I'm pretty sure Windows got their priorities straight: telemetry, advertisement are the priority and they're executing their strategy very well.
Your priority as a user are different, but, sorry to say, your voice doesn't count. The year-end revenue and KPI is what counts, because you and 99% of other companies will still be buying and using PCs with Windows preinstalled and paying Microsoft for licences. You say so yourself, you're disappointed with the direction Windows is taking, but you still use it [for very legitimate reasons].
Why should Microsoft sell Windows for $199, when they can earn $199 + $x/month/user from ads and create more value for its shareholders?
I would pay extra to buy a "Signature Edition" (kind of like they had with PCs) of Windows that has none of the ads and whatever other "value-add" pieces are integrated in it. One would say - I want LTSC accessible for customers like myself, without the kneecapped ability to run latest Windows software.
They make more off you if you have a regular licence and they can sell your data. You wanting to pay extra not to be spied upon is irrelevant, you have no choice in the matter.
Very simply, the money lost because some people have left Windows for greener pastures is being offset by the increased revenue.
There must be some amount of money that someone could pay to make it worth it to Microsoft to not show ads or sell data. The problem is, I doubt many people would actually pay that amount.
There was an interesting interview on the Windows Weekly podcast with Chris Capossela (CMO of consumer at Microsoft) a little ways back I believe where the hosts asked Chris why there is no ability to do just this - I believe the answer was that Microsoft views these features as valuable to the user, so why would they think that a user would want to turn them off?
I wonder, do marketing types actually believe that kind of nonsense? Could it actually be true for them, personally, that they feel they get some benefit from intrusive communication? That would be such a different experience of the world that it's difficult to wrap my head around.
And yet... I was once griping about one or another of the many tricky ways excessively-clever web designers abuse javascript to impose their concept of a "user experience" on me when I would deeply prefer they simply left well enough alone, and my listener replied - "but what if I want the experience they're offering"? - Well, that thought had never occurred to me.
.. because the minute your monopoly power crumbles, you will be met with resentment and abandonment, including by the "investors" who were with you minutes ago.. the ecosystem has dealt with hostile insider moves, high profile technology theft, and constant attack vectors already.. more in store here
Windows 11 is the first windows release I haven’t used. It’s also the first windows release I will never use going back to windows 3. I am completely done with it now. The last release which wasn’t a complete punch in the balls was nearly 20 years ago.
You've got to admire Microsoft's support of open source software. They're doing their best to push users to Linux! By making their UI as ugly and difficult to use as possible so that users don't feel too much of a bump in usability when they try Linux.
I'm sure MS can get the job done and kill off their OS with just a few more years of obnoxious bullshit forcefully shoved into their operating system!
It is awful, but so is office on windows. I get so many weird lockups, crashes, and file desynchronizations. Office is one of the worst pieces of software I have to run in windows.
This was years ago now, but I got thru college with a Macbook Air using the "Office Online" apps because the native apps were so unbelievably sluggish and resource hungry. Somehow the web apps were more performant.
I've had similar thoughts. If GUI programs running in WSL will look just like "regular" Windows apps (as MS said they intend to do) then Windows becomes a kind of front end to Linux. That would solve the "desktop" problems Linux has had.
But between the overwrought UI and the bugs MS never seems to fix, Windows is becoming a less and less attractive platform with each revision.
Agreed. Windows 11 and macOS 12 finally gave me the kick necessary to switch to Linux full-time (Lenovo Carbon X1).
macOS 12 cannot maintain a USB 2.0 connection. Not by dongle. Not by dock. Not by monitor. Not with 3rd party. Not with Apple-approved hardware. No way, no how. This is known, reported and totally Apple's fault (some of the earlier macOS 11 builds work fine). And this is the standard problem with Apple, "It just works--until it doesn't. If it doesn't, sucks to be you." I'm done with that.
Windows 10 was already bad enough with "Please, sir, can I have some compute?" with "I say thee NAY! I will now upgrade for the next 40 minutes. Hah!" Add in even more telemetry and inconsistency and I just gave up.
The whole point of Windows and macOS was to NOT have to dork with my OS and just get my work done. If I have to dork with my OS to make it not suck, I should be on Linux! At least then, when I figure out how to make my OS not suck, I'm helping instead of contributing to Microsoft or Apple profits.
So, yeah, I'll maintain a Windows desktop for the few times I need it (Fusion 360 and some videoconferencing stuff), but otherwise it's been Linux full-time for me. And Apple can just go pound sand.
My conclusion is that all mainstream operating systems are now iterative and constantly in a state of semi-breakage, just like all modern apps, in an attempt to be more "modern" and to cut down on costs. I'm especially disappointed in Microsoft for their obsessive data collection. I've never experienced the "good old days" Apple fans seem to be referring to, so I can't comment on macOS (other than that it's clearly not for me).
It's quite absurd, really, because while the Linux desktop environment is certainly good for novices and advanced Linux users, anyone that falls between those categories (and that's a lot of people!) will definitely struggle when they try to switch to Linux. You're either content with the default setup, or need to dive into the terminal at some point, and the fact commercial operating systems are making their UX worse than Linux would be impressive if it wasn't so disappointing.
For what it's worth, I've managed to get Fusion360 running on Manjaro with a script a friend linked me online. I can't remember where I got it from exactly, but it involved auto downloading a bunch of Wine requirements and then just running the setup.
If you're not interested in tweaking your system, feel free to skip over the rest of the comment. If you're willing to give it a go, I've got some experience with Windows stuff on Linux that you may be interested in.
I barely use Fusion360, but the few times I used it, it worked pretty well in Wine. Even had decent 3D acceleration, though you can probably get a lot better performance with more trickery (DXVK etc. to enhance the 3D acceleration for example). Lutris (https://lutris.net/) has an install script (https://lutris.net/games/autodesk-fusion-360/), I recommend you give it a try. Lutris can help enable performance tuning tricks for productivity software quite easily, even if it's originally developed for playing video games. Might work for you, or it might not; if it does, it might just cut down on more unnecessary reboots. If it doesn't, you'll at most lose the time it takes to download the installer and remove the failed installation.
As for the video conferencing, you might be interested in Cassowary (https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary), a tool to run Windows executables in a Windows VM through RDP, with suspend/resume of the VM on demand to cut down on resources used when you're not using Windows. It requires a bit of setup, but the guide is quite comprehensive in my opinion. You can forward your webcam to the Windows VM through USB forwarding to get it to work with video, and modern RDP should just be an RDP stream so there shouldn't be too much quality loss. Even if the Cassowary setup doesn't work, you can probably use the VM anyway.
This post resonates with me a lot, as I share many of the same complaints. The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hope get ironed out over time), but the level of ads creeping ever higher is alarming. The “accidental” inclusion of an ad in Windows Explorer this week may have tipped their hand - if that’s the direction they are going, I’m moving off the platform entirely.
> The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hop get ironed out over time)
I wouldn't get my hopes up. Microsoft seems to be introducing new UI frameworks -- each with their own slightly different appearance -- at an ever-increasing rate. If current trends continue, by 2030 there will be more Windows UI frameworks than developers using them. :)
It's complicated, but the short answer is that the Windows team messed up and there isn't really a good new native UI framework to migrate Regedit to.
UWP was burdened with sandboxing+packaging requirements that made it very difficult to use, even for first-party software. They eventually figured that out and have made some attempts to lift UI stuff out of UWP (XAML Islands and WinUI 3), but they're both train wrecks (and not staffed with nearly enough people to put up a fight against Chromium).
One hopes it never will, because everything post-Win32 seems to be much worse. UWP (what is used for the new Control Panel/"Settings") is particularly frustrating.
...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it, when it's already started saying things like this a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198
The apps are slow. They are optimized for non-technical people using touch screens (though I haven’t tested that). And the rewrites suck because one needs to learn a new UI, and you would still need to find the old UI for a lot of purposes.
> ...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it
From what I understand, the thinking is something like:
- There currently aren't any great alternatives for an attractive, touch-friendly, modern-looking UI framework. UWP applications generally feel pretty good to use despite UWP's problems.
- MS already has to support UWP apps forever (once something ships with Windows it's immortal), so they might as well take advantage of that support guarantee.
The Windows team is currently investing heavily in Chromium/Edge/WebView2, but it's still fairly early days. I'd bet good money that within the next 5 years, web UI in some form will fully replace UWP for new first-party development.
Should it be? I imagine the number of people who use Regedit is less than one per cent, and those people really don’t care what it looks like? (yes, RegEdit is a terrible UX but for me familiarity makes me less likely to make mistakes in a tool you really don’t want to make mistakes in!)
If they shipped a version of Windows sporting the Windows-11 kernel, so running all the recent software, but with Windows 2000 UI for a thousand dollars I would buy it immediately.
That's true, but then you start running into weird compatibility issues, where a specific game won't work because an Xbox Live component is not installed or DirectX SDK is not at the right version (and you can't install the right version because it only works on the consumer OS).
Server 2012 (or was it 2008?) was absolutely terrible in that was absolutely Windows 8-ified with a forced full-screen metro start menu "experience," but that was fortunately rectified in the next release (Server 2016, I'm pretty sure).
It’s not quite Windows 2000, but the LTSC edition has much of the bullshit stripped out. It does not support the store therefore Candy Crush is not installed by default. And I don’t think it’s quite $1000, if you can figure out how to buy it.
Basically they give you every version of Windows so you can test your code. So 10 LTSC is in there. I run it in my VMs because it uses so little memory and CPU compared to the regular one.
I don't know which flavor of subscription you need to get it. I got my sub free as an MVP.
Snooped around and looks like the only option is to purchase VS Enterprise + Github Enterprise (professional versions don't work). This is definitely going to be pricy. I guess if my company has enterprise license I might be able to take advantage of that...
Been running Windows Server as my desktop dev environment since NT4. Back then it was so the dev environment was the same as the server environment, that’s pretty much fixed now so it’s just to avoid all this horrible store nonsense. Can’t upgrade from 2019 as I don’t have a TPM so no WSL2 or new terminal but happy to accept that trade off. And shout out to win2k server which was awesome!
A product costing more than $200 and not available in the consumer market without some hoops to jump? Of course someone would resell it for $20 (including their profit) totally legally.
The latest LTSC actually doesn't have as much stripped out anymore. Telemetry choices are the same now and also MS accounts are there. I was really disappointed when I tried it.
No it doesn't force you, just like regular Win 10 Pro. But it does have the option and also the telemetry choice is now 'basic' or 'everything'.
LTSC is often hailed as the solution for privacy but when I last tried it it was just regular Win10 with a bit less bloatware (and the long term support of course). Didn't seem very different from Win10 on the privacy side at all.
One thing I forgot to check is if you can choose to delay updates to whenever you want. Obviously this is a big miss in Win10 and as LTSC is meant for mission critical systems I assume this is possible.
I don't recall which version it was exactly, but it was the latest I could get about a year ago when I tried. One of our colleagues in industrial automation got me a VM in their lab to try it out.
I haven't looked at the scene recently but in the past I've seen various projects on somewhat-underground (and often non-English) forums where they try to do similar things, mixing different versions of kernel and userland.
It would take probably another $100M in engineering pay to do this, so unless there are 100k other people willing to pay $1,000 for this, you're short on how much you need to pay to actually get this done.
The operating system would look consistent, but we would still have to deal with all the applications that decided they need to draw their own UI, including everything from Microsoft Office to all the web browsers to all the electrons apps.
Windows at this point is a ball and chain around even Microsoft's leg. They pivoted to a "cloud and services" company under Nadella because they can't make money off Windows anymore -- except by strip-mining its reputation and ubiquity by turning it into adware/spyware. Truly we live in the worst timeline.
Agree. Wine, Proton and associated libraries are allowing Windows to slowly go the way of the dinosaur. If those projects keep delivering I genuinely believe the year of the Linux desktop will slowly approach.
ReFS has the stink of death all over it. It's been the "next generation" filesystem for Windows since 2012, with no signs of ever graduating to being the current filesystem -- in fact, a 2017 update to Windows 10 removed the ability for most desktop systems to create ReFS volumes.
The problem with this is fragmentation, if I understand you correctly.
It's one of the two reasons why Linux isn't ubiquitous on the desktop. (The other being open source doesn't provide enough incentive to do the boring unsexy work)
Fragmentation kills support. Imagine non technical users searching for help on an issue. First finding articles on Windows, then version X, then getting 'only applies with piece X, Y, Z installed'. That's already a problem and the suggestion of making Windows less 'batteries included' would make it harder for the mainstream users, who are the bulk of users.
Fragmentation also kills products, it increases development costs, reduces velocity etc.
Microsoft knew/knows how to make a better product, they just don't choose to because they evaluate they can make more money by screwing consumers over.
In my opinion we need regulation regarding anti-features. It's not perfect but it's the approach that is the answer in the non-digital world.
Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn't really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they're going to do this with Teams now.
For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.
It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.
It's such an interesting contrast, for both ends of Microsoft to have reversed so heavily. The core consumer product once fought for betterment and improvement. "Where do you want to go today" was the slogan, suggesting users the helm, piloting their Personal Computer wherever they may. Oh, and it was a complete vision, totalizing. Microsoft did not care at all about open source, webdev, Linux, or broader ecosystem outside their castle.
The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.
> But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing
Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.
I think there is a danger, but hubris has gotten them way up shits creek & their relevance was rapidly moving to 0. Desktop platform is dying, mobile barely matters and they have no presence there... Microsoft started playing with others because pretending they were the unilateral giant that could dictate terms to the world landed them on a small shrinking pathetic island. So help them gods if they try that shit again.
That said, I 100% absolutely endorse caution. The past couple years of behaviors are no indicator Microsoft will stay a societally-positive technological force. The corruption & darkness & manipulation could play back in at any moment. Already, Microsoft creating very special terms of service for things like VSCode Remote Development Plugin, having extremely fantastically proprietary implementations for the incredibly useful/popular/fantastic LiveShare are harbingers of the old ways, indicators that Microsoft just wants to force the door open, not really engage & participate.
For now though, I still overall think they are doing good work, pariticpating/not domineering (with some caveats). They learned very very very personally what happens when you violate the core rule of software, the most important maxim, not couched as such but absolutely of key vitality to computing: "Create more value than you capture." -Tim O'Reilly. Of course, all organizations forget the/their past. And I quake thinking of how many people pretend they are using/learning Linux while never seeing systemd, freedesktop, the greater Linux project: WSL is amazing but a dark & tragic small death for the real open source, & it's cheered on & fanboyed endlessly for enabling the blessed ignorant. You are right. Adopter beware.
Another thing that really bothers me about Microsoft is all the logging they do. They don't care about privacy at all.
They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder.
I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter.
They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.
Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them.
Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.
As a developer I want to implement everything possible on the web platform.
It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.
As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.
I agree with all of your points yet come to the opposite conclusion. Choosing the web means everything I make goes through Google’s hands in one way or another, which irks me. Plus it evolves so quickly that you can’t just make a good product and let it be.
Microsoft don't help themselves by making desktop app production very confusing. A huge range of possible GUI frameworks, every one looks like a trap/dead end like Silverlight.
Microsofts successful cross platform apps like VSCode and Teams ignore all of them so following suit seems pretty sensible to me.
Teams is only successful because it's free and integrates with the M365 ecosystem. All its competitors are so much better.
It wasn't actually so bad at the start, it was just a poor slack knock-off. (Poor because the visual density is much lower with these oversized chat bubbles)
But now they are spending all their dev time cramming so much stuff into it without considering performance that it's become tooslow and cluttered. Now it's a wiki, a file storage thing, a video chat app, an interface to Yammer, not to mention the tons of plugins. Cool idea to have one app that does everything but performance and usability have gone down the drain. It feels very beta to me.
Oh and the choices they make are so stupid sometimes. When I decline a meeting it still adds me to its associated chat and pings me for everything that's said in it. Constant distraction and no way to turn off this stupid default.
I would agree Teams itself is a mess. I was just pointing out that Microsoft have successful apps across 3 different operating systems, and neither of them use Microsoft GUI frameworks.
I don't see why I should use a Microsoft GUI any more either. Once you stop using their libraries, you no longer need their OS at all. Pretty strange behaviour from MS if you ask me, encouraging your users to get off their systems.
> It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.
Actually web is getting worse with anti-features and jank as well.
What is wrong with Linux nowadays? I've used it as my main driver for long enough that I can't see the big problems that are preventing everyone from switching. Like, it seems easier than even WSL to me. Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. If a person has good hardware compatibility, in the face of the bloated pushyess of Windows 11, why not use Linux? What am I missing?
There's a lot of software not on Linux or that doesn't run well on Linux.
People pick their OS based on what software they want to run, not the other way around. And they pick from what they can buy. Go into a BestBuy and you can choose between Windows machines, Apple machines, and a few Chromebooks.
If you did manage to buy a Linux machine somewhere, you are going to be disappointed when you go back into that BestBuy to get a printer or webcam or some other accessory and the box says "compatible with macOS and Windows".
But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers. If Brother feels that there are enough people running Linux and want to own a Brother printer, they will make the driver. Maybe that is the issue we need solve, or at least the part we need to be vocal about. If brother gets a significant number of emails asking for linux support, perhaps they will finally make linux a first class citizen?
I think it's interesting you chose Brother here, because Linux support is a first class citizen -- they not only offer CUPS drivers, they offer Deb and RPM packages that also set up dependencies.
I just picked the first vendor off the top of my head and Brother came to mind. Feel free to replace it with any other vendor/manufacturer. In no way is it meant to single out brother as being poor on Linux.
> But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers.
Users don't care. For them things either work or not. Users are not going to e-mail Brother or Nvidia or Microsoft to fix their issues with printers, video cards or Onedrive. How is that so hard to understand?
If the vendors got metrics that showed that desktop linux user share was enough and viable enough, they would. The issue is, Linux users are a small share of the desktop market. But, if that number grew, it changes. Hardware vendors would port their drivers over once the potential revenue of customers on a different platform outweighs the cost in doing so. Otherwise, I don't think Brother or Nvidia really give a damn if an end user is running Windows or Linux, they just care that enough of those user exists in their respective ecosystem to justify the engineering costs.
This is true, but still - people want to print documents. They don't want to run Linux (or Windows). If they can't print documents, that's a problem.
The solution was Google Cloud Print, IMO. That was a great idea. Who cares what you run, as long as it can connect to the internet you can print. I don't know how in-depth it got with the various crazy menu systems
That brings up an excellent point. Services like these start to eventually render driver support useless. I haven't heard of Google cloud print, but I just looked it up. Even though it looks to be EOLed, there are alternatives still going, just not from google. My HP printer has an app. I can push documents to the app that goes up to HP then comes back down on to my printer, if I have my printer configured with that. I think my last printer, which was a bother had something similar where I could set it up on my home network in such a way that I can just email a document to a special bother email address which then prints it out on the brother printer.
Ironically, printers are now easier to get working on Linux than they are on Windows. The whole no-driver setup in the unix world murders the "must install this driver and possibly restart" shenanigans on Windows.
I was quite surprised when I switched my main dev machine to Linux and the printer not only appeared by itself, but worked out of the box.
Linux is great for doing things on your own. Where it fails is when you have to sync up with other people's proprietary norms.
For example, I'm a researcher who gets funding from the US government. I can do my day-to-day technical work in Linux. But I'm forced to still use Windows to present PowerPoint slides over Teams to my funding overlords, because that's what they use, and I have to conform to that. Linux ports/knock-offs of those products just don't interoperate with proprietary MS systems well enough for me to rely on them. Unless the US government (or at least the relevant parts I deal with) ditches Microsoft products, I have to keep a foot in MS-land to carry out the accountability parts of my job.
Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else.
But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at least 90% of the time doesn't cut it. Free instead of paying a few hundred bucks for the extra percentage points isn't even a question worth asking from a business perspective.
Linux has great software, sometimes the best available on any platform, in certain areas. Developer tools is an obvious one. Servers is another. Some of the multimedia stuff is good. The picture for running games is getting better all the time even if most of them are still ports of some kind rather than truly native applications.
But as much as I hate to say it, the reality is that in most areas that most users are going to care about the Linux ecosystem is still lacking in both quality and quantity. I'd bet on the evolution of web technology disrupting Windows long before the Linux desktop does. But that is hardly a solution to the phone-home and forced-update problems that a lot of us don't like about modern Windows.
> But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it.
However bad Linux is at package management, Windows is even worse. So I'm not sure how your argument convinces people that Windows package managers are superior?
Most business software can be installed by the network admins, software that can't doesn't matter for a lot of these companies and just won't be used. Even in my smaller but rapidly growing company they are doing more to restrict what software can be installed. Easy install of packages isn't what a large company wants
I didn't say anything about package managers. What counts is the software that is available. The best package manager in the world isn't worth anything if it doesn't have the packages that you need.
With Linux while sitting idle my laptop burns battery about twice as fast as it does on Windows while I go about my normal workflow. This is a laptop which is certified for both Fedora and Ubuntu.
I've been wondering about that as well, never found a comprehensive answer to why is the difference so stark. I'd be willing to use Linux on my laptop when the difference would be 10-12%, but as of now I just can't. I have laptop because I need to use it on the go and linux makes it harder for me.
I have tried tlp which includes cpu frequency scaling on numerous distributions over the last couple of years with little if any noticeable difference.
Installation is utterly broken and hopeless on Linux. Let's not pretend like it's in any way ready for the general consumer. Including Ubuntu, the "flagship" poster boy for widescale adoption of Linux.
We're more likely to see people going back to dumb-terminals with GUIs being streamed to their ChromeOS from a server running linux than we are to see people using Linux.
Application installation is broken. If software isn't hand-curated in the distro's repository and kept up to date by someone, then get ready to set up a dev environment and compile from source. Hopefully you will not break your entire system trying to cater to whims of whatever insane build environment it uses. This includes new versions that no one has got around to packaging yet.
AppImage and Flatpak are making inroads to eliminating this foolishness, but I still routinely run into software that isn't yet on board with that.
This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97. If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.
Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
> This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97
Sadly, while some parts of the Linux Desktop have come a long way since the 90s, many others have not.
> If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.
Presumably people use software to do something, and many times there simply isn't alternative software that does what you want to do and you're stuck with it even though it is toxic.
> Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.
This describes Windows as well though, just read all the complaints from the original article and thread. Sadly there is no decent OS any longer, they all had/have their flaws and now they are being dumbed down and control taken away.
>Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.
I am a long time windows user who recently switched to PopOS.I'll say its getting better. This was one thing I was worried about switch back to linux. After I got fed up with what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, I decided I had it and switched. So far it has not been as a pain in the ass as much as it used to be. There are a few things I still have to tweak to get my work flow back to the way it was on Windows.
This article has a laundry list of things that annoyed the heck out of me. So I decided to try and dual boot to Ubuntu on my Surface Pro 7.
This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:
- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.
- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.
- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.
- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?
- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.
- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.
- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).
- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.
- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.
I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.
Ubuntu Unity the desktop environment Ubuntu abandoned back in 18.04? On X11 with Gnome 3 with Ubuntu 20.04 it does actually support fractional scaling and if IIRC does it in a somewhat similar way to MacOS where it scales up the res*2 then downscales it. For whatever reason either GNOME didn't accept Ubuntu's changes or they didn't submit them upstream so it doesn't work in any other distro for GNOME 3. It actually works pretty well IME. It possible to mimic it with the right call to xrandr in other DEs.
I still run Unity on a bunch of machines here, but it's old now and starting to bitrot. I haven't even tried on the 1 or 2 boxes that have hi-DPI displays: it's not worth it.
On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.
Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:
• GNOME Shell. No thank you.
• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.
• Cinnamon.
I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.
So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.
Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.
> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.
> Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
There's the challenge.
Who cared about "hardware"? Jony Ive and Jobs perhaps?
Who cares about OS performance? Linus Torvalds. I'm sure there are MS insiders who we don't know.
Who cares about the desktop? .....
The funny thing is the desktop was a solved problem with the mother-of-all-demos, and everything else is sugar on top, and yet there has to be this continual awful rebranding. Ok we went from VGA, to HD, to 4k HDR, but the underlying design and UI doesn't have to change so poorly each time.
Even stuff like WSL is loosing it's shine now for me. I've personally hit a bug on multiple computers that I can reliably repo a blue screen if I attempt to update a specific package.
The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago.
Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.
AFAIK WSL 1 isn't actively being worked on anymore, now that there's WSL 2. As for your issue with WSL 2, it runs off hyper-v, so my guess is that there's something with your BIOS/UEFI/firmware settings that's breaking it (eg. secureboot/CSM, TPM, virtualization).
You might be right about WSL 1 being dead, which is just annoying since it's useful for me.
Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks.
Agreed. The concept of WSL1 was much more interesting. Interfacing with Windows through a Linux userland. Actually do stuff on the windows system with a familiar interface.
WSL2 is just Linux in a VM which has been around like forever.
By the way it also put my system in a boot loop (blue screen on boot). I tracked it down to a buggy Lenovo driver but when I removed that it crashed on something else and I got sick of it and gave up.
omg thank you for this. The amount of people trying to tell me WSL2 is groundbreaking - meanwhile I have been rocking Fedora in virtualbox for years.
WSL1 was really interesting, but ultimately Microsoft needed a flagship product to demonstrate the capabilities of Hyper-V and WSL was the perfect project.
To be clear, wsl 2 lets you interact with the Windows filesystem. I believe you can launch exes in wsl1, but not 2. However, I've never needed to do that. It's definitely not groundbreaking, but it is convenient.
Using it with the new terminal app is nice. It will load and unload the ram for the instance immediately whenever you pop open a linux shell. IMO opening and closing virtualbox/hyper-v takes longer and is clunkier. Overall it reduces friction.
It seems like 9p is the defacto standard for this. With all the network filesystems available, anyone know why that's the case? I personally don't have any experience with 9p.
It's not just running a vm on windows. The integration between the two makes it a lot more streamlined than just running something on virtual box. You can do stuff like browse the windows file system from Linux easily and vice versa. You can also run windows executables from inside Linux to do things like write stdout to your windows clipboard by piping it to powershell.
"Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks."
In 2028, we'll be reading news articles about how the Year of Linux on the Desktop never really came, but the Year of Anything But Monetized Microsoft Windows sure did.
If I were making a list of companies and software packages that should be focusing on long term value rather than trading short term value for everyone hating your product, Windows would be a strong contender for top of the list. Microsoft may not want to depend on Windows, but throwing away so much user value for so little money is a stupid decision.
I just can't hammer on this point enough. There isn't that much money in advertising. The best advertisers in the world are looking at ~$10-20 per user per year at scale [1]. Advertising makes a lot of money because there's a lot of those users, not because they make that much per user. (That's why all the plans to "share the revenue" with the ad consumer are just hopeless. The money can't support it.) Windows ads can not necessarily jump to that level of performance right away, either. I really don't see how they could possibly be making enough money in their OS ads to make up for the goodwill they're pissing away. They're trading a money stream that still has at least a good decade in it, quite possibly more, for short term gain that isn't even all that impressive. Who is pressing for all these ads? What kind of analysis is being done internally that shows this is worth it? I find it hard to believe. Even a Windows in decline picking up licensing fees on new computer sales should be bringing in vastly more revenue than advertising possibly could. Ruining your 2025 sales for not really all that much money right now seems a very bad decision for a product coming up on 30 years old and still making lots of money.
[1]: You can do better for very targeted things like mesothelioma ads, but at scale, that's what Facebook is looking at.
Every time Microsoft does something that a couple of people aren't happy with the trumphets of "now is the year of Linux" sound everywhere, in the end the large majority of consumers and the developers that care to get money from those consumers, keep using Windows.
When XP came to be, when Vista was released and DX 10 was vista only, when Windows 8 arrived, when all the talk about WinRT started, .... now Windows 11 with these issues.
My system bluescreens when I so much as install WSL2 on my second work laptop with Windows 11. Tried to track it down and it seems to be some stupid Lenovo driver but it's almost impossible to fix :(
Yeah I’ve never had issues. I’ve used Linux as a daily driver since Vista came out so wsl has been nice for me. I can finally have a gaming PC that can also serve as a docker server and just generally test my backend on. With that said my two coworkers, who are very much Windows daily driver users, have had nothing but issues. Some times I think my Linux knowledge is what’s helped me here, ironically.
Try doing anything I/O intensive in WSL and it all falls apart. I have a 32 core machine with 128GB using nvme disks and it's getting murdered performance wise by an 8 core AWS instance with 16GB of ram on gp2 disks.
Yes, the UIs Apple make are no longer anywhere near as intuitive as they were in Steve Jobs’ days, but Apple definitely still have their soul. You don’t even have to look further than the latest iMacs.
Really? It's all so painful sterile. Even their attempts at deviating from that coldness feel like someone with a spreadsheet calculated they should increase the brand-safe fun quotient in sector 7G by 4%.
Windows Ink? Do you mean Windows Ink Workspace or Windows Sketchpad?
It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble.
Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.
To be fair, that legacy control panel doesn't list any apps that use the AppX/MSIX packaging model introduced with Windows 8. I'm still not on Windows 11, so I don't know if Teams is listed in the newer list of apps available in modern Settings, but it's worth looking there.
"Microsoft Teams" is present for in Settings -> Apps -> Apps & Features on Win11 for me. But given how they're integrating Teams into the OS, I wouldn't be surprised if I lose the ability to uninstall it soon.
The fact that they are making that huge hunk of trash a core part of Windows tells me everything I need to know about the direction they are headed into. How does anybody put up with Windows in 2022?
since the announcement that windows 11 will require a microsoft account to install, I've decided that windows 10 is the last version of windows I will use for my personal computers. Your description of microsoft's opinion of their customers ('nobody at microsoft...actually cares') is apt.
There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone.
Some random examples:
Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure.
Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox.
Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR.
Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows.
To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ.
There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.
Bingo. All these posts that say "oh just use Linux, it's compatible!" must be from naive junior devs who never have had to to deal with external organizations (especially governments) that require you to use their Word templates and share PowerPoint slides on their Teams calls.
It "works," but not well enough for my purposes. I need to be able to share PowerPoint on Teams with my full slides visible to participants, and speaker notes visible only to me. There's no native PowerPoint for Linux, so that's a no-go.
PDFs? Unless participants need to edit the actual slides themselves what's wrong with PDFs? Most half decent PDF readers these days have a presentation mode where it goes full screen and arrow keys page through. Yes, you lose swoopy animations, sound effects and video but that's arguably a plus. And participants can read the slides on a wider range of devices with little hassle. Your speaker notes can stay with whatever slide program was used to make them.
My government funding overlords require me to send them PPTXs and DOCXs. And MS Teams on Linux only supports full-screen sharing, not window-specific sharing, so I can't do presenter view on my screen and slides-only on the call.
I feel a lot of responses here are missing the point. Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to. Linux is a bad tool for my required workflow (a workflow that isn't all that uncommon), so I keep Windows around because it's a more suitable tool for that.
I'll repeat what I said: Linux is a great tool when you're a junior individual contributor, but it sucks when you're responsible for external communications with MS Office organizations.
While I'm sympathetic to this because it's, well, simply true for many people, I think it's always important to bear in mind that
> Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to.
Is an entirely deliberate outcome that Microsoft has pushed hard for over decades (as you'd expect, since losing that monopoly is an existential threat to them).
I have no idea why the Linux Teams application is so limited. Instead on Linux to get the missing features you can run browser based teams in Chrome or Edge. It supports window specific sharing. Can also do blurred and virtual webcam backgrounds (but does not support custom virtual background).
It kind of works on Linux now. The only way I was able to join a call as a guest (not to my tenant!) was to launch it in Edge -- the native client crashed on launch if invoked to join an external meeting.
That is why I think Microsoft should someday consider Open Source Windows, or at least the kernel. Leave the UI and Library on top closed source as a moat on user for compatibility.
It is popular because it filled a niche where next to nothing existed, so for people in those fields anything is a step up.
For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.
For example, instead of making improvements to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), Microsoft marked it as deprecated and "forced" everyone over to Visual Studio Code, whether they like it or not. E.g.: it's the only Microsoft IDE with PowerShell Core (pwsh) support.
Despite being the only supported Microsoft PowerShell IDE, VS Code does not play nice with PowerShell. For example, if I open Code, it opens three(3!) PowerShell terminals for unfathomable reasons. One of those starts with errors, the other works, but the third one is the default and crashes if you look at it sideways. Tab-complete just... stops. Even when tab-complete "works", it'll often start mid way through the list, hiding all of the relevant items and showing your random garbage like "quick start snippets" that make zero sense in the given tab-complete context.
I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Then there's always the smart-ass that explains patiently that this is all my fault for not "customising" my VS Code experience with JSON configuration settings that are seven levels deep and documented only in some blog article from three years ago. Meanwhile, I've never had to customise anything in Visual Studio. It "just works" the way you'd expect a Windows application to work. Not some Linux-Windows hybrid intended to be the "embrace" part of the unholy "embrace-extend-extinguish" trio.
I don't think the (not very good) PowerShell extension is a great basis for judging VS Code as a whole.
I've spent most of my career in Visual Studio, I have a great deal of respect for how it just works, nobody's forcing me to leave it and yet... I'm mostly done with it. I'd rather use VS Code for C# development these days; it nails a lot of speed+UX things that Visual Studio doesn't.
There are a ton of editors both free and paid for that niche you mentioned. Visual Studio code wasn't even the first one made with Electron, there was one called Atom before it. I have used and continue to use Sublime Text, and at work they install Notepad++ on all computers by default.
I guess though if you're coming from raw notepad then that is a step up.
And with anything "browser based" like VS Code you're going to always spawn a ton of processes to do even the simplest things.
> For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.
Sure, if your entire usage is the stuff that VS does well (which is a very narrow range compared to Code), and you are used to VS, it's probably an annoyance.
> I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Almost none of the things I do with Code I would have done with Notepad before. There are lots of non-IDE programmers editors that existed before Code. It may not be as good as VS or some IntelliJ variants for the use cases those IDEs are best for, but it's better for almost everything else than almost anything, and even for the things those major commercial IDEs specialize in, it's good enough for lots of specific use cases that when you need to do that plus other things, the context switch of using the commercial IDE for some tasks isn't worth it.
Popular is not the same as quality. That's something that MS seem genuinely unable to understand - examples of a better product are countered with "our product is X times bigger, it is better". Well, no - X times bigger is probably momentum, or network effect, or sneaky placement/contracts - it has nothing to so with the quality of the product.
Similar "well liked" very often really means "the only product I've used" or "the only product I know well" :(
I got the impression that Windows used to make APIs so that others could use the same UI elements as the OS in their programs. Have they stopped doing that?
Win32 was the one and only GUI framework. If you wrote your app for Windows, it would look like Windows. This was true for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and XP.
Then Office got the Ribbon UI but they decided not to let anyone else use it. Then Vista got the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was a lot like HTML, but used XML and had a more powerful styling+templating system. At one point they even tried to make JavaScript Windows applications a thing over a decade before it unfortunately did become a thing (Electron).
The problem is that WPF, like HTML, allowed nearly "anything". You could style any control any way that you wanted. So WPF apps looked somewhat... random.
Worse, it turned out that WPF was just too slow for applications, to the point that Microsoft themselves almost never used it. Instead, they used incompatible bits and pieces of it with C++ so that they could have something reasonably fast. But this wasn't WPF, and didn't look the same as user apps, and wasn't even internally consistent!
Now there are something like 10+ UI frameworks from Microsoft alone, not including third-party ones that can run on Windows.
This is why the Windows 11 interface is such a mess.
It is, as is the embedding of Edge as a default browser. The attitude seems to be that it doesn't matter anymore or that it's worth doing even if they do get in trouble.
They're all paid up on their bribes now so they aren't worried. What's a bit of monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior when you've got a few Senators and other Bedfellows in your pockets?
Would be interestng to know how many non-enterprise Windows users have ever made a direct payment to Microsoft. For that segment, the company suffers from the same problem as "tech" companies. The non-enterprise Windows user is not the customer.
Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.
Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced.
I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things).
Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.
I've seen so many people say things like: "Windows is fine, all you have to do is [gigantic list of obscure settings changes, registry edits, external freeware programs] to turn off the telemetry!"
It will eventually get to the point where it will take more settings-twiddling to make Windows do what you actually want than Linux does.
I used an Ubuntu 21.10 installer recently, it was completely uneventful to set up with the default side-by-side configuration and actually easier than the Windows one (which must create a Windows account, you can then disconnect this from your local account later with a magic settings dance).
While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions.
Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use, where you get your choice between "up to date but frequently broken" rolling-release[0] or "several years out of date but probably stable". To me, the idea it is considered reasonable to expect a user to set up a dev environment and compile software from source is ludicrous, but until relatively recently that's been the norm[1]. Thankfully, AppImage and Flatpak have been gaining popularity and making that much less of a problem.
Now the two biggest things keeping me from switching immediately are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane[2], and my Oculus isn't supported at all[3]. Still, I'll go to Linux before I go to Win 11.
[0] which still often has out of date and missing packages
[1] for anything not packaged by the distro or if you need a newer version
[2] thanks Bitcoin Idiots, LLC
[3] and from everything I gather no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
Fwiw, I used Linux with an 1080 Ti for years; it was the first card I tried Linux on. The only hitch is having to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Distros with GUI tools for drivers (e.g., Manjaro) make this easy.
The only problem was actually my G-SYNC monitor. It was one of those super expensive ones with G-SYNC hardware in it. It turns out those just go black if you're not using an Nvidia card && aren't running proprietary drivers.
At some point, I gave it and my 1080 Ti away and got an AMD card with FreeSync monitors. Funnily, the FreeSync doesn't actually work. (Luckily, I don't care that much about tearing, and it's less noticeable at >=144 Hz.) AND, with AMD, you don't have a nice GPU settings panel like Nvidia provides (as basic as it is compared to its Windows equivalent). I've noticed no other differences. Nevertheless, having the open source driver in-kernel and not worrying about installing it out of band is nice.
>no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
Yep, probably; tech is too new. I don't even try stuff like that until it's 30 years old and mainlined. ;D
>GNOME
Yeah, I don't know how anyone sane likes GNOME, and it's insane to me that KDE isn't the default DE instead. I reckon it's a combo of inertia, the fact that the GNOME faction were the GPL purists compared to TrollTech back in the day, and (enduring?) convergence/low-tech user adoption hopes.
> Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use
I have the opposite feeling: installation by search engine and speculative .exe downloads feels so dirty. There's the Windows store but it doesn't seem to actually work very often.
Then again, following StackExchange or blog posts to add keys and deb repos for Ubuntu is no better. The AUR is also similar, but I trust that a bit more than a random blog post since at least there's a flagging mechanism.
FWIW, I rarely have issues with rolling releases on Arch, certainly fewer issues than I have with Ubuntu repo package versions.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community.
As mentioned, I've been using Linux for ten years as my only system and I installed at time over the twenty years before that. At worst, twenty years ago, I would contact people and got "I ignore your bug 'cause you don't have the very latest thing everywhere". In my current experience, I've never had to "talk" to anyone. It's not without hiccups but it's not "abusive" in the sense of Windows 'cause no one is fixing one thing to break another or gaslighting you about bugs.
> are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane
If you're worried about support for the Nvidia 1080ti, I've found no problems with the Nvidia drivers for a 1050, a 1060, and the 1650 I'm currently using now. If you're just wishing to upgrade and would rather go the AMD route because of binary drivers, I get it. If you're worried about bad Nvidia drivers in linux, I've found them to be very good lately as long as you keep them updated.
WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.
I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor?
https://github.com/google/gvisor
> I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
I think any developer that could long moved from their ecosystems by now. You can see that if you try to get technical knowledge.
I can imagine that there are many departments that have to continually justify their existence and management tries to find the one-hit wonder that gets users engaged. All these departments try to have their dejure product integrated into Windows to have a chance to pump up their KPI.
You should be able to tell an operating system that it is not allowed to phone home. That is not possible in Windows, on the contrary, they have increased their spying dramatically. It has been a adversarial relationship for a long time by now and I don't see any attempts to change course or anyone that really cares for the platform. Their corporate integration and PC gaming keeps Windows relevant for now, but people will look elsewhere.
You are not the target audience for Microsoft, the corporation is. Who uses a home computer anymore? (it's all smart phones now) You start work, you get a pre-installed Windows laptop to use by the corporate IT department, configured to be used as they see fit. You no longer own a computer. Nobody is expected to, these days.
Me (but not Windows), my three grown children, my sister, at least one brother in law. At least half of the people I know personally. Half of them using laptops, the rest desktop machines. All of them have smartphones, and sometimes tablets, as well.
I think combining Macbooks and gaming PCs then home computers are being used more than ever, but I'm not sure, it's true that you don't need one to browse facebook anymore. But at the same time I don't know anyone without a laptop.
They are doing this with Teams and it gets better, it’s a different Teams than normal that looks the same but only accepts personal MS accounts not business / 365 ones. WTF?
> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.
I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either.
It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads?
I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need.
And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".
Making money and caring about users are related, but there's definitely a difference between making a good product that people would like to use, and trying to make money. The latter may well make you rich, but it may make your product much worse, which you shore up with lots of salespeople and complex pricing schemes and dealmaking to keep people locked in.
Or they do have an idea what the users want, but it is still bad... at my job, the non-technical managers bought the SAP marketing koolaid, promised our internal users the cool new stuff they were going to get with the new software, and we in the IT just want to scream and say, no, you can't get that, that's not supported, or will take a year to build because we would have to revamp almost everything ourselves... and, yes, all because at SAP no one knows what users need. We have had several rounds with SAP PMs already were they basically said "huh, that's interesting, that's how you work with the software? We need to discuss this internally." Well... good thing you didn't ask before launching the new version then.
Hah, you cannot adopt SAP to your needs, it's the other way around, you have to adopt to them. If that matches your use case, allright, but otherwise forget about it.
I don't even know what is my microsoft account anymore. I have created so many for so many services and devices over the years that I don't have a "main" one anymore.
So every new install is a crapshot, I try to go local account only, but something gets in the way and I end up creating yet another one for that specific device.
From my POV it has come to a time where the tradeoffs you make switching to Linux (xubuntu in my case) are worth it.
A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery/safe mode and take a look.
But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn't work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it.
I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse.
If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?
"If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?"
Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need.
(except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)
Are you complaining about missing drivers in Linux? For the life of me, I never had to install any particular driver since like 2010 on both laptops and workstations. Not even for printers.
Specialized audio/video equipment? Probably, and of course the vendor will only provide them for Windows.
"Are you complaining about missing drivers in Linux? For the life of me, I never had to install any particular driver since like 2010 on both laptops and workstations. Not even for printers."
Yeah well, then you are among the lucky few, or you are not aware of the difference a good driver makes.
Right now I cannot get my linux workstation to do screencasting with hardware encoding(with OBS). On windows no problem.
And the laptops. On ALL my laptops I owned (6+) I tried linux, but experience was always worse, or even impossible. That includes tweaking, messing with grub, tlp and and in one instance even compiling the kernel.
Still way worse battery life, performance, standby resume issues, freezes and dont get me started about touchscreen. I hate windows. But I have work to do.
I've had light issues on every new PC I've had in the past 5 years. Be it the sound card, or the WiFi, or the NIC, or suspend / sleep. I will state all the issues were usually fixed in 6 months to a year as new kernels with improved drivers were released. So Linux on bleeding edge hardware is usually so so. (My TR workstation wouldn't even boot Linux without a specially compiled kernel and some boot parameters when it came out).
But if your hardware is over a year old, the Linux experience tends to be rock solid.
I dont think it is contempt for the users, It is more that consumers (i.e non-enterprise editions of windows) is the Beta Test group for windows
Microsoft has always been, and will always be an enterprise company, they do not care about Consumers, and they do not care about SMB business. they care about Large Enterprise.
I have seen it countless times in my career, SMB space and can be complaining up a storm about a problem for years but until some 20,000+ employee CTO has the problem MS will not give it the time of day.
It is all numbers, and if you are not a government or Large corporation Microsoft does not give you the time of day
Windows and macOS users have different expectations. On a Mac, I expect my login account to also know my Apple ID and connect seamlessly with my iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, Messages, and all other Apple cloud services. I like being able to answer phone calls on the computer when the phone is nearby. When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like, it faces a couple problems - not everyone wants to be on Skype or Teams - some people use Zoom or Slack. To make things worse, even Microsoft products are not well integrated into the platform. Depending on how I open a SharePoint document, I can either have another Edge window, with an online version of an Office app or the standalone app opening (with different UI conventions on how shared edits work).
The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed.
And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.
> When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like
Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?
> Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem?
Not sure. Macs are not that available and, in some places, are prohibitively expensive. Others would love the everything-integrated experience while using software that runs only on Windows.
I'm not sure Microsoft even has that "core customer" as neatly defined as Apple (or Linux). Getting a Mac or a Linux box is a deliberate action, whilst, for the end user, getting a Windows box is the default when you get a "generic" computer.
One group I can think of is the corporate administrators, who want to deliver a locked down set of functions to corporate workstations - VPN settings, firewalls, blocked websites, custom update schedules, and so on. That same crowd also orders Macs and Chromebooks with the same goals.
What Microsoft can do is to offer tailored experiences for specific groups - people who want everything to just work (who'll be happy with Skype logging them on on boot, with OneDrive backing stuff up...), gamers who'll definitely not want Skype to interrupt them and who have nothing to back up to OneDrive, but, sometimes, want to record and stream their games, Windows developers who'll spend most of their time within Visual Studio and the MSDN KB (am I dating myself here?), and so on. I'm very sure they have a list of personas already built for that.
It depends on the direction Windows itself wants to go in really. This isn’t the early 2000s where Windows was the used OS everywhere and was some hyperpower among software. Most apps are cross platform and there is a healthy ecosystem of OSs. Microsoft can let itself be the gaming and office PC, it can attempt to remain being the jack of all trades and master of none, or it could plot its own new course. I think either way they’ll have plenty of costumers.
Yeah I expect that my MacBook, Mac Mini, IPad and IPhone are all connected. I can open up browser tabs from one device to the other, take phone calls or send texts, not have to worry about sharing passwords etc.
I expect, want in fact, none of these things on my Windows PC. I do not trust Microsoft with my data, and this was before the last year of them being owned. It may not be right or even logical, but I imagine a ton of other users fit this same archetype. To me windows is the spyware ridden OS I use to pay a handful of games, and it basically always will be.
The one thing I find the most terrible is the "10 different UI conventions" thing. Dig enough and I bet you'll find a control panel or some other thing the has Windows NT 3.1 look and feel.
It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.
Disappointingly this wasn't in the ARM version (the access driver). Just SQL Server.
Wonder if it can be found anywhere else. I did try the old progman.exe (via x86 compatability), and while it worked, it uses the modern API for the file dialog.
As the techie helping my folks with their Windows issue, it was far easier and better for my mental health to spend my own money buying everyone chromebooks and ipads.
Is it nobody cares or they care about different things? If you want to be cynical, they care about making money. But could it also be that they're more focused on the general population (who don't care as much about this stuff)?
It's hard to tell for me to be honest, but are we (e.g. HN crowd) just a minority of power users that are in our own echo chamber complaining and making us happy doesn't really move the needle for MSFT?
This article nails a lot of the issues with Windows 11.
I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards.
- Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click.
- I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical.
- All apps are not readily accessible from the start menu; I have to click another button to get to them.
- I have a 2-in-1 laptop, and turning it into tablet mode is wonky.
- I can't choose to not have grouped buttons on the taskbar.
- The context menus UX is horrible. Some context menu items are now two clicks away instead of one. Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding?
- The stacked notifications is confusing, and always shows the calendar when I open the notifications panel.
- Lots of crap pushed on me, like chat (aka Teams), widgets (which require a Microsoft account), 3rd party apps that look like they're installed but actually get downloaded/installed on first use.
I was able to fix a lot of those issues with ExplorerPatcher [0]. However, one day after a Windows update, Explorer didn't start at all after login (black screen, I thought Windows was hosed). This has since been fixed. But I decided enough is enough, and finally "upgraded" back to Windows 10.
The only good thing about Windows 11 is wslg, which provides out of the box support for Linux GUI apps (not available on Windows 10). But I can get the same result with an X server and some work.
When I first heard about this, everything that's ever bothered me about the Windows 8-10-11 evolution makes so much more sense. They're turning it into MacOS.
The Macification of Windows has been in progress for years -- and it makes no sense! When Microsoft designed the UI for Windows 95 they did extensive user studies and everything from how the start menu worked and the task bar was carefully figured out.
They've spend the last few decades undoing all that work piece by piece until nobody actually knows how to use it anymore.
Windows 95 is under-appreciated in the GUI histories I feel - it had many things that became 'standard' pretty much immediately afterwards (I even have a shortcut to Applications in my Dock which mimics a Start Menu).
But it's hard for a company to justify "paying to leave shit alone" so even if a maximum was reached, it will recede.
The difference is that Mac OS actually looks somewhat consistent and has kept much of its familiar paradigms (Spotlight, System Preferences, the menubar, context menus...) the same over the past decade. Microsoft seems to have lifted the aesthetics of Mac OS without any of the UX.
OS X has been great for the past decade. I won't say the same for MacBooks, where there have been some pretty horrible decisions (butterfly keyboard, touch bar), but OS X has kept humming along, very usable, very productive. A few issues with Spotlight and some easily removed nags to use crap like iCloud is the worst I can say.
They also spent years telling people how the butterfly keyboard were amazing, despite the feedback they got. It came off like they ignored their customers and said "we know what's best." You can do that in development, but once your customers actually get their hands on the product, it's time to listen to them.
Last year I went through every version of macOS from 10.1 to the current release and used each for a couple of weeks. The thing that surprised me the most is just how consistent the user interface has been. Anybody familiar with 10.1 would have no problem using Monterey.
And more importantly, when Apple changes some design guidelines, provided you’re using the Cocoa API (which you likely are, if you’re developing for macOS natively), your application will look consistent with the rest of the OS.
Yes, Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatability, so you might have to update your application so that it runs on the latest macOS version, but there’s no way around it.
You either have a gazillion competing frontend APIs to maintain compatability with shit that was written for Windows 3.1, or you don’t care about any of that and end up with almost entirely consistent visual styles across the entire OS.
Sadly we've lost that, as more and more apps everywhere are now developed in Electron or other "cross OS" systems. Even Java apps would try a bit harder to match the OS than these "let's create a new UI paradigm for everything" apps that won't even let you open a second window.
This is the most embarrassing thing I've ever read. That thread goes on to extoll the virtues of dogfooding, and its absolutely true.
I personally believe the reason that chrome/edge/firefox and apps in general have become so resource hungry is because all the devs have been given beefy machines to allow them to compile on-device and this has lead to the devs basically ignoring the app's resource budget. The ultimate "it works on my machine" shrug. imo windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram, let them optimize their code for that experience.
> windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram
And slow HDDs. The gains of going from an HDD to an SSD have been squandered. The time it takes my computer to boot to a usable desktop feels the same as the bad old days with spinning HDDs.
I remember when SSDs where new and YouTubers were making videos of booting into Win7 with Office, etc. open in seconds. WTF happened?
Yup, I got a relatively new AIO from work for free, set it up as an all purpose media machine in the kitchen, but no one ever used it bec it was so slow, after about a yr of aggravation I decided to check the specs, had an HDD, I replaced it with a cheap sata SSD, now it purrs.
My fairly high-end system with NVMe drives is absurdly slow at booting to my minimal Arch Linux installation's (tty) login screen. And I'm not some anti-systemd evangelist, but it certainly doesn't seem to be helping matters. Once the kernel starts being loaded, it shouldn't take more than a couple more seconds to get to login.
I have a theory that the people who used the bar on the side and the people who turned the user metrics off are the same people (myself included). But I’m not sure how I feel about the results.
In any case I hope shells like litestep make a comeback as a result of ever more hostile ui decisions, either that or everyone jumps ship entirely to put energy into making something else great.
The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI). Whether that's due to monopoly or being actually better, it doesn't matter. The fact is competition is almost non-existent.
I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome with two tweaks (put the min/max buttons back on the window header and move the main menu to the bottom of the screen so it works like the old win 10 task bar) and it's streets ahead of Windows 11. It's a great blessing in disguise when Microsoft decide your old laptop won't support Windows 11.
I don't mind the big borders, although most of the time I'm using dual 2k screens.
The borders don't seem that much bigger than the ones in Windows 10. As for the extensions, I've been enabling those via extensions.gnome.org and have no problems so far on Buster or Bullseye.
Dash-to-panel helps, but it doesn't go far enough for me. It doesn't work well in vertical orientations: for instance, status icons should be arranged in horizontal rows. In a single column they take up far too much space.
The article mentioned all the UI generations you can find in Windows. Linux is even worse. Once you leave the menus your desktop environment provides, it becomes a design free for all. Sometimes you'll see UI styles from another environment (run Kompare in Gnome), sometimes you get ancient X UIs.
If GNOME bundled Kompare or other KDE programs you might have a point. You wouldn't blame Apple for the look of LibreOffice on macOS so why blame GNOME for the non-GNOME programs?
The GP wasn't blaming Gnome, they were complaining about the Linux GUI desktop in general. Running a KDE app on Gnome was just an example; they could just as well have mentioned the opposite and still not be "complaining about KDE ".
I get your point and I'd raise you the suite of Microsoft products:
- Word, PowerPoint, Excel, all one style
- Teams, different style
- Notepad, different style
- Paint, different style
That's just within the MS ecosystem, leave that ecosystem and you rapidly find the same style mess that you get on Linux. It's basically due to the many different GUI frameworks, not the OS itself, hell MS supplies a whole list of frameworks that look different from each other.
Even MacOS/iOS which are _really_ good at having a cohesive UI style suffer from this problem.
I'd argue that if this is a valid complaint with Linux DEs (be it GNOME/KDE/what have you) then it's an equally valid complaint for Windows.
I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow.
So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".
It's also the bane of its existence, because it means that they can NEVER retire anything, because by doing so they would break backwards compatability.
And that's actually how we ended up here. They can never get rid of even Win16 GUI (let alone Win32) because it would break shit written for Windows 3.1 (yes, there are still some dialogs in Windows 11 that use Windows 3.1 file select dialog, namely the ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit)[0].
So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Win32 isn't being used for anything they are making now, but it's used by other people, and more importantly it's used by all the old apps.
So now they have to justify ETERNAL support for an essentially deprecated API. Which they obviously aren't doing, which is why we're here.
> I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Unless they are extremely domain specific, surely there are modern alternatives?
Actually windows 64 bit won't run 16 bit programs, that part has been gone for a decade or so.
Yes there are probably alternatives, but that's the point, I like the way it's working now - I don't want to find new equivalents and then discover what's missing from them.
But I'm not sure what the existance of win32 has to do with anything - it's not like it stops win64 from working.
I can't speak for Windows 11 as I didn't use it, but Windows 10 feels better. macOS feels very dumbed down and Apple takes decisions instead of letting the user do it.
In my opinion, Window management on Mac is bad compared with everything that isn't Mac. On the other hand, there's lots to like about Macs, so I keep using them.
GNOME is way better the Windows UI, checked out what options there where when win11 came out and i have been on fedora ever since, really modern UI and none of the Microsoft bs
I say KDE is the best desktop if they could just get their shit together and debug it on all hardware configurations. It's absolutely miles ahead of Windows in features, however, as a power user I can fix it if it gets wonky, but a regular user shouldn't be expected to.
Windows 7 was a GUI horror show compared to pretty much anything else at the time. Ugly font rendering, e.g. Especially if you have a ton of open windows, Windows has always been amazingly bad at helping the user manage them. Multiple / desktops can finally be enabled since Windows 10 (without hackery), but are still a pain. The font rendering has improved but is nowhere near MacOS. I could go on for a while. In my experience, the only people who think Windows has superior GUI have never truly worked with other desktops.
> The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI)
Same with Windows Explorer. Finder in macOS is still terribly crippled compared to it:
-It can't even perform folder merges in many cases, only allowing you to "Replace" the entire folder.
-You can't pause/resume file transfers.
-Cancelling large transfers is like canceling a print job in the 00's - it might cancel, but if it does it will be when 95% of the job is done anyway and you're screwed.
-You aren't shown metadata of any files you are prompted about.
-Batch management of file conflicts/actions not possible.
Most of these features were added to Explorer all the way back in Vista 15 years ago.
> I have a theory that the people who used the bar on the side and the people who turned the user metrics off are the same people (myself included)
I keep telemetry enabled in Firefox in the hope that they see that I use all of the features that they later remove anyway. It seems like nobody is using metrics to prove that it's not safe to remove a feature. Or they say "oh, it's only 1% of users using that feature", not realizing how much 1% really is.
I still miss Firefox's "View Image" context menu option. There is no suitable replacement. No, I do not want to open the image in a new tab. No, I do not want to use some janky extension that re-implements it but places the option at the very bottom of the context menu.
Exactly that, minus opening it in a new tab. It opened in the same tab (and maybe new tab if you middle-clicked the menu item? I don't quite remember).
I understand. That's for sure more convenient. I really miss one feature of Safari: When something triggers a new Tab open and you do swipe right to go back in history, it actually closes the new opened tab. That's in generally very convenient
It seems to frequently be true that Microsoft releases a horrifying nightmare OS, polishes is up and removes hated features, and then releases a new version. It's been a bit of a pattern.
Windows 8 -> Windows 10
Windows Vista -> Windows 7
and even before that:
Windows Me -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP was a pretty solid chain that shows it over three releases (personally I think XP was buggier, I don't know what the idea was there other than to make some more money?).
Windows ME didn’t get replaced by 2000, they were both released around the same time.
In terms of OS evolution, there were two separate branches, Windows NT and Windows 95.
On the 95 branch:
95 > 98 > ME > Discontinued
On the NT branch:
NT 3.5 > NT 4 > 2000 > XP > Vista > 7 > 8 > 10 > 11
Non-business users were originally only ever on the 95 branch, then when it was discontinued they were transitioned to Windows XP, but the neutered home edition, which has been the model since.
Fair, I switched from 98 to 2000 to XP because Me had such an incredibly bad experience.
From a technology stack side I realize you are right, but I did not experience the UI of Windows ME as a successor to 98 and instead experienced it as a proto-win2k. I'm talking about the UI evolution more than the kernel, which I realize is more subjective.
I do think there is a "paid forced beta -> better after overton window shift" pattern from for instance Vista to 7 and 8 to 10. Those were extremely obviously intended to be the same UI, the first with an extremely questionable UI and the second with a stabilized UI.
From a UI perspective, in the context of a useful work computer, Windows 8 was an absolute failure. Windows 10 I only tolerate because it's gotten most of the bugs worked out and Windows 7 is no longer getting security updates... I fully intend to skip Windows 11 and wait for the next one if I can possibly do so.
It will I'm sure still have a UI mess that makes it even less pleasant than Windows 10, as (in my opinion) Windows 7 was better than Windows 10 and I would have preferred they just keep fine tuning that UI.
I just want my OS to be an OS instead of an experience, and for things to just iterate better rather than see massive overhauls for what they must know is mostly a business OS. It's such a strange approach, I guess they're just worried about going the way of Sun or IBM by not adopting the latest trends. Or maybe they have a business team and a home computer team and the latter is trying to keep up with Apple while the prior is begging them to stop...
Microsoft has a tick tock approach to consumer OS releases, where every other OS is “the good one”.
Windows me - bad
Windows xp - good
Windows vista - bad
Windows 7 - good
Windows 8 - bad
Windows 10 - good
Windows 11 - bad
For a bad release windows 11 is pretty good. This gives me hope that windows 12 will be their best ever.
This is why it would have been smart of them to stick to windows 10 like they planned, but like picking at a scab they just couldn’t let go of the idea of rearranging the deck chairs and rechristening the ship as windows 11.
The "good" releases are good relatively to the crap ones they've succeeded, not on their own. As if they wanted to pay for QA only every other release.
I really need to dig very deep into my memory; wasn't Windows ME kind of dead on arrival? And MS themselves half acknowledged it by releasing XP within a few months.
The Win9x/ME (please read as DOS based) series of OS was intended for home users.
The NT/2K was intended for business users.
Only as an example most games at the time would not have run on NT/2K, and Win9x/Me was essentially single-user only.
For some reasons with XP the good MS guys decided to force down the throat of pro/business users (that were very, very, very happy about Windows 2000) the bells and whistles and graphics they didn't ask for and force down the throat of home users (that were very, very happy about Windows 98, not so much about ME [0]) the complexities of the NT, user access, permissions, NTFS, and other things that at the time made no sense whatever.
Basically they (the MS guys) unified the two branches into one and the result was (of course) a compromise.
[0] I know it is hard to say this, but ME, beside some quirks that there was no time to fix, was not as bad as it has been depicted, as a matter of fact the "best" bastard retro system you can make today is a Windows 98 with selected components of ME integrated/backported or a ME with some features of 98SE brought back, the failure of ME (not entirely unlike the later Vista one) was greatly induced (IMHO) by two factors, underpowered hardware and issues with drivers, both - if you want - essentially the responsibility of OEM's.
I wasn’t aware that XP was meant to be an upgrade for 98/ME (home users) as well as for 2000 (business users). Talk about posing off both set of customers at the same time.
I personally didn’t mind ME and liked XP, but then it was as a student who didn’t do anything serious with computers so it doesn’t count much.
> that were very, very happy about Windows 98, not so much about ME [0]
I disagree somewhat. The 9x family didn't handle multitasking well and had driver issues, frequently leading to lock-ups and BSODs. The architecture didn't handle isolation well, but NT did. Windows NT mostly stayed out of people's way in XP unless they looked for those menus. It was a huge problem for Vista, though.
Well, you have to put it in context, home users at the time could have:
1) free (in the sense of included in the price or their new PC) a somewhat unstable OS with lower requisites (particularly about RAM) where most software somehow ran (including games)
or:
2) a more stable, paid (costing if I recall correctly more than the equivalent of 2-300 US$ of today) OS needing double the RAM (think of 128 vs. 64 MB), definitely slower, where they could not run many games
for some reasons many chose #1, and BSOD's (on the 9x/Me) were so common that it was perceived by many (that had not any occasion to experience the stability of NT and of 2000) as a "normal state of things".
I hate the Windows 11 taskbar and using ExplorerPatcher to revert to Windows 10 style. Thankfully ExplorerPatcher is yet to let me down. If it does happen I will probably switch to Chrome OS Flex.
This is literally the first thing I do on a fresh install. What the hell were they thinking
> start menu further ruined
but whyyyyyyyyyyyy
I honestly never had a problem with Microsoft Windows over its UI decisions until Windows 8.
Windows up to and including Windows 7 were actually ok, because you could put the start menu on the side, switch to classic UI, turn off the graphical embellishments that your shit laptop didn't like, and so on.
Windows 8 became very tabletified, but with options to switch to classic UI, and Windows 10 is the same but arguably a bit more bizarre.
Neither UI was really consistent or knew what it wanted to be, and worst of all, the user can't decide what it should be.
Not working in MS but I would guess everyone knows about how bad it is. The problem is so colossal (technically and organisationally) thus no one person has the political capital to push for change.
It’s a kind of thing where the usual growth metrics “looks fine”, so it’s hard to justify big initiatives to fix it, yet everyone knows it’s broken. One day, those metrics will start looking bad and then they will try to fix it, but by then it would be too late.
I imagine the bigger problem is that you have to have hard user research to back colossal changes like this one up, especially if the change would do something like invalidate a possibly three-digit large engineering team's years of work. The only thing that saves this is Microsoft's continued commitment to win32 apps, which will probably continue for eternity at least until MS recreates the _entire_ os from the ground up.
Personally, I've advocated for many user-friendly scenarios only to get shutdown by "business decisions" higher up by folks who have been in Windows for 20+ years. The engineering culture inside of Windows, from my experience, is poor and not improving
I posted an update to that article just the other day - it's a (new?) policy that feedback will be retained for at most 15 months. FBH can be safely disregarded as a waste of time.
Ha, that's incredible. The MSFT employee (ralvis) cited in the article who complained about the "never combine" change in W11 is someone I know quite well, and he's not a developer. Normal users hate it just as much as us developers/nerds.
Microsoft's OS business is a classic "cash cow". It's very big and very profitable, but has limited growth prospects and its revenue is currently growing at only single digit percentage points per year.
Every MBA course teaches that the way to handle a cash cow is to milk as much profits from the users and spend as little money maintaining it as you can get away with. You do this to maximise the amount you have to invest in other, faster growing businesses that will be the future of the company, even if it causes long-term damage to the cash cow.
MS have been milking their OS and Office businesses to fund their cloud and XBox businesses and, so far, it's a textbook example of the strategy succeeding; the cloud already brings in more revenue for MS than Windows and is still growing much faster than it.
The OS features that are getting attention, such as VS Code and WSL are ones that have synergy with the more important businesses and help them sell. Things like fixing the safari park of UI conventions don't have that synergy, so the resources that could improve them go to the other businesses.
The ads and forced sign-ins are also part of this; in the long-term, they'll drive some users away from Windows, but right now, they funnel money and users to places that should matter more to the company in the long-term.
MS aren't listening to Windows feedback - and the internal feedback from people working on the product is usually part of it in these situations -, because what's good for Windows isn't what's good for MS.
(Not a Microsoft employee) Even if you do have the feedback, is it worth fixing issues if your boss doesn't prioritize them, and you won't get promoted for it?
As far as I can see everything in the article applies in W11 Professional. It will be interesting, though, to see what happens when more big enterprises start piloting their upgrades to W11. The taskbar changes alone could cause mutinies in thousands of back office departments.
These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove your product growth. They instead flock to a competitor that leaves you holding your bag of a shitty product.
There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what they want.
I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else.
You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.
You're not wrong, but office users should be locked to a browser in 2022 anyway. What do they need Windows for? They can all use a web browser.
Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
As an officer worker, there are many many things I do that cannot be done in a web browser. File comparison tools, macros and complex excel queries, hard applications for both new and legacy critical programs...
Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
I'd have to say that, today, all of those can be done in the browser except Excel.
File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from you, so Excel won't be available. But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
> Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser
Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document.
I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.
I think you're still misunderstanding. The documents don't need to be "in the cloud", the WASM in your browser can operate on them locally.
Is the WASM "untrusted"? Sure, I guess, all code you haven't written yourself is "untrusted" by default. Why would a native application shipped via CD or download be any more "trusted"?
OneNote is still a pig in the browser. Every day it has to reload and loses track of all the folders in the notebook so I have to reload them all again.
VBA macros aren't supported. Last time I checked even conditional formatting wasn't supported, although I see now it was added in January 2022 [1]. Even so, as with many other features, the web UI is different and more limited. Links to documents stored locally or on an SMB share don't work. Scrolling through thousands of rows is laggy. Generally, Excel Online is useless for the complex spreadsheets used in large enterprises, which themselves are often workarounds for the limitations of the web apps the enterprise is supposed to run on.
I can vouch for personal experience with macros and Linux, since I made my return to it this month. It's not ideal yet, but it's workable, and there's a generational transition taking place while moving from x11 to Wayland, since the two have different notions of input, so you have to wander through some compatibility stuff to find your way.
This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because you can customize things right down to the kernel level and generally get the result you're looking for in a pretty direct fashion. I now have it set up so that it detects the model of keyboard I plugged in and redirects specific models to specific macro layers - a seemingly obvious two-keyboards use case that can be a serious hassle on Windows without resorting to a hardware solution.
Last i heard they experimented with windows running in the cloud and the user having just a kind of thin client.
It is hilarious that 20 years after SUN's "The network is the computer" and some years after freedesktop's initiatives "wayland", "X is obsolete" "X on network sucks", Microsoft is coming doing just this.
Not sure if with "should" you are talking about some kind of ideal world. But in 2022 in the real world, this cannot be done. Online Word is a joke. I would like to use it (because I hate MS Office, so if I could go without having it installed and taking room in my HD and start menu, it would be great) but it's unusable even for my quite basic needs. A sister comment talks about advanced stuff like Excel macros, etc.; but even very basic functionality is not available.
For example: right now, it's impossible to edit a document online with Track Changes without showing all the changes (which makes documents practically unreadable). And you don't even have pages online, documents are shown with a continuous layout where it's difficult to know where pages start and end.
MS Office in browser is like Teams: terrible. Aparently MS decided to rewrite the UI for the browser app and even they acknoledge that is not working (do you want to open in desktop app ?)
If you want Linux to compete, you need spreadsheet software as good as Excel and a word processor that's 100% compatible with Word. I tried to use LibreOffice for a while but Calc ins't there yet and I had tons of formatting problems when I sent documents to Words users. After dealing with this for a while you just give up and start using Office again.
I don't want to pull back the curtain too much or tramp on everyone's hopes, but Linux can't compete with Microsoft because of UEFI. The PCs being sold today only allow Microsoft's software to run. In order to distribute a Linux distro, you have to ask Microsoft to give you a shim where they've signed your private key, so that you can share your own signed kernel builds with others. Therefore you can't publish a Linux desktop for consumers without being in league with the adversary.
Source? I've installed Ubuntu on half a dozen newish UEFI computers, some of which came with OEM Windows, over the past few years with no trouble https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
The source is in your own link. Also note, the person you replied to went on to emphasize 'consumer' in a followup comment, which I think makes the point much more salient.
[1]: "On Ubuntu, all pre-built binaries intended to be loaded as part of the boot process, with the exception of the initrd image, are signed by Canonical's UEFI certificate, which itself is implicitly trusted by being embedded in the shim loader, itself signed by Microsoft.
On architectures or systems where pre-loaded signing certificates from Microsoft are not available or loaded in firmware, users may replace the existing signatures on shim or grub and load them as they wish, verifying against their own certificates imported in the system's firmware."
That's why I was used the word consumers. Rolling your own crypto will let you work around the requirement of asking Microsoft for permission to install our own operating system. But it limits the audience for your work to the technical class.
I think this is the first time someone has ever reacted non-negatively towards me online after I brought up the subject. UEFI has good PR and I think people refuse to believe the implications of what happened. It would be like having Google officially be the only CA for HTTPS certificates and then removing HTTP from Chrome. That's basically what the security community did with PCs.
That surprises me. Much better in my opinion to listen then to assume I know better - especially because I'm familiar with your work.
Even though Secure Boot can be disabled on most hardware afaict [0] that's still a step consumers won't take so the point still stands easily. Especially with the amount of "you will break everything and kick a a puppy" that manufacturers throw in there to disuade anyone who manages to get to the menu.
[0] worked at a repair ahop until 1.5ish weeks ago, have disabled SB on a lot of hardware.
> you need spreadsheet software as good as Excel and a word processor that's 100% compatible with Word
IIRC I read an anecdote a few years back that if MS ever lost the code to their office products they couldn't re-implement it 100% compatible again since they don't completely abide by any standards like the Open Document Format.
I will always continue to harbor hatred for MSs Office products since when I had to write a big piece of homework for 9th grade in school (a "Facharbeit", kinda like a mini Bachelor's thesis as an intro to scientific writing) I then had to transfer the file from my computer via USB drive to my fathers' PC to print it out.
Naive as i was, I didn't think to double-check the formatting after the transfer since it was the same software on the same version on the same OS etc.
Ended getting a "1 (very good)" for content but the formatting grade was so bad it dragged the combined mark down to a "3 (satisfactory)".
Since then I'll only print documents after converting to pdf and double-checking everything is ok and will never voluntarily use an MS Office product ever again.
There's WPS Office that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The user interface has a level of polish that rivals Microsoft Office. Sadly, I didn't have a chance to explore if it is seamless to move a file between MS Office and WPS Office.
Linux would kill it if it made it trivially easy to run Windows inside a sanitised and privatised container or VM that prevented telemetry and all the other nonsense.
I suspect a lot of people would accept a modest performance hit if that were possible.
That’s true but the new generation have grown up with (for better or worse) web/apps. Once they are the main workforce, they will be much less reluctant to switch to whatever OS.
She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders.
There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.
> She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders.
> There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
I'm not aware of any generation for which being comfortable with those things hasn't put one in, at least (I'm being very conservative), the top 20% of computer literacy. Most people are bad at just using a computer—given how long it's been a problem, there's either a lot of essential complexity there that cannot be mitigated or avoided to improve usability, or we as an industry have just done a terrible job designing desktop operating systems for regular people. I don't think tablets et c. have much to do with it.
I don't think pleasing tech adopters is what help windows at this point. Maybe 20 year ago, sure. Today, most consumers of Windows that are not business/enterprise, are probably doing it more so because that was the defacto OS for them when they were in grade school, and it has been the defacto OS on most computers sub $1K. We are seeing some market shift to chrome OS and there is probably a good future where Chrome OS displaces Windows massively. If it does, it won't be because of tech adopters and such. It will be because Chrome OS is what is gaining popularity for kids in school and they will grow up being used to.
Edit: Defacto above meaning, when I go into best buy, that is what is pre-loaded. Or I go to walmart, that is what comes on the computer.
Edit: 'there is probably a good future where Chrome OS' typo or poor wording. Meant to say something along the lines of, 'there is probably a good chance that a Chrome OS future happens'
I didn't say it was going to save me. I do think I had a type that said 'good future.' I meant to put something along the lines of 'good probability of a future.' Chrome OS is going to be another user hostile environment for sure. But the point is, Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on.
Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on.
That's even worse, because as the saying goes, those who never had freedom (or ownership, for that matter) won't miss it.
Fear not; they'll deprecate Chrome OS and Stadia in the next few years and add it to https://killedbygoogle.com/ , which I see has just added AngularJS recently. Google Cloud Print stuck out there too, since we had a big thing about rolling that out at work just a few years ago as the future solution for all our printing needs.
Google does kill off a lot of products, but I wouldn't hold my breath on Chrome OS. It is paying off for them in the education space. They have an OS that ships on cheap computers that work well enough for students. Gets them in the google ecosystem and the mind set of Chrome OS is what a computer should be. Not to mention contracts in place with school systems that probably nets them easy money.
What is worst or better is not what matters in this instance. This is a matter of the reality of what will probably lead to the adoption of an OS. Would I be happy with Chrome OS displacing Windows? No. Am I happy with Windows having the market share it does? No. But what I want doesn't matter in adoption. What matters is, Chrome OS has a strategy that will probably work. And that strategy doesn't involve tech influences getting excited over the product, it is simply getting it in kid's hand so they think Chrome OS is how a computer should be. Regardless if that is true. That is why Linux adoption for the common user sucks, their first experience was probably Windows, so in their mind, Windows is how a computer should be.
> kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on
I noticed chromebook getting big in the education space and really getting into the hands of kids 7 years so. Your business executives I assume are old enough to pre-date chromebook's big debut in eductaion? They likewise are probably most familiar with Windows and that is why they hand it down as the required bit of software? or probably a sweet business contract, that also plays a factor.
Add MacOS to the list. The continued crippling of the OS for power users keeps pushing us toward the iOS experience, and it’s killing me.
I can’t see details of my own log files for privacy reasons.
The new Finder design is just awful and accomplished nothing for all the change.
Now I learn I can’t make hardlinks for directories on APFS.
The list goes on.
Yes, I moved away too. So much dumbing down, so many things changed just for the sake of it. And of course no settings to revert it. Eventually it was just too annoying to upgrade.
A lot of it is security hardening but the problem is I have to give all control to Apple. There is no way for me to change anything in the read only OS part without the whole rigmarole of booting into recovery mode and blessing my changes with every update. There should be a way I can sign my own changes. It's the Apple way or the highway. And I'm running into more and more issues when the Apple way is just not good enough for me.
I'm really so happy with having options again with KDE. No more opinionated software for me.
They have long understood that security is always an argument to throw into the pot to justify their changes. Boot malware isn't really a widely spread problem in 22 and MS still pushes TPM 2.0. It is probably less about user security than control about users and machines.
Poor security design. App installers should definitely be sandboxed, "sip" or not. Preventing the local admin from making any changes due to lack of that, is fixing the wrong problem. Or perhaps not in a granular enough way.
Yes, and those reasons are why I mentioned poor design.
This morning I was reminded, my work Mac has a dozen daemons trying to contact things I don't want, such as icloud, itunes, google, etc. A fraction of these are ostensibly useful, but I had to resort to Little Snitch to block them because the OS is read-only, i.e. insanity.
Even the user-hostile mess of Windows allows me to turn off the worse services... although even that is dwindling.
No. It's just reached the point where organic growth is all that's possible. This leaves Microsoft no choice other than the turn their users into the product in order to increase revenue.
It's a GOOD thing! The more people that migrate off of Windows the better the world will be because then companies can (hopefully) focus their software development on non-closed, cross-platform ecosystems.
Microsoft is long overdue for a market correction. Hopefully the OS market will diversify, bringing a cambrian explosion of life into the market.
Yes, I'm Russian. No, I don't support what's happening right now and I stand with Ukraine. No, I can't do anything about it. Now get out of the way and let me read the article.
These performative acts of shoving politics where it doesn't belong doesn't do anything to change the situation, they just make people like me angry.
Because virtue signaling. I'm not saying this to de-legitimize the "russia is bad" message, but the fact is, in instances like this (eg. a personal blog) such actions are far more about benefiting the person performing the action (ie. setting up the ukraine message) than it is actually about getting russia to stop.
Does anyone have any insight into how much benefit MSFT actually gets from these decisions? I understand that the intent is to 'make line go up', but as a simpler user I can't really imagine how telemetry and shilling OneDrive actually leads to meaningful revenue growth. On the other hand, people have been loudly complaining about this since the Windows 7 days, and I imagine that there must be some reason they're doubling down on such an unpopular strategy.
> I can't really imagine how telemetry and shilling OneDrive actually leads to meaningful revenue growth.
Microsoft’s ad revenue is $10B (1). Allowing advertisers to send ads based on user profiles is a major feature of digital advertising. Collecting telemetry data improves the user profiling.
These types of changes have a direct positive impact on one of Microsoft’s fastest growing revenue stream. This will lead to meaningful revenue growth.
I'd argue that once a movement has been installed it's very difficult to rule it out unless someone on the board can PROVE that it hurts revenue. This kind of decision (UI designers overriding anyone else) probably comes from a middle manager who has top support, the exact reason why it is impossible to un-stuck such decisions. Think Apple, you have to get X out before you can unstuck his/her decisions. That's politics.
Former MSFT here. People tend to think of Microsoft as one unified company with a unified strategy.
That is not the case, its best thought of as a batch of little companies that band together to create a product. These companies may compete for resources and attention internally and so each one will optimize for their own benefit.
Ads in Edge? That's probably a decision made by some Principal Program Manager with director support on the browser team. The metrics that get tracked for that event are likely how many people click through the ad, rather than the over all impact to the OS.
The OS Core team doesn't have the influence to say no, or stop the browser from showing those ads. I recall internally when I (a paying customer for O365) got a toast (that is what a popup ad is called internally) for O365 and I decided to raise an issue.
Some PM II (mid-level PM was running the campaign, and they were showing metrics that more people signed up for O365 as a result of the campaign, so per them it was good. I was not in that organization and since that director had OKRs that required signups, he told me to go away.
The core OS stripped down has none of these things, but at integrated build, lots of stuff gets put in, and when one team says no to something, often another one will say yes. A good example is that Office has its own update infrastructure and tooling outside of Windows Update. Why? Office wanted to deliver updates on weekly basis and Windows Update said no as that would be too impacting for users, so Office simply said ok and built their own.
These issues rarely if ever get surfaced to an executive, as by the time the metrics get up to a CVP generally they are showing broader trends, like adoption, or game breaking bugs, or as you note, the line going up. Executives do not get these problems (such as inconsistent UI) to them. Those things rarely rise above a Group PM or Engineering Manager level, and those people often do not care about the complaint as for that metric helps them or is part of their strategy.
Windows, the product team cannot do anything about it due to political problems internally at MS and that is not the engineering team behind Window's fault. We (as that was a team I was on) hated when a product team would do something obnoxious and if we could catch it prior to release would often bluntly complain. More often than not we would get told that we were the platform and to stay out of the other teams business.
Anyways, there isn't some mass company dark pattern strategy or other conspiracy, just a bunch of little factions that are all optimizing for their own interests. Office is probably the worst offender of the batch (Skype, Teams, OneDrive) and Windows can do little about it.
Windows 7 is the last version made by Microsoft as a software company. Starting from Windows 8, Microsoft became a cloud company, pushing users all these craps.
Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed.
In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account.
Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit..
It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.
I’m desperately wishing for Valve to have success with the Deck so that Linux gets better attention from game devs. The last Windows machine in my environment is exclusively for PC games, and I honestly can’t wait to install Linux over it.
Just start now. Think of unsupported games as you think of games for Nintendo and Sony machines. Your financial support of gaming on Linux will encourage developers to support it. Waiting just keeps the status quo.
I did this a few years ago with the same mindset, thinking I’d still regularly boot into Windows, but I haven’t done so in probably over a year. I was surprised at how little I missed the games that don’t run (well or at all) on Linux—probably because there are so many good options these days.
At this point I’m thinking of deleting my Windows partition altogether.
Really? I made the same move (or at least finished it 100%) at the same time, and that's not a problem I've ever seen.
Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.
But it’s linux, so one obscure setting in a config file or slightly different hardware can make all the difference. I say this as a linux user since WinXP.
This is my feeling over the past few years. No OS is in a great spot. But I have hopes for Linux being better supported with Valve using it on the Steam Deck. (Not the highest hopes, but more hope than I used to have)
I don't agree. KDE in particular feels more well rounded than ever before. I use it on FreeBSD but I use Linux on servers and I'm also very happy with that.
Windows 10 is stable for me too though I was hit with the eTPM stutter bug (I use my Windows box exclusively for gaming, in particular VR which I didn't feel like figuring out in proton). But the windows dark patterns are surely there and I hate them. But as it's only my gaming machine I can deal with it.
And Mac... Well I moved away from it because Apple is locking down too much and I've come to hate opinionated software. Still they seem to be doing nice things with M1..
> A lot of the best kernel, driver, and gui shell improvements have only really hit their stride in the past 24 months.
Could you elaborate on that?
I've been using desktop Linux almost exclusively for the past 24 years (ouch!), and recent years seem pretty average to me. Things work great, most of the time, like always.
Unless you're talking about gaming. I'm not a gamer (or i wouldn't be such a long time Linux user) but I hear there's enormous progress on that front.
Gaming was what held me back from switching for decades. Steam is doing a great job on that front, most recent (like in max 5 years old) games in my library work like a charm under Ubuntu. And that includes all AAA games. Old games are harder as those are, understandably, not on top of the priority list to convert to Linux. For those, and some rarely used other stuff I haven't bothered to figure out Linux alternatives for, I still use Windows.
If Linux based gaming continues on the current trajectory, I could imagine a world in which a great chunk of the consumer market switches from Windows to Linux.
I've used WindowMaker as a Window manager for decades. Only recently did I decide to switch to Mate because I wanted a taskbar at the bottom with useful things like applets to show and switch Wifi/network, volume control and often-used icons/launchers.
TBH, if I could get things like tint2 and yabar working with the mate applets, I'd probably switch back to WindowMaker in a heartbeat.
FWIW: most systray applets work with any of WindowMaker's dockapp systrays, and there are a few dockapps (wmappl, wmbutton) that allow you a slightly more compact often-used icons/launcher thing. Mate panel applets do need the Mate panel of course but you can generally find equivalents for just about anything.
I don't run Linux anymore (not natively, for everyday use, in any case) -- like most people in this thread I also think the desktop is a shitshow these days but it's a particularly bad shitshow in Linux, and I was using Linux in 2003 so I know what a shitshow looks like. But when I do still need to touch a Linux machine, WindowMaker is still my WM of choice. It's really good.
Mainly that I like the concept of FreeBSD. It's just one OS, has excellent documentation. Some good tech like jails, zfs on root etc.
Apparently it's not great at WiFi but I don't use that on my main driver (NUC).
On Linux I use docker a lot, and while FreeBSD has its excellent jails, it doesn't have the whole ecosystem around them. So that's why I use Linux on the server side more.
I don't play videogames and I'm perfectly fine with my Ubuntu install, it does everything I need it to do. Only gamers put videogaming as a must for an operating system.
I dropped Windows for Linux with XP. I use Linux for all my computing needs, except a few video games that don't like Wine. For those, I do have a separate Windows machine that gets turned on to play those games (like a console), and turned off when I stop. Both machines are built desktops.
I never use the Windows box for anything else. No files, no coding, no internet browsing, no music, etc. No cameras, microphones, bluetooth adapters, etc. are installed. I turn that thing on every few weeks or so.
This has worked well, and is a compromise with which I can live. Try it, it's blissful!
Projects like Proton and Lutris are making it so that most of the configuration work is encapsulated in installation scripts that make most of that grinding go away.
I use macOS + Windows + Pop!_OS (Ubuntu-based) on a daily basis and they're all better or worse depending on the task at hand. They're all useable but imperfect. For me, Windows is for gaming and some music production stuff, macOS is my work laptop and dev environment, and Ubuntu is for most other things like personal use, but also my desktop dev environment.
Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't work very well today (I have hope that we'll get there soon). Windows VMs work a lot better on my Ubuntu desktop, but a lot of our dev tools have mostly macOS users, so getting them to work with Ubuntu takes a bit of massaging at times. macOS is hard / unsupported to virtualize, so I basically have to use macOS when developing macOS software.
If we could run macOS as a VM, I'd choose Ubuntu / Pop!_OS for most things.
OS X virtualization is well supported by Parallels if you're on a Mac and are willing to pay for software (it's a just a few clicks via the GUI to set up and they offer a trial). I haven't tried it under windows, but it's still eminently possible.
You can run macOS under VMWare Workstation Player on Linux using an unlocker. If you combine it with a serial from an actual mac you own, but no longer use, you can get iMessage working also.
Unless you care about gaming MacOS has been rock solid for at least a decade. For what it is worth I am no mac fanboy, I am typing this to you on a windows 10 computer in my shop(that I use for gaming, among other things).
Yeah, this. Macos is my daily driver and it does a good job of staying out of my way.
I recently got a windows pc just for gaming, and god DAMN it's annoying. Even worse than Vista. Nothing is consistent anymore and everything is always trying to grab my attention for irrelevant shit. What the hell happened :/
In my experience, messing with Windows in this manner (especially with an unmaintained script as this one is) results in a broken installation after enough updates. I just let my Windows partition do whatever the hell it wants, and keep my use of it to absolutely minimal levels.
Yeah, it does take some getting used to. It's nice having a real shell though, and not have to worry about Windows Subsystem for Linux to get work done.
As someone who grew up with MS-DOS, Windows used to be really good until Microsoft started getting desperate and started shoving crapware down your throat... ads for Office, preinstalled Teams that starts up by itself, Skype, stupid Defender scans, nonstop UAC warnings, won't let you use a password instead of a PIN... all these dumb, user-hostile decisions. Zero respect for their users.
Apple has a bit of that now (iCloud logins, OS level notifications, bundled apps) but not quite as bad.
If Linux had Adobe Suite and MS Office I'd probably switch in a heartbeat. Need those to collaborate with other non-devs in the office.
I've got a Mac at work and I hate it with passion. I now use my own linux Laptop instead. There is no del key, no home, ctrl and alt are swapped in some aplications and not the others. Login screeen does not remember the language and animations come back after every update even when I explicitly disable them. Muscle memory from other 99% computers I use doesn't work and most of the games don't. I feel like mac os is in contempt of me and I really hate it when I have to use it for mandatory tasks. Mac doesnt fit for me at all, I use Linux for Production and Windows for games
Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.
Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.
> Login screeen does not remember the language
It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.
> animations come back after every update
Yeah, that's fair.
> Muscle memory
That's not.
> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me
I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.
The last time I had to use MacOS regularly, the thing that killed it for me was the lack of a tiling window manager.
I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.
However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.
Delete forward is Fn + delete, Home is Fn + up. It's not a specific key, obviously, but all those keys don't fit on a laptop. However, if you plug in your own keyboard I'm sure they'll be recognized.
My experience is that the only apps that use actual Ctrl on macOS are GTK apps, like Inkscape, and terminal apps (because Ctrl-C should be quite different from activating the menu item corresponding to the Cmd-C shortcut). Unfortunately, if you use non-native apps, you're going to get a non-native experience.
It's like this since it became clear smartphones were going to become the bigger market, so around 2012 or so.
Investment into desktop everything went down: OSes, apps, games, etc.
Heck, you can see this even for Open Source desktop stuff. There was a flurry of releases of cross platform Open Source software around 2009 or so: KDE4, better support for GTK on Windows, etc. All of that has slowed down or frozen in time.
Mobile has sucked all the money and hype from desktop development.
It's all games, both proton and native, on a specific computer. The issue didn't occur for a long time when I first installed, so I'm pretty sure its a software/config problem which a reinstall would fix. I just haven't gotten around to it. Probably a nvidia driver problem tbh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2lhwb_OckQ)
I can’t wait for Proton to get better so I can ditch Windows for good. I know it’s already really good and it will run for most of the game I play, but I do like to dabble in competitive online or AAA once in a while :(
I've probably played ~15-20 games on wine now and literally all have worked with, at most, minimal tweaking (Changing the proton version). I mostly play single player or indie multiplayer so I haven't had to deal with the anti cheat.
Only game that hasn't worked with Proton is Oneshot and its kina understandable considering the games context... It did have a linux version that mostly works out of the box though!
I've had the freezes happen when my nvidia drivers weren't properly installed and when the kernel wasn't using the nvidia DKMS modules. glxgears should run super fast at a consistent framerate. Check out https://gist.github.com/wangg12/c69b56272eaeed1aba9515d19f55...
> All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason,
All?
My experience is that 90% work fine, 9% have weirdness, (for instance, voices in Skyrim are out of sync with mouth movements) and 1% of them have game breaking bugs.
Can you keep an htop running by chance? It would be very helpful to see if CPU is maxxing out when the hitches happen, or if the swap file is growing, etc.
Any time it happens to me, it's usually low resources because of something. Most often some chrome tab (or 3) that are going crazy. I also discovered that one of the apps that I thought was using hardware acceleration actually wasn't. The CPU usage made it pretty clear that the CPU was doing a ton of work.
I made Kubuntu my main OS a long time ago, and I play a lot of (thanks to Valve, Steam, Wine and Proton...) games, and I never experienced a game freezing. My experience it's so good, that I only touch Windows to play Fornite.
The only annoying bug/problem that I have actually, it's that Dolphin could have a erratic behavior if I had mounted a SMB folder via an VPN and I end the VPN before un-mounting the SMB folder.
>All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason,
Could be a GPU thermal issue, happens to me with old games that have no FPS limit, then the GPU does so much work that it hangs for some reason(Nvidia GT970), I am not sure if is my GPU broken/dusty, the driver bugged or Xorg, Windows users only see a game crash not a full system crash.
Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit..
I'm not sure how that sort of behaviour isn't a clear violation of all kinds of privacy laws in 2022.
I'm sure it was specified somewhere in the EULA that you were forced to agree to long ago while installing the OS. It's been a while since I've looked at it too, but I believe there's a clause in there that also permits them to change it at any time without telling you.
One of the few really good things about some modern privacy laws is that this kind of defence carries almost zero weight. You don't get to do scummy things and then claim that the user "consented" because of some small print on page 50 of some document no-one ever reads before clicking the button they have to click in order to use the software they just paid for.
But the problem is that in practice I still don’t see those laws being enforced in any meaningful manner. Case in point, Microsoft is doing this - they’re not stupid, they’ve reviewed the legal implications that and rightfully decided that they’ll benefit more than the penalty from enforcement if it ever happens. Same with Google, Facebook, etc.
They're starting to be enforced but obviously the regulators particularly in Europe are underfunded and there are a lot of bad actors to chase. I imagine Facebook and Google both rate higher than Microsoft for now. That doesn't mean there won't be significant penalties later, particularly as governments come to realise how lucrative penalising these big tech firms can be under the rules they've created for themselves.
Do you understand that the potential fines for violations under some of the recent laws (notably the GDPR) have a few extra zeroes on that? The limiting factor at the moment seems to be a lack of resources for the regulators that are responsible for enforcing privacy rules. Obviously a big tech firm facing a fine that could run to hundreds of millions is like to exhaust their legal avenues for challenging it before handing over the cash. It's going to take time and money from the regulator's side to deal with those challenges before any big penalties get applied effectively.
> Do you understand that the potential fines for violations under some of the recent laws (notably the GDPR) have a few extra zeroes on that?
That's been the case for 4 years now, none of these fines have occurred. The total amount of fines across all companies over those 4 years is barely above 1Bn.
> The limiting factor at the moment seems to be a lack of resources for the regulators that are responsible for enforcing privacy rules
Not just resources but also willingness. I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this and campaigning for doing so is a politically-risky move, as not only does your campaign rely on the same companies that would be fined, but those companies now control the majority of humanity's social fabric and can trivially restrict even organic sharing of information/links about your campaign.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR. Hint: if an industry making a huge chunk of its profit based on non-consensual data collection complains about data protection laws, it means the laws are actually working as designed. Most likely, this insanity will also go ahead, if it didn't already.
That's been the case for 4 years now, none of these fines have occurred.
The largest fines so far have been approaching 9 figures, far more than the "couple of million" in the comment I replied to above.
That's not pocket change even for a multinational and of course there has to be reasonable due process before handing out that kind of penalty. If anything I'd say the fact that several eight-figure penalties have already been handed down is reassuring.
I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this
I'm genuinely curious about how you formed that impression. Here in the UK our data protection regulators have been fairly consistent in their public views on these issues under multiple Information Commissioners now and have handed down some significant penalties, so I don't really buy the conspiracy theories about corruption and so on.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR.
As someone who is both a strong proponent of privacy safeguards and involved in running businesses that actually have to comply with the GDPR, I have very mixed feelings about this.
On one hand I don't like the idea of weakening important privacy protections and I have no faith whatsoever in the competence of the current government here to understand the technical or social implications of these policies.
On the other hand I also don't think much of the GDPR as written. It's full of ambiguity and it is unnecessarily difficult for a good actor to comply with it, particularly smaller organisations that don't have dedicated staff to deal with this kind of admin and also don't have any interest in doing things with personal data that most of us here probably wouldn't like. People like to focus on a tiny number of points that we'd probably agree are positive steps or at least well-intentioned, but the GDPR is roughly a hundred pages long and that's before you include supporting materials like official guidance on interpretation from all the different regulators. There are a lot of small and a few big problems in the rest of those pages once you look past the headlines. Not coincidentally those areas also tend to leave loopholes that some bad actors are relying on to escape the trap.
I don't have first-hand experience with other DPAs so I can't comment on those, though the fact that Facebook and Google are still around and still have business presences in most EU countries suggest they aren't much better.
I have multiple experiences dealing with the UK one, spending unreasonable amounts of time raising complaints for obvious breaches of the GDPR with no outcome. I've summarized my experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662905
Not to mention, this high-profile incident which they are themselves proud enough to announce on their own website: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl... - so you've got a company whose entire business is to manage people's personal data and is large enough to have the resources to understand & comply with the regulation, and you caught them red-handed misusing data that people outright had no choice in giving up (I don't know any bank that allows opting out of CRA reporting even if you never actually intend to take out credit) for a purpose that's definitely not in the data subjects' best interests, and the outcome is a letter?
What message do you think the above sends? To me it sends that breaching the GDPR absolutely does pay and you should absolutely do it at least once because even getting caught brazenly breaching it (considering the size & resources of said companies, number of people impacted and the fact people had literally no choice) will lead to just politely being asked to stop with no monetary penalty nor having to compensate the affected users.
Not only do they have enough money to begin with, but they're earning way more from this than any fine they can realistically expect (if a fine ever comes, that is).
That whole thing with Edge has got to be the biggest information heist in the history of the software industry. Everyone on Windows basically woke up one morning and Microsoft was like, greetings, we've backed up your hard drive to our cloud. Always do your work in a terminal folks!
> It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.
I'm not even sure it's possible, I've tried multiple approaches but gave up after almost having to do a clean install.
Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.
I saw this comment and began to wonder if it was necessary to make a throwaway to make your comment. But then I clicked the name and realized this account is used more than some random throwaway.
Almost had me asking hn if we were abusing throwaway accounts.
To be honest, yeah, I can't decide which one is the biggest anti-user shitshow. My personal favorite is YT which likes to make at least one universally disliked decision per year. But I'm sure everyone has their own.
And Facebook groups are full of posts advertising impersonation services aimed to bypass background checks at jobs, notably delivery and ridesharing services, for people with criminal background and people that do not pass e-verify.
I have reported them but Facebook won't do anything about them.
That is a pretty low bar to have in tech. A few years ago spying on your users was seen as a grave sin. This was changed by large tech corporations that groomed their developers respectively so that they can justify it to themselves.
So being the least bad tech company isn't too convincing.
Oh, I installed two OSes last year: Ubuntu on my then daily driver (it still is my private one) and a clean Windows ten on my son's laptop. That used to be my old back-up and had my old company account on it, in addition to his school teams account. I tried to convert it to a local admin and throw his educational MS Office license on it. It ended with buying a second market Win10 license (I bought two, only one worked) and a clean, new install. Everything else just failed. I'll never use a MS Account for anything again.
That expends to MS Office subscriptions as well. I once bought one through (stupid, I know) GoDaddy as an extension to my domain mail service. It never worked, not once. I still paid for it, so. The user account didn't even exist on MS's end. Only way to get rid of it was to cancel the credit card behind it. MS stopped bothering me after two months of unpaid subscriptions...
> Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.
Really? For me, when I install Windows with a Microsoft account, it makes my username just something like "nyusz" rather than "nyuszika7h".
I do not mind logging into a Microsoft account however the most bizarre situation happened to me very recently.
I will occasionally log into my personal Microsoft account when accessing a Microsoft website when I am on Lunch to work on some personal projects.
At work last week, I was upgraded to Office 365 and as a result I started downloading the latest versions and trying it out in various ways. One of these was upgrading my old OneNote into the latest version (2013 -> 365)
Saturday morning, I booted up my own different PC at home and notice in the "Recommended" section on the Windows 11 start menu "Work 365". This is the name of the OneNote I created at work when I upgraded the document. I do not even have Office on my own PC.
Hovering over it would show that it was located in my Works One Drive folder.
I must have been logged into my personal account on OneNote and it somehow meta-data? links it between the work and personal accounts.
I am now in process of removing all traces of my personal account from Windows on my work laptop as the very last thing I want to happen is to see personal files appearing in the Recommended section of my works laptop!
Wow that is CREEPY AF and very very scary. This is an instant reason to never use Windows because I'd be so scared that I'd leak personal/private data to other people's computers. The really fucking scary thing is that even we both as power users who understand computers, the internet and how things work are even extremely vulnerable to those hostile dark patterns in Windows that less tech savvy family members would be absolute prey to those Microsoft hyenas. There is NO WAY that anyone in my family will ever use a Windows or Microsoft device. It will be iPhones and Macs for them for the rest of their lives.
I had my young son with me at the time so I didn't investigate it further.
What would have I seen if I clicked the More > button in the Start Menu - would there have been more leakage?
Have I logged into my work account on my personal PC at some point?
Why did it only show the OneNote file but not any others?
What happened if I actually clicked it and tried to open it?
Did I simply make a mistake when using multiple accounts in one OS?
There are numerous questions I am asking myself that I don't have an answer for yet.
As far as I can see, I have removed all traces of my personal account off my work laptop now but I am hoping (not sure this is the correct wording in this context) that I can see still the file in my Recommended Section when I get home.
I really would like to know exactly how it can happen.
If you take info sec seriously that should be immediate reason to ban one note, IMHO. Because if you are not trying to, MS will just spill company data to your private accounts for you!
It’s not just OneNote. They are absolutely confused, as an organisation, about accounts, data privacy and data security.
I can’t, in theory, access my work’s OneDrive from my personal machines, due to a required SSO on top of Microsoft’s, and a VPN requirement. But somehow there are some of my personal files in my work’s OneDrive.
I don’t know how this happened. I can’t log into our VPN as it’s machine-locked (it checks before allowing you on) and therefore OneDrive is supposed to stop me accessing it.
I keep getting emails from Microsoft about an Azure Enterprise agreement that they have decided I have power over, along with a group of people from a random company that I’m not related to in any way. Someone did a typo and included me by accident? Not likely as I have an email address that’s difficult to accidentally use via typo.
Microsoft are taking people’s responses to the group as authorised instructions as to what to do with their enterprise agreement. I’ve responded several times and said I am not related but they keep emailing about it. I know a lot about that company’s people, structure and agreements with Microsoft now!
> In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft
and then you try to look at a picture of your kids but it's a HEIC file from an iPhone so Windows says you have to go to the Store and download Microsoft HEVC decoder which for some reason wasn't bundled with Windows but hey it's just a dollar oh that's nearly free we just need your credit card details and e-mail and make a user account and would you like a free newsletter with that LOOK OVER THERE whileweswitchdefaultbrowsers and check out what else is on sale today
Maybe I am being silly about it but Minecraft just migrated from mojang accounts to MS accounts. I am worried they are going to pull these sort of hijinks with that.
It gets more complicated than that. Imagine having to sign into the machine with a work (AAD) account. Potentially, your machine can be taken over and bound to AAD policies operated by IT at the same time it's connected to a personal account. Very messy.
Wow, I feel like that goes beyond a dark pattern and strays into unconsensual abuse (excuse the truism). I feel like a dark pattern persuades and tricks you into doing something, but won't outright do something without your consent. Reminds me of when Linked In did that thing where it sent unsolicited emails after getting access to your address book.
It's mind boggling how user-hostile one can make a piece of "premium" software.
You pay 145€ for the Home or 259€ for the Pro Edition and they treat it like it's freeware.
I want my computer to support me in achieving what I want to do, but Windows just keeps grabbing attention with intrusive ads and never-ending notifications.
I bought 1 pro license for Windows 8. I have used that key ever since. Countless virtual machines and reinstall / hardware upgrade has accepted that key the past 10 years.
Yeah I think the issue is that for most people it is freeware. Very few consumers are actually paying €145 for Windows. They might have got Windows 7 with their PC (I believe the actual cost is around $10) a literal decade ago and paid nothing since.
I can see why Microsoft are trying to explore other revenue sources. If they give Windows away they make a huge loss but if they charge for upgrades nobody will upgrade and it will become a support nightmare.
We used to call seeing ads in Windows ‘adware’. Now we just call it ‘Windows’.
I’m dead serious - unless you have a specific business reason like most do to use this POS, I can’t imagine anyone actually choosing to use Windows over the alternatives. What a seriously awful piece of software.
What Apple wants and what I want seems to intersect about 95% of the time, at least in terms of phones and laptops.
Mainly what I want is to not think about my tools at all, and just pick them up or put them down whenever the need arises, without worrying about whether I'm making a secret catastrophic error or that my tools are pretending to be my tools, while actually their master is somebody else.
I gladly sacrifice control to Apple the same way I sacrifice control to my doctor or to my sanitation engineer, or, if I had a car, to my car manufacturer.
I'm not a teenager exploring the universe of options anymore. Now I just want to get from point A to point B.
In my experience, Apple customers mostly just convince themselves that they must want whatever it is Apple chooses to offer at the moment. This is most easily seen whenever the new version of an Apple product arrives, lacking a feature they had relied on. They immediately set to work persuading themselves they can make do without that.
This seems dismissive, especially when you're talking to other devs who have a lot of experience with different OS's. I'm sure some people just accept whatever Apple pushes because they want to have an iPhone for the status signal, but there are a decent number of tech-informed people who prefer MacOS for reasonable reasons.
If I agree with you that Apple sucks, then you were right that Apple sucks.
If I say most of Apple's design and philosophy decisions are the best option for someone like me, then you were right Apple sucks because I'm trying to convince myself otherwise.
The only version of my experience you'd believe is the one you believed already: that Apple sucks.
Well, you're right, as far as that goes. But there's the old T-shirt slogan, "If you can't change your mind, are you sure you still have one?" The processes by which Apple arrives at its feature set and design necessarily differ radically from the process that determines what features any individual needs. So, any overlap (insofar as that differs from what everybody else does) must be largely fortuitous, unless in fact your process is to look at what they offer and choose to want just that. Or, you are just one of the tiny minority where they happen to match by accident.
Clearly almost all Apple fans have to be in the former group. It is just possible you are in the latter, instead.
This menu is familiar to me because that’s what the Windows API allows you to create (as long as you are not creating it through Windows Forms.) There is no dark theme for this, but at least there are rounded corners.
That is just a huge WTF. Since the very earliest versions of Windows there has always been the option of a dark (or white, or rainbow, or ...) theme, where you could adjust the colours and sizes and fonts, and everything using Win32 would follow it. Here's Win95 example:
Yet if I'm understanding correctly, in Win11 that stopped working completely? It really sounds like the Windows team has no one left who knows what used to be possible but isn't anymore, being replaced with probably younger developers making constant excuses to "modernise" by rewriting and breaking stuff. To use an analogy, they're not just reinventing the wheel but making it square.
Mind you, at the same time, there's fewer and fewer users for those old features, so why should they be priority vs the people who are just starting to pick up a computer?
The author is pointing out that the context menu style applied through Microsoft's own software GUI framework is inconsistent with the style applied by the rest of the OS. What 'old feature' are you referring to?
Ah, but you see - there is a difference in how theming works in Windows 11, in that it's different from the high-contrast mode. So, you can get a control that swaps the theme to high-contrast (you need to use the native Windows API for that), but you can't get one that works with the Windows 11 style of dark theme out-of-the-box without re-writing it from zero.
In other words, they decided to rewrite the theme stuff while neglecting to realise that there's existing code (which they mostly broke around the time of Win8 by removing the Appearance control panel...) that would do what they wanted.
I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.
> I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.
I agree almost, but not quite 100% with that. My tiny disagreement: The decline set in a bit earlier, not after but some time in the W7 era: Up until some point you could set window border width to 0 in the Appearance control panel applet; after that this input field was apparently made read-only for the user. For a while after that you could "hack" that by editing a Registry value, but AFAICR they disabled that, too. (Or rather, if not exactly disabled Registry editing, made the display driver ignore it.)
In practice it stopped working well long before windows 11 because so few apps were win32 based and/or because developers would explicitly override the theme. I gave it a go on Windows 7 and even apps like outlook and office wouldn't look right.
Gnome/KDE still offer proper themeing that works with proper native apps but even there you've got web browsers and electron apps that ignore it.
Going to disagree. I will agree once Apple allows you to ungroup windows of the same application in the dock. Until then, I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system.
Sure, Apple has a different workflow. Pro-Apple peeps insist I should 'learn it'. Why? I know the Apple workflow. In my eyes, it is inferior to the one offered by Windows, and KDE on Linux. Everyone has their opinions of course. I respect people who can get stuff done on a Mac, but I'm not one of those people. I grew up on MS-DOS, Linux, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, etc. I'm left-handed and use alternative inputs.
I also don't care about the UX design. It's a step above Windows 10, that is all that matters.
Both Apple AND Microsoft could learn a ton of stuff from each other. For Apple: Don't dictate user workflows. For Microsoft, consistency is key.
> I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system.
Glutton for punishment I see. Seriously, I used WSL2 under Win10 for a year as a (very) poor man's linux for $dayjob. Recently switched to a Mac. I do keep pressing on getting Linux laptops, having run them for work for the last 22+ years ...
WSL2 is garbage. Pure and simple. Even on an 8 core 16 thread 64 GB monster with Nvidia graphics. My view on it is that it is an attempt by MSFT to staunch the flow of developers off their platform. To say "hey, see, we do linux within windows". But then you use it. And get bitten in the behind, repeatably, by the memory compaction bit, even after tuning the overall memory usage of WSL2.
I was able to get a rough linux desktop by using MobaXterm, single root display, and then running Xfce4 (which I had to build myself, as our corporate approved WSL2 distro was/is broken in so ... so many ways). This setup regularly crashed WSL2, and often windows.
When I mentioned this in various fora, windows fans claim that the OS isn't buggy, it must be the hardware. Many BSOD, many hangs, crashes, etc. Couldn't be the OS. Had to be hardware. Or drivers.
Windows 11 adds another layer of chrome on top of 10, 8, 7, XP, and 98/95. All the code is there. I also see Firefox having the same issue albeit at a much smaller extent -- lots of legacy screens and maybe even some XUL.
It was a bit odd to have a section criticizing UI inconsistencies followed by a section criticizing Microsoft for fixing those UI inconsistencies in Notepad and Task Manager.
As I mentioned in the blog post - both Notepad and Task Manager aren't that inconsistent with the rest of the OS. Notepad is just a giant text box. Task Manager is a compact, tabbed view (tabs didn't go anywhere in the latest version of Windows) that now became Fluent-ified and in the process now looks very wasteful of vertical space.
Above all, I think the problem is in priorities - Notepad and Task Manager _should_ be consistent with the OS. But when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS, it's fair to start raising some questions.
> when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS
Do you have any evidence that Notepad and Task Manager required "so much focus"?
The new Notepad's about as bare-bones as the old Notepad, it just happens to use XAML Islands for the UI. It would be surprising if it significantly detracted from other efforts.
It's all about contrast to everything else. If my house roof is leaking and instead of fixing that I put a limited amount of resources I have into repainting my office and installing a fancy new European faucet, and then go and tell everyone about it - that says a lot about my priorities.
Yes, I am fully aware of the fact that different teams do different things at a big company, but funnily enough when asked about high-priority issues the answer is almost universally "We don't have enough time and/or developers to tackle this right now." But there is magically time for MSN toolbars and Notepad tweaks.
Complaining about Windows UX inconsistency sort of misses the point that the OS and the windowing system should be separate. The function of an OS is not to manage windows, it is to provide an abstraction layer between the applications and the hardware.
I think your argument is valid for something Linux where you can actually decouple those things. Technically, it is still true for windows, but practically it isn't. What you get from Microsoft is a complete OS without any officially sanctioned way to decouple the OS part (kernel and perhaps a few critical user land utils) and windowing system.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] threadYour priority as a user are different, but, sorry to say, your voice doesn't count. The year-end revenue and KPI is what counts, because you and 99% of other companies will still be buying and using PCs with Windows preinstalled and paying Microsoft for licences. You say so yourself, you're disappointed with the direction Windows is taking, but you still use it [for very legitimate reasons].
Why should Microsoft sell Windows for $199, when they can earn $199 + $x/month/user from ads and create more value for its shareholders?
Very simply, the money lost because some people have left Windows for greener pastures is being offset by the increased revenue.
And yet... I was once griping about one or another of the many tricky ways excessively-clever web designers abuse javascript to impose their concept of a "user experience" on me when I would deeply prefer they simply left well enough alone, and my listener replied - "but what if I want the experience they're offering"? - Well, that thought had never occurred to me.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/18/22940517/windows-11-pro-r...
Windows 7 was actually pretty bloody good.
I'm sure MS can get the job done and kill off their OS with just a few more years of obnoxious bullshit forcefully shoved into their operating system!
When I worked at apple I wasnt the only person who ran office in a windows vm. It was a supported config.
But between the overwrought UI and the bugs MS never seems to fix, Windows is becoming a less and less attractive platform with each revision.
macOS 12 cannot maintain a USB 2.0 connection. Not by dongle. Not by dock. Not by monitor. Not with 3rd party. Not with Apple-approved hardware. No way, no how. This is known, reported and totally Apple's fault (some of the earlier macOS 11 builds work fine). And this is the standard problem with Apple, "It just works--until it doesn't. If it doesn't, sucks to be you." I'm done with that.
Windows 10 was already bad enough with "Please, sir, can I have some compute?" with "I say thee NAY! I will now upgrade for the next 40 minutes. Hah!" Add in even more telemetry and inconsistency and I just gave up.
The whole point of Windows and macOS was to NOT have to dork with my OS and just get my work done. If I have to dork with my OS to make it not suck, I should be on Linux! At least then, when I figure out how to make my OS not suck, I'm helping instead of contributing to Microsoft or Apple profits.
So, yeah, I'll maintain a Windows desktop for the few times I need it (Fusion 360 and some videoconferencing stuff), but otherwise it's been Linux full-time for me. And Apple can just go pound sand.
It's quite absurd, really, because while the Linux desktop environment is certainly good for novices and advanced Linux users, anyone that falls between those categories (and that's a lot of people!) will definitely struggle when they try to switch to Linux. You're either content with the default setup, or need to dive into the terminal at some point, and the fact commercial operating systems are making their UX worse than Linux would be impressive if it wasn't so disappointing.
For what it's worth, I've managed to get Fusion360 running on Manjaro with a script a friend linked me online. I can't remember where I got it from exactly, but it involved auto downloading a bunch of Wine requirements and then just running the setup.
If you're not interested in tweaking your system, feel free to skip over the rest of the comment. If you're willing to give it a go, I've got some experience with Windows stuff on Linux that you may be interested in.
I barely use Fusion360, but the few times I used it, it worked pretty well in Wine. Even had decent 3D acceleration, though you can probably get a lot better performance with more trickery (DXVK etc. to enhance the 3D acceleration for example). Lutris (https://lutris.net/) has an install script (https://lutris.net/games/autodesk-fusion-360/), I recommend you give it a try. Lutris can help enable performance tuning tricks for productivity software quite easily, even if it's originally developed for playing video games. Might work for you, or it might not; if it does, it might just cut down on more unnecessary reboots. If it doesn't, you'll at most lose the time it takes to download the installer and remove the failed installation.
As for the video conferencing, you might be interested in Cassowary (https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary), a tool to run Windows executables in a Windows VM through RDP, with suspend/resume of the VM on demand to cut down on resources used when you're not using Windows. It requires a bit of setup, but the guide is quite comprehensive in my opinion. You can forward your webcam to the Windows VM through USB forwarding to get it to work with video, and modern RDP should just be an RDP stream so there shouldn't be too much quality loss. Even if the Cassowary setup doesn't work, you can probably use the VM anyway.
I wouldn't get my hopes up. Microsoft seems to be introducing new UI frameworks -- each with their own slightly different appearance -- at an ever-increasing rate. If current trends continue, by 2030 there will be more Windows UI frameworks than developers using them. :)
Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.
UWP was burdened with sandboxing+packaging requirements that made it very difficult to use, even for first-party software. They eventually figured that out and have made some attempts to lift UI stuff out of UWP (XAML Islands and WinUI 3), but they're both train wrecks (and not staffed with nearly enough people to put up a fight against Chromium).
...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it, when it's already started saying things like this a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198
From what I understand, the thinking is something like:
- There currently aren't any great alternatives for an attractive, touch-friendly, modern-looking UI framework. UWP applications generally feel pretty good to use despite UWP's problems.
- MS already has to support UWP apps forever (once something ships with Windows it's immortal), so they might as well take advantage of that support guarantee.
The Windows team is currently investing heavily in Chromium/Edge/WebView2, but it's still fairly early days. I'd bet good money that within the next 5 years, web UI in some form will fully replace UWP for new first-party development.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/#software-a...
Basically they give you every version of Windows so you can test your code. So 10 LTSC is in there. I run it in my VMs because it uses so little memory and CPU compared to the regular one.
I don't know which flavor of subscription you need to get it. I got my sub free as an MVP.
No? I installed it in a VM just fine without it. During initial setup there's a "domain join" option, but all that does is create a local account.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...
Although I haven't figured out how to ...install the latest version, it seems more complex than the one before.
I always have a laugh when I see this logic.
A product costing more than $200 and not available in the consumer market without some hoops to jump? Of course someone would resell it for $20 (including their profit) totally legally.
LTSC is often hailed as the solution for privacy but when I last tried it it was just regular Win10 with a bit less bloatware (and the long term support of course). Didn't seem very different from Win10 on the privacy side at all.
One thing I forgot to check is if you can choose to delay updates to whenever you want. Obviously this is a big miss in Win10 and as LTSC is meant for mission critical systems I assume this is possible.
I don't recall which version it was exactly, but it was the latest I could get about a year ago when I tried. One of our colleagues in industrial automation got me a VM in their lab to try it out.
There is this more recent attempt, Win10 explorer.exe with Win11 kernel: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o6ytuw/so_i_replac...
It's too late for the Windows ecosystem.
I think wine is doing a more important job than MS at allowing windows to die
So make all features modular with advanced user being able to remove and get a lean and mean OS.
We want less, we want speed.
P. S. It is about time to upgrade the File System. It is too slow...
https://gist.github.com/0xbadfca11/da0598e47dd643d933dc
It's one of the two reasons why Linux isn't ubiquitous on the desktop. (The other being open source doesn't provide enough incentive to do the boring unsexy work)
Fragmentation kills support. Imagine non technical users searching for help on an issue. First finding articles on Windows, then version X, then getting 'only applies with piece X, Y, Z installed'. That's already a problem and the suggestion of making Windows less 'batteries included' would make it harder for the mainstream users, who are the bulk of users.
Fragmentation also kills products, it increases development costs, reduces velocity etc.
Microsoft knew/knows how to make a better product, they just don't choose to because they evaluate they can make more money by screwing consumers over.
In my opinion we need regulation regarding anti-features. It's not perfect but it's the approach that is the answer in the non-digital world.
For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.
It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.
The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.
Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.
That said, I 100% absolutely endorse caution. The past couple years of behaviors are no indicator Microsoft will stay a societally-positive technological force. The corruption & darkness & manipulation could play back in at any moment. Already, Microsoft creating very special terms of service for things like VSCode Remote Development Plugin, having extremely fantastically proprietary implementations for the incredibly useful/popular/fantastic LiveShare are harbingers of the old ways, indicators that Microsoft just wants to force the door open, not really engage & participate.
For now though, I still overall think they are doing good work, pariticpating/not domineering (with some caveats). They learned very very very personally what happens when you violate the core rule of software, the most important maxim, not couched as such but absolutely of key vitality to computing: "Create more value than you capture." -Tim O'Reilly. Of course, all organizations forget the/their past. And I quake thinking of how many people pretend they are using/learning Linux while never seeing systemd, freedesktop, the greater Linux project: WSL is amazing but a dark & tragic small death for the real open source, & it's cheered on & fanboyed endlessly for enabling the blessed ignorant. You are right. Adopter beware.
They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder.
I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter.
They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.
Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them.
Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.
It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.
As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.
I’m learning rust as time allows.
Microsofts successful cross platform apps like VSCode and Teams ignore all of them so following suit seems pretty sensible to me.
It wasn't actually so bad at the start, it was just a poor slack knock-off. (Poor because the visual density is much lower with these oversized chat bubbles)
But now they are spending all their dev time cramming so much stuff into it without considering performance that it's become tooslow and cluttered. Now it's a wiki, a file storage thing, a video chat app, an interface to Yammer, not to mention the tons of plugins. Cool idea to have one app that does everything but performance and usability have gone down the drain. It feels very beta to me.
Oh and the choices they make are so stupid sometimes. When I decline a meeting it still adds me to its associated chat and pings me for everything that's said in it. Constant distraction and no way to turn off this stupid default.
I don't see why I should use a Microsoft GUI any more either. Once you stop using their libraries, you no longer need their OS at all. Pretty strange behaviour from MS if you ask me, encouraging your users to get off their systems.
Actually web is getting worse with anti-features and jank as well.
People pick their OS based on what software they want to run, not the other way around. And they pick from what they can buy. Go into a BestBuy and you can choose between Windows machines, Apple machines, and a few Chromebooks.
If you did manage to buy a Linux machine somewhere, you are going to be disappointed when you go back into that BestBuy to get a printer or webcam or some other accessory and the box says "compatible with macOS and Windows".
Users don't care. For them things either work or not. Users are not going to e-mail Brother or Nvidia or Microsoft to fix their issues with printers, video cards or Onedrive. How is that so hard to understand?
The solution was Google Cloud Print, IMO. That was a great idea. Who cares what you run, as long as it can connect to the internet you can print. I don't know how in-depth it got with the various crazy menu systems
I was quite surprised when I switched my main dev machine to Linux and the printer not only appeared by itself, but worked out of the box.
Linux is great for doing things on your own. Where it fails is when you have to sync up with other people's proprietary norms.
For example, I'm a researcher who gets funding from the US government. I can do my day-to-day technical work in Linux. But I'm forced to still use Windows to present PowerPoint slides over Teams to my funding overlords, because that's what they use, and I have to conform to that. Linux ports/knock-offs of those products just don't interoperate with proprietary MS systems well enough for me to rely on them. Unless the US government (or at least the relevant parts I deal with) ditches Microsoft products, I have to keep a foot in MS-land to carry out the accountability parts of my job.
But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at least 90% of the time doesn't cut it. Free instead of paying a few hundred bucks for the extra percentage points isn't even a question worth asking from a business perspective.
Linux has great software, sometimes the best available on any platform, in certain areas. Developer tools is an obvious one. Servers is another. Some of the multimedia stuff is good. The picture for running games is getting better all the time even if most of them are still ports of some kind rather than truly native applications.
But as much as I hate to say it, the reality is that in most areas that most users are going to care about the Linux ecosystem is still lacking in both quality and quantity. I'd bet on the evolution of web technology disrupting Windows long before the Linux desktop does. But that is hardly a solution to the phone-home and forced-update problems that a lot of us don't like about modern Windows.
However bad Linux is at package management, Windows is even worse. So I'm not sure how your argument convinces people that Windows package managers are superior?
On an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U
My main travel laptop is still an old Thinkpad X220, because of the great keyboard.
It lasts considerably longer on Ubuntu 20.04 than in Windows 10 $LATEST. In Windows, it runs too hot to have on my lap, and the fans run constantly.
In Ubuntu, it runs cool and I rarely hear the fan at all.
Check your firmware is current: that's step 1.
We're more likely to see people going back to dumb-terminals with GUIs being streamed to their ChromeOS from a server running linux than we are to see people using Linux.
AppImage and Flatpak are making inroads to eliminating this foolishness, but I still routinely run into software that isn't yet on board with that.
Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Sadly, while some parts of the Linux Desktop have come a long way since the 90s, many others have not.
> If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.
Presumably people use software to do something, and many times there simply isn't alternative software that does what you want to do and you're stuck with it even though it is toxic.
> Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.
I am a long time windows user who recently switched to PopOS.I'll say its getting better. This was one thing I was worried about switch back to linux. After I got fed up with what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, I decided I had it and switched. So far it has not been as a pain in the ass as much as it used to be. There are a few things I still have to tweak to get my work flow back to the way it was on Windows.
This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:
- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.
- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.
- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.
- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?
- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.
- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.
- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).
- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.
- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.
I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.
On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.
Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:
• GNOME Shell. No thank you.
• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.
• Cinnamon.
I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.
So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.
Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.
Nobody is kicking MS off of that pedestal, and unless we get some significant anti-trust legislation, we aren't getting that on Linux.
> Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
There's the challenge.
Who cared about "hardware"? Jony Ive and Jobs perhaps?
Who cares about OS performance? Linus Torvalds. I'm sure there are MS insiders who we don't know.
Who cares about the desktop? .....
The funny thing is the desktop was a solved problem with the mother-of-all-demos, and everything else is sugar on top, and yet there has to be this continual awful rebranding. Ok we went from VGA, to HD, to 4k HDR, but the underlying design and UI doesn't have to change so poorly each time.
The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago.
Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.
Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks.
WSL2 is just Linux in a VM which has been around like forever.
By the way it also put my system in a boot loop (blue screen on boot). I tracked it down to a buggy Lenovo driver but when I removed that it crashed on something else and I got sick of it and gave up.
WSL1 was really interesting, but ultimately Microsoft needed a flagship product to demonstrate the capabilities of Hyper-V and WSL was the perfect project.
Using it with the new terminal app is nice. It will load and unload the ram for the instance immediately whenever you pop open a linux shell. IMO opening and closing virtualbox/hyper-v takes longer and is clunkier. Overall it reduces friction.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/filesystems
In 2028, we'll be reading news articles about how the Year of Linux on the Desktop never really came, but the Year of Anything But Monetized Microsoft Windows sure did.
If I were making a list of companies and software packages that should be focusing on long term value rather than trading short term value for everyone hating your product, Windows would be a strong contender for top of the list. Microsoft may not want to depend on Windows, but throwing away so much user value for so little money is a stupid decision.
I just can't hammer on this point enough. There isn't that much money in advertising. The best advertisers in the world are looking at ~$10-20 per user per year at scale [1]. Advertising makes a lot of money because there's a lot of those users, not because they make that much per user. (That's why all the plans to "share the revenue" with the ad consumer are just hopeless. The money can't support it.) Windows ads can not necessarily jump to that level of performance right away, either. I really don't see how they could possibly be making enough money in their OS ads to make up for the goodwill they're pissing away. They're trading a money stream that still has at least a good decade in it, quite possibly more, for short term gain that isn't even all that impressive. Who is pressing for all these ads? What kind of analysis is being done internally that shows this is worth it? I find it hard to believe. Even a Windows in decline picking up licensing fees on new computer sales should be bringing in vastly more revenue than advertising possibly could. Ruining your 2025 sales for not really all that much money right now seems a very bad decision for a product coming up on 30 years old and still making lots of money.
[1]: You can do better for very targeted things like mesothelioma ads, but at scale, that's what Facebook is looking at.
When XP came to be, when Vista was released and DX 10 was vista only, when Windows 8 arrived, when all the talk about WinRT started, .... now Windows 11 with these issues.
i really recommend trying out wsl2. you now can install it from the window store.
I'll live with a dedicated VM for now.
WSL2 inside the virtual disk should be very fast.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste" -- Steve Jobs
Yes, the UIs Apple make are no longer anywhere near as intuitive as they were in Steve Jobs’ days, but Apple definitely still have their soul. You don’t even have to look further than the latest iMacs.
Really? It's all so painful sterile. Even their attempts at deviating from that coldness feel like someone with a spreadsheet calculated they should increase the brand-safe fun quotient in sector 7G by 4%.
[1] https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4
I basically lost the reason for having a windows touch+pen input screen:/ and nobody has found out how to get the killer app back.
I suspect that only pre-windows 8 good features will be retained over time
It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble.
Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.
But it's easy to copy-and-paste a bit of Powershell and just uninstall them anyway:
https://www.techsupportall.com/uninstall-built-apps-windows-...
There are 3rd party tools too: https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10...
Some random examples:
Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure.
Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox.
Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR.
Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows.
To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ.
There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.
It's a pig of an app especially on Mac (haven't tried Linux enough to verify) but it runs.
On my Mac it takes a minute to start (fast M1 system), randomly crashes or hangs and often uses more than half my memory. But it is supported :)
I feel a lot of responses here are missing the point. Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to. Linux is a bad tool for my required workflow (a workflow that isn't all that uncommon), so I keep Windows around because it's a more suitable tool for that.
I'll repeat what I said: Linux is a great tool when you're a junior individual contributor, but it sucks when you're responsible for external communications with MS Office organizations.
> Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to.
Is an entirely deliberate outcome that Microsoft has pushed hard for over decades (as you'd expect, since losing that monopoly is an existential threat to them).
I have no idea why you would say this. VS Code is an incredibly popular and well-liked product.
For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.
For example, instead of making improvements to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), Microsoft marked it as deprecated and "forced" everyone over to Visual Studio Code, whether they like it or not. E.g.: it's the only Microsoft IDE with PowerShell Core (pwsh) support.
Despite being the only supported Microsoft PowerShell IDE, VS Code does not play nice with PowerShell. For example, if I open Code, it opens three(3!) PowerShell terminals for unfathomable reasons. One of those starts with errors, the other works, but the third one is the default and crashes if you look at it sideways. Tab-complete just... stops. Even when tab-complete "works", it'll often start mid way through the list, hiding all of the relevant items and showing your random garbage like "quick start snippets" that make zero sense in the given tab-complete context.
I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Then there's always the smart-ass that explains patiently that this is all my fault for not "customising" my VS Code experience with JSON configuration settings that are seven levels deep and documented only in some blog article from three years ago. Meanwhile, I've never had to customise anything in Visual Studio. It "just works" the way you'd expect a Windows application to work. Not some Linux-Windows hybrid intended to be the "embrace" part of the unholy "embrace-extend-extinguish" trio.
I've spent most of my career in Visual Studio, I have a great deal of respect for how it just works, nobody's forcing me to leave it and yet... I'm mostly done with it. I'd rather use VS Code for C# development these days; it nails a lot of speed+UX things that Visual Studio doesn't.
I guess though if you're coming from raw notepad then that is a step up.
And with anything "browser based" like VS Code you're going to always spawn a ton of processes to do even the simplest things.
Sure, if your entire usage is the stuff that VS does well (which is a very narrow range compared to Code), and you are used to VS, it's probably an annoyance.
> I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Almost none of the things I do with Code I would have done with Notepad before. There are lots of non-IDE programmers editors that existed before Code. It may not be as good as VS or some IntelliJ variants for the use cases those IDEs are best for, but it's better for almost everything else than almost anything, and even for the things those major commercial IDEs specialize in, it's good enough for lots of specific use cases that when you need to do that plus other things, the context switch of using the commercial IDE for some tasks isn't worth it.
Similar "well liked" very often really means "the only product I've used" or "the only product I know well" :(
Win32?
Now I admit it is a bit more complex than calling C functions, but only if one insists in calling COM from C.
Win32 was the one and only GUI framework. If you wrote your app for Windows, it would look like Windows. This was true for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and XP.
Then Office got the Ribbon UI but they decided not to let anyone else use it. Then Vista got the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was a lot like HTML, but used XML and had a more powerful styling+templating system. At one point they even tried to make JavaScript Windows applications a thing over a decade before it unfortunately did become a thing (Electron).
The problem is that WPF, like HTML, allowed nearly "anything". You could style any control any way that you wanted. So WPF apps looked somewhat... random.
Worse, it turned out that WPF was just too slow for applications, to the point that Microsoft themselves almost never used it. Instead, they used incompatible bits and pieces of it with C++ so that they could have something reasonably fast. But this wasn't WPF, and didn't look the same as user apps, and wasn't even internally consistent!
Now there are something like 10+ UI frameworks from Microsoft alone, not including third-party ones that can run on Windows.
This is why the Windows 11 interface is such a mess.
Hot reloading with C++ outside Visual Studio? Good luck with that if not willing to shell out some bucks for Live++.
Other frameworks are still relearning the ways of WPF and Blend tooling.
Many things make me angry how Microsoft management is dealing with them, yet the alternatives are even worse.
Only the Java ecosystem is a sound alternative to MS tooling, regardless of their current misdirection.
Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.
Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced.
I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things).
Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.
It will eventually get to the point where it will take more settings-twiddling to make Windows do what you actually want than Linux does.
Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use, where you get your choice between "up to date but frequently broken" rolling-release[0] or "several years out of date but probably stable". To me, the idea it is considered reasonable to expect a user to set up a dev environment and compile software from source is ludicrous, but until relatively recently that's been the norm[1]. Thankfully, AppImage and Flatpak have been gaining popularity and making that much less of a problem.
Now the two biggest things keeping me from switching immediately are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane[2], and my Oculus isn't supported at all[3]. Still, I'll go to Linux before I go to Win 11.
[0] which still often has out of date and missing packages
[1] for anything not packaged by the distro or if you need a newer version
[2] thanks Bitcoin Idiots, LLC
[3] and from everything I gather no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
Re the second, I haven't built an app from source since about 2005? or so.
I've had to build apps from source - but these were free extras, not things I needed for basic functionality.
>I have an Nvidia 1080ti
Fwiw, I used Linux with an 1080 Ti for years; it was the first card I tried Linux on. The only hitch is having to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Distros with GUI tools for drivers (e.g., Manjaro) make this easy.
The only problem was actually my G-SYNC monitor. It was one of those super expensive ones with G-SYNC hardware in it. It turns out those just go black if you're not using an Nvidia card && aren't running proprietary drivers.
At some point, I gave it and my 1080 Ti away and got an AMD card with FreeSync monitors. Funnily, the FreeSync doesn't actually work. (Luckily, I don't care that much about tearing, and it's less noticeable at >=144 Hz.) AND, with AMD, you don't have a nice GPU settings panel like Nvidia provides (as basic as it is compared to its Windows equivalent). I've noticed no other differences. Nevertheless, having the open source driver in-kernel and not worrying about installing it out of band is nice.
>no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
Yep, probably; tech is too new. I don't even try stuff like that until it's 30 years old and mainlined. ;D
>GNOME
Yeah, I don't know how anyone sane likes GNOME, and it's insane to me that KDE isn't the default DE instead. I reckon it's a combo of inertia, the fact that the GNOME faction were the GPL purists compared to TrollTech back in the day, and (enduring?) convergence/low-tech user adoption hopes.
I have the opposite feeling: installation by search engine and speculative .exe downloads feels so dirty. There's the Windows store but it doesn't seem to actually work very often.
Then again, following StackExchange or blog posts to add keys and deb repos for Ubuntu is no better. The AUR is also similar, but I trust that a bit more than a random blog post since at least there's a flagging mechanism.
FWIW, I rarely have issues with rolling releases on Arch, certainly fewer issues than I have with Ubuntu repo package versions.
As mentioned, I've been using Linux for ten years as my only system and I installed at time over the twenty years before that. At worst, twenty years ago, I would contact people and got "I ignore your bug 'cause you don't have the very latest thing everywhere". In my current experience, I've never had to "talk" to anyone. It's not without hiccups but it's not "abusive" in the sense of Windows 'cause no one is fixing one thing to break another or gaslighting you about bugs.
If you're worried about support for the Nvidia 1080ti, I've found no problems with the Nvidia drivers for a 1050, a 1060, and the 1650 I'm currently using now. If you're just wishing to upgrade and would rather go the AMD route because of binary drivers, I get it. If you're worried about bad Nvidia drivers in linux, I've found them to be very good lately as long as you keep them updated.
WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor? https://github.com/google/gvisor
Others have done it.
Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx
The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator
As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
I can imagine that there are many departments that have to continually justify their existence and management tries to find the one-hit wonder that gets users engaged. All these departments try to have their dejure product integrated into Windows to have a chance to pump up their KPI.
You should be able to tell an operating system that it is not allowed to phone home. That is not possible in Windows, on the contrary, they have increased their spying dramatically. It has been a adversarial relationship for a long time by now and I don't see any attempts to change course or anyone that really cares for the platform. Their corporate integration and PC gaming keeps Windows relevant for now, but people will look elsewhere.
Me (but not Windows), my three grown children, my sister, at least one brother in law. At least half of the people I know personally. Half of them using laptops, the rest desktop machines. All of them have smartphones, and sometimes tablets, as well.
I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either.
It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads?
I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need.
And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".
"As a user I want to XYZ"
vs.
"As a product manager listening to what I think a user said, they want to ABC"
That's what happens when developers in large companies are not allowed or do not want to talk to users.
So every new install is a crapshot, I try to go local account only, but something gets in the way and I end up creating yet another one for that specific device.
It's madness.
A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery/safe mode and take a look.
But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn't work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it.
I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse.
If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?
Its just too much effort.
Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need.
(except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)
Specialized audio/video equipment? Probably, and of course the vendor will only provide them for Windows.
Needs a touchpad driver on both Fedora and Pop?_OS, I'm not sure if this is still true or not. I don't really care, since I can fix this.
I use all the major operating systems.
Yeah well, then you are among the lucky few, or you are not aware of the difference a good driver makes.
Right now I cannot get my linux workstation to do screencasting with hardware encoding(with OBS). On windows no problem.
And the laptops. On ALL my laptops I owned (6+) I tried linux, but experience was always worse, or even impossible. That includes tweaking, messing with grub, tlp and and in one instance even compiling the kernel. Still way worse battery life, performance, standby resume issues, freezes and dont get me started about touchscreen. I hate windows. But I have work to do.
But if your hardware is over a year old, the Linux experience tends to be rock solid.
Manjaro is way better than Ubuntu; KDE is way better than Xfce.
Debian is way better than Manjaro; i3 is way better than KDE.
Pop!_OS is way better than Debian; Gnome is way better than i3.
Microsoft has always been, and will always be an enterprise company, they do not care about Consumers, and they do not care about SMB business. they care about Large Enterprise.
I have seen it countless times in my career, SMB space and can be complaining up a storm about a problem for years but until some 20,000+ employee CTO has the problem MS will not give it the time of day.
It is all numbers, and if you are not a government or Large corporation Microsoft does not give you the time of day
The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed.
And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.
Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?
Not sure. Macs are not that available and, in some places, are prohibitively expensive. Others would love the everything-integrated experience while using software that runs only on Windows.
I'm not sure Microsoft even has that "core customer" as neatly defined as Apple (or Linux). Getting a Mac or a Linux box is a deliberate action, whilst, for the end user, getting a Windows box is the default when you get a "generic" computer.
One group I can think of is the corporate administrators, who want to deliver a locked down set of functions to corporate workstations - VPN settings, firewalls, blocked websites, custom update schedules, and so on. That same crowd also orders Macs and Chromebooks with the same goals.
What Microsoft can do is to offer tailored experiences for specific groups - people who want everything to just work (who'll be happy with Skype logging them on on boot, with OneDrive backing stuff up...), gamers who'll definitely not want Skype to interrupt them and who have nothing to back up to OneDrive, but, sometimes, want to record and stream their games, Windows developers who'll spend most of their time within Visual Studio and the MSDN KB (am I dating myself here?), and so on. I'm very sure they have a list of personas already built for that.
At least considering the product policy that Microsoft currently applies to Windows, I tend to doubt that. ;-)
I expect, want in fact, none of these things on my Windows PC. I do not trust Microsoft with my data, and this was before the last year of them being owned. It may not be right or even logical, but I imagine a ton of other users fit this same archetype. To me windows is the spyware ridden OS I use to pay a handful of games, and it basically always will be.
How do you know you aren't regularly running one (or more) of those? Or at least some stuff last updated sometime between W2K and W7?
It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.
Click "Add..."
Click "Finish" with "Microsoft Access Driver" selected (no, you're not finished)
Click "Select..."
Wonder if it can be found anywhere else. I did try the old progman.exe (via x86 compatability), and while it worked, it uses the modern API for the file dialog.
It's hard to tell for me to be honest, but are we (e.g. HN crowd) just a minority of power users that are in our own echo chamber complaining and making us happy doesn't really move the needle for MSFT?
I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards.
- Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click.
- I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical.
- All apps are not readily accessible from the start menu; I have to click another button to get to them.
- I have a 2-in-1 laptop, and turning it into tablet mode is wonky.
- I can't choose to not have grouped buttons on the taskbar.
- The context menus UX is horrible. Some context menu items are now two clicks away instead of one. Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding?
- The stacked notifications is confusing, and always shows the calendar when I open the notifications panel.
- Lots of crap pushed on me, like chat (aka Teams), widgets (which require a Microsoft account), 3rd party apps that look like they're installed but actually get downloaded/installed on first use.
I was able to fix a lot of those issues with ExplorerPatcher [0]. However, one day after a Windows update, Explorer didn't start at all after login (black screen, I thought Windows was hosed). This has since been fixed. But I decided enough is enough, and finally "upgraded" back to Windows 10.
The only good thing about Windows 11 is wslg, which provides out of the box support for Linux GUI apps (not available on Windows 10). But I can get the same result with an X server and some work.
[0] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features
The people who worked on the design use Macs. Seriously.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
The way I usually describe Win11's UI is as the worst of GNOME 3, MacOS, and Windows bundled up in a wrap of spyware.
They've spend the last few decades undoing all that work piece by piece until nobody actually knows how to use it anymore.
But it's hard for a company to justify "paying to leave shit alone" so even if a maximum was reached, it will recede.
Or they focus on new users and not on the amount of things people have already learned.
They killed the butterfly keyboard in 2019 (almost 4 years after it was introduced), and they killed the touch bar last year.
Yes, it took them some time, but they sorted these things out.
Or the ever more locked down environment, or the iOS style dumbed down apps they prefer now..
I think it was pretty much downhill after leopard :(
Yes, Apple doesn’t care about backwards compatability, so you might have to update your application so that it runs on the latest macOS version, but there’s no way around it.
You either have a gazillion competing frontend APIs to maintain compatability with shit that was written for Windows 3.1, or you don’t care about any of that and end up with almost entirely consistent visual styles across the entire OS.
I personally believe the reason that chrome/edge/firefox and apps in general have become so resource hungry is because all the devs have been given beefy machines to allow them to compile on-device and this has lead to the devs basically ignoring the app's resource budget. The ultimate "it works on my machine" shrug. imo windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram, let them optimize their code for that experience.
And slow HDDs. The gains of going from an HDD to an SSD have been squandered. The time it takes my computer to boot to a usable desktop feels the same as the bad old days with spinning HDDs.
I remember when SSDs where new and YouTubers were making videos of booting into Win7 with Office, etc. open in seconds. WTF happened?
And it has even less configurability than Windows.. Add-ons don't count because they often break.
The borders don't seem that much bigger than the ones in Windows 10. As for the extensions, I've been enabling those via extensions.gnome.org and have no problems so far on Buster or Bullseye.
This is the one that makes Gnome useable for me:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/
Cinnamon suffers from the same problem, FWIW.
edit: google says "british". In fairly common use in Australia.
- Word, PowerPoint, Excel, all one style - Teams, different style - Notepad, different style - Paint, different style
That's just within the MS ecosystem, leave that ecosystem and you rapidly find the same style mess that you get on Linux. It's basically due to the many different GUI frameworks, not the OS itself, hell MS supplies a whole list of frameworks that look different from each other.
Even MacOS/iOS which are _really_ good at having a cohesive UI style suffer from this problem.
I'd argue that if this is a valid complaint with Linux DEs (be it GNOME/KDE/what have you) then it's an equally valid complaint for Windows.
The only thing Windows has going for itself is backwards compatability.
I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow.
So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".
It's also the bane of its existence, because it means that they can NEVER retire anything, because by doing so they would break backwards compatability.
And that's actually how we ended up here. They can never get rid of even Win16 GUI (let alone Win32) because it would break shit written for Windows 3.1 (yes, there are still some dialogs in Windows 11 that use Windows 3.1 file select dialog, namely the ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit)[0].
So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Win32 isn't being used for anything they are making now, but it's used by other people, and more importantly it's used by all the old apps.
So now they have to justify ETERNAL support for an essentially deprecated API. Which they obviously aren't doing, which is why we're here.
> I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Unless they are extremely domain specific, surely there are modern alternatives?
[0] https://i.imgur.com/MrvLCSr.png
Yes there are probably alternatives, but that's the point, I like the way it's working now - I don't want to find new equivalents and then discover what's missing from them.
But I'm not sure what the existance of win32 has to do with anything - it's not like it stops win64 from working.
So I switched to Rectangle, which has optional Spectacle-compatible keybindings. https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
I also add RightZoom: https://www.blazingtools.com/right_zoom_mac.html
With them, window management becomes basically as good as any other desktop I use, and delivers most of what I like from tiling WMs.
Plasma Gnome MacOS Windows
That would be my pick top to bottom of best UIs
Windows is a shambles and it mentally destroys a piece of me everytime I use it
Same with Windows Explorer. Finder in macOS is still terribly crippled compared to it:
-It can't even perform folder merges in many cases, only allowing you to "Replace" the entire folder.
-You can't pause/resume file transfers.
-Cancelling large transfers is like canceling a print job in the 00's - it might cancel, but if it does it will be when 95% of the job is done anyway and you're screwed.
-You aren't shown metadata of any files you are prompted about.
-Batch management of file conflicts/actions not possible.
Most of these features were added to Explorer all the way back in Vista 15 years ago.
I keep telemetry enabled in Firefox in the hope that they see that I use all of the features that they later remove anyway. It seems like nobody is using metrics to prove that it's not safe to remove a feature. Or they say "oh, it's only 1% of users using that feature", not realizing how much 1% really is.
Not working well so far.
Windows 8 -> Windows 10
Windows Vista -> Windows 7
and even before that:
Windows Me -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP was a pretty solid chain that shows it over three releases (personally I think XP was buggier, I don't know what the idea was there other than to make some more money?).
This isn’t a transition which existed.
Windows ME didn’t get replaced by 2000, they were both released around the same time.
In terms of OS evolution, there were two separate branches, Windows NT and Windows 95.
On the 95 branch: 95 > 98 > ME > Discontinued
On the NT branch: NT 3.5 > NT 4 > 2000 > XP > Vista > 7 > 8 > 10 > 11
Non-business users were originally only ever on the 95 branch, then when it was discontinued they were transitioned to Windows XP, but the neutered home edition, which has been the model since.
From a technology stack side I realize you are right, but I did not experience the UI of Windows ME as a successor to 98 and instead experienced it as a proto-win2k. I'm talking about the UI evolution more than the kernel, which I realize is more subjective.
I do think there is a "paid forced beta -> better after overton window shift" pattern from for instance Vista to 7 and 8 to 10. Those were extremely obviously intended to be the same UI, the first with an extremely questionable UI and the second with a stabilized UI.
From a UI perspective, in the context of a useful work computer, Windows 8 was an absolute failure. Windows 10 I only tolerate because it's gotten most of the bugs worked out and Windows 7 is no longer getting security updates... I fully intend to skip Windows 11 and wait for the next one if I can possibly do so.
It will I'm sure still have a UI mess that makes it even less pleasant than Windows 10, as (in my opinion) Windows 7 was better than Windows 10 and I would have preferred they just keep fine tuning that UI.
I just want my OS to be an OS instead of an experience, and for things to just iterate better rather than see massive overhauls for what they must know is mostly a business OS. It's such a strange approach, I guess they're just worried about going the way of Sun or IBM by not adopting the latest trends. Or maybe they have a business team and a home computer team and the latter is trying to keep up with Apple while the prior is begging them to stop...
Windows me - bad
Windows xp - good
Windows vista - bad
Windows 7 - good
Windows 8 - bad
Windows 10 - good
Windows 11 - bad
For a bad release windows 11 is pretty good. This gives me hope that windows 12 will be their best ever.
This is why it would have been smart of them to stick to windows 10 like they planned, but like picking at a scab they just couldn’t let go of the idea of rearranging the deck chairs and rechristening the ship as windows 11.
Nice idea but it just doesn't fit.
Windows 95/98/Me were all poor.
XP was widely panned when it came out because existing hardware wasn't quite good enough and it was riddled with security issues. Rememebr SP2?
Where did 8.1 go?
Windows 10 is full of the stuff people are complaining about in this thread.
95 good. 98 bad.
2000 good, XP bad (for me), Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 better but not great, 10 OK, 11 bad.
As always: https://www.badscience.net/wp-content/uploads/complicatedcov...
("I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." -- Ben Goldacre)
...and for a good release Windows 10 is pretty bad.
Despite all the flak it got at the time, Windows 8.1 (plus StartIsBack to hide metro crap) is still the best Windows released in the last decade.
The Win9x/ME (please read as DOS based) series of OS was intended for home users.
The NT/2K was intended for business users.
Only as an example most games at the time would not have run on NT/2K, and Win9x/Me was essentially single-user only.
For some reasons with XP the good MS guys decided to force down the throat of pro/business users (that were very, very, very happy about Windows 2000) the bells and whistles and graphics they didn't ask for and force down the throat of home users (that were very, very happy about Windows 98, not so much about ME [0]) the complexities of the NT, user access, permissions, NTFS, and other things that at the time made no sense whatever.
Basically they (the MS guys) unified the two branches into one and the result was (of course) a compromise.
[0] I know it is hard to say this, but ME, beside some quirks that there was no time to fix, was not as bad as it has been depicted, as a matter of fact the "best" bastard retro system you can make today is a Windows 98 with selected components of ME integrated/backported or a ME with some features of 98SE brought back, the failure of ME (not entirely unlike the later Vista one) was greatly induced (IMHO) by two factors, underpowered hardware and issues with drivers, both - if you want - essentially the responsibility of OEM's.
I wasn’t aware that XP was meant to be an upgrade for 98/ME (home users) as well as for 2000 (business users). Talk about posing off both set of customers at the same time.
I personally didn’t mind ME and liked XP, but then it was as a student who didn’t do anything serious with computers so it doesn’t count much.
I disagree somewhat. The 9x family didn't handle multitasking well and had driver issues, frequently leading to lock-ups and BSODs. The architecture didn't handle isolation well, but NT did. Windows NT mostly stayed out of people's way in XP unless they looked for those menus. It was a huge problem for Vista, though.
1) free (in the sense of included in the price or their new PC) a somewhat unstable OS with lower requisites (particularly about RAM) where most software somehow ran (including games)
or:
2) a more stable, paid (costing if I recall correctly more than the equivalent of 2-300 US$ of today) OS needing double the RAM (think of 128 vs. 64 MB), definitely slower, where they could not run many games
for some reasons many chose #1, and BSOD's (on the 9x/Me) were so common that it was perceived by many (that had not any occasion to experience the stability of NT and of 2000) as a "normal state of things".
This is literally the first thing I do on a fresh install. What the hell were they thinking
> start menu further ruined
but whyyyyyyyyyyyy
I honestly never had a problem with Microsoft Windows over its UI decisions until Windows 8.
Windows up to and including Windows 7 were actually ok, because you could put the start menu on the side, switch to classic UI, turn off the graphical embellishments that your shit laptop didn't like, and so on.
Windows 8 became very tabletified, but with options to switch to classic UI, and Windows 10 is the same but arguably a bit more bizarre.
Neither UI was really consistent or knew what it wanted to be, and worst of all, the user can't decide what it should be.
But whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
(edit: from throwaway as a protective measure)
It’s a kind of thing where the usual growth metrics “looks fine”, so it’s hard to justify big initiatives to fix it, yet everyone knows it’s broken. One day, those metrics will start looking bad and then they will try to fix it, but by then it would be too late.
The OS features that are getting attention, such as VS Code and WSL are ones that have synergy with the more important businesses and help them sell. Things like fixing the safari park of UI conventions don't have that synergy, so the resources that could improve them go to the other businesses. The ads and forced sign-ins are also part of this; in the long-term, they'll drive some users away from Windows, but right now, they funnel money and users to places that should matter more to the company in the long-term.
MS aren't listening to Windows feedback - and the internal feedback from people working on the product is usually part of it in these situations -, because what's good for Windows isn't what's good for MS.
Or do we need to get Enterprise?
There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what they want.
You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.
Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.
Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.
File comparison, hard applications, legacy code, can be compiled to WASM and run quite well in the browser. The pieces are in place to do it, they just need polishing and tuning to make it ubiquitous. Even Excel could be compiled like this but again MS wants to own you and pin you over a barrel while extracting everything they can from you, so Excel won't be available. But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on proprietary/confidential/classified information.
>But many/most Spreadsheets can be done in Libreoffice, or code or no/low code alternatives.
Not when you're working on spreadsheets that you need to send to organizations that heavily rely on MS Office.
Why not? The WASM approach the OP is suggesting works entirely locally, the web is simply pushing client code to your browser.
Because "the web is simply pushing client code to your browser". Untrusted code. Which may violate the confidentiality of you document. I still don't get it why companies which deal with "confidential information" are very happy to put those documents in the cloud. But ... it is their data and they decide what to do with it.
Is the WASM "untrusted"? Sure, I guess, all code you haven't written yourself is "untrusted" by default. Why would a native application shipped via CD or download be any more "trusted"?
Oh and it's soooo slow :(
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365
However Excel Online breaks down quickly with large file sizes, loses formatting and struggles mightily with complex macros.
[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/new-condit...
This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because you can customize things right down to the kernel level and generally get the result you're looking for in a pretty direct fashion. I now have it set up so that it detects the model of keyboard I plugged in and redirects specific models to specific macro layers - a seemingly obvious two-keyboards use case that can be a serious hassle on Windows without resorting to a hardware solution.
And that browser more likely is owned by oogle...
For example: right now, it's impossible to edit a document online with Track Changes without showing all the changes (which makes documents practically unreadable). And you don't even have pages online, documents are shown with a continuous layout where it's difficult to know where pages start and end.
When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway.
On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.
And also, can’t you just disable Secure Boot?
[1]: "On Ubuntu, all pre-built binaries intended to be loaded as part of the boot process, with the exception of the initrd image, are signed by Canonical's UEFI certificate, which itself is implicitly trusted by being embedded in the shim loader, itself signed by Microsoft.
On architectures or systems where pre-loaded signing certificates from Microsoft are not available or loaded in firmware, users may replace the existing signatures on shim or grub and load them as they wish, verifying against their own certificates imported in the system's firmware."
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot#How_UEFI_Secure_Boot...
I've not done it personally as most of my machines I just disable Secure Boot, but it's an option if you know about it and buy carefully.
I see what you mean now, I screwed up reading your first comment.
Even though Secure Boot can be disabled on most hardware afaict [0] that's still a step consumers won't take so the point still stands easily. Especially with the amount of "you will break everything and kick a a puppy" that manufacturers throw in there to disuade anyone who manages to get to the menu.
[0] worked at a repair ahop until 1.5ish weeks ago, have disabled SB on a lot of hardware.
IIRC I read an anecdote a few years back that if MS ever lost the code to their office products they couldn't re-implement it 100% compatible again since they don't completely abide by any standards like the Open Document Format.
I will always continue to harbor hatred for MSs Office products since when I had to write a big piece of homework for 9th grade in school (a "Facharbeit", kinda like a mini Bachelor's thesis as an intro to scientific writing) I then had to transfer the file from my computer via USB drive to my fathers' PC to print it out. Naive as i was, I didn't think to double-check the formatting after the transfer since it was the same software on the same version on the same OS etc. Ended getting a "1 (very good)" for content but the formatting grade was so bad it dragged the combined mark down to a "3 (satisfactory)". Since then I'll only print documents after converting to pdf and double-checking everything is ok and will never voluntarily use an MS Office product ever again.
Linux would kill it if it made it trivially easy to run Windows inside a sanitised and privatised container or VM that prevented telemetry and all the other nonsense.
I suspect a lot of people would accept a modest performance hit if that were possible.
She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders.
There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.
> There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.
I'm not aware of any generation for which being comfortable with those things hasn't put one in, at least (I'm being very conservative), the top 20% of computer literacy. Most people are bad at just using a computer—given how long it's been a problem, there's either a lot of essential complexity there that cannot be mitigated or avoided to improve usability, or we as an industry have just done a terrible job designing desktop operating systems for regular people. I don't think tablets et c. have much to do with it.
Edit: Defacto above meaning, when I go into best buy, that is what is pre-loaded. Or I go to walmart, that is what comes on the computer.
Edit: 'there is probably a good future where Chrome OS' typo or poor wording. Meant to say something along the lines of, 'there is probably a good chance that a Chrome OS future happens'
That's even worse, because as the saying goes, those who never had freedom (or ownership, for that matter) won't miss it.
https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/chrome-os/chromebook/228534/....
I noticed chromebook getting big in the education space and really getting into the hands of kids 7 years so. Your business executives I assume are old enough to pre-date chromebook's big debut in eductaion? They likewise are probably most familiar with Windows and that is why they hand it down as the required bit of software? or probably a sweet business contract, that also plays a factor.
A lot of it is security hardening but the problem is I have to give all control to Apple. There is no way for me to change anything in the read only OS part without the whole rigmarole of booting into recovery mode and blessing my changes with every update. There should be a way I can sign my own changes. It's the Apple way or the highway. And I'm running into more and more issues when the Apple way is just not good enough for me.
I'm really so happy with having options again with KDE. No more opinionated software for me.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...
If you have to remove a load-bearing pillar to install a light-switch, the design is poor, to say the least.
- root access - doesn’t disable SIP
- Disabling SIP requires you to go through many contortions.
People didn’t need to disable SIP to install Chrome. They were doing it for other reasons.
This morning I was reminded, my work Mac has a dozen daemons trying to contact things I don't want, such as icloud, itunes, google, etc. A fraction of these are ostensibly useful, but I had to resort to Little Snitch to block them because the OS is read-only, i.e. insanity.
Even the user-hostile mess of Windows allows me to turn off the worse services... although even that is dwindling.
It's a GOOD thing! The more people that migrate off of Windows the better the world will be because then companies can (hopefully) focus their software development on non-closed, cross-platform ecosystems.
Microsoft is long overdue for a market correction. Hopefully the OS market will diversify, bringing a cambrian explosion of life into the market.
edit: https://archive.ph/q8ayE
These performative acts of shoving politics where it doesn't belong doesn't do anything to change the situation, they just make people like me angry.
Microsoft’s ad revenue is $10B (1). Allowing advertisers to send ads based on user profiles is a major feature of digital advertising. Collecting telemetry data improves the user profiling.
These types of changes have a direct positive impact on one of Microsoft’s fastest growing revenue stream. This will lead to meaningful revenue growth.
(1) https://digiday.com/media/microsofts-ad-revenue-hit-10b-and-...
That is not the case, its best thought of as a batch of little companies that band together to create a product. These companies may compete for resources and attention internally and so each one will optimize for their own benefit.
Ads in Edge? That's probably a decision made by some Principal Program Manager with director support on the browser team. The metrics that get tracked for that event are likely how many people click through the ad, rather than the over all impact to the OS.
The OS Core team doesn't have the influence to say no, or stop the browser from showing those ads. I recall internally when I (a paying customer for O365) got a toast (that is what a popup ad is called internally) for O365 and I decided to raise an issue.
Some PM II (mid-level PM was running the campaign, and they were showing metrics that more people signed up for O365 as a result of the campaign, so per them it was good. I was not in that organization and since that director had OKRs that required signups, he told me to go away.
The core OS stripped down has none of these things, but at integrated build, lots of stuff gets put in, and when one team says no to something, often another one will say yes. A good example is that Office has its own update infrastructure and tooling outside of Windows Update. Why? Office wanted to deliver updates on weekly basis and Windows Update said no as that would be too impacting for users, so Office simply said ok and built their own.
These issues rarely if ever get surfaced to an executive, as by the time the metrics get up to a CVP generally they are showing broader trends, like adoption, or game breaking bugs, or as you note, the line going up. Executives do not get these problems (such as inconsistent UI) to them. Those things rarely rise above a Group PM or Engineering Manager level, and those people often do not care about the complaint as for that metric helps them or is part of their strategy.
Windows, the product team cannot do anything about it due to political problems internally at MS and that is not the engineering team behind Window's fault. We (as that was a team I was on) hated when a product team would do something obnoxious and if we could catch it prior to release would often bluntly complain. More often than not we would get told that we were the platform and to stay out of the other teams business.
Anyways, there isn't some mass company dark pattern strategy or other conspiracy, just a bunch of little factions that are all optimizing for their own interests. Office is probably the worst offender of the batch (Skype, Teams, OneDrive) and Windows can do little about it.
In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account.
Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit..
It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.
All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.
At this point I’m thinking of deleting my Windows partition altogether.
Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.
The whole OS market is pretty rough right now.
This is my feeling over the past few years. No OS is in a great spot. But I have hopes for Linux being better supported with Valve using it on the Steam Deck. (Not the highest hopes, but more hope than I used to have)
Windows 10 is stable for me too though I was hit with the eTPM stutter bug (I use my Windows box exclusively for gaming, in particular VR which I didn't feel like figuring out in proton). But the windows dark patterns are surely there and I hate them. But as it's only my gaming machine I can deal with it.
And Mac... Well I moved away from it because Apple is locking down too much and I've come to hate opinionated software. Still they seem to be doing nice things with M1..
I've also played FFXIV and Path of Exile extensively in Linux.
The only thing left is Adobe products which is honestly a matter of time. Just really takes hammering out some market share until Adobe relents.
A lot of the best kernel, driver, and gui shell improvements have only really hit their stride in the past 24 months.
Things are coming together rapidly.
Could you elaborate on that?
I've been using desktop Linux almost exclusively for the past 24 years (ouch!), and recent years seem pretty average to me. Things work great, most of the time, like always.
Unless you're talking about gaming. I'm not a gamer (or i wouldn't be such a long time Linux user) but I hear there's enormous progress on that front.
If Linux based gaming continues on the current trajectory, I could imagine a world in which a great chunk of the consumer market switches from Windows to Linux.
I assume by
> using a window manager for ever
I've used WindowMaker as a Window manager for decades. Only recently did I decide to switch to Mate because I wanted a taskbar at the bottom with useful things like applets to show and switch Wifi/network, volume control and often-used icons/launchers.
TBH, if I could get things like tint2 and yabar working with the mate applets, I'd probably switch back to WindowMaker in a heartbeat.
Pnmixer for Pulseaudio, NM-applet/connman...
I don't run Linux anymore (not natively, for everyday use, in any case) -- like most people in this thread I also think the desktop is a shitshow these days but it's a particularly bad shitshow in Linux, and I was using Linux in 2003 so I know what a shitshow looks like. But when I do still need to touch a Linux machine, WindowMaker is still my WM of choice. It's really good.
Apparently it's not great at WiFi but I don't use that on my main driver (NUC).
On Linux I use docker a lot, and while FreeBSD has its excellent jails, it doesn't have the whole ecosystem around them. So that's why I use Linux on the server side more.
I never use the Windows box for anything else. No files, no coding, no internet browsing, no music, etc. No cameras, microphones, bluetooth adapters, etc. are installed. I turn that thing on every few weeks or so.
This has worked well, and is a compromise with which I can live. Try it, it's blissful!
Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't work very well today (I have hope that we'll get there soon). Windows VMs work a lot better on my Ubuntu desktop, but a lot of our dev tools have mostly macOS users, so getting them to work with Ubuntu takes a bit of massaging at times. macOS is hard / unsupported to virtualize, so I basically have to use macOS when developing macOS software.
If we could run macOS as a VM, I'd choose Ubuntu / Pop!_OS for most things.
https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM
Eg https://kb.parallels.com/en/125105 and https://osxdaily.com/2021/07/15/how-install-macos-virtualbox...
I recently got a windows pc just for gaming, and god DAMN it's annoying. Even worse than Vista. Nothing is consistent anymore and everything is always trying to grab my attention for irrelevant shit. What the hell happened :/
https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
However, it's ironic that the author has now given up on Windows, for the problems the script attempts to solve.
As a long time Windows and Linux user who recently got a MacBook Pro, I find the UI incredibly weird and confusing compared to what I'm used to.
The hardware is however more than good enough that I'm willing to put up with MacOS until I get used to it.
As someone who grew up with MS-DOS, Windows used to be really good until Microsoft started getting desperate and started shoving crapware down your throat... ads for Office, preinstalled Teams that starts up by itself, Skype, stupid Defender scans, nonstop UAC warnings, won't let you use a password instead of a PIN... all these dumb, user-hostile decisions. Zero respect for their users.
Apple has a bit of that now (iCloud logins, OS level notifications, bundled apps) but not quite as bad.
If Linux had Adobe Suite and MS Office I'd probably switch in a heartbeat. Need those to collaborate with other non-devs in the office.
Ctrl+d, like in emacs
> no home
Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.
Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.
> Login screeen does not remember the language
It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.
> animations come back after every update
Yeah, that's fair.
> Muscle memory
That's not.
> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me
I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.
I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.
However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.
My experience is that the only apps that use actual Ctrl on macOS are GTK apps, like Inkscape, and terminal apps (because Ctrl-C should be quite different from activating the menu item corresponding to the Cmd-C shortcut). Unfortunately, if you use non-native apps, you're going to get a non-native experience.
It's like this since it became clear smartphones were going to become the bigger market, so around 2012 or so.
Investment into desktop everything went down: OSes, apps, games, etc.
Heck, you can see this even for Open Source desktop stuff. There was a flurry of releases of cross platform Open Source software around 2009 or so: KDE4, better support for GTK on Windows, etc. All of that has slowed down or frozen in time.
Mobile has sucked all the money and hype from desktop development.
Only game that hasn't worked with Proton is Oneshot and its kina understandable considering the games context... It did have a linux version that mostly works out of the box though!
So mine last Windows was XP.
All?
My experience is that 90% work fine, 9% have weirdness, (for instance, voices in Skyrim are out of sync with mouth movements) and 1% of them have game breaking bugs.
Any time it happens to me, it's usually low resources because of something. Most often some chrome tab (or 3) that are going crazy. I also discovered that one of the apps that I thought was using hardware acceleration actually wasn't. The CPU usage made it pretty clear that the CPU was doing a ton of work.
The only annoying bug/problem that I have actually, it's that Dolphin could have a erratic behavior if I had mounted a SMB folder via an VPN and I end the VPN before un-mounting the SMB folder.
Could be a GPU thermal issue, happens to me with old games that have no FPS limit, then the GPU does so much work that it hangs for some reason(Nvidia GT970), I am not sure if is my GPU broken/dusty, the driver bugged or Xorg, Windows users only see a game crash not a full system crash.
I'm not sure how that sort of behaviour isn't a clear violation of all kinds of privacy laws in 2022.
I guess we need higher fines to get the message across.
That's been the case for 4 years now, none of these fines have occurred. The total amount of fines across all companies over those 4 years is barely above 1Bn.
> The limiting factor at the moment seems to be a lack of resources for the regulators that are responsible for enforcing privacy rules
Not just resources but also willingness. I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this and campaigning for doing so is a politically-risky move, as not only does your campaign rely on the same companies that would be fined, but those companies now control the majority of humanity's social fabric and can trivially restrict even organic sharing of information/links about your campaign.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR. Hint: if an industry making a huge chunk of its profit based on non-consensual data collection complains about data protection laws, it means the laws are actually working as designed. Most likely, this insanity will also go ahead, if it didn't already.
The largest fines so far have been approaching 9 figures, far more than the "couple of million" in the comment I replied to above.
That's not pocket change even for a multinational and of course there has to be reasonable due process before handing out that kind of penalty. If anything I'd say the fact that several eight-figure penalties have already been handed down is reassuring.
I have the feeling that nobody actually wants to enforce this
I'm genuinely curious about how you formed that impression. Here in the UK our data protection regulators have been fairly consistent in their public views on these issues under multiple Information Commissioners now and have handed down some significant penalties, so I don't really buy the conspiracy theories about corruption and so on.
Worse: in the UK, there's been news about actually weakening the GDPR, based on the Culture Secretary being stupid (or having financial incentives for doing so) and actually believing the tech industry's vilification of the GDPR.
As someone who is both a strong proponent of privacy safeguards and involved in running businesses that actually have to comply with the GDPR, I have very mixed feelings about this.
On one hand I don't like the idea of weakening important privacy protections and I have no faith whatsoever in the competence of the current government here to understand the technical or social implications of these policies.
On the other hand I also don't think much of the GDPR as written. It's full of ambiguity and it is unnecessarily difficult for a good actor to comply with it, particularly smaller organisations that don't have dedicated staff to deal with this kind of admin and also don't have any interest in doing things with personal data that most of us here probably wouldn't like. People like to focus on a tiny number of points that we'd probably agree are positive steps or at least well-intentioned, but the GDPR is roughly a hundred pages long and that's before you include supporting materials like official guidance on interpretation from all the different regulators. There are a lot of small and a few big problems in the rest of those pages once you look past the headlines. Not coincidentally those areas also tend to leave loopholes that some bad actors are relying on to escape the trap.
I have multiple experiences dealing with the UK one, spending unreasonable amounts of time raising complaints for obvious breaches of the GDPR with no outcome. I've summarized my experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662905
Not to mention, this high-profile incident which they are themselves proud enough to announce on their own website: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl... - so you've got a company whose entire business is to manage people's personal data and is large enough to have the resources to understand & comply with the regulation, and you caught them red-handed misusing data that people outright had no choice in giving up (I don't know any bank that allows opting out of CRA reporting even if you never actually intend to take out credit) for a purpose that's definitely not in the data subjects' best interests, and the outcome is a letter?
What message do you think the above sends? To me it sends that breaching the GDPR absolutely does pay and you should absolutely do it at least once because even getting caught brazenly breaching it (considering the size & resources of said companies, number of people impacted and the fact people had literally no choice) will lead to just politely being asked to stop with no monetary penalty nor having to compensate the affected users.
The response to every legal argument is "yes, you do" as long as you have enough money. Lo and behold, Microsoft is swimming in it.
I'm not even sure it's possible, I've tried multiple approaches but gave up after almost having to do a clean install.
Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.
Almost had me asking hn if we were abusing throwaway accounts.
- Google search
- Google maps
- YouTube
- FB Messenger/WhatsApp
- Instagram
- Oculus
- FB Marketplace
I have reported them but Facebook won't do anything about them.
I never forgave M$ for IE6 though, so I’m biased. A new generation is being lulled into thing they’re the good guys.
So being the least bad tech company isn't too convincing.
That expends to MS Office subscriptions as well. I once bought one through (stupid, I know) GoDaddy as an extension to my domain mail service. It never worked, not once. I still paid for it, so. The user account didn't even exist on MS's end. Only way to get rid of it was to cancel the credit card behind it. MS stopped bothering me after two months of unpaid subscriptions...
Really? For me, when I install Windows with a Microsoft account, it makes my username just something like "nyusz" rather than "nyuszika7h".
I will occasionally log into my personal Microsoft account when accessing a Microsoft website when I am on Lunch to work on some personal projects.
At work last week, I was upgraded to Office 365 and as a result I started downloading the latest versions and trying it out in various ways. One of these was upgrading my old OneNote into the latest version (2013 -> 365)
Saturday morning, I booted up my own different PC at home and notice in the "Recommended" section on the Windows 11 start menu "Work 365". This is the name of the OneNote I created at work when I upgraded the document. I do not even have Office on my own PC. Hovering over it would show that it was located in my Works One Drive folder.
I must have been logged into my personal account on OneNote and it somehow meta-data? links it between the work and personal accounts.
I am now in process of removing all traces of my personal account from Windows on my work laptop as the very last thing I want to happen is to see personal files appearing in the Recommended section of my works laptop!
I had my young son with me at the time so I didn't investigate it further. What would have I seen if I clicked the More > button in the Start Menu - would there have been more leakage? Have I logged into my work account on my personal PC at some point? Why did it only show the OneNote file but not any others? What happened if I actually clicked it and tried to open it? Did I simply make a mistake when using multiple accounts in one OS?
There are numerous questions I am asking myself that I don't have an answer for yet.
As far as I can see, I have removed all traces of my personal account off my work laptop now but I am hoping (not sure this is the correct wording in this context) that I can see still the file in my Recommended Section when I get home.
I really would like to know exactly how it can happen.
I can’t, in theory, access my work’s OneDrive from my personal machines, due to a required SSO on top of Microsoft’s, and a VPN requirement. But somehow there are some of my personal files in my work’s OneDrive.
I don’t know how this happened. I can’t log into our VPN as it’s machine-locked (it checks before allowing you on) and therefore OneDrive is supposed to stop me accessing it.
I keep getting emails from Microsoft about an Azure Enterprise agreement that they have decided I have power over, along with a group of people from a random company that I’m not related to in any way. Someone did a typo and included me by accident? Not likely as I have an email address that’s difficult to accidentally use via typo.
Microsoft are taking people’s responses to the group as authorised instructions as to what to do with their enterprise agreement. I’ve responded several times and said I am not related but they keep emailing about it. I know a lot about that company’s people, structure and agreements with Microsoft now!
and then you try to look at a picture of your kids but it's a HEIC file from an iPhone so Windows says you have to go to the Store and download Microsoft HEVC decoder which for some reason wasn't bundled with Windows but hey it's just a dollar oh that's nearly free we just need your credit card details and e-mail and make a user account and would you like a free newsletter with that LOOK OVER THERE whileweswitchdefaultbrowsers and check out what else is on sale today
Not sure it’s possible anymore though or what an alternative might be now.
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You pay 145€ for the Home or 259€ for the Pro Edition and they treat it like it's freeware.
I want my computer to support me in achieving what I want to do, but Windows just keeps grabbing attention with intrusive ads and never-ending notifications.
I can see why Microsoft are trying to explore other revenue sources. If they give Windows away they make a huge loss but if they charge for upgrades nobody will upgrade and it will become a support nightmare.
I’m dead serious - unless you have a specific business reason like most do to use this POS, I can’t imagine anyone actually choosing to use Windows over the alternatives. What a seriously awful piece of software.
If you want a computing environment that is responsive to your needs, you need to step away from products of those autocratic organizations.
Mainly what I want is to not think about my tools at all, and just pick them up or put them down whenever the need arises, without worrying about whether I'm making a secret catastrophic error or that my tools are pretending to be my tools, while actually their master is somebody else.
I gladly sacrifice control to Apple the same way I sacrifice control to my doctor or to my sanitation engineer, or, if I had a car, to my car manufacturer.
I'm not a teenager exploring the universe of options anymore. Now I just want to get from point A to point B.
If I agree with you that Apple sucks, then you were right that Apple sucks.
If I say most of Apple's design and philosophy decisions are the best option for someone like me, then you were right Apple sucks because I'm trying to convince myself otherwise.
The only version of my experience you'd believe is the one you believed already: that Apple sucks.
Clearly almost all Apple fans have to be in the former group. It is just possible you are in the latter, instead.
It is the same, BTW, for political parties.
That is just a huge WTF. Since the very earliest versions of Windows there has always been the option of a dark (or white, or rainbow, or ...) theme, where you could adjust the colours and sizes and fonts, and everything using Win32 would follow it. Here's Win95 example:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5...
Yet if I'm understanding correctly, in Win11 that stopped working completely? It really sounds like the Windows team has no one left who knows what used to be possible but isn't anymore, being replaced with probably younger developers making constant excuses to "modernise" by rewriting and breaking stuff. To use an analogy, they're not just reinventing the wheel but making it square.
I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.
I agree almost, but not quite 100% with that. My tiny disagreement: The decline set in a bit earlier, not after but some time in the W7 era: Up until some point you could set window border width to 0 in the Appearance control panel applet; after that this input field was apparently made read-only for the user. For a while after that you could "hack" that by editing a Registry value, but AFAICR they disabled that, too. (Or rather, if not exactly disabled Registry editing, made the display driver ignore it.)
And then rounding the corners of the said ”wheel” :)
Gnome/KDE still offer proper themeing that works with proper native apps but even there you've got web browsers and electron apps that ignore it.
Sure, Apple has a different workflow. Pro-Apple peeps insist I should 'learn it'. Why? I know the Apple workflow. In my eyes, it is inferior to the one offered by Windows, and KDE on Linux. Everyone has their opinions of course. I respect people who can get stuff done on a Mac, but I'm not one of those people. I grew up on MS-DOS, Linux, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, etc. I'm left-handed and use alternative inputs.
I also don't care about the UX design. It's a step above Windows 10, that is all that matters.
Both Apple AND Microsoft could learn a ton of stuff from each other. For Apple: Don't dictate user workflows. For Microsoft, consistency is key.
That is all.
Have you tried other desktop environments on linux?
Glutton for punishment I see. Seriously, I used WSL2 under Win10 for a year as a (very) poor man's linux for $dayjob. Recently switched to a Mac. I do keep pressing on getting Linux laptops, having run them for work for the last 22+ years ...
WSL2 is garbage. Pure and simple. Even on an 8 core 16 thread 64 GB monster with Nvidia graphics. My view on it is that it is an attempt by MSFT to staunch the flow of developers off their platform. To say "hey, see, we do linux within windows". But then you use it. And get bitten in the behind, repeatably, by the memory compaction bit, even after tuning the overall memory usage of WSL2.
I was able to get a rough linux desktop by using MobaXterm, single root display, and then running Xfce4 (which I had to build myself, as our corporate approved WSL2 distro was/is broken in so ... so many ways). This setup regularly crashed WSL2, and often windows.
When I mentioned this in various fora, windows fans claim that the OS isn't buggy, it must be the hardware. Many BSOD, many hangs, crashes, etc. Couldn't be the OS. Had to be hardware. Or drivers.
Yeah. About that.
I believe that feature was also recently removed in Windows 11
Above all, I think the problem is in priorities - Notepad and Task Manager _should_ be consistent with the OS. But when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS, it's fair to start raising some questions.
Do you have any evidence that Notepad and Task Manager required "so much focus"?
The new Notepad's about as bare-bones as the old Notepad, it just happens to use XAML Islands for the UI. It would be surprising if it significantly detracted from other efforts.
Yes, I am fully aware of the fact that different teams do different things at a big company, but funnily enough when asked about high-priority issues the answer is almost universally "We don't have enough time and/or developers to tackle this right now." But there is magically time for MSN toolbars and Notepad tweaks.
as a user it makes getting help when something is not working (which is often) very difficult and borderline impossible
not to mention completely infuriating
if i could boot directly into a launcher for my games i would do it in a heartbeat. get the OS out of my way please