Ah, the most regular one I hear, and one of my favourites:
"We just wanted to let you know we've exited John. We spoke and he agreed it was time to pursue new opportunities elsewhere. There's nothing nefarious going on, so we wanted to reassure you there's nothing to worry about. Business as usual."
What else are they gonna do? "Fuck this guy amirite boys? Eat shit Terry!"
Personally I have no problem with politeness, even if it's a veneer. There's a reason cities full of millions of people can function without clawing eachother's throats out, and it's got nothing to do with Law.
It's clear to everyone that he has been fired. Otherwise they would have let him resign by himself.
Saying "we have been planning for is for Terry Myerson to pursue his next chapter outside Microsoft" is a stab in the back. Not only did they show him the way to out but they also gave him a kick in the ass while on the way out.
"Fired" is such a loaded word. There are many reasons for a company to want someone to leave, and not all of them necessarily "negative."
Off the top of my head, when the oil and gas market dipped in 2014, tons of great engineers lost their jobs because the companies simply didn't have work for them. Or a CEO that's really good at 5-50 startups simply not being a good fit for scaling 50-100 and upwards of 1000s of employees. Etc.
They're not replacing him; after the reorg the position he had will no longer exist.
I have no idea whether this is actually on good terms or not, but there aren't very many exec VP level positions to go around; it's entirely possible there just doesn't happen to be one that works for both him + management.
I really hope they make fixing the long standing Windows usability issues a priority rather than adding even more "features" that nobody wants or uses.
This is one of the reasons I'm transitioning to linux for my new build at home. I will use Windows 10 only to game. I'm going to strip Windows to it's bones and transition personal stuff into Linux & my Macbook.
... now if only GPU prices would come down. Goddamn blackchain craze.
Depends on what you mean by "stripped down." Candy crush can be removed through the registry editor (I know, I know) as well as all the other weird bullshit apps. Cortana can be silenced, etc. What am I missing for stripping on my rig?
At least in my case, my rig has more than enough power to run debian in VirtualBox at native resolution. Works better than the native installation on my work thinkpad actually... one more excuse to work from home when I get the chance ;)
The features aren't a bad thing, it's good to have them, and it's good to have an OS finally that improves more than once every four years. I have no real issue with their efforts towards supporting 3D printing natively, for instance, even though I currently can't use it myself.
It's the anti-features I have a problem with, like the fact that Candy Crush has to be preinstalled on each domain user in a corporate environment. The general unreliability of the build cycle needs some serious rethinking as well, right now it takes five months to get from a new build to a stable release... and builds are only six months apart.
First, LTSB requires an Enterprise license, which most corporations haven't traditionally sprung for. (It actually costs a little more than Enterprise, actually.) Microsoft seems to be trying to pressure corporations into it, but most businesses use the Pro licenses that come with their PCs, which has traditionally been more than adequate.
Second, LTSB is not really intended for general desktop use, even in a corporate environment. LTSB is intended for devices like MRI machines and the like which need Windows, and the latest security updates, but literally no improvements whatsoever otherwise.
Ideally, corporate users should remain roughly one major Windows 10 release behind the current one, but of course, three times in the last six months, Microsoft has broken the updater and updated PCs to the latest build despite group policy prohibiting it.
If they fixed my two biggest pet peeves with Windows 10, I'd be so, so happy.
My number one pet peeve after switching back to Windows from Mac is the search.
On Mac, I used a hotkey for Spotlight to launch apps. It always found the right stuff, even with typos.
On Windows, the Search results can be ridiculously bad even when you spell things correctly. Given how MS owns a search engine and that Apple doesn't, you'd expect it to be much, much better.
My number two pet peeve is that there are two types settings - the new Windows 8/10 settings and the old Windows Control Panel. I don't know why it's taking so long to consolidate them, it unnecessarily complicates the user experience. Just pick one and go with it.
There's a lot more than two types of settings! For example, many of the Windows 7-style Control Panel dialogs are missing more sophisticated features until you click on Advanced or some sort of similar properties button, which actually will then pull up a Windows XP-style dialog!
Microsoft has never successfully unified their settings and likely never will. Even though the Settings app has come a long way, it's still unideal for a lot of purposes, and they annoyingly have been making it harder to get to the Control Panel quickly. (Protip: If you want the legacy Programs and Features, searching "appwiz.cpl" is now the fastest way to get there, since they explicitly block "Programs and Features" from appearing in the search box it seems.)
While annoyingly they've broken the legacy user management to force people to use Settings so they can repeatedly shove Microsoft accounts down people's throats (even in a domain environment), things like managing local/roaming profiles still requires you go all the way back to an XP-style advanced properties dialog you can only get to from the 7-style System Control Panel.
I don’t see the settings ever fully converging. The various control panel dialogs, MMC snap-ins, and other “old” settings dialogs expose an incredibly rich amount of functionality that most users will never need.
Not sure why you have issues with W10 search - it always seems to do the right thing for most common use cases for me - C brings up Chrome, F Firefox, cm command prompt, A android studio to give a few examples.
Settings - it's a transition thing. With so many legacy CPLs out there - system and 3rd party ones - that's the only reasonable approach they could take - to duplicate everything over to modern settings and leave the old ones around long enough. As time has progressed more and more stuff has appeared in modern settings.
With the availability of great hardware options, it's hands down the best platform right now for users and developers.
It works about 70% of the time on the first couple of keystrokes. On obviously easy stuff like the examples you mention, it's fine.
On others, i.e. multiple apps that share the same words or prefix, like `photo`, or multiword apps where the keyword is not the first word in the name, it fails miserably.
For example, if I type in the word `power` on my desktop, and I have Cyberlink PowerDirector and Cyberlink Power2Go and Cyberlink PowerMedia installed, only Powerpoint shows up in my app list to run. For me to even get all of my Cyberlink apps to show up, I have to type in the word `cyberlink` completely. Typing in `cyber` only shows two of the five Cyberlink apps I have installed. Mentally in my head, when I think of my Cyberlink apps, I think of the app names, not prefixed by vendor name.
For your example "cm command prompt" - I use Cmder instead of the standard command prompt, which literally starts with `cm` unlike command prompt (yes, I get that the actual file name does start with `cm`), and Cmder is never the first option until I get to the `e`.
Misspell a word, and all bets are off.
Spotlight on Mac was way better at guessing what I wanted than Windows. IIRC, the accuracy was in the high 90% range on the first couple of keystrokes.
Search on Windows is almost impressive in its "badness."
And I'd love to say it is a recent development (or "bug") but Windows search has been junk for many years and releases. I mean they themselves must know something is wrong since they tried to reboot it in the failed Vista offshoot (WinFS in Longhorn[0]) using a relational database instead of their current index. But since that failed, they just stuck with it and kept piling on failed concepts to a broken core.
Windows 8/8.1's web search took something inherently unreliable and tacked on a web search. Windows 10 tacked on a personal assistant. But often all people want is a reliable way to search file metadata (name, date, author, etc), file content, and misc OS constructs (Settings/Control Panel Applets, Shortcuts, etc). It gets none of that right.
If I was in charge of the Windows division I'd fire the entire search team, and bring in a fresh set of eyes. There's something dysfunctional in a division that can consistently put out such poor software.
They're third party app launching and search solutions but Wox [1] and Listary [2] (not entirely free) come to mind.
For me the staggering number of Windows non-server SKU options [3] has been a pet peeve. I have zero insight into how profitable it is for them to structure things this way but in terms of optics it's just comical. Now they might be carving out the Home editions even further [4]??
I bought a license for Listary when I switched from Mac to Windows 8. It's ok, but it's not quite as clean as just hitting the Windows key with your pinky finger and starting to type away.
Under Search, you may want to enable "match path", then set up your favorite hotkey and read the search options and you should be all set.
For apps, I just use Classic Start Menu (wonderful), but Launchy or something like that may be more up your alley for super common apps, not sure what the current best of breed is in that space.
I gave up on Windows Search long ago. These days, I disable Windows Search indexing entirely, and use the Void Tools software called "Everything" - it needs a new name so you can use it as a verb (I Everythinged for the file sounds wrong), but other than that, it is a near-flawless, INSTANT search.
Once, I was searching and searching for a particular file, couldn't find it anywhere. Was starting to wonder if I had deleted it or lost it...so I went looking and found HN users referring to this Everything thing.
I installed it, checked the box for "run Everything now" on the finish wizard, the window loaded, I typed the name, and poof, there the file was, 27 (or whatever, way more than 5) directories deep. My jaw hit the floor, and the rest is history.
Yeah, I get it. The first thing I disable on any Windows machine is the "search the web" part of search. I never ever want a web search when I'm using the Windows search box. That default behavior drove me nuts.
The only thing I really use it for is launching apps (via the Windows key), in the way I used to use a hot key + spotlight on Mac.
That Microsoft does not use this functionality in their search, at least in a useful way, to me implies malice rather than incompetence. There's simply no way you can be that incompetent at UI design.
Interesting. Terry Myerson was the head of the Windows Phone division through WP 7, 8 and the early part of WP 10 and bore at least some responsibility for its (lack of) success before being promoted to head of the Windows division as a whole. The inclusion of the much derided tie-in ads in Windows required at least his tacit approval.
The general impression was that he was one of Satya Nadella's darlings. One wonders what finally felled him?
The subsequent attempts to turn desktop Windows into Windows Phone were infuriating and ill-conceived. Almost everything that I liked about Windows Phone did not translate to the desktop.
Windows Phone was definitely NOT good. It was stable, and it was visually appealing. But it was always "almost there". It always gave you the impression that the next update would get there, but updates were super slow, if you would get them at all.
At some point MS switched update strategies for WP to cut out the carrier delays. Everyone gets WP updates on time if your device is still supported. They still seem to come out once every month or two, though there haven't been any major feature updates in a long time.
Windows 10 Mobile gets updates every month, just like Windows 10 does. (Also, it's fun to measure how much faster Windows Mobile phones are still patched for major vulnerabilities than Android phones. Even the Pixel took like three extra months to get the KRACK patch.)
I think he was already at the helm of Windows by the time Nadella took over as CEO. To be honest, I think they've been looking for an excuse to do this for a while. Microsoft seems to be doing well in general, but all the bad press I hear about comes out of anti-patterns in Windows (ads, telemetry, forcing updates, UWP or "Modern apps" or whatever the hell they call them now). Sometimes it takes a really long time to fire people....
He's lead windows for the last 21 years. He gave us Windows 2000, ME, Vista, 8, and 10. I am not surprised his time is up.
Microsoft has lost the next generation of computer users to Android and iOS because of their regular release of completely botched products. The enterprise company I work for just rolled out their Mac program and we are slowly transitioning from Windows.
Jbob2000 I'm sure the "enterprise company" You work for also agrees with you that java was a failure before android was launched. What "enterprise company" is it? Is it called "please please somebody not-a-compettitor do it so it can be an example"?
I hope this gets them to focus Windows 10 back on corporate uses, or at least giving back some reasonable aspect of control. Candy Crush ads built in to Windows Pro is just absurd. MS already lost the mobile war, so they should be focusing on where they really shine, not trying to dumb it down to straddle multiple markets at once.
Unless you believe Microsoft intentionally designed the OS to hose your presentation by rebooting right when it believes you are doing one, this is incompetent/bad design, not "malicious" design.
Let's compromise and call it "depraved indifference". No update ever made is that important that it needs to boot me out of what I'm doing at the moment.
That's another thing that bugs the shit out of me, to the point that I made a passive-aggressive bug report out of it: The update process is 3-part, and two parts of them require your input after the first part, if your computer didn't automatically restart. First is the force shutdown "blue screen," which, with no restart, can leave your computer/laptop in a time-bomb "fuck you" state. Woops, forgot that the last time you turned off your computer, it was an update-shutdown? Hahaha, you need it for a presentation in five minutes? Jokes on you, we still have two update screens to go!
Then you have the black screen with the circle, and then the blue screens "we are configuring your updates and didn't touch your files".
Incompetence as an excuse can only go so far. It's not like Microsoft is unaware of or completely ignorant that people use their Windows systems for all kinds of things — sometimes even mission-critical things. Choosing to ignore an ill you created despite knowing the consequences it has on others is not incompetence.
In their defense, there was a pretty large subculture of technically knows-enough-to-be-dangerous people who would do everything in their power to totally disable Windows Update for various reasons.
Microsoft looked at this as compromising Windows' security and harming Microsoft's reputation. Their solution in Windows 10 was to make it much more difficult or impossible to delay or turn off updates for Home and Pro users. It's annoying as all hell for those who know what we're doing and do stay up to date. I hate it because it restarts in the middle of the night, then boots up into the Bitlocker screen - so when I get up in the morning I discover my desktop has been running at 100% CPU and blasting fans like a jet engine for god knows how many hours thanks to Windows update.
But at the same time, I can see why they did it, but there had to be a better way.
"Telemetry" that can't be fully turned off. I mean off. Not "minimal", not "disabled", off.
By itself this isn't horrible, but it (and many other Windows features, for that matter) crosses into malware territory when it treats the user as hostile (like re-enabling itself or working around blocks like DNS)
To be clear though, these "ads" are solely for Microsoft/Windows features, the most third party they get is being "suggested" apps on the Windows Store. Some people may not perceive them as "ads" (and Microsoft claims they aren't, as laughable as that is), because they are connected to Windows features, you'll never get sent to a third party webpage from these things.
And I don't think they're actually paid ads, for either the suggested apps or the rare occasion they've put an "ad" as the lock screen background. They've promoted the Surface on it before, and then for Tomb Raider, I think they were mostly pushing the idea of "hey, you can get games in the Windows Store now", rather than it necessarily being a paid campaign with the game studio.
They put "suggestions" for 3rd party apps right in the start menu. There's no way they're intelligently suggesting those apps either because they pop up almost immediately after a fresh install, and are often about games.
> And I don't think they're actually paid ads, for either the suggested apps or the rare occasion they've put an "ad" as the lock screen background. They've promoted the Surface on it before, and then for Tomb Raider, I think they were mostly pushing the idea of "hey, you can get games in the Windows Store now", rather than it necessarily being a paid campaign with the game studio.
So you're saying MS doesn't profit if you buy a Surface or something from the Windows Store?
I was the same (win10 pro as well, immediately customized options), then I saw a fresh install on a customer laptop to setup, and oh my god what a mess.
Thankfully for now there are still settings to turn off most of it, and removing all squares/tiles form the menu makes the Start menu look like the classic clean concise style, but it's frustrating that most people get stuck with the subpar experience.
Microsoft is making the same mistake as Apple; they call something Pro but in an effort to appear "not boring" they make it a mass market product that neglects almost entirely the Pro workflow.
I have a CNC machine that I control from windows. Windows 10 forced a hard shutdown for updates while I was running a job the other day. No notion that the software was running an active program, no observation that active processing and I/O was underway. I HATE windows. It seems to have more irrational and user hostile defaults than any other system. I'm sure that if I were better about it I could craft an image that worked better, and I could disable stupid things, but in a workshop I never want cortana. If I had wanted it, I'd be playing Halo...
Windows 7 was fine, but the spammy feature bloat is so frustrating.
I am tied to Mach3 at the moment, which only runs on windows. I've thought about LinuxCNC before, but there seem to be issues supporting my machine. Otherwise, yeah, I would happily be running Linux.
I've worked harder to make Windows 10 Enterprise actually useful than for any other version. Lot's of Group Policy and Registry edits are required to strip out the cruft, and even then it often leaves things broken. Windows 10 is the PC equivalent of a crappy Android phone with your carrier's impossible-to-remove bloatware baked into it. Absolutely horrible experience.
I would love for them to fork Windows into consumer and commercial editions.
I used to uninstall the things I want gone, but I've given up. Contacts, maps, money, music, mail, news, weather, and the other bloatware just kept coming back. You can't uninstall stuff like Cortana at all, AFAIK.
Main reason you currently can't remove Cortana, is because Cortana if you leave the additional features disabled, is just a rebrand of Windows Search, a relatively core OS function. Earlier versions of Windows 10 used to differentiate the two, current versions do not.
This is provably good for Microsoft. I watched a couple of presentations and Myerson never came across as very savvy in presenting their technologies. Not sure about his internal doings though, but they should have always used someone else to demo and present things.
Microsoft makes the most stable, easiest to use desktop OS, especially since Apple started slowing dwindling MacOS to make it into some kind of iOS varient.
Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time, but the OS has grown to become my favorite desktop environment in the past few years, if for no other reason than that everyone else keeps screwing around and tweaking things that don't need tweaking. Linux GUIs have been getting all fancy with it, Apple thinks desktops are just for making Apple software, and yet Windows remains a great place to play games, watch movies, browse the Web. It's by far and away the fastest, most responsive desktop GUI out there. I hope it gets back to basics.
You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.
And as arguments you mention playing games, watch movies, and browse the web?! All three are possible on all mentioned systems. The last two even in the completely same way as on windows (besides user interface).
I am just glad that i switched to the other two options and never had to look back. Apple also fucks up things. Still a pretty solid system for my use case. Also i am not able to see the iOS-varent movement you mentioned. Also Linux GUIs get better and better. It shocks me everytime what Windows Users tolerate while bashing the other two system, when i have to configure something on our AD (only used Windows Server in house). Inconsistent GUI Designs on expensive software, xbox gaming center preinstalled on a SERVER EDITION, everything shuffeled together, ...
I can't speak for the server stuff, but objectively speaking gamers should be using Windows 10. Even just ignoring DirectX, it has the highest compatibility with the most popular games and most up to date drivers.
I use Debian for work but the gaming rig is straight Windows. Shame SteamOS never took of, I was into it (got the steam wifi dongly doo on the TV in the living room with four steam controllers lol)
I have a Windows 10 license literally only for gaming and they still manage to make that a horrible experience, between first party xbone controllers regularly disconnecting, forced updates happening in the middle of a game (because the clock can’t remmeber my time zone reliably), and random issues like broken Ethernet drivers (on my skylake-era motherboard) after an update, or ads for some office 365 ripping me out of a full screen game. Every time it happens I just think how much I paid for this experience.
If steam on Linux supported 1/10rd of triple A titles instead of 1/100th I would switch and never look back.
Owner of windows 10 desktop, windows 7 laptop, and macbook pro here. Windows can go to hell. So many important things are crazy inconsistent. When plugging headphones stops being a complicated and finicky process I will consider re-evaluating my opinions.
Also do you know what the difference between a Windows fuckup and a macOS fuckup is? The macOS fuckup makes news while the Windows one in business as usual.
I don't think you have used a Mac recently then. When you plug headphones in, the sound outputs through the headphones. And it works if the computer was off when you plugged them in. Or asleep. Or closed. I probably care way to much about this.
> When you plug headphones in, the sound outputs through the headphones.
That's how Windows 10 behaves for me. I already knew it, but just tried again for you playing a movie using VLC and plugging in my headphones. Works like a charm.
I think that's a vendor implementation. I used a Lenovo for a long time, worked perfectly without a pop-up. Just got a Dell XPS 15, it pops up a prompt when I plug stuff in (but it also allows me to set a default behavior, so.... ️
No nothing. Also, forgot to mention another test, went to hibernate while the sound playing through laptop's speakers, plugged in headphones while the machine is off, started the machine. Sound was coming through the headphones after the boot. I'm on a t450s.
I'm consistently baffled by MS. It employs some incredibly smart people, but reliably generates consumer products that are bywords for uninspired user hostility.
Usually, it's up to the audio chipset driver manufacturers to provide the headphone switching logic. Windows itself has a more passive view of sound devices. You can change the active device from the context menu of the speaker icon in the system tray, and some chipsets (e.g., Realtek) tend to do the headphone switching for you.
My notebook had some issues re plugging in headphones and Bluetooth because of some bad Realtek drivers. Uninstalling that and using Microsoft's own drivers solved the problem.
3rd party software on Windows machines is an ongoing problem.
> You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.
Sure they can tell you that. X can be a disaster and a pain to use, and still be better than Y, if Y is a worse disaster.
You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.
This is Emacs vs vi/vim vs GUI editors (Scintilla-based, Sublime, Electron-based, whatever).
You can feel that Emacs is the best thing ever, but still hate Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta combinations. You can love vi and still sometimes get annoyed about switching modes.
Seems to me that part of what he's feeling is that MacOS has become the unwanted outsider, and frankly most people have better things to do / aren't OCD enough to want to spend a bunch of time trying different windowing systems.
Barebones gnome has been great for me. One time I did the "full" install by accident and yea it came with a bunch of bullshit games and stuff, but otherwise it's been the most stable out of all of them.
Unity or whatever Ubuntu ships with did not like working from an install on neither my macbook pro nor my thinkpad, and it really didn't like my 4k monitor. KDE didn't like switching between 4k and my laptop screen.
I'm only just now trying out Debian KDE as a daily driver (previously only Windows/OSX for all non "RDP/SSH into this box, run 5 commands for troubleshooting stuff then exit" usage scenarios) and I have to say, I'm okay with them getting all fancy with it if it means I have fuzzy analogues to Windows' Start Menu, Control Panel applets, settings dialogues, etc.
The menus, etc. help me grope my way through the dark as I learn the "Linux Way" of computing concepts.
I disagree with a few things in your post, but foremost among them is the word "stable". Just some anecdata, but the number of times I've had to reinstall because the OS was misbehaving and I couldn't figure out how to fix it:
Linux: 0
MacOS X: 1
Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year.
Have you ever noticed how in most orgs, every IT guy's first response to a weird-looking Windows problem is to suggest a reinstall? And that's not even irrational. Troubleshooting Windows takes too long to be worthwhile, because there are too many places to look for where things might be going wrong. Its complexity has become unfathomable to mere mortals, and it shows in maintaining the OS.
Haha, how have you managed to avoid Linux re-installs? I almost always eventually break something horribly while tinkering. Always my fault, but still requires a reinstall.
Oh if I'm screwing things up just to learn, I don't count that, and I've done that plenty of times on all operating systems I've used. Not the OS's fault, even for Windows. Just part of the fun!
I had the same problem until I realized this is actually a distro problem. Most distros focus very much on making the installing and configuring "easy" (still leaving much room for debate), but in turn make their system so rigid that it's pretty much unthinkable to fix lower-level problems during updates. Often, the software they package is ancient, which also doesn't help.
If you're interested in avoiding that, try a rolling-release distro (updating frequently) with good documentation and a sane low-level setup.
Hardly; I personally settled with Arch and am pretty pleased with it, but I understand that it's far from everyone's cup of tea. Their documentation is excellent though, and can be a great help with problems on other distros, too. You just have to be aware that your distro might not do everything the same way when you use it.
I've heard good things about OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have never tried it, so I can't vouch for it.
If you have the time and energy, I'd recommend you to look at a couple of distros yourself and see how much of the "dirty hands" part you can grasp yourself from the documentation. Can you fix GRUB or their equivalent yourself? Is there documentation on how to do things without a GUI? I'd say those are certainly a good sign.
As a bad example, I wasted a whole afternoon once trying to uninstall a botched Radeon driver in the TTY on Fedora (since it screwed up Xorg beyond repair). Their documentation was abysmal[1]. That's the stuff you want to avoid.
[1]: In fact, in the end, it turned out I had to set a magical environment variable that was never mentioned in the small paragraph there was in the docs. Oh, and of course, the driver was botched because of a system upgrade I couldn't revert.
Edit: OTOH, if you're more patient than me (and don't screw around with e.g. PPAs because you want a new-ish version of certain libraries), you might find using ZFS for your main drive to be a good idea. Make a snapshot, upgrade and if something breaks: revert and wait for a fix.
Edit2: Also, if you're going to try a rolling release: Don't wait too long for updates and find the news channel where breaking changes (and the necessary upgrade steps) are communicated. It's important to know about those, and it simultaneously helps you in guessing how often they're about to happen. Arch's feed is on their landing page, for example.
> Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year.
When I was first reading your comment I assumed it was experience in the distant past. The different experiences people have with the same software is incredible to me. I have owned four Windows computers, up to present day, and maintained those of family and some friends, and not once have I had to reinstall Windows since the days of Windows 2000, excepting harddrive failures. I always wonder what makes the difference.
But I guess if I knew, Microsoft would know (being staffed by people smarter and more informed than me), and hopefully fix whatever causes the problems necessitating reinstall.
It's like all the complaints about Firefox's memory usage - people have complained about it for years, it's clearly a real problem for some? many? users, but I have never seen it on any platform.
I don't think it's really fixable. As I mentioned, Windows has gotten too complex, and one of the reasons why is that there is too much legacy cruft. Some bug in a random piece of software flipped a bit somewhere in the registry that upsets another piece of software? Good luck ever finding that. And is the registry ever going to go away? Nope. Not unless MS decides to break with backwards compatibility on an apocalyptic scale.
To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine.
Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more.
Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works.
This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.
No. Then every time I make a change in my network (not just changing IPs, but when I add a machine), I would have to modify a bunch of host files on all my different machines. No, this is actually what DNS is made for. As I said, Linux and MacOS are fine with it. It's Windows that's causing a problem.
Anecdata: I have never had to re-install windows in the last decade on my personal machine (neither have I had to reinstall Linux or OSX). My current W10 machine at work is at a 140 day uptime because I netured the update and can't be bothered to update. My W7 Laptop hasn't been re-installed since I purchased it in 2012 !!
That's business as usual actually. I don't know wth you are doing with your machines but Windows is crazy stable. Much more than my mac at work. And linux... like... nevermind...
I left Windows years ago, when they released Vista. Vista was so bad that, suddenly, I could no longer see a credible upgrade path.
I had been dabbling with linux, so I switched to Ubuntu for a few years. But then Ubuntu also lost its mind, so I switched to Arch for a a year. I learned a lot during my time with Arch, but the most important lesson is "wow, a full blown OS, with an integrated DE, network management, and a dozen other systems does so much more for me than I ever knew."
Then I switched to OSX for a time. I suffered greatly. Folks think Apple's software quality issues are a recent thing, but they aren't. Apple has always been extremely bad at making reliable software. I wasn't doing anything fancy, but experience data loss issues due to file system errors, iTunes wiping out years of song metadata, and on and on. And OSX is incredibly slow - not because of the software, but because of the CPU, RAM, and heat limits imposed by apple form factors. Even now, my work laptop is a fancy MBP, and it is just dog slow when doing any kind of meaningful work. The only nice thing about OSX is being able to pull of a terminal with familiar tools.
I decided to try out windows 10 on my home desktop. I built this rig for much less than the cost of a mac, with all top-end parts. With 8 logical CPUs and 64gb RAM, it flies and I almost never experiences a slowdown of any kind. It doesn't matter how many dozens of browser tabs, terminals, or apps I have open. Running Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux is very pleasant and gives me access to proper command line tools. I haven't experienced the issues you mention (drivers all work like magic, haven't seen any ads, no tablet mode issues).
I have some issues with Windows still. They've really outdone themselves in making the system settings windows almost totally unusable and confusing. And I wish a bash shell was the default terminal, along with more pre-packaged open source tools. Probably the single worst part is Windows Update - it is a fucking abomination, impossible to predict (will restarting or shutting down actually cause a 20 minute update cycle?) and disrupting work at all the wrong times. And bitlocker's refusal to just encrypt a hard drive without a TPM module present is stupid, especially since it wont let me save the encryption key to dropbox (saving to the same drive being encrypted is not allowed).
But none of the downsides are deal breakers for me. My system is super stable, is always fast, and let's me get work done. I love it.
> And bitlocker's refusal to just encrypt a hard drive without a TPM module present is stupid, especially since it wont let me save the encryption key to dropbox (saving to the same drive being encrypted is not allowed).
???
Do you have Pro or Home? The full Bitlocker in Pro does (or did) allow encryption without TPM. Both my desktop and old laptop did not have TPM and have Bitlocker enabled. It also let me back up the key to the local (Bitlocker encrypted) drive.
There's nothing particularly insane about not breaking the APIs with every single release like OS X does with user-facing stuff or Linux does with kernel-facing stuff.
In fact, you have to go the extra mile to break stuff.
You'd be surprised, because a lot of Windows software developers do unholy things like plugging into undocumented APIs or modifying parts of the OS that should not be modified.
Previous leaks of Windows source have indicated Microsoft ends up putting in a lot of workarounds to give specific third party apps old functionality just because some app is popular and badly written and a fix for something else broke it.
Can you please give an example of something that is used frequently and that is as backwards compatible as Windows. Android is not from my experience(having to be often be recompiled for newer version.)
And there’s a fine example of windows user bipolar disorder, a condition I suffer from also. It’s amazing but it pokes you in the eye ten times a day with ridiculous things that should just bloody well work.
If it didn’t poke you in the eye ten times a day it’d be perfect. However Microsoft have been chasing fad dragons for the last decade and only get 80% of the way through engineering efforts before direction changes. That last 20% is what makes people nod approvingly and smile and it’s called quality.
With a non-trivial amount of tweaking (and 3rd party apps) you can make Windows 10 a non-poke-in-the-eye OS at least until the next major named release where you then have to redo at least a third of those tweaks.
This is not huge praise for the Windows desktop but there really is a very good OS under all the crap that Microsoft seems to be piling on.
It almost feels like there are two groups running Windows development: One group that is cleaning up the file manager, the settings dialogs, adding the Linux subsystem, fixing the console, etc. And other group adding Candy Crush, Cortana, screwing up the start menu / search, Edge, etc. The look, feel, and usability of these things are so radically different it's hard to believe that same team is responsible for them all.
The problem is management and organizational priorities rather than the developers themselves. Microsoft was clearly able to give users what they want in the past (Windows 7) but that's clearly not the direction they're going.
What actually still constantly boggles me is the tooling for Windows.
There are so many things that would just need a better tool shipping with the OS to be fine, but are neglected (say: the event log (slow as hell and not nearly as comfortable as `less`. 'nuff said), the services dialog (still looks like in Win95, still can't auto-refresh, still has no useful search), notepad, PS ISE, the `scheduled tasks` dialog (still confusing as hell), even the effing task manager). Then there are tools MS actually owns (cf. Sysinternals) but refuses to distribute with Windows. And then, there are the new shiny things that get implemented to the point where they just barely work, and are never touched again (like the new terminal windows and workspaces in Win10).
I mean - especially the workspaces! Just give them to an intern and tell them to do the obvious improvements. They could be great, but they are still cumbersome.
The task manager has gotten a lot of work. I massively prefer many of the old Windows-style control panel items like services, add/remove programs, networking dialogs, etc. I will give you that scheduled tasks is confusing and the event log (which is fast enough for me) isn't super comfortable.
Microsoft doesn't want to distribute more tools with Windows (like sysinternals) because they'll have ship them forever. They should, however, put them in the store.
It feels like a lot of the new features are half-baked. They have tried to go to a rapid release model which should mean continuous improvement but I don't think they're quite comfortable with that. It's like the worst of both worlds right now -- slow fixes but lots of churn.
I get that MS isn't just twiddling their thumbs and that there are tradeoffs to be considered. It's just that from the outside, it looks like they're not really considering changing anything.
Also, I too can see that there is work that has gone into the task manager. It's still nowhere near where it should be, though. Personally, I'd switch to ProcessExplorer on any machine in a heartbeat, exept that I can't, because it's not bundled, and some businesses are very paranoid on software that has to be installed additionally. Note: I'm not saying it should be the default, but it should be there.
If the thing that's holding such changes back is the release model, then perhaps this reorg might change some things? Though, I somehow doubt that was the issue here...
I don't know what "regular users" experience, because I'm a seasoned power user, but I agree. At home, I run things like Plex, Photoshop, Premier, Battlefield One, 1998 StarCraft, Spider Solitaire... they just work. I haven't had a real issue on my desktop, 3 laptops or 1 tablet (RT!) in a few years. (The last big issue was on a pre-release version of Windows 10.) At work I run all the .NET developer tools, alongside some front-end dev tools like Node and Grunt (what even are these things, I don't know, they work). Git, Chrome, Firefox, (Edge did have an issue with sharing an overloaded cache with IE, ew!) They just work. My biggest issue with my work machine is that it occasionally asks me to type in a 5 billion digit BitLocker key. But for the work I make it do, it works remarkably well, without complaint. shrug I am probably not a typical Windows OS user with typical experiences. But I do push my machines hard. (The corporate overlords have this machine running CrashPlan, Trend Micro.. but I run IIS, NodeJS, MongoDB, Bing Desktop, Visual Studio, Outlook, Word/Excel, Adobe Acrobat, SQL Server... the list goes on.)
My home desktop is a Phenom II w/ just 4GB. It has had Vista, 7, 8/8.1 and now 10 on it. I think I did a clean sweep with 7, but I've gone through all the upgrades since then, and it's still running pretty well. (It won't cold boot, but that's a motherboard hardware problem!) It's approaching 10 years old at this point. Of course it has an SSD (actually 3...) or it would be pretty painful to use. But it isn't, and that's pretty impressive.
It periodically uses extra CPU cycles! Oh, and it updates my wallpaper about once a day to something new and shiny. (Similar to what Windows 10 lock screens do, but it's a different set of photos.) Though today's red and white architectural picture is a little harder to look at than the usual landscapes and fuzzy animals.
Seasoned power users (most HN participants) will generally vastly underestimate how much time they spent learning how to get their OS of choice 'just right' and subconsciously use many tricks that would not be obvious to a layman.
Yes, my Windows just works as well, but not without tweaks and regular maintenance.
>if for no other reason than that everyone else keeps screwing around and tweaking things that don't need tweaking.
Sadly, Microsoft has decided to follow this path lately too. It's truly terrible that this mentality has infected them because there doesn't currently exist a decent alternative. They'll just keep screwing things up just enough that other desktops are still screwed up worse.
Makes me want to give up computing and live in a cave.
I remember last year Microsoft did some major reorgs as well. Is it typical for Microsoft size organizations to re-org so much ?
While re-orgs are probably good for re-organizing the workforce around a set of goals but I think for lower level managers and individual contributors these are very distracting. Constant change in leadership affects employee morale.
If I read this correctly, Windows is no longer a top level division of Microsoft and is a part of Experiences and Devices.
This is huge. Few companies have reinvented themselves as many times as Microsoft has. From developer tools (BASIC) to Dos to Windows to Office and now to Cloud and Services.
Under Nadella, Microsoft has regained the agility for which it was famous for under Bill Gates.
Sort of. Windows shell/app/device teams got merged with other "experience" teams (i.e., Office), while Windows platform teams got merged with other platform teams (i.e., Azure)
Linux (various OS's on that kernal) have been objectively more stable and easier to use than windows since windows 8 came out. I plugged an Ubuntu machine into my work network and could print to any printer without installing any extra drivers! Updates ONLY when I want them. Also, no bloatware or unnecessary personal assistant tied to every search feature. Microsoft should've just polished windows 7.
Hey John, I work at MS too and welcome! As for how this may impact you, you should speak with your recruiter and connect with your hiring manager. Please do not hesitate to ask.
Personal experience differ, but here's my story. When I joined MS 9 years ago it was in the midst of the big layoffs, and my recruiter reached out immediately after news broke and made sure that everything is still in place and I am still due to start in the summer after my graduation, and I've been happily working here since.
It's a bit disconcerting to see the apparent narrow mindedness of educated, technical people in regards to the forced windows update system. Linux's way of manual updating is better than windows, only because the only people using Linux are capable of understanding security issues and will update as soon as is is convenient.
The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so.
Microsoft had to make a hard choice, and they made the hard choice. That hard choice is the reason 98% of wannacry infections were on windows 7 and barely 1% on windows 10.
If ubuntu somehow ends up replacing windows in hands of the general public, don't be surprised to see the same update system to appear in it.
The key issue is one of control. I don't mind having an automatic update system, so long as there is some way of telling the os "I know what I'm doing - let me handle this". In a similar vein, updates should respect explicit configuration choices made on the system, and not re-enable things like Cortana without permission.
> If ubuntu somehow ends up replacing windows in hands of the general public, don't be surprised to see the same update system to appear in it.
If that happens, don't be surprised when a fork of Ubuntu comes out without the forced updates.
> The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so.
The choice doesn't have to be between 'update now' and 'update never'. There are more polite ways of pestering people into doing something good, than completely hijacking their system.
The choice doesn't have to be between 'security updates AND feature updates, together' or 'nothing at all'. The "feature" updates don't have to include ads and auto-reinstalled Candy Crush. The "security" updates don't have to auto-enable explicitly disabled telemetry settings of users.
All of the development machines in my office either auto-apply security updates or prominently nag us to manually apply updates that can/could not be automatically applied. None of them reboot in the middle of a development session. None of them auto-install feature updates or ads or sponsored apps. All of them run Kubuntu LTS.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadGotta love corporate speak. Do they even realize how awful that is?
"We just wanted to let you know we've exited John. We spoke and he agreed it was time to pursue new opportunities elsewhere. There's nothing nefarious going on, so we wanted to reassure you there's nothing to worry about. Business as usual."
:|
Personally I have no problem with politeness, even if it's a veneer. There's a reason cities full of millions of people can function without clawing eachother's throats out, and it's got nothing to do with Law.
Why load headlines with any form of negative language whatsoever? Why plop any mines into future interviews he may have with other companies?
Saying "we have been planning for is for Terry Myerson to pursue his next chapter outside Microsoft" is a stab in the back. Not only did they show him the way to out but they also gave him a kick in the ass while on the way out.
Off the top of my head, when the oil and gas market dipped in 2014, tons of great engineers lost their jobs because the companies simply didn't have work for them. Or a CEO that's really good at 5-50 startups simply not being a good fit for scaling 50-100 and upwards of 1000s of employees. Etc.
I have no idea whether this is actually on good terms or not, but there aren't very many exec VP level positions to go around; it's entirely possible there just doesn't happen to be one that works for both him + management.
... now if only GPU prices would come down. Goddamn blackchain craze.
Windows 10 Pro N is a good starting point for a non-annoying Windows "Experience", but I'm fairly certain you can't game with it.
The image of the VM is portable.
A force shutdown would force shutdown my VM, yes. I haven't ever had that on my PC, can't remember if it's because I fenagled updates or what.
It's the anti-features I have a problem with, like the fact that Candy Crush has to be preinstalled on each domain user in a corporate environment. The general unreliability of the build cycle needs some serious rethinking as well, right now it takes five months to get from a new build to a stable release... and builds are only six months apart.
Second, LTSB is not really intended for general desktop use, even in a corporate environment. LTSB is intended for devices like MRI machines and the like which need Windows, and the latest security updates, but literally no improvements whatsoever otherwise.
Ideally, corporate users should remain roughly one major Windows 10 release behind the current one, but of course, three times in the last six months, Microsoft has broken the updater and updated PCs to the latest build despite group policy prohibiting it.
My number one pet peeve after switching back to Windows from Mac is the search.
On Mac, I used a hotkey for Spotlight to launch apps. It always found the right stuff, even with typos.
On Windows, the Search results can be ridiculously bad even when you spell things correctly. Given how MS owns a search engine and that Apple doesn't, you'd expect it to be much, much better.
My number two pet peeve is that there are two types settings - the new Windows 8/10 settings and the old Windows Control Panel. I don't know why it's taking so long to consolidate them, it unnecessarily complicates the user experience. Just pick one and go with it.
Microsoft has never successfully unified their settings and likely never will. Even though the Settings app has come a long way, it's still unideal for a lot of purposes, and they annoyingly have been making it harder to get to the Control Panel quickly. (Protip: If you want the legacy Programs and Features, searching "appwiz.cpl" is now the fastest way to get there, since they explicitly block "Programs and Features" from appearing in the search box it seems.)
While annoyingly they've broken the legacy user management to force people to use Settings so they can repeatedly shove Microsoft accounts down people's throats (even in a domain environment), things like managing local/roaming profiles still requires you go all the way back to an XP-style advanced properties dialog you can only get to from the 7-style System Control Panel.
Settings - it's a transition thing. With so many legacy CPLs out there - system and 3rd party ones - that's the only reasonable approach they could take - to duplicate everything over to modern settings and leave the old ones around long enough. As time has progressed more and more stuff has appeared in modern settings.
With the availability of great hardware options, it's hands down the best platform right now for users and developers.
On others, i.e. multiple apps that share the same words or prefix, like `photo`, or multiword apps where the keyword is not the first word in the name, it fails miserably.
For example, if I type in the word `power` on my desktop, and I have Cyberlink PowerDirector and Cyberlink Power2Go and Cyberlink PowerMedia installed, only Powerpoint shows up in my app list to run. For me to even get all of my Cyberlink apps to show up, I have to type in the word `cyberlink` completely. Typing in `cyber` only shows two of the five Cyberlink apps I have installed. Mentally in my head, when I think of my Cyberlink apps, I think of the app names, not prefixed by vendor name.
For your example "cm command prompt" - I use Cmder instead of the standard command prompt, which literally starts with `cm` unlike command prompt (yes, I get that the actual file name does start with `cm`), and Cmder is never the first option until I get to the `e`.
Misspell a word, and all bets are off.
Spotlight on Mac was way better at guessing what I wanted than Windows. IIRC, the accuracy was in the high 90% range on the first couple of keystrokes.
And I'd love to say it is a recent development (or "bug") but Windows search has been junk for many years and releases. I mean they themselves must know something is wrong since they tried to reboot it in the failed Vista offshoot (WinFS in Longhorn[0]) using a relational database instead of their current index. But since that failed, they just stuck with it and kept piling on failed concepts to a broken core.
Windows 8/8.1's web search took something inherently unreliable and tacked on a web search. Windows 10 tacked on a personal assistant. But often all people want is a reliable way to search file metadata (name, date, author, etc), file content, and misc OS constructs (Settings/Control Panel Applets, Shortcuts, etc). It gets none of that right.
If I was in charge of the Windows division I'd fire the entire search team, and bring in a fresh set of eyes. There's something dysfunctional in a division that can consistently put out such poor software.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
For me the staggering number of Windows non-server SKU options [3] has been a pet peeve. I have zero insight into how profitable it is for them to structure things this way but in terms of optics it's just comical. Now they might be carving out the Home editions even further [4]??
[1] http://www.wox.one/
[2] http://www.listary.com/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_editions
[4] https://www.onmsft.com/news/new-windows-10-editions-windows-...
https://www.voidtools.com/
Under Search, you may want to enable "match path", then set up your favorite hotkey and read the search options and you should be all set.
For apps, I just use Classic Start Menu (wonderful), but Launchy or something like that may be more up your alley for super common apps, not sure what the current best of breed is in that space.
Once, I was searching and searching for a particular file, couldn't find it anywhere. Was starting to wonder if I had deleted it or lost it...so I went looking and found HN users referring to this Everything thing.
I installed it, checked the box for "run Everything now" on the finish wizard, the window loaded, I typed the name, and poof, there the file was, 27 (or whatever, way more than 5) directories deep. My jaw hit the floor, and the rest is history.
The only thing I really use it for is launching apps (via the Windows key), in the way I used to use a hot key + spotlight on Mac.
The general impression was that he was one of Satya Nadella's darlings. One wonders what finally felled him?
The subsequent attempts to turn desktop Windows into Windows Phone were infuriating and ill-conceived. Almost everything that I liked about Windows Phone did not translate to the desktop.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-and-why-microsoft-is-...
Microsoft has lost the next generation of computer users to Android and iOS because of their regular release of completely botched products. The enterprise company I work for just rolled out their Mac program and we are slowly transitioning from Windows.
It's time for a shake up.
Source or example of malicious stuff done?
Things like this[1] should not be possible.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP31lluUDWU
Then you have the black screen with the circle, and then the blue screens "we are configuring your updates and didn't touch your files".
It drives me insane.
In their defense, there was a pretty large subculture of technically knows-enough-to-be-dangerous people who would do everything in their power to totally disable Windows Update for various reasons.
Microsoft looked at this as compromising Windows' security and harming Microsoft's reputation. Their solution in Windows 10 was to make it much more difficult or impossible to delay or turn off updates for Home and Pro users. It's annoying as all hell for those who know what we're doing and do stay up to date. I hate it because it restarts in the middle of the night, then boots up into the Bitlocker screen - so when I get up in the morning I discover my desktop has been running at 100% CPU and blasting fans like a jet engine for god knows how many hours thanks to Windows update.
But at the same time, I can see why they did it, but there had to be a better way.
By itself this isn't horrible, but it (and many other Windows features, for that matter) crosses into malware territory when it treats the user as hostile (like re-enabling itself or working around blocks like DNS)
I'm genuinely curious what the difference is between my install and yours.
Yes, you can turn these advertisements off easily. But considering how much we pay for Pro (~$200), there shouldn't be any advertisements anywhere.
And I don't think they're actually paid ads, for either the suggested apps or the rare occasion they've put an "ad" as the lock screen background. They've promoted the Surface on it before, and then for Tomb Raider, I think they were mostly pushing the idea of "hey, you can get games in the Windows Store now", rather than it necessarily being a paid campaign with the game studio.
So you're saying MS doesn't profit if you buy a Surface or something from the Windows Store?
That's an advertisement. My computer has never had anything related to Fitbit on it. Ever.
Thankfully for now there are still settings to turn off most of it, and removing all squares/tiles form the menu makes the Start menu look like the classic clean concise style, but it's frustrating that most people get stuck with the subpar experience.
Windows 10 home on my hp laptop
Both are in insider branches
Never seen an ad. Never had it update without me telling it to. I never modified anything in Windows to get rid of telemetry.
I have a suspicion that Windows actually gets more strange the more you "fix" it
The only silver lining is WSL, but it’s a toy at best, not a fully featured POSIX-compliant development environment.
Windows 7 was fine, but the spammy feature bloat is so frustrating.
Or you work for an organization that has an Enterprise license.
I used to uninstall the things I want gone, but I've given up. Contacts, maps, money, music, mail, news, weather, and the other bloatware just kept coming back. You can't uninstall stuff like Cortana at all, AFAIK.
Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time, but the OS has grown to become my favorite desktop environment in the past few years, if for no other reason than that everyone else keeps screwing around and tweaking things that don't need tweaking. Linux GUIs have been getting all fancy with it, Apple thinks desktops are just for making Apple software, and yet Windows remains a great place to play games, watch movies, browse the Web. It's by far and away the fastest, most responsive desktop GUI out there. I hope it gets back to basics.
> Windows still drives me nuts, has ads, gets stuck in tablet mode when I'm on a desktop, and has driver issues from time to time
Stop, you're making this macOS user jealous.
You can't tell me that you windows drives you nuts, and keeps tweaking and tweaking making it worse. Still it is (your opinion) better as linux GUIs or Apple's one.
And as arguments you mention playing games, watch movies, and browse the web?! All three are possible on all mentioned systems. The last two even in the completely same way as on windows (besides user interface).
I am just glad that i switched to the other two options and never had to look back. Apple also fucks up things. Still a pretty solid system for my use case. Also i am not able to see the iOS-varent movement you mentioned. Also Linux GUIs get better and better. It shocks me everytime what Windows Users tolerate while bashing the other two system, when i have to configure something on our AD (only used Windows Server in house). Inconsistent GUI Designs on expensive software, xbox gaming center preinstalled on a SERVER EDITION, everything shuffeled together, ...
I use Debian for work but the gaming rig is straight Windows. Shame SteamOS never took of, I was into it (got the steam wifi dongly doo on the TV in the living room with four steam controllers lol)
If steam on Linux supported 1/10rd of triple A titles instead of 1/100th I would switch and never look back.
How is Far Cry 5 on Linux? How about MacOS?
Also do you know what the difference between a Windows fuckup and a macOS fuckup is? The macOS fuckup makes news while the Windows one in business as usual.
And there are adds. Built in to my OS. Fuck that.
That's how Windows 10 behaves for me. I already knew it, but just tried again for you playing a movie using VLC and plugging in my headphones. Works like a charm.
Every so often it will "forget" that it should be using the usb dac and revert to the hdmi audio output.
Apple solved that problem by not even letting you plug in headphones!
3rd party software on Windows machines is an ongoing problem.
Sure they can tell you that. X can be a disaster and a pain to use, and still be better than Y, if Y is a worse disaster.
This is Emacs vs vi/vim vs GUI editors (Scintilla-based, Sublime, Electron-based, whatever).
You can feel that Emacs is the best thing ever, but still hate Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta combinations. You can love vi and still sometimes get annoyed about switching modes.
Seems to me that part of what he's feeling is that MacOS has become the unwanted outsider, and frankly most people have better things to do / aren't OCD enough to want to spend a bunch of time trying different windowing systems.
this is true mainly only for current Gnome and KDE-
stay with xfce, lxde or even a window manager and this is not the case.
Unity or whatever Ubuntu ships with did not like working from an install on neither my macbook pro nor my thinkpad, and it really didn't like my 4k monitor. KDE didn't like switching between 4k and my laptop screen.
The menus, etc. help me grope my way through the dark as I learn the "Linux Way" of computing concepts.
Edit: fix my grammar a bit
Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year.
Have you ever noticed how in most orgs, every IT guy's first response to a weird-looking Windows problem is to suggest a reinstall? And that's not even irrational. Troubleshooting Windows takes too long to be worthwhile, because there are too many places to look for where things might be going wrong. Its complexity has become unfathomable to mere mortals, and it shows in maintaining the OS.
If you're interested in avoiding that, try a rolling-release distro (updating frequently) with good documentation and a sane low-level setup.
I've heard good things about OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have never tried it, so I can't vouch for it.
If you have the time and energy, I'd recommend you to look at a couple of distros yourself and see how much of the "dirty hands" part you can grasp yourself from the documentation. Can you fix GRUB or their equivalent yourself? Is there documentation on how to do things without a GUI? I'd say those are certainly a good sign.
As a bad example, I wasted a whole afternoon once trying to uninstall a botched Radeon driver in the TTY on Fedora (since it screwed up Xorg beyond repair). Their documentation was abysmal[1]. That's the stuff you want to avoid.
[1]: In fact, in the end, it turned out I had to set a magical environment variable that was never mentioned in the small paragraph there was in the docs. Oh, and of course, the driver was botched because of a system upgrade I couldn't revert.
Edit: OTOH, if you're more patient than me (and don't screw around with e.g. PPAs because you want a new-ish version of certain libraries), you might find using ZFS for your main drive to be a good idea. Make a snapshot, upgrade and if something breaks: revert and wait for a fix.
Edit2: Also, if you're going to try a rolling release: Don't wait too long for updates and find the news channel where breaking changes (and the necessary upgrade steps) are communicated. It's important to know about those, and it simultaneously helps you in guessing how often they're about to happen. Arch's feed is on their landing page, for example.
When I was first reading your comment I assumed it was experience in the distant past. The different experiences people have with the same software is incredible to me. I have owned four Windows computers, up to present day, and maintained those of family and some friends, and not once have I had to reinstall Windows since the days of Windows 2000, excepting harddrive failures. I always wonder what makes the difference.
But I guess if I knew, Microsoft would know (being staffed by people smarter and more informed than me), and hopefully fix whatever causes the problems necessitating reinstall.
It's like all the complaints about Firefox's memory usage - people have complained about it for years, it's clearly a real problem for some? many? users, but I have never seen it on any platform.
To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine.
Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more.
Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works.
This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.
https://imgur.com/a/u1h1a
But ... patching.
I had been dabbling with linux, so I switched to Ubuntu for a few years. But then Ubuntu also lost its mind, so I switched to Arch for a a year. I learned a lot during my time with Arch, but the most important lesson is "wow, a full blown OS, with an integrated DE, network management, and a dozen other systems does so much more for me than I ever knew."
Then I switched to OSX for a time. I suffered greatly. Folks think Apple's software quality issues are a recent thing, but they aren't. Apple has always been extremely bad at making reliable software. I wasn't doing anything fancy, but experience data loss issues due to file system errors, iTunes wiping out years of song metadata, and on and on. And OSX is incredibly slow - not because of the software, but because of the CPU, RAM, and heat limits imposed by apple form factors. Even now, my work laptop is a fancy MBP, and it is just dog slow when doing any kind of meaningful work. The only nice thing about OSX is being able to pull of a terminal with familiar tools.
I decided to try out windows 10 on my home desktop. I built this rig for much less than the cost of a mac, with all top-end parts. With 8 logical CPUs and 64gb RAM, it flies and I almost never experiences a slowdown of any kind. It doesn't matter how many dozens of browser tabs, terminals, or apps I have open. Running Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux is very pleasant and gives me access to proper command line tools. I haven't experienced the issues you mention (drivers all work like magic, haven't seen any ads, no tablet mode issues).
I have some issues with Windows still. They've really outdone themselves in making the system settings windows almost totally unusable and confusing. And I wish a bash shell was the default terminal, along with more pre-packaged open source tools. Probably the single worst part is Windows Update - it is a fucking abomination, impossible to predict (will restarting or shutting down actually cause a 20 minute update cycle?) and disrupting work at all the wrong times. And bitlocker's refusal to just encrypt a hard drive without a TPM module present is stupid, especially since it wont let me save the encryption key to dropbox (saving to the same drive being encrypted is not allowed).
But none of the downsides are deal breakers for me. My system is super stable, is always fast, and let's me get work done. I love it.
???
Do you have Pro or Home? The full Bitlocker in Pro does (or did) allow encryption without TPM. Both my desktop and old laptop did not have TPM and have Bitlocker enabled. It also let me back up the key to the local (Bitlocker encrypted) drive.
In fact, you have to go the extra mile to break stuff.
Previous leaks of Windows source have indicated Microsoft ends up putting in a lot of workarounds to give specific third party apps old functionality just because some app is popular and badly written and a fix for something else broke it.
If it didn’t poke you in the eye ten times a day it’d be perfect. However Microsoft have been chasing fad dragons for the last decade and only get 80% of the way through engineering efforts before direction changes. That last 20% is what makes people nod approvingly and smile and it’s called quality.
Hopefully this change will resolve that problem.
This is not huge praise for the Windows desktop but there really is a very good OS under all the crap that Microsoft seems to be piling on.
It almost feels like there are two groups running Windows development: One group that is cleaning up the file manager, the settings dialogs, adding the Linux subsystem, fixing the console, etc. And other group adding Candy Crush, Cortana, screwing up the start menu / search, Edge, etc. The look, feel, and usability of these things are so radically different it's hard to believe that same team is responsible for them all.
Whoever is working on the kernel, the driver subsystem, etc, and whoever is working on CLR stuff, can stay. Everyone else is fired.
There are so many things that would just need a better tool shipping with the OS to be fine, but are neglected (say: the event log (slow as hell and not nearly as comfortable as `less`. 'nuff said), the services dialog (still looks like in Win95, still can't auto-refresh, still has no useful search), notepad, PS ISE, the `scheduled tasks` dialog (still confusing as hell), even the effing task manager). Then there are tools MS actually owns (cf. Sysinternals) but refuses to distribute with Windows. And then, there are the new shiny things that get implemented to the point where they just barely work, and are never touched again (like the new terminal windows and workspaces in Win10).
I mean - especially the workspaces! Just give them to an intern and tell them to do the obvious improvements. They could be great, but they are still cumbersome.
Microsoft doesn't want to distribute more tools with Windows (like sysinternals) because they'll have ship them forever. They should, however, put them in the store.
It feels like a lot of the new features are half-baked. They have tried to go to a rapid release model which should mean continuous improvement but I don't think they're quite comfortable with that. It's like the worst of both worlds right now -- slow fixes but lots of churn.
Also, I too can see that there is work that has gone into the task manager. It's still nowhere near where it should be, though. Personally, I'd switch to ProcessExplorer on any machine in a heartbeat, exept that I can't, because it's not bundled, and some businesses are very paranoid on software that has to be installed additionally. Note: I'm not saying it should be the default, but it should be there.
If the thing that's holding such changes back is the release model, then perhaps this reorg might change some things? Though, I somehow doubt that was the issue here...
My home desktop is a Phenom II w/ just 4GB. It has had Vista, 7, 8/8.1 and now 10 on it. I think I did a clean sweep with 7, but I've gone through all the upgrades since then, and it's still running pretty well. (It won't cold boot, but that's a motherboard hardware problem!) It's approaching 10 years old at this point. Of course it has an SSD (actually 3...) or it would be pretty painful to use. But it isn't, and that's pretty impressive.
Yes, my Windows just works as well, but not without tweaks and regular maintenance.
Sadly, Microsoft has decided to follow this path lately too. It's truly terrible that this mentality has infected them because there doesn't currently exist a decent alternative. They'll just keep screwing things up just enough that other desktops are still screwed up worse.
Makes me want to give up computing and live in a cave.
While re-orgs are probably good for re-organizing the workforce around a set of goals but I think for lower level managers and individual contributors these are very distracting. Constant change in leadership affects employee morale.
This is huge. Few companies have reinvented themselves as many times as Microsoft has. From developer tools (BASIC) to Dos to Windows to Office and now to Cloud and Services.
Under Nadella, Microsoft has regained the agility for which it was famous for under Bill Gates.
Windows 10 - Nightmare
macOS - Slow & buggy.
Linux - No Apps & Games, Frequent changes in fancy GUIs
I think we've run out of options here. It's 2018 and we still don't have a solid Operating System. This is really sad.
I just hope fuchsia takes off really well.
Personal experience differ, but here's my story. When I joined MS 9 years ago it was in the midst of the big layoffs, and my recruiter reached out immediately after news broke and made sure that everything is still in place and I am still due to start in the summer after my graduation, and I've been happily working here since.
Good luck!
The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so.
Microsoft had to make a hard choice, and they made the hard choice. That hard choice is the reason 98% of wannacry infections were on windows 7 and barely 1% on windows 10.
If ubuntu somehow ends up replacing windows in hands of the general public, don't be surprised to see the same update system to appear in it.
If that happens, don't be surprised when a fork of Ubuntu comes out without the forced updates.
> The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so.
The choice doesn't have to be between 'update now' and 'update never'. There are more polite ways of pestering people into doing something good, than completely hijacking their system.
The choice doesn't have to be between 'security updates AND feature updates, together' or 'nothing at all'. The "feature" updates don't have to include ads and auto-reinstalled Candy Crush. The "security" updates don't have to auto-enable explicitly disabled telemetry settings of users.
All of the development machines in my office either auto-apply security updates or prominently nag us to manually apply updates that can/could not be automatically applied. None of them reboot in the middle of a development session. None of them auto-install feature updates or ads or sponsored apps. All of them run Kubuntu LTS.