When you choose Windows, the computer uses you. When you choose Linux, you use the computer. Stop complaining and start switching. It should be apparent by now that Microsoft isn't going to stop their bad behavior.
Gamers who bend over for the sake of their hobby are a pathetic bunch. Linux has many, many great games, and if that's not enough supplement it with a PS4 or something and you'll never be bored.
Most professionals would have no problem using Linux for their needs. What applications are you suggesting aren't up to snuff?
>Linux has more gaming than it did 5-10 years ago, but if someone wants to play a game at top performance on PC, you typically need to choose Windows.
You can make an argument about the size of the respective platform's game libraries, but not about their performance. Games on Linux often perform as well as or better than Windows. There's no clear trend that suggests the performance of games on Linux are worse than on Windows.
And even if it were, what good is 70 FPS over 60 FPS beyond pissing contests? You're limited by your display's refresh rate anyway.
Many people use monitors with 144hz refresh rates. And increased FPS means you can turn graphics up, or enable more sophisticated anti-aliasing solutions, without impacting absolute performance.
My point is that the difference isn't going to be enough to be meaningful. If your GPU can drive 144 FPS on your Windows install it can probably drive 144 FPS on your Linux install with the same graphics settings.
I'm just noting why it's not "just a pissing contest". You're right that performance will be similar for games which were built with cross-OS compatibility in mind. But the differences in performance do matter.
That's true, but also some companies cough Nvidia cough have drivers that aren't up to snuff with an OPEN SOURCE system. It's crazy that the software is FREE to access and really there would be no need to pay any real fees to develop better drivers for systems. AMD is one of the big players that has actually been working with the community to help support their cards.
This is not true: If you increase your target FPS to meet a monitor refresh rate, you must turn down your AA or other graphics settings to compensate when using the same hardware. Going from a 60 Hz to 144 Hz monitor more than doubles the FPS required for Vsync, which requires double the hardware performance to take advantage of the high refresh rate.
More and more games are coming to Linux, for sure (I'm a huge fan of games on Linux!), but Linux still is missing the latest-and-greatest AAA titles... think the Call of Duty's, Battlefield's, Skyrim's, Fallout's, Wolfenstein's... and many many more.
I find that as I grow older I'm less and less interested in the design-by-commitee AAA crap. The really interesting stuff is mostly in the small fry scene, and those tend to be cross platform.
I do have a Windows install specifically for gaming, but I haven't booted it in ages.
My experience is most of the indy games coming out I’m interested in are windows only. Also really good games this generation like Divinity 2 have no Linux support
Well it depends what you like. I never tried any of the Divinitys because I'm under the impression that the storyline is unimaginative and just game mechanics mostly don't cut it for me (let's not mention how much time i spend in Minecraft though).
My 2nd place entertainment activity is reading, and there are few games that can approach a good book in storytelling.
I don't normally click on timestamps to add to a deep thread, but if you like good storytelling, check out Pillars of Eternity. If you're a pen-and-paper nerd, then it might be right up your alley and the storytelling is really well done.
In that case, thank you for backing! I am currently replaying 1 on POTD, and enjoying every minute (I discovered it too late for the second Kickstarter, unfortunately).
Cause Wolf3D, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had native clients in early '00s when I played them. RTCW: ET was even completely free (as in beer). I played it for countless of hours!!
Back in those days we had a few people porting games over such as Ryan Gordon from Icculus or Timothee Besset (TTimo) from ID who ported, perhaps sometimes even as an after thought because the original floppies or CD (!!) didn't contain the Linux client.
We've come a long way. These days, you can just have one application to install a shitload of games (Steam, Humble Bundle) and you can find games for whatever platform you run, pay, install, and run it. With far, far more titles. Add to that: WebGL games are going to work on *NIX out of the box. Like Airmash, for example.
Actually, competitive esports players consistently play at a higher refresh rate than what is displayed (CS:GO in particular).... the main reason is that the computer is computes the inputs at the framerate, regardless of whats shown on screen.
Even if a game performs better on PC, whose to say it isn't optimized? Some of Vavle's own games have performed better via the Linux build compared to Windows or Mac. It's also super sketchy to not be able to see what's fully happening in one's system.
Frustrated, and I rally against it too. My laptops run coreboot. But the difference between your closed BIOS and your closed OS is that most people actually can choose their OS, whereas fixing the BIOS problem is a much more difficult obstacle.
in my case, it makes me feel double-plus un-good. which is why I go to the trouble of killing the ME on any system I can, despite the at-best trivial impact of doing so.
PS4 is also a closed ecosystem, far more so than PC gaming on Windows?
Inevitably people end up with a requirement for some Windows program that trips up users or administrators in the workplace. Some workplaces (e.g. mine) are fully paid-up committed Microsoft shops where everyone has MSDN.
>PS4 is also a closed ecosystem, far more so than PC gaming on Windows?
Baby steps. I don't own a PS4 anyway, but I'm so tired of discussing Windows with people who whine about losing their games that I feel the need to specify an out.
And I feel a need to point out that you behave like a jerk in this thread and well below the standard HN is known for. If you have a problem with Windows, that's fine, calling people pathetic is not.
There's a huge range of applications that are only macOS or windows only that are a miles better in everyway.
For instance, apple's sketch. You won't find anything like it even on Windows.
For instance, windows PC. You have a ton of native autohotkey applications for writing macros, powerful 3rd party file explorers like directoryOpus, etc. You can't play video games on it, naturally gamedevelopment is a hassle as well. You can't run CAD programs, etc
"Okay, Mr. Stallman, you've successfully forecast everything that's happened in computing over the last few years, and done so literally decades in advance, so thanks for that I guess, but please take off the tinfoil and go away now."
> especially for professional users and gamers. Those whose applications are only available for Windows.
I have gotten around this with a virtualized Windows installation for CAD applications. The Windows VM goes online for software activation only.
With VFIO, a dedicated graphics card, and an nVME SSD I don't feel any performance degradation. The graphics card and nVME drive are passed directly to the VM. Some simple benchmarks show there is ~3% performance decline in the VM vs booting it native, but I don't "feel" it.
Granted, picking VFIO compliant hardware and setting everything up is far outside the ability of the average Windows user.
VFIO is the real deal - if you can find the right hardware. Unfortunately, there isn't a master list of VFIO compatible hardware (that I know of). You have to scour reddit or the Red Hat VFIO mailing lists hoping someone has posted the motherboard/processor you're interested in.
Once you have hardware, there are lots of resources for pulling it off:
I do the same thing for a "virtual gaming pc" on proxmox with qemu/kvm. it was a pain to get working right with my specific hardware and with proxmox as a base, but is pretty nice now that it works.
Many people use Arch linux or redhat distros to do this also, but pretty much any major distro should be capable.
AFAIK it works on VMware ESXi too.
What card are you using, and what virtualization solution?
I'm running my Windows KVM on a GTX 1080, and it took months and months to work out all the little kinks causing system instability... now it runs quite smooth. I could never ever go back.
I've been slowly collecting blog posts and articles with the idea of writing an updated guide to making a completely stable and optimized VM with vfio, hugetables, reduced DPC latency, bridged networking, etc., written for audiences that aren't too familiar with Linux.
It would benefit adoption really well if someone unfamiliar with Linux could visit a single resource that explains everything they need to know.
>It's never that simple, especially for professional users and gamers. Those whose applications are only available for Windows.
I'm both, and you're definitely wrong. 155 of my 343 steam games have direct native ports. I've just stopped playing stellaris and started playing KSP. I've been a linux gamer for the last three years and it's been a better experience, not worse. I dominate on ballistic overkill because the input lag is noticeably lower on linux.
I'm also a software developer, and with the exception of dotnet development, software development is a considerably smoother and more consistant experience on linux. It grates every day to have to use windows at work, and I do half of my work inside a linux VM.
Maya, Sketchbook, Fusion, Visual Studio, DirectX, Microsoft Office, Acrobat, ...
Here's one really simple example for you of why this Windows software matters to a very large community of professionals: most accounting work is both taught and done in Excel.
Here's a few other pretty awesome art tools you might want to know about BTW:
Krita
Blender
Inkscape
If we're doing "what abouts" though, what about:
freely interchangable desktop layouts
native docker support
a user-friendly terminal
an os kernel that is designed to be malware resistant
Like seriously buddy, the GUI desktop is now ~40 years old and windows /still/ can't support uninstalling the default desktop and installing your own. Custom launchers are one of the most downloaded android app categories, don't try to tell me people don't want it. But hey, at least windows finally got multiple desktops by cribbing the idea from linux after two decades of unsuccessfully trying to tell their customers that it wasn't really that good a feature.
If the best you can say about your operating system is "adobe supports it", which is what it seems like you're saying, then oh dear. Like, I get it, photoshop is pretty darn good. But for realsies, we're in a thread where the title post is about microsoft installing random crap on your computer without permission. This is the same company that is showing ads on your lock screen and start bar[1], has been formally chastised by national governments for it's handling of telemetry[2], autoinstalled updates that bricked peoples laptops[3] and then autoinstalled other updates that put other peoples computers in reboot loops[4]. They're gonna keep doing this stuff. For goodness sake, they incentivised peoples "upgrades" from windows 7 by installing nagware with a deliberately malicious UI[5], and attempting to directly cause professional conflict for sysadmins with stability concerns[6].
You're part of an eternal beta of questionable QA control at the hands of a company that has a documented history of behaving unethically. Do they have to send someone round to your house to kill and eat your cat in front of you before you decide you could maybe dig deep and stoop to learning gimp?
> Like seriously buddy, the GUI desktop is now ~40 years old and windows /still/ can't support uninstalling the default desktop and installing your own.
Actually, it is worse: you used to be able to replace the default desktop and install your own from the first versions of Windows up until recently. Now you can't and with Windows 8 Microsoft removed a ton of functionality when it comes to customization (e.g. you cannot disable DWM and you cannot use the classic theme - which was the only one with support for totally customizable color schemes).
>> Like seriously buddy, the GUI desktop is now ~40 years old and windows /still/ can't support uninstalling the default desktop and installing your own.
I wasn't asking for alternatives, that's not an option. You have to stay compatible with the rest of the company/industry. Also do you really think these CAD tools are comparable at all?
Using Wine in work is also not an option, it is too unpredictable (although it's improving at a fast pace).
I know Linux has these features and that's why I personally use it. Clearly they're not the focus of other users though.
>I wasn't asking for alternatives, that's not an option. You have to stay compatible with the rest of the company/industry. Also do you really think these CAD tools are comparable at all?
If you're building a helicopter, they're not comparable at all. However, the word professional is a rather wider scope than that, and they're excellent for anyone whos business does not revolve around engineering, but has it as an auxiliary. Just as there are whole industries, like banking, that have software developers as a subset of the org chart, there are whole industries that need just a little bit of 3d CAD work.
I would not recommend professional grade adobe editing packages to an independent real estate agent that basically just needs to crop and color-correct photos, and I would not recommend autodesk inventor to a city planner that just needs to 3d print stand-in terrain. Nor would I suggest a $40,000 stratasys printer to them by the way. If you're not going to use the advanced features then the cost is high and the licensing compliance is more painful for no net benefit. GIMP and FreeCAD are exceptional front-runners for these kinds of purposes.
By the way, staying compatible with the industry is a great way to be non-exceptional. I'm not saying linux is the magical bullet of business success (because it's not), but if whatever you're doing is 100% compatible with industry software, then you're not doing anything that someone else hasn't already thought of. If you ever decide you want to move outside the bounds of what others have already done, you'll suddenly discover that open source is a competitive advantage, because it's much easier to extend it to the bleeding edge.
I'm sorry, but that is a complete joke. The distance between gimp and photoshop or darkroom and lightroom is tiny compared to the distance between even base autocad and the open source alternatives. And that's before we start talking about autocad variants like Civil3d and all the third party tools that are built on top of autocad.
Software developers are probably one of the few professional groups with virtually no software that ties them explicitly to Windows or MacOS. Accountants, artists, video editors, modelers, engineers, car mechanics... so many others rely on software only available on Windows.
On the gaming note - I'm glad you enjoy the games available on Linux, and that you were OK giving up some games you enjoyed. Personally, I'm working my way through WoW, with some dabbling in Space Engineers and Subnautica. None of which are available on Linux, without diving into the world of Wine.
Could I give up Windows PC gaming entirely? Sure.Could I dive into the convoluted and not-always-reliable world of Wine? Sure. Could Bob Ross have given up oil painting for acrylics? Sure. But... it doesn't sound like much fun.
In the chess world, everyone—every strong player in the world, it seems—uses ChessBase, which is Windows only. They used to have a Mac version years ago but it apparently was the worst software ever. It's used for studying recent master games, storing and training on your opening theory, analysing with computer engines to find new moves in the opening, studying the games of your next opponent etc. Other programs have similar functions, but it's more powerful, and no grandmaster uses anything else. Also its data format is secret, so no other software can convert to or from ChessBase format. It was created by some Germans in collaboration with Kasparov in the 1980s, and was instrumental to his unprecedented level of opening theory knowledge.
Yes “but” how do expect open alternatives to become better? Contribute to a project (with a very low bar for “contribute”, anything from “file a bug” to “fix the documentation” to “make artwork”). Yes, some big companies also push Linux forward but individuals who want good alternatives can do something to make those alternatives happen.
An open source project for external customers (i.e. us) operated by a bunch of unpaid volunteers will never really be able to compete with an application with paid developers, invested users, and the supporting departments.
I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good.
>I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good.
Hah, this is rich. Many open source products are far better than their proprietary alternatives, especially developer oriented products (which is natural considering that developers tend to use open source and tend to improve their own tools).
On the other hand, when it comes to categories like games, video game console emulators, office productivity applications, document publishing, etc., the open-source alternatives are generally way worse.
> Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.
As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.
> "way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.
Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.
>As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.
The only one that comes to mind is that one Wii U emulator. Xenia doesn't support Linux but it's open source and the lack of support more a reflection of its relative immaturity than not being possible (I'm certain a Linux port will come eventually, I was even working on it myself for a while).
>Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.
If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case. Writing new documents should use ODF, which MSWord supports fine (often transparently, non-technical users will probably see a file with the same MSWord icon and no file extension).
In some contexts it is a big deal, though. I suppose the answer to that is that everyone who uses Word should learn to use Latex instead but that's not realistic.
> If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case.
You sound like someone who never collaborated on an Office file with someone from another company.
If a company wants to be taken seriously, and some of their work involves exchanging and collaborating on presentations, text documents or tabular files, you cannot not use MS Office.
Even Mac Office used to be really bad here, although I think the newest versions are significantly closer to the real thing.
I feel like this is kind of an extreme example of something I see a lot on HN: hackers who literally cannot imagine ways of using a computer that are outside of their experience.
Open source video game console emulators are certainly not worse. If anything, the best by far emulator (Dolphin) is open source, but even beyond that almost every open source VGC emulator is also open source and those emulators tend to be the most long running ones (almost always because the developers of the closed source emulators lose interest). For some systems, you have only open source emulators.
There are several systems where your only option is Windows, unless the situation has changed drastically since I last looked into it. I remember Dreamcast, Saturn, DS, PSP, and PS2 being in this category, and also the options for N64/PSX not being very good, the last time I was interested. Of course, someone can respond to arguments about any program being missing with "well, I don't care about those," but you can't expect anyone to find that persuasive if they're not already converted.
There are emulators on Linux in active development for all the systems you've mentioned, most even being available in Debian (and derivative) repositories.
The situation may have improved, but the last time I tried this Yabause was a joke and the non-Windows versions of Desmume and PCSX2 were like a year behind and clearly not the main priority for anyone.
I can't say I know much about Yabause, but Desmume and PCSX2 have worked quite well for me on Linux, no problems whatsoever. PCSX2 was last updated in December on Arch Linux, and Desmume is up to date with the latest stable release for all platforms.
With respect, you should be looking these things up for yourself before you make claims like the ones you've been making in this thread.
Why the hell do I have to "look up" personal experiences I had that made me dislike using Linux and OS X? It's great to hear some of my issues were out-of-date but come on. I tried using these non-Windows operating systems and eventually switched back because I didn't like the experience. An imperious series of posts telling me that I'm wrong because there has been an improvement and, anyway, shouldn't want to do what I want to do, is not exactly persuading me to feel differently.
I see you haven't understood what I said. The specific examples I cited were real in the past. Even if those, specifically, are now solved, am I to believe this will never be an issue again? Because I think what's more likely is that non-Windows emulators will be behind by a few years in the future as well.
They're not behind, I doubt they've ever been behind, and if they get behind, it's a trivial matter to prod the package maintainer for an update. These emulators support Linux as a first class platform and hell, for several of them Windows is probably a second-class platform.
I'll give you (some) software development tools. Still, things like Sublime Text, Visual Studio, and the entire Jet Brains lineup which give lie to the "especially" part of the developer orientated toolset.
But...
Gimp is far better than Photoshop and Illustrator?
Blender is far better than 3DS Max and Maya?
Libre Office is far better than Microsoft Office?
Darkroom is far better than Lightroom?
Honestly, I can't even think of an open source CAD one that can even compare favorably to SketchUp, let alone AutoCad.
If you have to, there are many tools available to do a job on Linux, with a backup of VMs and Wine. They are not, however, "far better".
Yeah. Making software to sell forces you to listen to the market (not the same thing as just listening to your existing customers) if you want to grow your sales.
Emacs is more powerful than IntelliJ, say, but it's vastly inferior in terms of learning curve and UX. There are some things I'd rather do in it than in IntelliJ, but it's not what I'm going to use for day to day Android dev, say. Or what I'd point newcomers at.
Blender is just the worst example that you could have picked. It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field. It is like GIMP: just enough for those with simple needs.
KDE 3 would have been a much better example. But these days are gone, too.
What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?
To be honest, it can be summed up with one sentence:
Blender is striving to meet the features and capabilities of Maya and 3ds Studio, not the other way around.
A more "business" orientated sentence:
Blender is required to to split its focus to provide a complete movie/game making package including a movie editor, shader editor (i.e. photoshop), and animation editor, an audio editor, a physics editor, a compositing editor, and a game editor; Maya and 3ds Studio do not.
Blender just can't keep up. It's a good tool, no doubt about it, but few professional users will end up using it to make money.
I can comprehend what you are saying, but I disagree.
Over the past decade or so, Blender has been on par, and even ahead of "industry standard" tools.
It isn't required to split its focus. It is able to. That is something proprietary software from a company would fail at. It's something that free software and collaboration succeed at.
The biggest benefit is that it has all of these tools in a cohesive environment.
Instead of a photoshop/GIMP-like menu of functions, Blender is a cohesive manageable UI.
There are, in fact, a wide variety of professionals using Blender to make money. You don't hear about it, because telling you what they use is not their perogative.
What features to Maya/Max/etc. have that Blender is really behind on today? I can't think of any.
Blender is overextended. That's what Blender developers said openly. Parts like the compositor don't get much love at all. They were merely included because they were needed to fill huge gaping holes in the production pipeline for their demo movies. After that, interest in them dropped to near zero, but there were no better alternatives for a long time.
Now, there is at least Neutron as an open source compositing tool that seems to be filling that particular hole now much more competently than Blender ever could.
I do not understand how you can consider Blender's UI "manageable" in any way. There are much better ways to build UIs for enormously complex DCC tools. My go-to example for that has been Maya for a long time, but since a couple of years, Autodesk has bolted on features in a way that spectacularly breaks the internal consistency, logic and general discoverability of features in Maya. Even though, Blender's UI is still an unsorted mess compared to that.
> It isn't required to split its focus. It is able to. That is something proprietary software from a company would fail at. It's something that free software and collaboration succeed at.
Expanding feature sets is something commercial software fails at? The biggest reason nobody professionally uses the open-source alternatives is they're missing features.
Blender cannot cope with the kind of stuff that is thrown at commercial DCC tools in feature production. Parts of it don't scale, others fall short of what would be required. Many features are kind of there on paper, but are not fleshed out that well.
Blender faces a sort of a chicken and egg problem: if you don't push it, you can't find out what needs fixing. But nobody in the industry is willing to try because they know that it will break too easily.
This is sort of why the Blender Foundation creates these open source movie projects: they are there to figure out what needs fixing. A ton of new features had to be created for each new short. Last time I bothered to check, many of these features were stuff that would have been considered absolutely essential in VFX workflow at the time the Blender developers managed to implement it.
The downside to these projects is that they also lead to the addition of features like compositing and editing workflows that are out of place in a DCC tool (especially the editing part). Blender started to overextend itself and ended up with too few developers to push all of these areas equally well.
> What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?
I feel confidant in saying that yeah, there probably are. They're being paid to implement features and fix bugs found by their companies, who use R and Jenkins.
I think if you make development of portable software much easier, then people'll have no excuse for not building software that works on multiple platforms except "we specifically choose to not target that platform."
Sorry Sir_Cmpwn, but that's happening with W10. Windows 8.1 with the 'Windows Firewall Control", classicshell, a strong HOSTS file (someonewhocares.org), and a Firefox with NoScript/ublock/adblock+/etc and you got your privacy control in order.
I do agree with the Linux argument you are making, but you cannot swerve 50% of the global Windows users into Linux. It still doesn't have the best UI reputation (although it gets the job done).
You can't simultaneously talk about 50% of global Windows users and their struggles with UI and assume they have the foggiest idea how to set up a strong HOSTS file and a carefully secured Firefox installation. How about they just don't use a hostile OS? If you're defending yourself from your own operating system, you've chosen the wrong damn operating system.
Also, I don't want to hear the UI argument when KDE Plasma exists. I bet 90% or better of Windows users would be comfortable on Plasma.
> If you're defending yourself from your own operating system, you've chosen the wrong damn operating system.
this is exactly 100% dead on the money
prior to Windows 10 Microsoft was at worst known for producing unreliable mediocre quality software, but they were trustworthy (at least for the end user)
Windows 10 changed everything, at the point you're fighting the company that made the OS to not spy on you, not show you ads, not reboot against your will and not reinstall random crapware you previously removed: it's time to switch
As a professional who gets work done with Linux, I disagree. Lots of desktop environments (KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon) offer a UI is just as polished as mac or windows.
Lack of suitable software can be a dealbreaker for some professions. There aren't many professional video editing suites, for example. But in companies I've worked at, most workers only need a browser and an office suite to do their jobs. Linux would work for them.
I think the real obstacle is training. You have a workforce that's already used to the way windows works. It's easier to hire IT people with windows experience than it is with Linux. Users know how to do their tasks in Microsoft office, and even though Libre office is similar, they might have to learn a few new things.
I understand you're talking about the reputation, but Linux UI has gotten really good over the years. Recent Gnome, Mate, and Cinnamon builds can be truly beautiful and the Ubuntu based OSes are legitimately beautiful out of the box. I've haven't used Ubuntu since 12.x, but even then it was a legitimately good looking OS, certainly better than Windows. Mint looks and functions intuitively for any Windows user. Anyone who says Linux UI is bad has either not used Linux recently or picked an obscure distro. I've used Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, and Arch within the past 5 years and they've all been solid. I would take any of those out of the box over an out of the box Windows 8 or 10. Windows is basically non-functional to me without classicshell.
I'd switch to Linux in the blink of an eye if I didn't have to worry about my games working. WINE is great and all, but it's still not 100% compatible.
Then donate however many thousands of dollars you were going to spend on Autodesk/etc licenses to Blender, Krita, Gimp, etc. Blender and Krita are competitive with their commercial counterparts and Gimp is getting there.
I'm a very strong advocate of Open Source Software, and all things Linux as well.
I've used Gimp, Inkscape, and others... but sometimes you just need to get work done, and the closed source proprietary application is what you need, I'm sorry to say.
Donating thousands of dollars to Gimp today isn't going to put it on par with Photoshop today... I wish it would. Maybe it could be in a few years... but I need to get work done right now.
Sometimes you do need a commercial interest behind something to drive it's progress. That doesn't mean it has to be closed and proprietary, but they often are, sadly.
Note that the biggest issue with such programs isn't so much the features as the file formats these programs use that came to become de facto standards in their industries.
I was just yesterday talking with a friend of mine who worked in architecture visualization and told me that basically the main reason he cannot use blender, even though he'd really like to learn it (and it would save him money on licensing), and he uses 3ds max instead is that 3ds max can read (he didn't care about writing) all the file formats from more specialized software (not max files) that his clients send to him and that is basically the reason every firm that does the same thing cannot use blender.
When i suggested that maybe some of those firms could pay developers to implement and/or improve support for those formats, he said that none would do such a thing as the bigger firms who can pay developers do not really care and can afford to use 3ds max while those who would benefit more by switching to blender (smaller firms and freelancers) cannot pay the developers.
Yes, but not every user who needs a program can even do that.
The truth is that people are shit at using a computer (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/). At some point we need to draw the obvious conclusion from that: users capable of useful contribution to a project are a significant minority compared to the number of users who need or wish to use that software. How many people develop software? About 5%. How many people need to use software? 95% or more? Point being, no matter how important or unimportant your software is, you are guaranteed to have a user base predominantly incapable of contributing to the project.
This is why the constant responses of, "Patches welcome," or similar in response to user complaints is so hostile to users. It's saying to users, "This application is only for experts," which is likely to only appeal to experts. Since experts are so rare, that doesn't seem like a particularly inspiring response. You're just driving users away from your project.
Yes, anybody can contribute to an open source project. No, not everybody is capable of doing so meaningfully. Yes, anybody can recognize a bad design or bug. No, not everybody is capable of recognizing a good or correct design or fixing a bug. If Linux is to ever become an operating system for the desktop, we must accept that the majority of users are not going to be developers, and a user cannot be expected to become a developer just because they want to use a computer. It is no longer 1975.
The only exception to the above is if your project has a user base entirely devoted to programmers. That's precisely why those projects get so much development time.
Do you also own a PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii, and a Nintendo Switch? Do you miss the exclusives on them? You'll survive without the handful of games you have to leave behind.
FWIW there are some games on those systems i'd love to play (Last of Us being an example), but at least i know that they'll eventually be emulated so even if it takes 10, 15 or whatever years i'll play them at some point.
But the two major differences between what you are talking about and what others are talking about are that a) we have the hardware, it is totally a software issue and b) we are mainly talking for software we already have paid for, not software we may or may not buy in the future.
But hopefully as Linux becomes more popular with gaming (and Microsoft is distracted with UWP and the like), Wine will also see improvements that make gaming better. Already since Valve shown up and rattled things, Wine's gaming compatibility seems to have improved a lot compared to previous years.
>we are mainly talking for software we already have paid for, not software we may or may not buy in the future.
A solution for this is to set up dual boot or whatever and use it only for the Windows-only games, until you get bored of them. Then kill Windows and you're free.
This is the exact path I took ~15 years ago. Once I realized I didn't care much for the 'exclusively windows' games, I killed my windows partition and haven't looked back since. The exciting twist to this story is that many of those games are now playable on Linux because of Wine!
Yes, this is what i'm usually doing, although i tend to use Windows even for games that are available on Linux since they tend to perform and/or look better. I mainly use Linux for gaming when i'm already doing something on Linux and i don't feel like rebooting.
Games are that incredibly painful holdout. I'm in a similar boat. I have an HTPC in my living room that runs Kodi, along with custom launchers for Steam and RetroArch so that I can control everything with a bluetooth controller.
The amazing thing is that I could already switch it over to Linux via KodiBuntu or some other distro and get 90% of my day-to-day functionality. But then there's the Windows-only library of games that I have on Steam--games that I've paid hundreds of dollars for over the years, that I simply don't have the energy to try fiddling for hours with in WINE. And that damn remaining 10% is what keeps that PC on Windows 10.
As much as I despise W10, Microsoft has the gamer market by the balls, and they know it. I try as much as I can to buy the Remastered Classics of games like Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment that include proper Linux ports, just to chip away at that dependency, but there are plenty of games that in all likelihood will never have first-class Linux support.
I switched to only playing and buying games that work on Linux a few years ago and haven't regretted a moment of it. Indie games might not be as shiny and realistic looking but they're typically more creative and deep.
I know this isn't exactly what you were saying, but I recently bought myself the (ancient) Star Wars Empire at War games, and they run better under WINE than they did under Windows 10. There's some problem that makes it drop frames and become unplayable in Windows.
Moreso on topic, I actually do much of my gaming in Linux, I only have a couple of AAA titles that I use Windows for (Elite: Dangerous and AC:Origins), everything else is Linux (KSP, X-Com, X-Com 2, RimWorld).
I often try and make a point of emailing a "Thanks for supporting Linux!" to the companies who release the ones I want to play, just so they know we are out there.
The majority of people who could use Linux exclusively (only need a browser, don't need Office compatibility, nothing fancy) buy a "just works" Windows laptop or tablet and I bet 99% of them don't even know what Linux is. Even then you get some weird cases like banking software not working on Linux and they ask you to install Windows again. And kids wants to play what their friends are playing, it's hard to break the cycle. Oh you want to play PUBG? Too bad. Some games you might even be able to make it work with some baby sitting but it will drain all your energy and you are not getting paid for the job.
If you want Linux to have a chance it needs to play the long game and that won't ever happen. Everything I own except my gaming PC is Linux but it's not even worth trying to convert others. I find pretty immature to suggest "if your job demands Windows, just quit", "just spend 20 hours trying to make this thing that just works in Windows", "you don't need AAA games". I say immature because I was doing this shit a few years ago and I still cringe about it.
In my experience trying to teach people about the importance of privacy is mostly futile. What worked was, and I only did this to a close family friend, to show him what I could learn about him just by showing what was stored in AppData and many other folders. Some thumbnails will be forever ingrained in my mind.
I'm getting sick of this dichotomy. It's trivial to install both. Keep windows 10 on a partition big enough for your games/Netflix/etc., and use Debian/Archlinux/NixOS/whatever for everything else.
That, in itself, can be kind of annoying (interrupt all your downloads or whatever you are doing), and it doesn't get at the other issues -- having to run updates for both, having two incompatible filesystems where it's annoying to fetch a document from one and use it on the other, doubling the amount of setup and configuration you have to do, and so on. Every time I've set up a dual-boot system I've ended up just never using one of the options.
Of course, but is it more annoying than using Windows all the time? OP leads me to belive a growing number of windows users might think otherwise. It's also worth noting that rebooting is an order of magnitude faster than it was 10 years ago.
> having to run updates for both
Updates are a pain in Windows, but they are not in any serious GNU/Linux distro I have ever used. This is one of the main reasons that users are frustrated with Windows in the first place.
> having two incompatible filesystems where it's annoying to fetch a document from one and use it on the other
This is a real problem when you are using Windows, but not when you are using Linux. The idea here is to only use Windows when you need it anyway. It's an inconvenience, sure, but is it more of an inconvenience than using Windows all the time? That's up to the user. Personally, the answer is no.
> doubling the amount of setup and configuration you have to do
Not so much, if you seriously use GNU/Linux for everything you don't need Windows for. Besides, configuration isn't a big issue unless you are like me, and want everything exactly your way; although, GNU/Linux is the only way I can get that.
> Every time I've set up a dual-boot system I've ended up just never using one of the options.
That's you, and that's fine. The best setup for you is almost definitely not the best setup for most other people. That is the entire reason to use and promote free software: liberty.
Windows has made dual-booting difficult on purpose, because proprietary software begets proprietary software and control. Thankfully, there has been plenty of work in the other direction for those of us who want to control our computers, as opposed to the inverse.
> Of course, but is it more annoying than using Windows all the time?
In a word: yes.
I have at different points used Windows, Linux, and OS X as primary desktop operating systems, so I am not operating from a sense of total ignorance of what other systems are like.
My experience with Linux was that I needed to do far more configuration because lots of hardware wouldn't work right out of the box and needed a lot of tweaking and digging through Linux forums for someone with the same problem. I'm really not interested in doing that kind of thing on my personal computer anymore.
When is the last time you used a major Linux distro?
From my experience, installing and using Linux has been the most straightforward, especially compared to windows.
And that's the point: we all have different experiences, so I think it's a bad idea to tell someone they are going to have your bad experiences of they try something new, because better software ends up getting a bad rap.
You don't seem to have any qualms about sharing negative Windows experiences. Is the claim here that I should never share my opinion of software I have used?
Negative experiences with windows are shared, because windows is proprietary, and therefore consistent. This entire thread is about one of them.
I haven't had any negative experience with CUPS, and if I had, that wouldn't define my experience with GNU/Linux.
I don't have an issue with you sharing experiences. I do get frustrated when those experiences are used to define GNU/Linux to those who haven't experienced it at all.
There are too many people who hear that GNU/Linux is not for them, when it is really a fantastic alternative to windows. There's an attitude that free software will always fail people (which is not true), and I find that attitude not simply unfortunate, but malicious.
The way that things improve is for manufacturers to see demand; and that won't happen if people don't see free software as the viable alternative that it is.
Oh, the last time I tried it it came with a bunch of disclaimers to never mount an NTFS filesystem as read/write on a hard drive whose contents you weren't OK with losing, but it's good to hear things have gotten better.
A not-super-technical user can learn to do these things.
Is the liberty a free OS provides worth the effort to that user? That's entirely up to them.
It's easy to disregard change as too difficult to approach, especially when coming from such a controling and abusive environment (Windows/OS X). In reality, GNU/Linux is so much easier to use than Windows; most people have simply learned the latter first.
Just because one piece of software was unnecessarily difficult for someone does not mean the entire ecosystem is broken.
The problem we have is that a similar problem in Windows is instantly forgiven, because there is nothing you can do about it; whereas in Linux people expect a higher standard (which is often met) because that arbitrary limitation no longer exists.
Sure windows has gotten a lot better since XP, but it has a long way to go to catch up to circa 2006 Ubuntu.
The article says that the point isn't about CUPS in particular, but generally poor UX in Linux GUIs, and how Windows and Mac in this regard wipe the floor with Linux software in this respect, and I think it's completely right. There just isn't really a culture of providing a consistent UI experience or making the UI a first-class citizen in Linux-land.
funny thing is when you install various distros you have a look at what's installed and you go "geeze it's installed a bunch of crap apps"
I used to run dual boot, but then got annoyed with that, then used windows primarily and VM'd linux, and now I use the linux subsystem in windows and occassionally fire up the VM.
I don't understand your point. If you're talking about my setup it doesn't really matter (I only use Windows for gaming and at work). If it's about maintaining friends and family computers with dual boot then good luck with that. For the rest and vast majority of people, that panics when a desktop icon moves, dual boot will fry their brains.
The people whose brains are not fried by dual booting should be dual booting and moving the platform steadily forward to reduce the excuses for the people whose brains are fried by dual booting.
So basically you want me to setup dual boot, teach, offer free support for the rest of their lives, for every person that I know? Because that's the only group who could do what we are talking about.
Or maybe you want me to convince them they should pay someone else to do that because Stallman was right.
I'm sure some people are lucky enough to have friends and family who would accept your values instantly, learn the setup easily and be glad to pay someone else to do it. I can only speak from my own experiences and they don't reflect that (and as much as I might make a comment here and there I won't ever again try to push "my values" down someone's else throat).
I did and that reply is based on me not believing a few "coders" will make year of the Linux desktop ever happen. So if you need Linux: it won't be viable alone in the near future (I'm talking about Linux offering everything Windows users need, like commercial software and AAA games so they don't need anything else) for the non tech savvy person and dual boot is also not an option in most cases unless there's some technical person "sponsoring" the whole deal. Either paid or not.
> So basically you want me to setup dual boot, teach, offer free support for the rest of their lives, for every person that I know?
Do you handle all of their Windows-related technical issues?
Are they incapable of learning to do it themselves?
Really?
Are you absolutely sure?
It's all-too-common for people to become dependent on technically-minded friends/family like us, but the fact is that it really isn't difficult for them to do it themselves.
The main barriers they face are:
1. I haven't done this before.
2. I don't immediately see the benefit.
What it comes down to is self-reliance. We can teach people to rely on themselves instead of rely on us.
As the saying goes:
> Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
People don't want to feel dumb (or don't want to learn too much Computers so they aren't Nerds) so they find excuses and don't want to use anything "complicated". And good people don't want to abuse your time. That's my real life experience, maybe on the internet it's not the same.
For thinkers, problems are an opportunity to learn. Others, they don't see it that way, they want things to just work without making them think. If anyone you're trying to "teach" and "show them the way" ever loses money or have any kind of non trivial issue because "your linug broke my microsoft access" you'll be forever the guy that broke his computer. And he'll hate Linux forever.
"Yes nana, you just have to install linux-headers first"
Netflix does not allow 1080p streaming to a browser other than Safari/Edge/IE. I did try this firefox plugin[0], and it works sometimes, but it is a bit flaky.
I gave up on dual booting on a regular basis when Windows 10, once again, turned fast startup back on with a forced update. Now I use linux for everything at home.
I agree about the malware, I often make this analogy. I was in an exam today and people went to turn on their computers to write the test, we have two hours, and Windows decides to do an update. No asking, no options. These aren't power users; these people struggle with basic computing and are trying to get through school. So the administration worked with them so they could actually write the test but come on. You don't have control of your machine with Windows and I find that inappropriate.
Never once has this been true when I've pressed someone on it. It's FUD that's been repeated for years and oft reinvigorated by people that can't be bothered to Google or change a couple UEFI settings.
It's not even true in many (most?) cases that Secure Boot must be disabled.
If you're going to to claim it's trivial, maybe you shouldn't mention Arch in the same sentence. :p You don't want someone's first impression of Linux to be that.
Typing this from a laptop that has an Arch partition. I use it all the time for dev stuff. It sure as fuck wasn't trivial to set up.
A super-simple alternative is WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which let's you run Ubuntu in Windows 10 - I'm sure it won't work for some use cases (e.g running the docker daemon), but it's really rather good!
Bash is so much more powerful than the Windows shell, and try as I might I just don't like Powershell, so WSL gives me a great shell while running in Windows - no need for rebooting or VMs!
The point was about not being spied on, so not using Windows in the first place. They think dual boot could be used to minimize Windows usage, when absolutely required.
Many computers these days have an SSD and an HDD. Is it trivial to dual boot in that case? Do you partition both? One? Which one? After partitioning, which partition do you install your OS on?
Yes, it's pretty trivial. Ubuntu handles everything with the installation, then GRUB provides a boot menu that lets you choose which OS to use. More granular control is available to those who care, but it's still easy for those who don't care.
You have your disks listed, each with its free/used space. You click the one you want to install to, and drag a slider to decide how much space to use.
That's how easy it was to install Ubuntu over a decade ago.
Disagree. YMMV, but the last time I tried to install both I had a nightmarish time. Fedora worked, but both Ubuntu and Mint gave me massive headaches.
Even when I got one installed I had problems with getting flat mouse speeds, not being able to adjust mouse scroll wheel speeds, even the frickin clock was even messed up. ( had to dig around for the issue then figure out the two OSes where saving the time in different ways every time each shut down)
I've got pages of notes for fixes to various issues I encountered trying to get dual booting working smoothly.
There's no way I'd recommend this to anyone who wants a computer that actually works without a hassle.
I set up my brother in-law's new HP laptop he got from Costco and I had to spend over 2 hours removing crap from it. The amount of crapware installed (and a lot of them are MS apps) is unreal.
It's not just HP it's just about everything that comes out an retail store without an apple logo on it(unless you count itunes/facetime as unwanted software in which case it's just about everything).
If you buy high end laptops from a business partner or directly from the vendor and make sure you get a pro(paid) version of windows things are better but the razor thin margins of the consumer market make it hard to avoid strange and badly designed attempts at price differentiation and/or payola schemes.
If anyone wants a Windows laptop without bloatware, I think the best bet is through a Microsoft Store. They sell "signature edition" laptops which are supposed to contain Windows and nothing else. That's if the marketing is to be believed, anyway, I personally have never done this.
On another note, I got an XPS 13 from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. As far as I could tell, the only extra software on there was some drivers. I realize that the average person isn't going to want a Linux laptop though.
> Why is MS cramming down my throat some 3D Pain thing, Augmented Reality crap and other apps I don't care about?
How many OSs come without any graphics applications installed?
> Edit: Oh and Camera app. On a desktop. Without even a webcam. What is the justification for that?
Because a lot of hardware does have a webcam and thus benefits from having the app, while hardware without it sees nothing but a negligible HHD space impact.
Coming without any graphical applications and coming with 3D or AR software is a big difference. 90% of users will be able to make use of a simple image editor. 0.1% of users will be able to make use of 3D and AR.
It’s hard to believe that the loss of goodwill is worth whatever revenue Microsoft’s gaining from this, so I have to assume this is them dipping their toe into a strategy that attempts to make them more relevant to users. Maybe a reaction to the Windows app store’s lack of success? Thoughts?
I think it shows how little value Windows is to Microsoft anymore. Office 365 and Azure are where the money is at for the company now.
I use Win 10 Enterprise at work so I don't have to worry about any of the Candy Crush or FB malware trash on my PC but no way would I buy a consumer Windows based laptop anymore.
I use Windows 10 Enterprise at work and our image team had to specifically remove Candy Crush. It’s actually more annoying than that, the semiannual OS updates cause Candy Crush to be reinstalled.
Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their OS as the relentless foot in the door for getting there.
To me it's another nail in the coffin of general purpose computing. We've accepted that mobile devices/OSs are not for general purpose computing and expect that they come with a "lifestyle" to hawk, now one of the major general-computing OSs is heading in the same direction.
Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their OS as the relentless foot in the door for getting there.
I think the irony of that statement is from Windows 3.1 and on Windows (25-ish years) was already THE defacto PC platform. I was a pretty big MS fanboy for a long time (and make my living with .NET and their developer tools). But MS's quixotic fetishization of their app store to me looks like dousing the legacy (no pun intended) of their platform with gasoline and lighting it on fire.
They don't want to be just a PC platform anymore. They're looking at Apple's high-end lifestyle brand and trying to get in on some of that. I wish they'd be happy with the organic brand they're building around XBox and Minecraft and all that, but kids and education just don't have the same money or cachet as the upper middle class and up consumer.
And I'm no fanboy but boy am I a fan of .NET. So far it seems like that part of MS is well defended from this grossness, I only hope that holds up.
people dont buy apple because of the walled garden or spyware or iphoto bugs that expose your pictures. they buy apple despite all that.
if microsoft can produce better and more innovative hardware, which they already did with the surface line, they could have kept windows xp model of online isolation and not only got the people that want the flashy hardware but also the people that want to actively avoid the online tie-in.
instead they are doing the worst they could. you cant even use oneNote with your surface pen, I kid you not, without login in to a live.com account! and minesweeper is a 100mb app that you have to download from the store, and it have in-app purchases.
FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half.
Microsoft Jigsaw is perhaps my grandma's favorite thing ever, and the $20 yearly cost for premium (ad-free) is well-worth it to her.
> FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half.
it's not a good thing as they're using the opportunity to infest these programs with ads
Solitaire on Windows now has ads, and don't get me started on the new calculator
...What do you have against the new calculator? I use it really heavily and am a fan. I have to do some stuff with hex, so I drop into some of the additional modes from time to time even. There's no ads in the new calculator for sure.
Adding ads is definitely an irritation, but my point is, they are funding a supported, maintained product with Solitaire. It's more than just Solitaire now. It currently has five different games, not including features like daily challenges and the like. It gets updated reasonably regularly.
The reason HN does indented text that way is for code. People on HN post code snippets as a fairly regular thing, and having code snippets word wrap (or eat white space) is really confusing.
The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.
This kind of problem is why my conscience is clear when I use KMS cracks. I legitimately own about two or three Win10 licenses, but can't actually use any of them for various reasons.
Life's too short to put up with bureaucratically obstructive licensing schemes.
I bought a super cheap Toshiba laptop for taking notes in college. One of those ~$250 ones. Completely unusable with the included Windows 10, but sailed with ElementaryOS.
I put Fedora on it first, and it was mostly fine but Gnome was too slow for my liking. But then again I was usually taking notes in vim in a terminal, so that probably wouldn't have mattered in real world use.
I don't think your link says what you claim. The link says that users of Win S will have to pay $49 to upgrade to Pro. S is store-only mode, meaning it can't run anything that didn't come from the Store, whether it's win32 or otherwise.
Nobody ever paid that really. OEM rates were much lower. The real problem they face is two-fold: 1. People spend more time on phones and less on desktops/laptops, and 2. Computers have pretty much stopped getting faster so people don't replace them as frequently.
Since Microsoft made money from new computer sales and those are less frequent they have to move to a subscription type system.
Yes it doesn't install trash like Candy Crush and Farmville, or even Facebook. It does try to ram iCloud down your throat but that's just about acceptable given that it is an Apple product and doesn't spam you.
It doesn't force restarts to install new "features" you never asked for and can't decline all while creepily reminding you that "don't forget, Windows is a service!"
Well, they see Apple and Google and Valve getting a 30% cut of everything sold through their platforms, so that's clearly where they want to go. Their first attempt - GFWL - was sufficiently horrible that everyone is wary of them doing it for games.
I agree. I don't think it's evident that this is a bad user experience. They identified that many people would appreciate having Facebook notifications on their desktop, so they preinstalled the app and sent a notification to make people aware of it.
Windows 10 is a cancer. M$ removed the control from the user, and placed it to their money-hungry baboons.
It was clear since 8 and 8.1 that M$ will go for the "app model", where you are no longer the administrator on your own machine 'for your own protection'. I hope they come around, or they will just lose all their tech-savy customers.
I guess it's their turn to rip off their customers private-date/lives, just as Google does for some years now with Android.
I do see the benefits though for some users, but in my book, the privacy violation is worse than the benefits.
The thing I hate the most about windows 10 is lots of its default settings out of the box, whenever I have to set up a new PC for a family member. That, and windows 10 likes to automatically update itself whenever it wants.
Whenever I installed a new windows 7 PC, it was just plug and play really. When I have to install a new windows 10 PC, I have a significantly longer list of items that I do to it (delete cortana, enable search to only work locally, local user only (no xbox or microsoft login), remove forced updates, remove task panels, delete all PUPware that comes with it, etc), do a couple of registry edits, etc.
Lastly, privacy. No such thing as privacy in windows 10, the whole OS is basically spyware.
The only thing I like about windows 10 over its previous versions is the system refresh, but thats about it
I get your point, and I do get the OP's. But in all fairness, Google/FB/... are just lucky they don't have an 's' in their name because the '$' applies to all of them. Hmm, maybe the 'e' in Apple could be turned into the euro sign :]
It's definitely a blast from the internet commenting past, but given their recent user-hostile design decisions which can't be justified by anything other than abject greed at my expense, I think it's about ready for a comeback...
This isn't really an issue that goes beyond your first 1 hour on your new Windows 10 computer. You delete them, and then they are gone forever. They do not re-install themselves, they only come with a new user account.
They were annoying to me, only when I had installed the Windows 10 for the very first time, 2 years ago. I had several Windows 10 re-installations since then, and it really isn't worth nagging about them for the 30-45 seconds they steal from you as you remove them.
Besides, my housemate actually liked and kept some of them on his account. It probably really just does increase the overall customer experience.
I think I also may have had some ads back with a major update (e.g. Creators, Fall Creators), but I don't remember having them back ever with the normal updates.
In any case, it really is just a breeze to remove UWP apps, and they leave no trace either, so I cannot rationalize how it can be this so annoying to anyone.
The ad issue is separate to me. They keep adding ads to more and more places in Windows 10, and each location has a different toggle to turn on / off.
I turned off all advertising options in Windows 10 when I first installed, only to be greeted by another ad months later which they had added with a newly downloaded update.
The toggles aren't even centralized, you have to hunt them down in different menus. I have a hard time believing this wasn't done on purpose.
I have a laptop and a desktop running Windows 10 on my account. I use them both daily, one for entertainment, one for work. Both running on Pro and constantly up-to-date. I have been using one for exactly 2 years, and the other one for like 9-10 months.
I am completely unfamiliar with the experience you had, with no apps having been installed on my behalf without me explicitly installing it through the Microsoft Store, except for the ones I get after I reinstall the OS.
I also have a Windows Phone that I have been using for the past 2 years. Again, it gets some apps pre-installed whenever I reinstall the OS, but never otherwise.
Admittedly, PCs I think did once get some of them after one major update. I suppose it was one of the Creators Updates.
Me too. I have a perfectly functional music studio computer that's dual-booting Win7 on both partitions - one for more general use and making YouTube videos, and the other for making music. I've had quite a few 'why aren't you running Win10' comments... I have nothing to gain and a lot to lose - time if nothing else. I hate the Win10 UI, bloatware and changing things without your consent, and Win7 works perfectly for me at the moment.
I have done that before, but on the first anniversary update, they all come back. I will try it again, and wait for the next anniversary update to see if they come back again.
I use Windows when I have to now. I used to use Visual Studio as it is really good. But since Windows 8 and more so Windows 10 they have started taking from me. I paid for Windows 10 Pro, but I am subjected to the task of repeatedly removing software, or adverts for software, that I explicitly said remove. This is repeated when major updates go through. Plus the extra data and processing to get a system that isn't using my resources for tasks that I did not ask it too. It is my computer, not theirs.
So I dual boot and 99% of the time sit in Kubuntu land and my computer is fast, responsive, and generally only doing what I ask it too. As it should be.
Microsoft found a way to take an i7-7500 with 32GB of ram and make it feel slow on a fast OS. Windows 10 can be fast.
What am I missing? I have Windows 10 Pro on 2 computers I use daily, I have no crap games auto installing, I have no restarts other than when I select to, my computer never slows down "because windows things".
I'd recommend running Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 LTSB to avoid the entire mess. I run WS 2016 for my dev machine and I haven't had any issues and I don't have to deal with the damned Windows Store.
(honest question - that's the sole reason I have windows anything and I'd be thrilled to get rid of all the absolute nonsense they've been throwing at me)
Not sure about this, but you may be able to run the 180-day trial as much as you want, as long as you're willing to reinstall every 180 days. I installed the 2008 and 2012 trials several times over the years and got the full trial each time, but I haven't tried it back-to-back after expiration.
Could works for people with an MSDN subscription. However Microsoft is doing everything it can not to let the general public use the LTSB. Which is a shame as I see this version as the more consumer friendly and Win 7 like.
It's a tricky problem. I think tech people are fringe. For me, I would want to disable it all. But if people can turn it off then it doesn't let microsoft improve and adapt. In concept, I kind of like the idea the OS could anticipate the things I need. It's how we imagine futuristic computer systems. It's a bit different from the traditional OS where you are the master over everything.
I'm not sure many on HN are going to like this thing, but I would think MS gets to see the stats and has better view of how well they are doing. Percentage wise it might be working out pretty good, however, each percentage point they piss off ends up being a lot of people and if the fringe of tech people are in that 1% that can end up in a lot of angry blogs.
I would naively expect that Microsoft's market share is too large for any real adapting to occur. They've made my machines significantly worse enough times that I've stopped using their OSs completely, and since then I just hear more of the same. They can get away with making things worse, so why shouldn't they?
Totally agree. My computers are my things and should be under my control only. That’s why I’m wary of Win 10 which forces system replacement, install softwares without consent, display advertisements, can preload UWP apps in memory, etc. All this things might be an acceptable comprise on mobile for some people (which include myself) but is a big no go on anything desktop or server class.
My harware is not here to be part of someone else botnet. If MS wants my money, let’s make good product without subscription and let me pay for it. I would be glad to pay 20 to 50€ for Visual Studio if it encourages user friendly business practices.
your computer is your thing, install whatever OS you like. If you want a non consumer experience and want windows, go with a server product.
People are never gonna be happy with change. Not so long ago they took paint (which they insisted on us having whether we wanted it or not) out of the base install of their "botnet / malware" and people lost their shit. Now windows dynamically asks you whether you want a program and people are again losing their shit. In both cases it's microsoft making a call on what apps are on your machine. In both cases you can uninstall them.
you know they will want to get all your data before they "anticipate".... no thanks ... if only they would analyze locally (instead of mining cryptocurrencies /s).
Many (most?) people on Hacker News might be too young to remember the Halloween Documents. They were internal Microsoft documents describing their proposed strategy for dealing with competition from then-new Free Software alternatives:
If you want to understand why Microsoft is acting the way they are, read those documents.
It's not that I think they are still executing the strategies and tactics spelled out therein. Quite the contrary; Microsoft realises they've lost the OS war to Linux (on one front) and OSX (on the other).
The point is how astonishingly user-hostile those memos are. They lay out a strategy for competing with Free Software that has almost nothing to do with their users' needs and wants. Instead, the obvious assumption is that their users will be sacrificed to their (Microsoft's) strategic goals.
That's not to say that individual Microsoft teams don't produce excellent, user-centric software (two I can think of in my own experience are Excel and Visual Studio).
But the executive leadership, and company culture as a whole, seems to care little about the people who actually use their products. This was clearly true back in the 90s, and is clearly true now. In the 90s it was 'embrace and extend', in the 2010s it's 'track and advertise'.
Those memos are over 20 years old. You can't point to something 20 years old and say "see, they did it before therefore that's what's happening today".
I'm not a fan of what they're doing with some of the Windows 10 defaults. But you gotta be crazy to not see the user improvements they've done in so many other areas. They are a very, very different company than they were back then. I'm not saying that excuses anything but you're drawing false equivalences using a 2 decades old set of memos to try and back it.
The underlying theme is _exactly_ the same: they will chuck their users under the bus for what they see as important strategic goals. It was true 20 years ago, and everything I can see suggests it's still true today.
This is part of the reason I gave up developing for Windows and .NET after around a decade of doing it. I prefer to work on a stack with which I'm at least partially values-aligned. (Same reason I abandoned Linux for FreeBSD, actually).
In the same way, you also can't say "That's 20 years old and not relevant anymore". Appeal to novelty fallacy and all that.
Are they really that different of a company? Microsoft is huge, organizational memory is long, and decisions made long ago, whether rational or mere cargo culting, will affect how they run today.
I'd argue they're a bit more cunning, but not one whit less underhanded. The EU browser ballot thing was considerably more recent, for instance. The forced W10 upgrades with the trick X dialog. Dark patterns surrounding use of a Microsoft account. Non-disableable telemetry. Hawking Edge in a way that would even make Chrome blush [1].
I think they know that they can't be as overt anymore; a couple of antitrust suits will do that to you.
Windows has a new feature called "Controlled Folder Access", it is a security mecanism that protect from ransomware. It is a great idea, but the implementation is annoying. It block write access to selected directories, so lot of software fail to add a link to the desktop, or add files in the Documents folder. It should have protect agains delete not new file creation. Also the default Defender antivirus is so slow, it make the installation of software package 2 or 3 slower.
Well he only mentions delete. Do the Windows permissions actually make a meaningful distinction between create and modify? I think that might have been difficult to do without completely rewriting a lot of stuff.
Hah! You must not have used Mcafee Enterprise. I recently moved to Defender and the difference is startling - my laptop fans literally never stopped whining with Mcafee, as it was constantly gobbling CPU. With Defender, it remains silent, and CPU usage is low. I've used other AV systems too (e.g. Avira), and for sure they're better than Mcafee, but I'm impressed with Defender. Don't see any reason for me to use anything else.
I believe the LTSB Enterprise edition physically does not contain the "windows app store", cortana, and all the other garbage that gets in the way of a normally functioning computer.
Unfortunately any workaround we find has been "broken" with the subsequent Windows update, meaning Microsoft is actively working against any fixes for it.
I would love to be proven wrong, but the only way I know for sure is upgrading to the Enterprise or education editions.
I have never used Windows 10 nor made significant use of any Windows version since Windows XP. Nonetheless my parents asked me to look at some issues they were having with their laptops. The trend of increasing clutter that has plagued Windows since XP seems to have accelerated. The user experience appears to have been designed by a hoarder. I spent a significant amount of time asking "Do you know what this is? Do you use it?" to be able to remove some of the many goo-gahs that had been helpfully installed by either Windows or one of their devices. It made me sad that my parents just accepted that this was how computers are because they were unaware that the crap-strewn-everywhere experience was a deliberate choice for the Windows ecosystem.
To be fair, I'm not sure if Windows alone is to blame in this case.
If you're not familiar with Windows and try to clean a PC that isn't yours, it's probably hard to tell what was user installed, what was pre-installed by the manufacturers (they love to include bloatware and unnecessary "tools") and what actually came with Windows.
It's very easy for unaware users to install all sorts of crap and they never know where it came from or what it does - that's basically every PC of a non-tech-savvy user ever.
For the last 15 years or so i've earned my money doing Linux stuff. Before then I was doing VB/.NET/SQL Server etc.
January 2016 I worked at a secure facility that wanted an entire system doing malware analysis. The bare servers were running Linux, but some of the software used Windows so there were Windows VMs there. Usual KVM stuff.
Bear in mind this is a closed system and the Windows VMs were ephemeral, i.e. had to be discarded and reset after each malware run where we did static code analysis etc. So we used the Professional (hah) version, with AutoUnattend.xml or whatever it was to automatically reset them.
This worked fine until after a certain point with WSUS - we obviously applied security updates - where the VMs wouldn't boot. Turns out that a point in Windows 10's life they decided you needed a better version of Windows to be able to do the equivalent of a preseed or kickstart. 4 months of work disappeared, plus the additional licence cost; need to run a domain etc etc.
Luckily I left soon after but trust me - at any future role I will look at every possibility before Windows. I moved a subsequent client (large international appliance manufacturer that you've heard of) to Linux servers precisely because of this sort of shit.
Windows is done, it's just a case of when it disappears. This is exactly why Microsoft are pushing Azure and Office - they know the outcome, they're just squeezing the pips until it happens.
Your use case is very niche compared to how MS makes most of its money on Windows licenses. Windows isn't going anywhere until it's no longer pre-loaded on every machine, enterprise customers stop buying it completely, and Linux is much more user friendly on the desktop.
I don't disagree with anything else you said, admin'ing windows boxes is a terrible experience.
How the loving fuck can you expect to change the terms of engagement with your OS after it's released and not expect to lose business?
I know for a fact the malware analysis software we used are now planning a Linux version. I've literally persuaded a multinational to not continue using .net and Windows servers because of my argument that it's not sustainable. They alone are tens of thousands of Windows licenses that may go to Red Hat or even Centos or Ubuntu.
Windows has already started to go - my son doesn't know how to use it, all he's used is Google Docs or an iPhone / iPad. There is no love for Windows, only halcyon remembrances from the likes of myself who remembered the golden days of MSDN subscriptions. There is literally not a startup on the planet who will decide 'fuck it, we'll use a windows domain and Office instead of o365 or Google Apps.
>How the loving fuck can you expect to change the terms of engagement with your OS after it's released and not expect to lose business?
Lock-in, that's how. The customers they care about don't always have practical solutions, and most aren't able to make a call that will benefit everyone in e.g. 5+ years after spending a massive amount of money.
Also, what are you replacing the desktops/laptops with?
Yeah, fair enough. I started my career in the world of computers doing Windows desktop administration stuff and I was kind of surprised to learn how primitive the competition seemed to be.
But apart from AD the rest of Windows is primitive compared to the competition. Windows usage will decline - Azure will increase - it's all a case of how it works out for Microsoft in the end.
The NT kernel is very advanced and in many ways "better" than the Linux kernel.
Backwards compat on Windows is fantastic compared to competitors.
Even Powershell, though niche, can hardly be called primitive relative to the average default Linux shell. This is especially apparent to me, since I work in an old csh all day. :) If anything is primitive, it's passing around strings instead of objects.
Saying Windows is "primitive" compared to the competition makes it sound like you're working in a bubble, to be honest. It's different, to be sure, but I'm hard pressed to think of normal desktop or laptop applications where I'd call Windows primitive. On the server side there's many things competitors undeniably do better, but even then I wouldn't call it primitive.
See my other replies - PS isn't primitive but it isn't bash.
Bear in mind I can administer any program on the system with bash. I can't do that with PS. There isn't that ecosystem where everything has systemd/init.d bindings, etc.
Put it another way - if I was to start a new internet based company now i'd give everybody Chromebooks, use either GApps or O365, there would be a domain nowhere near it. Do you disagree this is wrong for the majority of situations?
> Bear in mind I can administer any program on the system with bash. I can't do that with PS.
What do you mean by "administer"? I can certainly launch applications, kill them, get various process properties, monitor it, etc.
> There isn't that ecosystem where everything has systemd/init.d bindings, etc.
System services are registered on Windows. Get-Service, Stop-Service, Restart-Service, Set-Service, etc all work fine and can be done remotely. You have more power with more arcane commands that I would have to look up (wmi stuff.)
> Put it another way - if I was to start a new internet based company now i'd give everybody Chromebooks, use either GApps or O365, there would be a domain nowhere near it. Do you disagree this is wrong for the majority of situations?
Yes. I think having a real, full desktop is important for most people's productivity if they're doing any serious work. Yes, it's possible to be a developer working on a Chromebook SSHing into everything. No, I don't think that's even close to ideal.
I agree with this reply, but I'd also add that any program that you can run in Windows you can interact with from PowerShell, although it obviously won't be quite as nice as utilities that return CLR objects.
So do I, but it's not bash. Used PS to manage WSUS which was a massive ballache. We had a 'sheep dip' situation, what with this being a secure environment, where we downloaded the WSUS updates from a separate network then moved it via USB to the secure one.
PS? Fine. WSUS? Awful. You had to start WSUS, change the categories (it already was trying to download updates on a network without internet), restart the service, mess around, etc.
With Linux i'd literally have one rsync command on each side of the sheep dip.
I did again like the autocomplete - but I prefer a million times more the immediacy of SSH.
No, it isn't, but I think in a lot of ways it is much better. It is really nice that the use of an object system means you rarely have to mess around with text-munging code.
PowerShell is good, if a bit verbose imo (small con, no big deal). The problem is the philosophy behind windows since its inception.
On a linux box I can do _everything_ I need to do as long as I have a terminal. Windows is coming around, but it's not there yet. New stuff is better, a lot of old stuff still sucks, but not everyone can dump the old stuff.
On the other hand, Windows' favoring graphical interfaces means that if I'm not looking to automate something, I probably have to spend little to no time reading documentation, in marked contrast to the terminal experience, where even commands I have used many times I can forget the arguments.
> [...] and Linux is much more user friendly on the desktop.
Actually, I am not sure if Linux is in fact user unfriendly. I mean, my grandpa (78) uses it every day since about a year now and hasn't complained once (email, banking, ebay, news, ...; he used vista before).
I mean it's not like you don't have to learn a lot of new stuff if you come from years of windows experience and want to reach the same level of proficiency on a new platform which is totally different. It most certainly doesn't feel good to be novice again just because you booted a different system. But I doubt that it is a usability problem with the Linux desktop as people who have no previous experience with windows tend to have an easier start with Linux.
My primary PC has Linux installed and my laptop has a dual boot with Linux and Windows 10. When I use Windows I feel often helpless. Some program tells you that you need to install the newest update but while the updater tells you that its updating, you can't see any progress. After waiting for hours without seeing any progress you conclude that something must be wrong. So you reboot a few times and start searching on the web. Eventually you find a page which tells you how you can reset the update cache and after that it takes only a few reboots to complete the update. I definitely prefer updaters which actually work and tell you straight away when something is wrong.
My problems are probably just the result of too much Windows absence, but somehow I don't expect that to become a real problem anytime soon.
> Linux is much more user friendly on the desktop.
Linux is much more user friendly than Windows. This is completely arbitrary metric, I am very comfortable using GNOME, KDE, awesomeWM and i3 but whenever someone hands me some Win 7 or Win 10 I just can't figure out anything for a while. Stuff starts jumping around and there are literally ads built into OS which annoys me. Windows may be user friendly for 90% of the population BUT this is only because it is "pre-loaded on every machine" as you put it. That is the only reason people find Windows easier to use.
Yes the DOJ was supposed to get rid of the Windows tax on every OEM PC sale, but did not.
Reactos, Haiku, AROS, OSFree, etc should all be considered as well and money invested in making them better and easier development tools for them to compete with Windows when Linux doesn't always work and a MacOS machine costs too much.
Good point - didn't work because of clock skew, which I assume was related to activation. Also, we didn't want to cheat the licensing, by whichever measure.
I wish it was true but come on, Linux may be good for many uses but simple things like decent font rendering still aren't up to par with Windows or Mac so forget desktop Linux for the masses.
With standard user interfaces like the shell and file browser Ubuntu font rendering is fine. The trouble with Linux, however, is that apps tend to do their own thing and with font-rendering they tend to do it badly. LibreOffice is a good example. Last time I looked at it I just gave up on Linux ever competing for mainstream desktop adoption.
Those articles are funny because for me all previous Windows versions were unusable, but I've found Windows 10 just the best OS. I don't have Facebook preinstalled and even if it was, I couldn't care less about it. There are bazillions of DLLs and other stuff preinstalled, what's the deal with one HTML page that I don't even run. I value other things, real usability improvements (for example virtual desktops are much better than macOS ones) and technical advancements (Linux subsystem, hyper-v, PowerShell).
>what's the deal with one HTML page that I don't even run
You sound like I spammer I once knew. He would always say things like "What's the big deal with one e-mail that you're not going to read anyway. Just delete it."
The mail icon in his Mac's dock showed over 29,000 unread messages. Spam just didn't bother him the way Windows popping up ads for Facebook doesn't bother you.
One might say "what's the big deal to buy new Mac if you want more RAM, paying premium for bad hardware". Another might say "What's the big deal not to play OverWatch with your friends and having unusable hibernate". I might say "what's the deal with those ads I can remove within a minute", yes. It's all about compromises. I'd like to have a perfect OS, but I have to choose between available alternatives.
I'm not sure how you would create a worse implementation of virtual desktops than Windows 10 has them:
- No indication of other workspaces existing.
- No indication of what applications are in those other workspaces.
- The keyboard shortcut for walking through desktops requires two hands (and in typical Windows fashion cannot be rebound).
I'm not familiar with macOS' implementation, so if you actually think that it's worse, then I would like to know how.
Also should be said, though, that you can replace the window manager on macOS, which should allow you to get most of the features of an actually good implementation of virtual desktops. I'm not aware of a way to do that on Windows.
I guess I'm using it differently, because I don't find those issues so important for me. I'm using desktops as a different computers for different states of mind. One desktop has some relaxing read (hacker news, for example, or reddit), some explorers, notepads with not so important stuff. 1-2 desktops for work projects, usually it's exactly one desktop. One desktop for gaming and related websites, discord, etc. I'm switching between them may be one or two times a day. I can see that if you're using multiple desktops for a single project, something like multiple displays and often switching between them, they might be not that usable.
macOS implementation was bad, because I accidentally switched between desktops all the time. It shows all launched apps in the dock from all desktops. If I'm working on my project, I don't want to see that I have Battle.net client launched and 10 unread notifications in Discord guild channel. If I'm clicking on Safari icon, I want to launch new window on current desktop, I don't want to switch to another desktop with some random website.
Anyway the main point of virtual desktops is that they are implemented at OS level. Actual interface is not very important, because if API exists, 3-rd party programs can embrace it. For example Windows 7 had virtual desktops implemented on system level (there wasn't UI to manage them), but API was very limited, for example it wasn't possible to move windows between desktops. Also applications usually weren't aware about those desktops and sometimes were outright buggy (for example you couldn't launch second Firefox window on another desktop).
Hey Microsoft, also stop rebooting without asking. In fact, just stop automatically doing anything and let me choose to do it myself. Be more like Linux.
Microsoft should design their OS to not require reboots for updates. The only time I ever have to reboot my Linux box is for a kernel update — that’s it.
Had similar experience with not being able to disable the windows store for my kids accounts. It was simply not possible and I followed all the Microsoft recommended procedures and external suggested ones to no avail. I just gave up and stopped using Windows for my family computer and spun back up an older mac Mini. This kind of lock in is very bad for the ecosystem and is a security nightmare. I don't know if I will ever use consumer grade windows for my personal computers any longer.
Now we won’t because your computer belongs to us. psssst have you heard about our new programming language TypeScript? Just adopt it, this time it will work out perfectly between us.
There are so many accounts of Windows 10 being installed, (re)installing apps, adding tiles that were previously removed, etc. without permission... but none of it has ever happened to me and I don't understand why. It's bewildering. Maybe it's because I have Windows 10 Pro instead of Home? The only thing I've seen is that it's pretty aggressive about badgering me to restart for an update (but doesn't restart until I say it can).
I don't know how much truth there is to this, and I'll check with my personal machines when I get home (I run Linux at work) but when I worked in a retail space, the apps that were pre-loaded varied based on the OEM. Dell got a set, Toshiba got a different set, Lenovo got a different set, etc. Sometimes it varied based on the particular line, like HP would include a different set of games on their laptops that had touchscreen devices, etc.
I'm not 100% confident on this and I haven't worked in Retail for a couple of years thankfully, but I suspect strongly that the apps that are installed are pushed not by Microsoft, but by the OEM in their recovery image. I suspect thus that if you buy a standalone version of Windows 10, and clean install the machine with nothing else on the hard drive, that you won't get those apps pre-installed. But buy a computer with Windows 10 preloaded, and the sky's the limit, the OEM pushes what they want, and Microsoft makes it difficult to opt out.
I'd love someone else to weigh in on this, because I've been distanced from the situation for a while. But no matter how you slice it, users are getting increasingly frustrated, and I think it's a terrible business strategy for Microsoft. They've ruined any potential trust I might have had for their app store before it had a chance to even take off, and I'm not sure they'll be able to recover. If anything, I've got my eyes on Google, who stand positioned to completely shake up the personal computer space with Chrome OS and its budding Android apps support. It'll be interesting to see how the space unfolds.
I can personally attest to this happening. Candy Crush kept popping back up, completely installed after I removed it. I'm sure I didn't accidentally click any dialogue boxes popping up asking for it to be installed.
I've only recently come back to Windows from MacOS for work, and this (along with the invasive tracking that doesn't turn off even if you turn the settings off) floored me.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadSure, there are some open source alternatives, but they are only rarely as good, and even more seldom better, than their Windows counterparts.
Most professionals would have no problem using Linux for their needs. What applications are you suggesting aren't up to snuff?
Linux has more gaming than it did 5-10 years ago, but if someone wants to play a game at top performance on PC, you typically need to choose Windows.
You can make an argument about the size of the respective platform's game libraries, but not about their performance. Games on Linux often perform as well as or better than Windows. There's no clear trend that suggests the performance of games on Linux are worse than on Windows.
And even if it were, what good is 70 FPS over 60 FPS beyond pissing contests? You're limited by your display's refresh rate anyway.
That's the only point I was trying to make there.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
>Skyrim's
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
>Fallout's
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
>Wolfenstein's
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
I do have a Windows install specifically for gaming, but I haven't booted it in ages.
Edit: my main entertainment IS games.
My 2nd place entertainment activity is reading, and there are few games that can approach a good book in storytelling.
The latest ones you meant?
Cause Wolf3D, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had native clients in early '00s when I played them. RTCW: ET was even completely free (as in beer). I played it for countless of hours!!
Back in those days we had a few people porting games over such as Ryan Gordon from Icculus or Timothee Besset (TTimo) from ID who ported, perhaps sometimes even as an after thought because the original floppies or CD (!!) didn't contain the Linux client.
We've come a long way. These days, you can just have one application to install a shitload of games (Steam, Humble Bundle) and you can find games for whatever platform you run, pay, install, and run it. With far, far more titles. Add to that: WebGL games are going to work on *NIX out of the box. Like Airmash, for example.
This leads to a more responsive and fluid response to your input commands... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjWSRTYV8e0
Inevitably people end up with a requirement for some Windows program that trips up users or administrators in the workplace. Some workplaces (e.g. mine) are fully paid-up committed Microsoft shops where everyone has MSDN.
Baby steps. I don't own a PS4 anyway, but I'm so tired of discussing Windows with people who whine about losing their games that I feel the need to specify an out.
"Well, maybe I would, but this program I use frequently is not available on Linux."
"So? You shouldn't want to use that anyway."
With a sales pitch like this I can't believe the Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come to fruition yet.
For instance, apple's sketch. You won't find anything like it even on Windows.
For instance, windows PC. You have a ton of native autohotkey applications for writing macros, powerful 3rd party file explorers like directoryOpus, etc. You can't play video games on it, naturally gamedevelopment is a hassle as well. You can't run CAD programs, etc
Note that you can do that with X11 too using tools like xbindkeys, xdotool, xnee, xrebind, wmctrl, etc.
I have gotten around this with a virtualized Windows installation for CAD applications. The Windows VM goes online for software activation only.
With VFIO, a dedicated graphics card, and an nVME SSD I don't feel any performance degradation. The graphics card and nVME drive are passed directly to the VM. Some simple benchmarks show there is ~3% performance decline in the VM vs booting it native, but I don't "feel" it.
Granted, picking VFIO compliant hardware and setting everything up is far outside the ability of the average Windows user.
Once you have hardware, there are lots of resources for pulling it off:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vfio.txt
https://www.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/
I'm running my Windows KVM on a GTX 1080, and it took months and months to work out all the little kinks causing system instability... now it runs quite smooth. I could never ever go back.
I've been slowly collecting blog posts and articles with the idea of writing an updated guide to making a completely stable and optimized VM with vfio, hugetables, reduced DPC latency, bridged networking, etc., written for audiences that aren't too familiar with Linux.
It would benefit adoption really well if someone unfamiliar with Linux could visit a single resource that explains everything they need to know.
I'm both, and you're definitely wrong. 155 of my 343 steam games have direct native ports. I've just stopped playing stellaris and started playing KSP. I've been a linux gamer for the last three years and it's been a better experience, not worse. I dominate on ballistic overkill because the input lag is noticeably lower on linux.
I'm also a software developer, and with the exception of dotnet development, software development is a considerably smoother and more consistant experience on linux. It grates every day to have to use windows at work, and I do half of my work inside a linux VM.
Here's one really simple example for you of why this Windows software matters to a very large community of professionals: most accounting work is both taught and done in Excel.
Photoshop->Gimp or just run it with wine
Lightroom->Darktable
Here's a few other pretty awesome art tools you might want to know about BTW: Krita Blender Inkscape
If we're doing "what abouts" though, what about:
freely interchangable desktop layouts
native docker support
a user-friendly terminal
an os kernel that is designed to be malware resistant
Like seriously buddy, the GUI desktop is now ~40 years old and windows /still/ can't support uninstalling the default desktop and installing your own. Custom launchers are one of the most downloaded android app categories, don't try to tell me people don't want it. But hey, at least windows finally got multiple desktops by cribbing the idea from linux after two decades of unsuccessfully trying to tell their customers that it wasn't really that good a feature.
If the best you can say about your operating system is "adobe supports it", which is what it seems like you're saying, then oh dear. Like, I get it, photoshop is pretty darn good. But for realsies, we're in a thread where the title post is about microsoft installing random crap on your computer without permission. This is the same company that is showing ads on your lock screen and start bar[1], has been formally chastised by national governments for it's handling of telemetry[2], autoinstalled updates that bricked peoples laptops[3] and then autoinstalled other updates that put other peoples computers in reboot loops[4]. They're gonna keep doing this stuff. For goodness sake, they incentivised peoples "upgrades" from windows 7 by installing nagware with a deliberately malicious UI[5], and attempting to directly cause professional conflict for sysadmins with stability concerns[6].
You're part of an eternal beta of questionable QA control at the hands of a company that has a documented history of behaving unethically. Do they have to send someone round to your house to kill and eat your cat in front of you before you decide you could maybe dig deep and stoop to learning gimp?
[1]https://www.pcworld.com/article/3039827/windows/7-ways-windo...
[2]http://www.zdnet.com/article/french-authorities-serve-notice...
[3]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/08/25/windows-10-...
[4]http://news.softpedia.com/news/windows-10-fall-creators-upda...
[5]https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/229040-microsofts-latest...
[6]https://www.windowschimp.com/admins-angered-new-windows-10-u...
Actually, it is worse: you used to be able to replace the default desktop and install your own from the first versions of Windows up until recently. Now you can't and with Windows 8 Microsoft removed a ton of functionality when it comes to customization (e.g. you cannot disable DWM and you cannot use the classic theme - which was the only one with support for totally customizable color schemes).
So these shell replacements I've been using for over a decade don't exist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for...
The only time explorer.exe is running on my computer is when I need some special control panel setting.
Using Wine in work is also not an option, it is too unpredictable (although it's improving at a fast pace).
I know Linux has these features and that's why I personally use it. Clearly they're not the focus of other users though.
If you're building a helicopter, they're not comparable at all. However, the word professional is a rather wider scope than that, and they're excellent for anyone whos business does not revolve around engineering, but has it as an auxiliary. Just as there are whole industries, like banking, that have software developers as a subset of the org chart, there are whole industries that need just a little bit of 3d CAD work.
I would not recommend professional grade adobe editing packages to an independent real estate agent that basically just needs to crop and color-correct photos, and I would not recommend autodesk inventor to a city planner that just needs to 3d print stand-in terrain. Nor would I suggest a $40,000 stratasys printer to them by the way. If you're not going to use the advanced features then the cost is high and the licensing compliance is more painful for no net benefit. GIMP and FreeCAD are exceptional front-runners for these kinds of purposes.
By the way, staying compatible with the industry is a great way to be non-exceptional. I'm not saying linux is the magical bullet of business success (because it's not), but if whatever you're doing is 100% compatible with industry software, then you're not doing anything that someone else hasn't already thought of. If you ever decide you want to move outside the bounds of what others have already done, you'll suddenly discover that open source is a competitive advantage, because it's much easier to extend it to the bleeding edge.
I'm sorry, but that is a complete joke. The distance between gimp and photoshop or darkroom and lightroom is tiny compared to the distance between even base autocad and the open source alternatives. And that's before we start talking about autocad variants like Civil3d and all the third party tools that are built on top of autocad.
Gimp is to Photoshop as Nano is to Emacs.
On the gaming note - I'm glad you enjoy the games available on Linux, and that you were OK giving up some games you enjoyed. Personally, I'm working my way through WoW, with some dabbling in Space Engineers and Subnautica. None of which are available on Linux, without diving into the world of Wine.
Could I give up Windows PC gaming entirely? Sure.Could I dive into the convoluted and not-always-reliable world of Wine? Sure. Could Bob Ross have given up oil painting for acrylics? Sure. But... it doesn't sound like much fun.
On macos, the mac versions tend to be slower than the windows versions on the same hardware.
I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good.
For a corollary: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936629310785437696
Hah, this is rich. Many open source products are far better than their proprietary alternatives, especially developer oriented products (which is natural considering that developers tend to use open source and tend to improve their own tools).
See pretty much every other reply in this thread for my take on this
>video game console emulators
Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.
>office productivity applications
"way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.
>document publishing
I don't know what this is supposed to be. LaTeX is pretty good, though.
As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.
> "way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.
Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.
The only one that comes to mind is that one Wii U emulator. Xenia doesn't support Linux but it's open source and the lack of support more a reflection of its relative immaturity than not being possible (I'm certain a Linux port will come eventually, I was even working on it myself for a while).
>Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.
If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case. Writing new documents should use ODF, which MSWord supports fine (often transparently, non-technical users will probably see a file with the same MSWord icon and no file extension).
You sound like someone who never collaborated on an Office file with someone from another company.
If a company wants to be taken seriously, and some of their work involves exchanging and collaborating on presentations, text documents or tabular files, you cannot not use MS Office.
I feel like this is kind of an extreme example of something I see a lot on HN: hackers who literally cannot imagine ways of using a computer that are outside of their experience.
Saturn: https://yabause.org/
DS: https://desmume.org/
PSP: http://www.ppsspp.org/index.html
PS2: https://pcsx2.net/
All of these are open source, support Linux, and have good compatability.
With respect, you should be looking these things up for yourself before you make claims like the ones you've been making in this thread.
But...
Gimp is far better than Photoshop and Illustrator?
Blender is far better than 3DS Max and Maya?
Libre Office is far better than Microsoft Office?
Darkroom is far better than Lightroom?
Honestly, I can't even think of an open source CAD one that can even compare favorably to SketchUp, let alone AutoCad.
If you have to, there are many tools available to do a job on Linux, with a backup of VMs and Wine. They are not, however, "far better".
Emacs is more powerful than IntelliJ, say, but it's vastly inferior in terms of learning curve and UX. There are some things I'd rather do in it than in IntelliJ, but it's not what I'm going to use for day to day Android dev, say. Or what I'd point newcomers at.
Depends how you define "powerful;" IntelliJ understands a lot more about your code than most Emacs plug-ins.
There are plenty of examples where they have done just that. Blender is probably the most obvious.
KDE 3 would have been a much better example. But these days are gone, too.
What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?
How so?
Blender is striving to meet the features and capabilities of Maya and 3ds Studio, not the other way around.
A more "business" orientated sentence:
Blender is required to to split its focus to provide a complete movie/game making package including a movie editor, shader editor (i.e. photoshop), and animation editor, an audio editor, a physics editor, a compositing editor, and a game editor; Maya and 3ds Studio do not.
Blender just can't keep up. It's a good tool, no doubt about it, but few professional users will end up using it to make money.
Over the past decade or so, Blender has been on par, and even ahead of "industry standard" tools.
It isn't required to split its focus. It is able to. That is something proprietary software from a company would fail at. It's something that free software and collaboration succeed at.
The biggest benefit is that it has all of these tools in a cohesive environment.
Instead of a photoshop/GIMP-like menu of functions, Blender is a cohesive manageable UI.
There are, in fact, a wide variety of professionals using Blender to make money. You don't hear about it, because telling you what they use is not their perogative.
What features to Maya/Max/etc. have that Blender is really behind on today? I can't think of any.
Now, there is at least Neutron as an open source compositing tool that seems to be filling that particular hole now much more competently than Blender ever could.
I do not understand how you can consider Blender's UI "manageable" in any way. There are much better ways to build UIs for enormously complex DCC tools. My go-to example for that has been Maya for a long time, but since a couple of years, Autodesk has bolted on features in a way that spectacularly breaks the internal consistency, logic and general discoverability of features in Maya. Even though, Blender's UI is still an unsorted mess compared to that.
Expanding feature sets is something commercial software fails at? The biggest reason nobody professionally uses the open-source alternatives is they're missing features.
Blender cannot cope with the kind of stuff that is thrown at commercial DCC tools in feature production. Parts of it don't scale, others fall short of what would be required. Many features are kind of there on paper, but are not fleshed out that well.
Blender faces a sort of a chicken and egg problem: if you don't push it, you can't find out what needs fixing. But nobody in the industry is willing to try because they know that it will break too easily.
This is sort of why the Blender Foundation creates these open source movie projects: they are there to figure out what needs fixing. A ton of new features had to be created for each new short. Last time I bothered to check, many of these features were stuff that would have been considered absolutely essential in VFX workflow at the time the Blender developers managed to implement it.
The downside to these projects is that they also lead to the addition of features like compositing and editing workflows that are out of place in a DCC tool (especially the editing part). Blender started to overextend itself and ended up with too few developers to push all of these areas equally well.
I feel confidant in saying that yeah, there probably are. They're being paid to implement features and fix bugs found by their companies, who use R and Jenkins.
I do agree with the Linux argument you are making, but you cannot swerve 50% of the global Windows users into Linux. It still doesn't have the best UI reputation (although it gets the job done).
Also, I don't want to hear the UI argument when KDE Plasma exists. I bet 90% or better of Windows users would be comfortable on Plasma.
this is exactly 100% dead on the money
prior to Windows 10 Microsoft was at worst known for producing unreliable mediocre quality software, but they were trustworthy (at least for the end user)
Windows 10 changed everything, at the point you're fighting the company that made the OS to not spy on you, not show you ads, not reboot against your will and not reinstall random crapware you previously removed: it's time to switch
Lack of suitable software can be a dealbreaker for some professions. There aren't many professional video editing suites, for example. But in companies I've worked at, most workers only need a browser and an office suite to do their jobs. Linux would work for them.
I think the real obstacle is training. You have a workforce that's already used to the way windows works. It's easier to hire IT people with windows experience than it is with Linux. Users know how to do their tasks in Microsoft office, and even though Libre office is similar, they might have to learn a few new things.
I've used Gimp, Inkscape, and others... but sometimes you just need to get work done, and the closed source proprietary application is what you need, I'm sorry to say.
Donating thousands of dollars to Gimp today isn't going to put it on par with Photoshop today... I wish it would. Maybe it could be in a few years... but I need to get work done right now.
Sometimes you do need a commercial interest behind something to drive it's progress. That doesn't mean it has to be closed and proprietary, but they often are, sadly.
I was just yesterday talking with a friend of mine who worked in architecture visualization and told me that basically the main reason he cannot use blender, even though he'd really like to learn it (and it would save him money on licensing), and he uses 3ds max instead is that 3ds max can read (he didn't care about writing) all the file formats from more specialized software (not max files) that his clients send to him and that is basically the reason every firm that does the same thing cannot use blender.
When i suggested that maybe some of those firms could pay developers to implement and/or improve support for those formats, he said that none would do such a thing as the bigger firms who can pay developers do not really care and can afford to use 3ds max while those who would benefit more by switching to blender (smaller firms and freelancers) cannot pay the developers.
The truth is that people are shit at using a computer (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/). At some point we need to draw the obvious conclusion from that: users capable of useful contribution to a project are a significant minority compared to the number of users who need or wish to use that software. How many people develop software? About 5%. How many people need to use software? 95% or more? Point being, no matter how important or unimportant your software is, you are guaranteed to have a user base predominantly incapable of contributing to the project.
This is why the constant responses of, "Patches welcome," or similar in response to user complaints is so hostile to users. It's saying to users, "This application is only for experts," which is likely to only appeal to experts. Since experts are so rare, that doesn't seem like a particularly inspiring response. You're just driving users away from your project.
Yes, anybody can contribute to an open source project. No, not everybody is capable of doing so meaningfully. Yes, anybody can recognize a bad design or bug. No, not everybody is capable of recognizing a good or correct design or fixing a bug. If Linux is to ever become an operating system for the desktop, we must accept that the majority of users are not going to be developers, and a user cannot be expected to become a developer just because they want to use a computer. It is no longer 1975.
The only exception to the above is if your project has a user base entirely devoted to programmers. That's precisely why those projects get so much development time.
Dev: I'm gonna be a dick and make false equivalences because I personally am not affected by product $X not supporting $Y
User: ...
But the two major differences between what you are talking about and what others are talking about are that a) we have the hardware, it is totally a software issue and b) we are mainly talking for software we already have paid for, not software we may or may not buy in the future.
But hopefully as Linux becomes more popular with gaming (and Microsoft is distracted with UWP and the like), Wine will also see improvements that make gaming better. Already since Valve shown up and rattled things, Wine's gaming compatibility seems to have improved a lot compared to previous years.
A solution for this is to set up dual boot or whatever and use it only for the Windows-only games, until you get bored of them. Then kill Windows and you're free.
And the number of games I'd leave behind in Linux is way more than a simple handful.
The amazing thing is that I could already switch it over to Linux via KodiBuntu or some other distro and get 90% of my day-to-day functionality. But then there's the Windows-only library of games that I have on Steam--games that I've paid hundreds of dollars for over the years, that I simply don't have the energy to try fiddling for hours with in WINE. And that damn remaining 10% is what keeps that PC on Windows 10.
As much as I despise W10, Microsoft has the gamer market by the balls, and they know it. I try as much as I can to buy the Remastered Classics of games like Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment that include proper Linux ports, just to chip away at that dependency, but there are plenty of games that in all likelihood will never have first-class Linux support.
Moreso on topic, I actually do much of my gaming in Linux, I only have a couple of AAA titles that I use Windows for (Elite: Dangerous and AC:Origins), everything else is Linux (KSP, X-Com, X-Com 2, RimWorld).
I often try and make a point of emailing a "Thanks for supporting Linux!" to the companies who release the ones I want to play, just so they know we are out there.
If you want Linux to have a chance it needs to play the long game and that won't ever happen. Everything I own except my gaming PC is Linux but it's not even worth trying to convert others. I find pretty immature to suggest "if your job demands Windows, just quit", "just spend 20 hours trying to make this thing that just works in Windows", "you don't need AAA games". I say immature because I was doing this shit a few years ago and I still cringe about it.
In my experience trying to teach people about the importance of privacy is mostly futile. What worked was, and I only did this to a close family friend, to show him what I could learn about him just by showing what was stored in AppData and many other folders. Some thumbnails will be forever ingrained in my mind.
Of course, but is it more annoying than using Windows all the time? OP leads me to belive a growing number of windows users might think otherwise. It's also worth noting that rebooting is an order of magnitude faster than it was 10 years ago.
> having to run updates for both
Updates are a pain in Windows, but they are not in any serious GNU/Linux distro I have ever used. This is one of the main reasons that users are frustrated with Windows in the first place.
> having two incompatible filesystems where it's annoying to fetch a document from one and use it on the other
This is a real problem when you are using Windows, but not when you are using Linux. The idea here is to only use Windows when you need it anyway. It's an inconvenience, sure, but is it more of an inconvenience than using Windows all the time? That's up to the user. Personally, the answer is no.
> doubling the amount of setup and configuration you have to do
Not so much, if you seriously use GNU/Linux for everything you don't need Windows for. Besides, configuration isn't a big issue unless you are like me, and want everything exactly your way; although, GNU/Linux is the only way I can get that.
> Every time I've set up a dual-boot system I've ended up just never using one of the options.
That's you, and that's fine. The best setup for you is almost definitely not the best setup for most other people. That is the entire reason to use and promote free software: liberty.
Windows has made dual-booting difficult on purpose, because proprietary software begets proprietary software and control. Thankfully, there has been plenty of work in the other direction for those of us who want to control our computers, as opposed to the inverse.
In a word: yes.
I have at different points used Windows, Linux, and OS X as primary desktop operating systems, so I am not operating from a sense of total ignorance of what other systems are like.
My experience with Linux was that I needed to do far more configuration because lots of hardware wouldn't work right out of the box and needed a lot of tweaking and digging through Linux forums for someone with the same problem. I'm really not interested in doing that kind of thing on my personal computer anymore.
From my experience, installing and using Linux has been the most straightforward, especially compared to windows.
And that's the point: we all have different experiences, so I think it's a bad idea to tell someone they are going to have your bad experiences of they try something new, because better software ends up getting a bad rap.
I haven't had any negative experience with CUPS, and if I had, that wouldn't define my experience with GNU/Linux.
I don't have an issue with you sharing experiences. I do get frustrated when those experiences are used to define GNU/Linux to those who haven't experienced it at all.
There are too many people who hear that GNU/Linux is not for them, when it is really a fantastic alternative to windows. There's an attitude that free software will always fail people (which is not true), and I find that attitude not simply unfortunate, but malicious.
The way that things improve is for manufacturers to see demand; and that won't happen if people don't see free software as the viable alternative that it is.
In my experience, NTFS on Linux works very well. Certainly well enough for any average user.
There fact is that you should always backup data you care about.
It's the same as saying they aren't responsible for your computer suddenly catching fire. Is that likely to happen? No.
Is the liberty a free OS provides worth the effort to that user? That's entirely up to them.
It's easy to disregard change as too difficult to approach, especially when coming from such a controling and abusive environment (Windows/OS X). In reality, GNU/Linux is so much easier to use than Windows; most people have simply learned the latter first.
That just isn't true. But don't take it from me; here's esr: http://web.archive.org/web/20180109063613/www.catb.org/esr/w...
The problem we have is that a similar problem in Windows is instantly forgiven, because there is nothing you can do about it; whereas in Linux people expect a higher standard (which is often met) because that arbitrary limitation no longer exists.
Sure windows has gotten a lot better since XP, but it has a long way to go to catch up to circa 2006 Ubuntu.
funny thing is when you install various distros you have a look at what's installed and you go "geeze it's installed a bunch of crap apps"
I used to run dual boot, but then got annoyed with that, then used windows primarily and VM'd linux, and now I use the linux subsystem in windows and occassionally fire up the VM.
Or maybe you want me to convince them they should pay someone else to do that because Stallman was right.
I'm sure some people are lucky enough to have friends and family who would accept your values instantly, learn the setup easily and be glad to pay someone else to do it. I can only speak from my own experiences and they don't reflect that (and as much as I might make a comment here and there I won't ever again try to push "my values" down someone's else throat).
Do you handle all of their Windows-related technical issues?
Are they incapable of learning to do it themselves?
Really?
Are you absolutely sure?
It's all-too-common for people to become dependent on technically-minded friends/family like us, but the fact is that it really isn't difficult for them to do it themselves.
The main barriers they face are:
1. I haven't done this before.
2. I don't immediately see the benefit.
What it comes down to is self-reliance. We can teach people to rely on themselves instead of rely on us.
As the saying goes:
> Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
... something like that, anyway.
For thinkers, problems are an opportunity to learn. Others, they don't see it that way, they want things to just work without making them think. If anyone you're trying to "teach" and "show them the way" ever loses money or have any kind of non trivial issue because "your linug broke my microsoft access" you'll be forever the guy that broke his computer. And he'll hate Linux forever.
"Yes nana, you just have to install linux-headers first"
[0] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox#with-exte...
Also my laptop literally cannot have linux installed on it thanks to UEFI.
(I installed Ubuntu 17.10 alongside Win10 few weeks ago on my UEFI laptop.)
Windows 10 is basically malware at this point.
Does it have "secure boot" that can't be disabled/other keys added?
It's not even true in many (most?) cases that Secure Boot must be disabled.
Typing this from a laptop that has an Arch partition. I use it all the time for dev stuff. It sure as fuck wasn't trivial to set up.
But nobody cares how easy it is to install both. Using both is a huge pain.
Bash is so much more powerful than the Windows shell, and try as I might I just don't like Powershell, so WSL gives me a great shell while running in Windows - no need for rebooting or VMs!
You have your disks listed, each with its free/used space. You click the one you want to install to, and drag a slider to decide how much space to use.
That's how easy it was to install Ubuntu over a decade ago.
Even when I got one installed I had problems with getting flat mouse speeds, not being able to adjust mouse scroll wheel speeds, even the frickin clock was even messed up. ( had to dig around for the issue then figure out the two OSes where saving the time in different ways every time each shut down)
I've got pages of notes for fixes to various issues I encountered trying to get dual booting working smoothly.
There's no way I'd recommend this to anyone who wants a computer that actually works without a hassle.
Yes you're breaking the law but when did that stop anyone?
If you buy high end laptops from a business partner or directly from the vendor and make sure you get a pro(paid) version of windows things are better but the razor thin margins of the consumer market make it hard to avoid strange and badly designed attempts at price differentiation and/or payola schemes.
On another note, I got an XPS 13 from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. As far as I could tell, the only extra software on there was some drivers. I realize that the average person isn't going to want a Linux laptop though.
Edit: Oh and Camera app. On a desktop. Without even a webcam. What is the justification for that?
Was that intentional? Made me laugh either way.
How many OSs come without any graphics applications installed?
> Edit: Oh and Camera app. On a desktop. Without even a webcam. What is the justification for that?
Because a lot of hardware does have a webcam and thus benefits from having the app, while hardware without it sees nothing but a negligible HHD space impact.
it's a feature!
I use Win 10 Enterprise at work so I don't have to worry about any of the Candy Crush or FB malware trash on my PC but no way would I buy a consumer Windows based laptop anymore.
What are you talking about?
[0] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/this-is-why-apple-enables-blue...
To me it's another nail in the coffin of general purpose computing. We've accepted that mobile devices/OSs are not for general purpose computing and expect that they come with a "lifestyle" to hawk, now one of the major general-computing OSs is heading in the same direction.
I think the irony of that statement is from Windows 3.1 and on Windows (25-ish years) was already THE defacto PC platform. I was a pretty big MS fanboy for a long time (and make my living with .NET and their developer tools). But MS's quixotic fetishization of their app store to me looks like dousing the legacy (no pun intended) of their platform with gasoline and lighting it on fire.
Edit: format tweak
And I'm no fanboy but boy am I a fan of .NET. So far it seems like that part of MS is well defended from this grossness, I only hope that holds up.
Excuse the rant.
people dont buy apple because of the walled garden or spyware or iphoto bugs that expose your pictures. they buy apple despite all that.
if microsoft can produce better and more innovative hardware, which they already did with the surface line, they could have kept windows xp model of online isolation and not only got the people that want the flashy hardware but also the people that want to actively avoid the online tie-in.
instead they are doing the worst they could. you cant even use oneNote with your surface pen, I kid you not, without login in to a live.com account! and minesweeper is a 100mb app that you have to download from the store, and it have in-app purchases.
Microsoft Jigsaw is perhaps my grandma's favorite thing ever, and the $20 yearly cost for premium (ad-free) is well-worth it to her.
it's not a good thing as they're using the opportunity to infest these programs with ads
Solitaire on Windows now has ads, and don't get me started on the new calculator
Adding ads is definitely an irritation, but my point is, they are funding a supported, maintained product with Solitaire. It's more than just Solitaire now. It currently has five different games, not including features like daily challenges and the like. It gets updated reasonably regularly.
The generally preferred way to quote on HN is to begin the line with a > and wrap the quote with * if desired.
It's an issue that comes up too often that HN needs to fix, but here we are.
The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.
My new laptop with Windows 10 became so slow I also switched to Mint. Couldn't be happier.
Life's too short to put up with bureaucratically obstructive licensing schemes.
I put Fedora on it first, and it was mostly fine but Gnome was too slow for my liking. But then again I was usually taking notes in vim in a terminal, so that probably wouldn't have mattered in real world use.
So they had to find another way to monetize Windows.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/windows-10-s-becomin...
Since Microsoft made money from new computer sales and those are less frequent they have to move to a subscription type system.
It was clear since 8 and 8.1 that M$ will go for the "app model", where you are no longer the administrator on your own machine 'for your own protection'. I hope they come around, or they will just lose all their tech-savy customers.
I guess it's their turn to rip off their customers private-date/lives, just as Google does for some years now with Android.
I do see the benefits though for some users, but in my book, the privacy violation is worse than the benefits.
Whenever I installed a new windows 7 PC, it was just plug and play really. When I have to install a new windows 10 PC, I have a significantly longer list of items that I do to it (delete cortana, enable search to only work locally, local user only (no xbox or microsoft login), remove forced updates, remove task panels, delete all PUPware that comes with it, etc), do a couple of registry edits, etc.
Lastly, privacy. No such thing as privacy in windows 10, the whole OS is basically spyware.
The only thing I like about windows 10 over its previous versions is the system refresh, but thats about it
Instantly ignored.
Stop. You destroy your own credibility when you resort to childish behavior like that in a serious conversation.
Either make your point objectively with facts, or don't at all.
They were annoying to me, only when I had installed the Windows 10 for the very first time, 2 years ago. I had several Windows 10 re-installations since then, and it really isn't worth nagging about them for the 30-45 seconds they steal from you as you remove them.
Besides, my housemate actually liked and kept some of them on his account. It probably really just does increase the overall customer experience.
In any case, it really is just a breeze to remove UWP apps, and they leave no trace either, so I cannot rationalize how it can be this so annoying to anyone.
I turned off all advertising options in Windows 10 when I first installed, only to be greeted by another ad months later which they had added with a newly downloaded update.
The toggles aren't even centralized, you have to hunt them down in different menus. I have a hard time believing this wasn't done on purpose.
I am completely unfamiliar with the experience you had, with no apps having been installed on my behalf without me explicitly installing it through the Microsoft Store, except for the ones I get after I reinstall the OS.
I also have a Windows Phone that I have been using for the past 2 years. Again, it gets some apps pre-installed whenever I reinstall the OS, but never otherwise.
Admittedly, PCs I think did once get some of them after one major update. I suppose it was one of the Creators Updates.
I'm wondering Microsoft is doing some sort of A/B or market segmentation testing. Perhaps testing different things in different regions.
So I dual boot and 99% of the time sit in Kubuntu land and my computer is fast, responsive, and generally only doing what I ask it too. As it should be.
Microsoft found a way to take an i7-7500 with 32GB of ram and make it feel slow on a fast OS. Windows 10 can be fast.
What are you guys experiencing that I am not?
(honest question - that's the sole reason I have windows anything and I'd be thrilled to get rid of all the absolute nonsense they've been throwing at me)
On top of that, I can run Rome 2 Total War which is not a simple game. It runs great.
I'm not sure many on HN are going to like this thing, but I would think MS gets to see the stats and has better view of how well they are doing. Percentage wise it might be working out pretty good, however, each percentage point they piss off ends up being a lot of people and if the fringe of tech people are in that 1% that can end up in a lot of angry blogs.
What?
NO. Just no.
This doesn't "anticipate the things I need". It doesn't "anticipate" anything. It's not "the things I need", it's whatever MS decides to promote.
There's a vaguely similar feature, that would be vaguely defensible - but this isn't it. This is malware, plain and simple.
My harware is not here to be part of someone else botnet. If MS wants my money, let’s make good product without subscription and let me pay for it. I would be glad to pay 20 to 50€ for Visual Studio if it encourages user friendly business practices.
People are never gonna be happy with change. Not so long ago they took paint (which they insisted on us having whether we wanted it or not) out of the base install of their "botnet / malware" and people lost their shit. Now windows dynamically asks you whether you want a program and people are again losing their shit. In both cases it's microsoft making a call on what apps are on your machine. In both cases you can uninstall them.
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/
If you want to understand why Microsoft is acting the way they are, read those documents.
It's not that I think they are still executing the strategies and tactics spelled out therein. Quite the contrary; Microsoft realises they've lost the OS war to Linux (on one front) and OSX (on the other).
The point is how astonishingly user-hostile those memos are. They lay out a strategy for competing with Free Software that has almost nothing to do with their users' needs and wants. Instead, the obvious assumption is that their users will be sacrificed to their (Microsoft's) strategic goals.
That's not to say that individual Microsoft teams don't produce excellent, user-centric software (two I can think of in my own experience are Excel and Visual Studio).
But the executive leadership, and company culture as a whole, seems to care little about the people who actually use their products. This was clearly true back in the 90s, and is clearly true now. In the 90s it was 'embrace and extend', in the 2010s it's 'track and advertise'.
I'm not a fan of what they're doing with some of the Windows 10 defaults. But you gotta be crazy to not see the user improvements they've done in so many other areas. They are a very, very different company than they were back then. I'm not saying that excuses anything but you're drawing false equivalences using a 2 decades old set of memos to try and back it.
This is part of the reason I gave up developing for Windows and .NET after around a decade of doing it. I prefer to work on a stack with which I'm at least partially values-aligned. (Same reason I abandoned Linux for FreeBSD, actually).
Are they really that different of a company? Microsoft is huge, organizational memory is long, and decisions made long ago, whether rational or mere cargo culting, will affect how they run today.
I'd argue they're a bit more cunning, but not one whit less underhanded. The EU browser ballot thing was considerably more recent, for instance. The forced W10 upgrades with the trick X dialog. Dark patterns surrounding use of a Microsoft account. Non-disableable telemetry. Hawking Edge in a way that would even make Chrome blush [1].
I think they know that they can't be as overt anymore; a couple of antitrust suits will do that to you.
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/W56CuN6.jpg
False equivalence? Microsoft IS a convicted monopolist.
That DID happen.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10s-...
Hah! You must not have used Mcafee Enterprise. I recently moved to Defender and the difference is startling - my laptop fans literally never stopped whining with Mcafee, as it was constantly gobbling CPU. With Defender, it remains silent, and CPU usage is low. I've used other AV systems too (e.g. Avira), and for sure they're better than Mcafee, but I'm impressed with Defender. Don't see any reason for me to use anything else.
Is there a way to completely/permanently neuter the Windows App store and functions like the one mentioned here?
I would love to be proven wrong, but the only way I know for sure is upgrading to the Enterprise or education editions.
I don't know how effective it is, though.
If you're not familiar with Windows and try to clean a PC that isn't yours, it's probably hard to tell what was user installed, what was pre-installed by the manufacturers (they love to include bloatware and unnecessary "tools") and what actually came with Windows.
It's very easy for unaware users to install all sorts of crap and they never know where it came from or what it does - that's basically every PC of a non-tech-savvy user ever.
January 2016 I worked at a secure facility that wanted an entire system doing malware analysis. The bare servers were running Linux, but some of the software used Windows so there were Windows VMs there. Usual KVM stuff.
Bear in mind this is a closed system and the Windows VMs were ephemeral, i.e. had to be discarded and reset after each malware run where we did static code analysis etc. So we used the Professional (hah) version, with AutoUnattend.xml or whatever it was to automatically reset them.
This worked fine until after a certain point with WSUS - we obviously applied security updates - where the VMs wouldn't boot. Turns out that a point in Windows 10's life they decided you needed a better version of Windows to be able to do the equivalent of a preseed or kickstart. 4 months of work disappeared, plus the additional licence cost; need to run a domain etc etc.
Luckily I left soon after but trust me - at any future role I will look at every possibility before Windows. I moved a subsequent client (large international appliance manufacturer that you've heard of) to Linux servers precisely because of this sort of shit.
Windows is done, it's just a case of when it disappears. This is exactly why Microsoft are pushing Azure and Office - they know the outcome, they're just squeezing the pips until it happens.
Your use case is very niche compared to how MS makes most of its money on Windows licenses. Windows isn't going anywhere until it's no longer pre-loaded on every machine, enterprise customers stop buying it completely, and Linux is much more user friendly on the desktop.
I don't disagree with anything else you said, admin'ing windows boxes is a terrible experience.
I know for a fact the malware analysis software we used are now planning a Linux version. I've literally persuaded a multinational to not continue using .net and Windows servers because of my argument that it's not sustainable. They alone are tens of thousands of Windows licenses that may go to Red Hat or even Centos or Ubuntu.
Windows has already started to go - my son doesn't know how to use it, all he's used is Google Docs or an iPhone / iPad. There is no love for Windows, only halcyon remembrances from the likes of myself who remembered the golden days of MSDN subscriptions. There is literally not a startup on the planet who will decide 'fuck it, we'll use a windows domain and Office instead of o365 or Google Apps.
Lock-in, that's how. The customers they care about don't always have practical solutions, and most aren't able to make a call that will benefit everyone in e.g. 5+ years after spending a massive amount of money.
Also, what are you replacing the desktops/laptops with?
Active Directory is really powerful in a way that, as far as I know, alternatives are not.
Backwards compat on Windows is fantastic compared to competitors.
Even Powershell, though niche, can hardly be called primitive relative to the average default Linux shell. This is especially apparent to me, since I work in an old csh all day. :) If anything is primitive, it's passing around strings instead of objects.
Saying Windows is "primitive" compared to the competition makes it sound like you're working in a bubble, to be honest. It's different, to be sure, but I'm hard pressed to think of normal desktop or laptop applications where I'd call Windows primitive. On the server side there's many things competitors undeniably do better, but even then I wouldn't call it primitive.
Bear in mind I can administer any program on the system with bash. I can't do that with PS. There isn't that ecosystem where everything has systemd/init.d bindings, etc.
Put it another way - if I was to start a new internet based company now i'd give everybody Chromebooks, use either GApps or O365, there would be a domain nowhere near it. Do you disagree this is wrong for the majority of situations?
What do you mean by "administer"? I can certainly launch applications, kill them, get various process properties, monitor it, etc.
> There isn't that ecosystem where everything has systemd/init.d bindings, etc.
System services are registered on Windows. Get-Service, Stop-Service, Restart-Service, Set-Service, etc all work fine and can be done remotely. You have more power with more arcane commands that I would have to look up (wmi stuff.)
> Put it another way - if I was to start a new internet based company now i'd give everybody Chromebooks, use either GApps or O365, there would be a domain nowhere near it. Do you disagree this is wrong for the majority of situations?
Yes. I think having a real, full desktop is important for most people's productivity if they're doing any serious work. Yes, it's possible to be a developer working on a Chromebook SSHing into everything. No, I don't think that's even close to ideal.
PS? Fine. WSUS? Awful. You had to start WSUS, change the categories (it already was trying to download updates on a network without internet), restart the service, mess around, etc.
With Linux i'd literally have one rsync command on each side of the sheep dip.
I did again like the autocomplete - but I prefer a million times more the immediacy of SSH.
No, it isn't, but I think in a lot of ways it is much better. It is really nice that the use of an object system means you rarely have to mess around with text-munging code.
On a linux box I can do _everything_ I need to do as long as I have a terminal. Windows is coming around, but it's not there yet. New stuff is better, a lot of old stuff still sucks, but not everyone can dump the old stuff.
Actually, I am not sure if Linux is in fact user unfriendly. I mean, my grandpa (78) uses it every day since about a year now and hasn't complained once (email, banking, ebay, news, ...; he used vista before).
I mean it's not like you don't have to learn a lot of new stuff if you come from years of windows experience and want to reach the same level of proficiency on a new platform which is totally different. It most certainly doesn't feel good to be novice again just because you booted a different system. But I doubt that it is a usability problem with the Linux desktop as people who have no previous experience with windows tend to have an easier start with Linux.
My primary PC has Linux installed and my laptop has a dual boot with Linux and Windows 10. When I use Windows I feel often helpless. Some program tells you that you need to install the newest update but while the updater tells you that its updating, you can't see any progress. After waiting for hours without seeing any progress you conclude that something must be wrong. So you reboot a few times and start searching on the web. Eventually you find a page which tells you how you can reset the update cache and after that it takes only a few reboots to complete the update. I definitely prefer updaters which actually work and tell you straight away when something is wrong.
My problems are probably just the result of too much Windows absence, but somehow I don't expect that to become a real problem anytime soon.
Linux is much more user friendly than Windows. This is completely arbitrary metric, I am very comfortable using GNOME, KDE, awesomeWM and i3 but whenever someone hands me some Win 7 or Win 10 I just can't figure out anything for a while. Stuff starts jumping around and there are literally ads built into OS which annoys me. Windows may be user friendly for 90% of the population BUT this is only because it is "pre-loaded on every machine" as you put it. That is the only reason people find Windows easier to use.
Reactos, Haiku, AROS, OSFree, etc should all be considered as well and money invested in making them better and easier development tools for them to compete with Windows when Linux doesn't always work and a MacOS machine costs too much.
Now it is simply a free service to learn more about us consumers to build the Bing product.
People don't realize that Bing is growing and becoming a serious contender in the market: https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-07-19/microso...
Do you have a more recent source for that? Your link is from 2016.
You sound like I spammer I once knew. He would always say things like "What's the big deal with one e-mail that you're not going to read anyway. Just delete it."
The mail icon in his Mac's dock showed over 29,000 unread messages. Spam just didn't bother him the way Windows popping up ads for Facebook doesn't bother you.
- No indication of other workspaces existing.
- No indication of what applications are in those other workspaces.
- The keyboard shortcut for walking through desktops requires two hands (and in typical Windows fashion cannot be rebound).
I'm not familiar with macOS' implementation, so if you actually think that it's worse, then I would like to know how.
Also should be said, though, that you can replace the window manager on macOS, which should allow you to get most of the features of an actually good implementation of virtual desktops. I'm not aware of a way to do that on Windows.
macOS implementation was bad, because I accidentally switched between desktops all the time. It shows all launched apps in the dock from all desktops. If I'm working on my project, I don't want to see that I have Battle.net client launched and 10 unread notifications in Discord guild channel. If I'm clicking on Safari icon, I want to launch new window on current desktop, I don't want to switch to another desktop with some random website.
Anyway the main point of virtual desktops is that they are implemented at OS level. Actual interface is not very important, because if API exists, 3-rd party programs can embrace it. For example Windows 7 had virtual desktops implemented on system level (there wasn't UI to manage them), but API was very limited, for example it wasn't possible to move windows between desktops. Also applications usually weren't aware about those desktops and sometimes were outright buggy (for example you couldn't launch second Firefox window on another desktop).
Microsoft should design their OS to not require reboots for updates. The only time I ever have to reboot my Linux box is for a kernel update — that’s it.
I'm not 100% confident on this and I haven't worked in Retail for a couple of years thankfully, but I suspect strongly that the apps that are installed are pushed not by Microsoft, but by the OEM in their recovery image. I suspect thus that if you buy a standalone version of Windows 10, and clean install the machine with nothing else on the hard drive, that you won't get those apps pre-installed. But buy a computer with Windows 10 preloaded, and the sky's the limit, the OEM pushes what they want, and Microsoft makes it difficult to opt out.
I'd love someone else to weigh in on this, because I've been distanced from the situation for a while. But no matter how you slice it, users are getting increasingly frustrated, and I think it's a terrible business strategy for Microsoft. They've ruined any potential trust I might have had for their app store before it had a chance to even take off, and I'm not sure they'll be able to recover. If anything, I've got my eyes on Google, who stand positioned to completely shake up the personal computer space with Chrome OS and its budding Android apps support. It'll be interesting to see how the space unfolds.
I've only recently come back to Windows from MacOS for work, and this (along with the invasive tracking that doesn't turn off even if you turn the settings off) floored me.