otherwise leave it behind and move on to Linux, BSD or whatever doesn't require a cloud account to work

I installed it on a VM the other day, and trust me it was only because my job, which pays me, required it. I couldn't believe it was trying to get me to sign in to a Microsoft account to finish installation. I had to look up some arcane way to skip it. The article I read listed other methods, many of which no longer work so it seems they really want you to log in.

Then it was showing me shit like the FTSE 100 price right on the desktop, and some stupid thing about the football world cup. All totally unsolicited spam. I couldn't believe people put up with Windows some 15 years ago when I ditched it. Now I'm convinced some people are just conditioned to being in an abusive relationship and can't imagine any different.

Moving 15 years back puts you into glory Win7 days. IIRC, the spam started with win8 which was released ~13 years ago and was very mild at first

That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.

I can totally see Internet availabilit correlating with the rise of unwanted stuff in the install. Believe it started with 3rd party games being part of the OS at first. I don't recall the yes/maybe later dialog "options" in win8 though, at least not in the beginning.

I actually really liked the win8 start menu change and the live tiles, even wrote some tiny homegrown apps with them. My logic was always "if I am opening the start menu, I will want to interact with that menu and only it until it's closed", so having it fullscreen made sense.

> "Yes/Maybe later" patterns

I wish I could understand the managers that insist on these patterns.

Are they completely out of touch and don't know that people hate them? Are they aware that people hate them but don't care? Or perhaps they've drank their own Kool-Aid so much that they truly believe nobody would actually want to say "No" and think they just need more opportunities to say Yes?

Actually it was Vista that made me quit for good, so I might be out of date with my "15 years" claim.

It's amazing how things can seem great when looking back at them. I remember when Bush was President of the US and we made fun of him for being "stupid". Now looking back he seemed like a great chap. The good old days...

> It's amazing how things can seem great when looking back at them. I remember when Bush was President of the US and we made fun of him for being "stupid". Now looking back he seemed like a great chap. The good old days...

Things were bad back then too. They're just even worse now (at least on those fronts).

Oh man, unfortunately all the things I need windows for doesn’t work well in a VM:

Solidworks, needs special license to work in a VM that my company is not willing to pay for

DAWs, need real time access to low level audio stuff

Games, well, lets just say the experience is better with wine on linux

With the exception of work, at some point I decided that not only is windows dead to me, but any application that can only run on windows is also dead to me.

At least on Proxmox the Solidworks and DAW latency problems are solvable.

Do tell! Specifically the DAW latency problems. I love the idea of running a DAW in a VM on Proxmox.

Assuming a decent host with virtualization support enabled and low latency network. Where you can allocate sufficient resources so the VM will not be starved:

Create the VM with the native cpu intruction model, not the portable version, give sufficient memory (no ballooning), harware passthrough an entire PCIe USB hub (not the simple USB passthrough) for controllers and soundcards (I think this needs the device to support ACS for VFIO). In your Windows VM, make sure you install the virtio-win drivers. Also enable the qemu guest agent.

People report better audio latency accessing the VM through NoMachine or Parsec rather than Remote Desktop.

The only limiting factor for me is - some games using anticheat (rainbow 6 mainly) - some programs that will never port (FL Studio, Adobe, etc.)

Apart from that, I have no desire to keep my home PC on windows.

Linux hasn't reached the point where it can be the main driver, not for my usecases. Everything works until very suddenly it doesn't and there's no budging.

Same. With every enshittification step Microsoft takes I want to switch, but alternatives are still worse.

Interesting. what kind if applications are challenging you?

Running old software. Like, late 90s to early 00s. Most of the time I can get them to work reasonably well under Win10, but wine keeps failing (and don't get me started on proton).

Plus, godawful midi support cripples many dosbox experiences.

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