Have the exact same experience with my mothers laptop. Some acer shit.
Within a few months of her using it she complained it’s slow, takes ages to turn on etc. After removing almost everything from the manufacturer it was usable. But even now she barely uses the machine and never installs anything and it’s unusable slow with essentially zero usage after a couple of years. She’s not even ran any updates. It wouldn’t surprise me if these machines are built to die.
Try Ubuntu (or whatever Linux you enjoy, it's just that Ubuntu is mostly hand-off for 5 years), I just bought a ~6 y/o laptop for my brother, a Fujitsu Lifebook E736 (introduced in 2016), 512 GB hard drive, 8 GB ram, some Corei5 CPU 150 eur, I did put a new battery in it. Works like a charm, 0 complaints.
But, to be honest, the guy that sold it put some super bare Win10 on it and that also felt pretty fast.
In any event, for email and web-browsing I think Ubuntu is just perfect. I have it on our HTPC and the whole family uses it without thinking twice. And it stays fast.
Oh, our family laptop (the one the kids use, and I do on occasion) is a Dell Latitude E5450, first introduced in 2015(!), I got it 2nd hands in 2019, it looked barely used. I put Ubuntu on it (but recently I installed Arch, when I regularly use a machine myself I prefer it), the thing still feels like a fast new laptop, the kids went through Covid with it, using Teams (for Linux) and doing online homework. I use it for dev work on the side. Love the machine.
My advice: Get a second hand business model from a good source (some local trader that gets good reviews, or you can visit, we have a lot of local IT people gathering on a website here that sell older business hardware [0, Dutch website]). Plus, it's nice to give stuff a second life instead of buying cheap throw-away shitware for cheap.
I use Fujitsu since a long time at home (3 notebooks, 1 workstation). I think Fujitsu has almost none bloatware. For me the reason, why I buy this (a bit expensive) brand .. and Linux does work mostly well too.
During the pandemic I used what I had to hand, I chucked Fedora on a Vostro 3750 (which was my old dev laptop years ago so had an SSD and 16GB of RAM) and the thing was perfectly acceptable for all his schooling, youtube stuff, since that model was a 17" battleship desktop replacement it was perfect for him with an external keyboard and mouse .
My mother has a gas meter in her home, which requires a usb device to be plugged into her laptop to load value on to this device which is then plugged into the meter and transfers the value. It is not compatible with anything but Windows.
arguably just force you to use windows. you could possibly go to a neighbor or library or something, but.. well.. a library would probably lock down random usb drives being put in or random software to manage gas meter accounts. and ... your neighbor may not want to share because you'd have access to their meter info as well (assuming you could even do that)... so... yeah...
I'm surprised there aren't more suggestions to ditch the windows install totally and go with a Linux distro like Ubuntu. Personally I also know of family members that get on very well with chromebooks
I agree, but the biggest obstacle is still hardware compatibility. Any device you buy out there that plugs into a computer will work with Windows. They might not work with Ubuntu or even have been tested with Ubuntu (so even the manufacturer might not know whether it's compat).
Having said that, many devices just need to sync with your phone and not computer, so there's maybe less of an issue than before. For example, my bike computer doesn't need to be Win compat since it syncs with an app on my phone.
I would honestly just move right on to Linux Mint. If they're familiar with Windows, they will be right at home with the Cinnamon DE.
I'm really impressed with this distro and use it as my own daily driver. One of the few times where I do very little tweaking to get the UI/UX just right for my own preferences.
Switching my 60 y/o mom from Windows laptops to a Macbook reduced the amount of family IT support I do by about 75%. She still struggles with some stuff, but more on the level of how to do things than issues with the machine itself.
My mum (in her 70s) switched to a MacBook Pro and while it increased the family IT support for me in the short term as the Mac "expert" among us, once she'd figured out her way around, I've not had a single help request in about 5 years now.
Similarly for me, I switched my dad to my old Dell XPS which came pre-installed with Ubuntu. He's on Fedora and it's been running fine for about 4-5 years, across multiple (automatic) version upgrades.
The only thing I've had to help him with across that time are little things like setting his Firefox home page and finding some files "I definitely saved in Documents" but turned out to be in Downloads. I can deal with those.
I don't get it. For a few more bucks they instantly get their brand connonated with slowness and being unreliable.
How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care.
I've moved to Mac but back in days I used Windows, the VERY FIRST thing I did was to install a fresh copy of Windows, then install any necessary drivers which are absolutely required for proper function (I remember just finding the driver files and installing them manually from add hardware dialog instead of installing bloatware of the manufacturer).
Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't.
And of course I'm tech savvy. I don't see any less-savvy senior being able to solve this problem; it should be regulated in a way that there should be a mandatory and ugly label showing all the crapware included with the device while buying, perhaps even extra taxing for each crapware included, discouraging manufacturers from including them.
If you happened to buy a machine with an OEM Windows Home license baked into the motherboard and want to install retail Windows 11 Professional, this makes it extremely frustrating because you no longer get the choice of which version of Windows to use during the install process.
You need to add the EI.cfg and PID.cfg [0] files to the installer medium before booting it. Once you have those files present with the correct syntax, it will install the version you want, but I can't imagine a non-tech person being able to figure this out on his own.
I was mostly concerned with making sure none of the preinstalled Windows Home bloatware would remain after an upgrade. I figured the safest way would be installing Professional right off the bat.
Yes; your laptop should have the Windows license embedded in firmware. If it came with one, that is. You can download the Windows installer directly from MS.
Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.
You can install windows 10 for free and leave it like that forever if you can deal with the watermark and non-restrictions like not changing the wallpaper.
On the laptops I've used with pre-installed Windows (which I reinstalled), the license key was in ACPI table "MSDM". I assume Windows gets it from there automatically. You can extract the license key from Linux with: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
In general, I think, yes, as long as you're installing the same edition. Usually the license is somehow stored in the firmware.
However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807
You have to watch out these days even when installing a fresh copy of Windows as I found out recently, since some motherboards coughASUScough have software in the BIOS which can get automatically installed. There's an option that comes up on first boot and I clicked yes thinking it was some drivers, but it was the regular company branded bloatware more or less. Not going to make that mistake again.
Windows allows the firmware to provide a binary that will be executed on first boot (or maybe every boot? not sure) - ASUS is abusing this feature to make their crapware permanent.
Not new. Windows Update will by default pull and automatically install drivers and software based on hardware IDs. If you try to uninstall it, it might be "self-healing software" (can't actually uninstall, have to delete services, autostarts and files manually and in the right order) but in any case Windows Update will put it back anyway soon until you disable automatic driver updates completely. GP already mentioned ASUS by name, MSI also does this, their boards install some weird very hard to remove "audio improvement software" or something like that.
Fair enough. I suppose I should have said "new to me".
Also, I stopped using MSI when their motherboards weren't properly supporting Piledriver/Steamroller AMD cpus power and thus thermal requirements. At least, on some of the mid-high tier boards. (It said it could handle a 8350. That apparently was a lie.)
I had the same experience recently. It's a rootkit installed by the BIOS to inject the crapware.
Immediately returned the ASUS board and got something else. It sucked to tear apart a computer I just built but I don't trust then hardware in my machine now.
It's called Windows Platform Binary Table, and lets the firmware provide an EXE for Windows to execute on boot. So even if you install a clean OS, this will run, and there is no mandatory prompt (if it's run through this approach and you see a prompt, then the software that was run was nice enough to ask, it was not Windows asking you to confirm whether that is OK).
Yep, experienced this a few times on their consumer products and even older Thinkpads licensed with Windows 10 Home. It is possible to neuter all (most?) of the bloatware by deleting the associated binaries and wiping all of Lenovo's background processes, but it's still a royal pain-in-the-ass when reinstalling Windows on it. They're easy to shut up with Linux, but my heart weeps for those who insist on using Windows.
Being slow and crap is basically what consumers expect in a windows laptop. Which is why they largely moved to mobile or a work provided laptop without the crap ware.
I see this indeed, it is why some older people move almost entirely to an (entry level) iPad and are quite happy. The Windows laptop is something of a necessary evil to them, they use it from time to time but hate it (fear of virusses, nag ware, because they use it very little they always need to spend time updating, confusion because of Windows-S).
Imposing restrictions on OEMs got them in a bunch of trouble in the past, and restrictions like what you're suggesting are actively getting Google in trouble (see the recent fine imposed by India).
Incidentally, this kind of thing is why my personal laptop is a Microsoft Surface, and my personal phone is a Google Pixel.
Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.
Would be interesting to develop an executive/managerial compensation structure that functions like a 10-year call option. Maybe it could feel a bit like TV show 'residuals' - even if you leave the company you'd still get a check in the mail for the company's longer term success.
So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters.
How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
Maybe you could do a 10 year stock grant that is fully vested regardless of employment, and grant the same amount at the same schedule each year (or more frequently) so number of options is proportional to length of employment?
I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?
Exactly. A lot of boneheaded corporate decisions make a whole lot of sense when you think about the individual manager/exec who would've been empowered to make that call and which metrics might get that manager promoted or fired.
The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph.
The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz.
The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.
> Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't.
We no longer have browser toolbars. I remember a time when I had customers come in with 4, 5, or even 6 different browser toolbars. The Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the McAfee toolbar, the Because-We-Fucking-Can toolbar, etc. Most laptops came with at least one toolbar pre-installed.
Haha! I was working IT support for the local municipality back then. One time I had to go into the office of the local orchestra to fix their computer which was "slow". When I turned it on there was a cat or a dog walking around on the screen, IE had at least 5 toolbars, including two porn tool bars and the bookmark menu was full of porn links. A hot mess to say the least. Cleaned it up and removed all junk, malware, spyware, toolbars and "fun" applets. Pretty sure it was back to the same mess a couple of weeks later ...
Toolbars we're a big mistake, but I understand why people thought they might be a good idea. Explorer context menu hooks (i.e. open in VS Code) are really useful, and without the benefit of hindsight those seem similar to toolbars.
> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care.
Edit: To be clear I'm not defending the companies, they shouldn't put all this crapware on there. I'm just saying most customers won't notice it on a new laptop.
In most cases on new laptops their crapware doesn't make a huge difference, because there is enough CPU headroom. The people who are doing so much that they would notice probably will reinstall fresh Windows anyway.
This is certainly the case, and I think more and more people are going this way. My 70 year old mother uses her 4 year old iPad for things she might have previously done on a PC. She gets on with it without issues
I used to think the iPad was going to be the best way forward for my (non-technologically-inclined) father, now in his 90s. But in the end, the combination of the touch UI and his arthritic fingers just didn't work out. We ended up going back to a Chromebook, with slightly better success.
I use Windows 11 on an Intel 10th generation NUC and it is very fast. It came from Novatech in the UK.
My last computer was a 32 core 128gb RAM Threadripper from ChillBlast.
Surprisingly the Threadripper had a slower single core performance than the Intel NUC.
I also use a Ubuntu virtual machine in VirtualBox with Vagrant for development machines to do DevOps.
But I also use IntelliJ and it is fast enough on the NUC and it's SSD and 32GB RAM. I don't play games. But I write multithreaded software so I get 12 logical cores to play with. (6 physical cored and 12 hardware threads)
I think the innovators dilemma has occurred with mobile technology. Mobile chips such as my NUC and ARM chips in phones are good enough for development. (See apple silicon) I can run 6 virtual machines without slowdown.
Admittedly my IntelliJ is running on a small repository. I suspect it I was working on an employer's project it would slow down due to all the files.
Most of the time the computer is waiting for IO and the CPU can be different levels of idle. I recommend the Gist "latency numbers every developer should know"
I would recommend people buy from manufacturers that don't preload stuff into their laptops. Such as Framework, System76, ChillBlast, Novatech.
EDIT: I had an ASUS but I installed Ubuntu on it and I cannot remember if the windows had lots of manufacturer software on it. I rarely booted into windows.
> "How often does the trackpad REALLY need a firmware update?"
Never. Literally had broken trackpad drivers on Lenovo for years. They were aware of the issue, it was "normal" on the model I had. This was around 2013.
I will never ever again recommend anything from Lenovo. Trackpad was a minor issue compared to other problems that I had with that same laptop.
I was a student, barely managed to afford it, couldn’t justify replacing it. Wifi issues were worse than trackpad for example - absolutely terrible range and speeds up to 400KBs. I sent it back only to get the same laptop back with extra scratches. After that I didn’t even get a reply from support anymore.
I managed to fix wifi issues with extra dongle, but how sad is that? Trackpad was always an issue.
You think I’m speaking badly of Lenovo just for fun?
I doubt it. Instead they are focused on chasing down profits by engineering out the value.
My family has several 'copies' of a laptop from the same company, one of which is the newer model, by one year. The newer model is flimsy and has required multiple repairs to the display, hinges, keyboard, case, etc... Parts are easy to source for the newer model but impossible to find for the older one, although naturally we haven't needed any yet.
But this is how you get those dirt cheap laptops isn't it? Likewise for super cheap huge TVs.
I've long believed that most computers sold cheap as consumer devices simply aren't fit for purpose, sure, most people here could take one and make the changes required to remove bloat and spyware, but it's out of the reach of a typical consumer
This is true even when installing a fresh copy of Windows. Microsoft have made some deals to include a lot of apps that gives you nothing. Zero. Well, unless you for some reason need candy crush on your laptop. If that's your thing, sure, enjoy. For the rest of us; please just give us the minimum.
Pre-installed Office package just in case we will buy a license in the future?
It's not even limited to a 'fresh' copy of Windows either. When you 'upgrade' to Windows 11, it automatically installs and enables Microsoft Teams (formerly Skype) at startup without the user's consent. I have never once used the software in my life. Surely the capable engineers at Microsoft have a way to detect if I have Skype/Microsoft Teams in my previous installation to make an educated guess as to whether it should be enabled in the new installation?
On the other hand, my very high end work-issued Lenovo laptop came with zero crapware installed. Only one Lenovo support tool which I used when I needed and has never bothered me ever.
I think this problem is more with the consumer line.
I've been in the same situation as OP before though with computers from parents and friends, and it's unbearable. A straight reinstall of Windows after buy is the only viable option. I had to diagnose a not-so-old pc sold with all kinds of crap installed, 4GB of RAM, Windows 10 and a rotating 5400HDD thrashing all the time.
>I think this problem is more with the consumer line.
That's my experience as well. So if you need a cheap Windows laptop, a used corporate class laptop is often a better path than a cheap new consumer class one.
> I think this problem is more with the consumer line.
Not even all of their consumer products are bad. It's often the cheap (sub $600) laptops that I suspect gets subsidised by the crapware that comes preinstalled.
When people ask me for recommendations for a laptop for around $400, I always say "second hand" or "save up a bit longer" because these days spending less than $600 is often a recipe for disaster.
> When people ask me for recommendations for a laptop for around $400, I always say "second hand" or "save up a bit longer" because these days spending less than $600 is often a recipe for disaster.
This is the best advice you can give, but I'd include the option of an iPad/Chromebook. And even with a Chromebook anything <$300 is asking for trouble. Realistically, a decent laptop that will be performant and cheap that is well made doesn't exist. You're looking at ~$800 before you get get anything relyable.
My late father, who was a software developer by trade before his retirement, had a desktop machine set up running Windows 7 (probably?) that he used for checking email, and buying stuff online.
A few years later, when he had been diagnosed with cancer and was on chemo, it updated itself to Windows 10 without his explicit consent. It completely fucked up the install, and was unusable for him from then on. He was too tired to go through the process of getting it sorted out, and was thus unable to book a vacation that he had intended to take to recover from that round of chemo.
Microsoft's unfriendly us-first, customers-second process robbed him of his last holiday and I will not easily forgive them for it.
If a seasoned developer can be robbed of quality of life by this flavour of bullshit, what chance do the non-technical types stand?
I installed Teams on my personal PC last week, and as part of the install Microsoft managed to change my whole windows install to use my Microsoft account to login, rather than my local account. It took me a while to work out what had happened and unfuck it all.
During the Windows 10 install they make it look like you needed to login with your MS account. They option to use a normal local login is right there but it’s named in some funny way so you don’t think that it’s the normal login. At first I thought this was just for the main admin account and let it slide, because I was only intending to use Windows for games (it’s not good for anything else). But when you want to create a second account, it tries to trick you into creating a new MS account.
With Windows 11 there's no UI option to use local account at all. You need to press magic combination, launch cmd, execute some bat-file with unpronounceable name and reboot. Then this option appears.
I mean, it's one Google search away, so not a big deal, but they do push hard for MS account.
To run Android apps on Windows 11 you need a Microsoft account AND an Amazon account. The Windows Subsystem for Android comes with the Amazon Appstore app which is only available through the Microsoft Store.
The process is available (though you also need to click away a few nudges to get you onto cloud) using the normal setup if you use Pro instead of Home, with Home they basically force it on you, allegedly so they get to backup your BitLocker recovery keys.
I think in general Microsoft is suffering from an incentive problem. Unlike Apple they don't really have any revenue stream from users except for the up-front cost of the installation but still incur costs for patching etc. so they do all this trickery to at least get access to data and metrics to improve their paid line of products (Office etc.)
Idk what happens on the backend, so I wont engage in conjecture on how safe it is, but keep in mind that BitLocker is not available for Home users at all in Win10 and enabling it by default in Win11 does increase the data safety of the average user quite a bit because a petty thief will not be able to get any data from the device.
Thanks, was not aware about edition difference. I'm surprised that MS put that bat-file in their install files, because it definitely looks like it was specially created for that purpose (it sets one key in registry and then reboots computer which starts installation again, but now this registry key enables UI option to use local account).
Telemetry/metrics and device-account relation is not just for revenue or improving the paid products; it helps immensely in tracking down and debugging Windows and external device drivers as well.
I believe this is about to change in 22H2 Pro. You will need internet and microsoft account to set up. And a Pro license is a $1000 markup on consumer laptops, from what I've seen.
I recently had to install Windows 11 and did so by downloading an ISO and flashing it to a USB. To my surprise the latest version of Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) can detect if you are using the official Windows 11 ISO and let you skip the initial setup and create a Windows 11 local account. You can also disable the TPM and processor requirements IIRC. IDK how it even does this, I guess it modifies some boot menu when writing the image.
Win 11 still sucks but this makes it much much better.
On 11, just click the 'login with Microsoft Account' and for email use no@thankyou.com and when you click Next it'll automatically dump you to the local setup flow.
I recently ran into this setting up a laptop for work and how user hostile this step had become made my blood boil. There is no option to setup an initial local account unless you intentionally provide bad input to the Microsoft login page, I ended up just wiping the machine and installing Windows 10 from scratch
I'd really like to able to send invoices to Microsoft and other companies like Dell who pull this bullshit for wasting time in my life to work around this stuff (and I wonder how much potential productivity is used up by these practices)
The last time I installed Windows on a computer, back in late 2020, that option would also be hidden if you were connected to the internet. Since the wifi configuration occurs first, ostentiably to start downloading updates while going through the setup, this was usually the case. The only way to get the local option back was to entirely shut down the machine, then start the process over.
What about Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC ? I recently installed it in a Qubes to be able to run some specific database software until I can export the data to an open, libre database. My understanding was that LTSC didn't require an account or even an activation code, but I've been able to run a trial iso I downloaded directly from Microsoft.
In my experience, shutting down and rebooting wasn't enough; Windows 10 still forced me to create a Microsoft account. I had to open a cmd on the installer screen and remove my home Wi-Fi network from the known network list, then possibly reboot.
For me, because I know this is subjective, fucking with Linux to make it work how I want is less of a hassle now than fucking with Windows to make it work how I want (again).
Reinstalling graphics drivers from a real TTY when the occasional update hoses them is far and away more preferable than, say, ads in the start bar (for me).
... or installing fucking candy crush by default (which, really, is just a long form ad).
But maybe that's my inner (outer, now?) old man talking? I mean, Minesweeper, patience and a couple of others, maybe even a pinball game always came with Windows.
Windows never came with fortune though, which is the best "I didn't ask for this, but would have if I'd known" default I've come across. Yep, old man is now outer and child is inner.
The difference to me between Minesweeper + Solitaire and the Candy Crush incident is that Candy Crush was developed by a third party and, more importantly, is designed to be addictive and separate users from their money. The point of putting Candy Crush on Windows machines was to lure new people into playing Candy Crush and hopefully giving King + MS money. Microsoft is providing access to its users to third parties for profit.
The point of putting Solitaire + Minesweeper on the machine was to demonstrate the OS's capabilities + get people used to using either a computer or a GUI. Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed for the user, Candy Crush was installed for King.
Microsoft accounts are the biggest clusterfuck they've produced in recent history. I hate them with a passion, and they keep pushing them no matter how much you keep rejecting them. You need to jump through lots of hoops to simply get a local account in Win 10, and then they keep harassing you about upgrading.
When my son was ready for his own laptop, I originally set it up with a Microsoft Family account. That was a terrible mistake. Microsoft Family causes only pain and misery and completely fails at what it's supposed to do.
Microsoft bought Minecraft and recently forced everybody to migrate from perfectly functional Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts, which makes everything more complicated. My son's Minecraft account ended up on my wife's Microsoft account, and suddenly I'm called UnshavenFiber (though not entirely incorrectly, I've got to admit).
Also Microsoft stores the escrow keys for disk encryption and login on their servers when you use a Microsoft Account, and will happily hand it to the government on request.
I can't express how much the MS account thing totally ruined me from ever using or buying MS products again. Trying to make a PC have an account for my kids to play MS flight simulator was pure insanity. Never again MS.
Oh the pains of Minecraft administration! I could write a book about cross platform incompatibility, Microsoft account dysfunction, billing issues, and upgrade blocking execution. We’ve spent $100s and it does nothing but get worse.
To clarify mcv's last statement... if you have taken the time to create local user accounts because who is using your computer is none of Microsoft's business, and then you make the mistake of buying Minecraft and logging in to it, Minecraft will automatically and with no warning [1] irrevocably tie that Windows user account to the Microsoft account used to log in Minecraft.
I now have n+1 accounts on my Windows system because I had the kid who did that leave that account just to use Minecraft and created a new account for everything else.
I'm pretty close to going to Linux on this system. It was the house game system but I just got a Steam Deck, which is fulfilling that role nicely, and that leaves Windows hanging on only by a thread of my personal laziness/business (depending on how charitable you are); everything else that system does is either equally doable by Linux or better done by Linux.
[1] At least, no warning I saw and/or understood, and I think it's fair to say that if I didn't realize that's what going to happen, neither did 99%+ of the user base. I'm sure lawyers have their bases covered somewhere but I don't care.
> I'm pretty close to going to Linux on this system
Well, I'm one step ahead of you. As of last weekend, I purchased and returned 3 games due to unplayability on Windows 10 (yes, patched, all drivers updated, msconfig nothing running, ran exclusive/un-bordered/windowed, every recommended change and sfc checks ok), and they all crashed regularly at irregular intervals.
I've partitioned the SSD and have installed Ubuntu. Now to learn how to use Proton to make games work.
That was my last Windows machine. Goodbye Microsoft.
edit: Just to add...I'm the most technical of my group of friends and typically lead the way. If this works, I'll have 5 other guys migrating in the next 12 months with me, they too have been complaining since leaving Windows 7.
I tried setting up Minecraft the first time on my kids ipads and the whole Xbox/Live account thing literally made me angry. I am technically competent and I couldn't figure that shit out for hours.
> including the forced updates making desktop unusable for hour every month.
Patch day is once a month and takes 15 minutes at worst, sometimes only a reboot after the work day.
edit: Not to mention how upgrading Firefox on Linux-based systems through the console forced me to restart my Firefox mid-day, because "it works that way". Never had that on Windows.
With those specs I would guarantee the update actually takes less than 15 minutes on average each month. I don't remember an update adding more than 1 or 2 minutes on my i5 8gb to my restart time since Windows 11.
I got a six year old T460, so I'm not really top of the line either. Nevertheless I don't sit in front of the machine for hours each and every month and watch Windows doing its updates.
People like to dramatically exaggerate how long Windows update bind you each month. Probably no Windows users but it's an easy target.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes if it elects to do it when you want to do something else. Computers are our servants not our managers. Choosing to do something which can neither be deferred or cancelled is unforgivable.
Yeah, but I'm not refering to the original post but to complaints that Windows updates will take hours of your productive time each month for nothing. That's simply not true.
It doesn't matter whether it is hours or one minute, it's unacceptable. A sibling comment here describes how a Windows update started in the middle of a presentation someone was giving, which indicates quite clearly that Windows Updates take productive time away - not just of the user of the computer, but those who were listening also.
Again, computers are our servants, not our managers.
I was at a conference and 5 minutes into the plenary speaker's keynote address, his Windows 10 laptop that he was running his presentation slides from started an obligatory none-cancelable system upgrade. I don't think Microsoft scored any PR points there.
These posts are perplexing. It's like watching people getting angry because they were pulled over for not renewing their car tabs.
- Everyone knows that car tabs have to be renewed by a deadline and everyone knows Windows has forced updates by a deadline.
- Everyone knows how to pay to renew their car tabs and everyone knows how to check the Windows update so that it updates when you have free time for it. And if they don't, it's just 5 seconds of Googling to find either.
- Everyone knows what is going to happen if they don't renew their car tabs or allow the reboot by a certain date.
- Everyone knows that neither the vehicle licensing authorities nor Microsoft is going to change their policies. It doesn't matter what people think the policy ought to be because it isn't that way and they know it.
So basically, they picked up a gun, took careful aim at their foot, pulled the trigger, and are shocked and angry that there's a bleeding hole? Sure, they can go ahead and change operating systems but it isn't going to fix the fundamental problem, if you know what I mean.
Actually it would fix the problem. No other operating system forces updates whenever the fuck it feels like, and people should not accept this as a fait accompli.
Also; where the do you live such that there isn’t a grace period on registration renewal? Do you think a car just stops working when that happens in the middle of your commute to work?
I have the opposite experience. 4GB of ram + i3-4005U + spinning drive, windows update is unbearable. That's on top of anything newer than 2016 being unusable anyway.
I don't do media on it, so I've been quite happy running 9front lately.
There's your problem. Even the cheapest of SATA SSD will massively outperform almost any laptop hard disk drive when it comes to random I/O. And it'll probably increase your battery life a smidge as well.
I wouldn't put applications on any spinning rust these days, especially laptop 5400 (or worse!) drives.
$40 for a 512GB SATA SSD that'll blow the socks off whatever spinning drive you have.
I don't have the budget for that at the immediate moment, but yes, I know.
I do think my point still stands though. I don't think it's acceptable for software to run this slow, even on this. I'm talking windows has been idling for hours and basic tasks like clicking on the volume slider are sluggish.
On a side note: I'm fascinated HOW cheap SSD storage has become. Really looking into changing my backup drives to SSDs instead of good old spinning drives...
We have to tolerate it because some software isn't available on Linux.
For example, I can't think of one RAW image processor from the original manufacturer that's available on Linux. Honestly, if there was, it would actually be a good reason to switch to that brand.
Also yes, I'm aware of RawTherapee and DarkTable. I use RawTherapee regularly, it's absolutely excellent and I highly recommend it, but it's also absolutely useless for certain use cases.
Nowadays I tend to use linux apps on Windows, thanks to WSL. For example, Windows' file browser crashes frequently on my setup, so I use Dolphin instead.
> RAW image processor from the original manufacturer
I'm active in a few photography spaces online and I don't think I've talked to a single person who actively uses one of those. Most people use Lightroom or Capture One, which are also not available on Linux.
I'm curious as to what value you get from OEM RAW processors.
> I'm curious as to what value you get from OEM RAW processors.
Exactly (or almost) the same render as from SOOC images.
I hate it when I deliver SOOC preview images that the customer really likes, but wants some small tweaks (remove a fly from the image, for example), and the colors or contrast on the resulting image is different because I didn't use the same processing engine or color profiles.
You can do the reverse too. Wine or a vm to run the couple things you still need. If valve can get all their AAA game titles to run using proton, you ahould be able to make it work. I had one tool at work, an xml viewer that was enough better than the competition to be worth running in wine. I stopped even noticing it wasn't a linux app.
I tried Wine for a variety of things in the past, but never quite could get it to work right.
Also, some of those software are mission-critical for me, and I can't really afford to use something that may break unexpectedly when I need to deliver images same day.
Sounds like you know what you are doing, wasn't trying to guilt trip anyone, just provide options. Despite the topic of the thread, windows is a much better os than it ever has been. If it is still possible to keep an install on some (potentially older version) running in a vm that would be sufficient mitigation against unscheduled MS decisions interrupting your business. I'm not an IT professional though, I just code.
This is an advanced task, and if you want to focus on games, this so wrong it hurts. Most new games (and especially AAA titles) need a substantial amount of work to run well on the part of the proton (and sometimes game) developer, very few have good support, less still without some performance penalty, and even less within a few months of release. Thats before you run into driver oddities, and good luck with multiplayer.
The idea that you can slap wine on the few things that you need is a weirdly repeated fiction, it wont make it true by repeating it, stop doing it.
I've never used proton, that was just heresay feom my gamer friends using steam decks. I remember having problems with wine in the late 90s but the single data point of that xml app was really good. I guess I just got lucky. Running a windows vm in linux has never worked as well as the ither way around, but it does work. And for people with critical software that runs on w95 or some version of dos it isn't unusual to keep it in a vm with extremely limited connectivity. Do you think that might be a reasonable approach for the gp?
But after being unable to even _install_ the Win7 downgrade that was promised with my purchase of a Win10-only machine (several years back), I decided Microsoft's obsession with licenses and stuff was just getting in my way. I grabbed Ubuntu and haven't looked back.
Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment. But those seem easy enough to opt out of, I can tweak a few things and I'm largely fine day-to-day.
Updates tend to break things in weird ways, but I can always just reinstall, or decide it's time to try a new distro, restore /home/ from backup, and go on with my life. A Windows reinstall is usually a multi-day affair and barely works afterward.
My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs. There's an image viewer apparently just called Image Viewer, and if you think that's fucking obnoxious to search for help about, you're right! Ditto with pretty much all the other default GUI tools. I think the file manager is probably called Nautilus but you can't get it to tell you that, you have to just infer that from googling error messages and finding them mentioned in issue-trackers for something called "nautilus". Aaaaagh.
Apple loves giving things generic names, i.e. “Music”. The only reason they get away with it is you can search for “macos $APP”, “Apple $APP”, or “$APP.app”.
> Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment
That's just Ubuntu.
> My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs
I don’t use Gnome (want tiling, am able to set up whatever, only use like 3 applications), but feel it’s pretty amazing. My 6-yo with no prior knowledge of computing devices that aren’t an iPad can use it (to launch Scratch, watch videos I loaded, show around his photos, and keep an audio diary) after 10 minutes of explanation, and seems to prefer it for some things over the iPad. My 70+ yo parents (with computing experience starting from the late 1960s, but limited capacity for new bullshit) use it with no issues. My wife uses it for the few tasks she doesn’t do on her phone, and is fine with it. I occasionally use it (as a minimum, to show things to all of them), and it’s very easy to remember how. By comparison, other environments (I include Windows) are overwhelming and have tons of confusing stuff that only gets in the way.
This is all re: vanilla Gnome, not whatever Ubuntu delivers.
Because even with the low bar set by windows, desktop linux is genuinely less usable. If you need anything outside of a browser and encounter a problem you need substantially more understanding of how the OS works get it fixed, not to mention many common use-cases are either not supported or have an inferior less stable version on linux.
For common problems in windows you can find a current guide with pictures in seconds, on linux you are more likely to find a slightly out of date forum. And thats ignoring the complexities of different desktop environments and hardware compatibility.
> For common problems in windows you can find a current guide with pictures in seconds, on linux you are more likely to find a slightly out of date forum. And thats ignoring the complexities of different desktop environments and hardware compatibility.
This actually isn't my experience. It's possible that I only ever have had less common problems on windows, but invariably whenever I've looked something up for that, I've usually found terrible windows support forums with incorrect information and usually no correct solution at all.
For linux, and again I'd consider myself a power user so am familiar with most things, I usually find the information easily and it's quite straightforward. I believe part of this is due to the more technical nature of linux users, and due to there being active stack overflow resources e.t.c. which is far better than windows support forums (both in quality of questions and answers).
Obviously this is a very opinion based position, but I find the opposite to what you've asserted.
It’s not bias, it’s just how it is. If it’s not something bleepingcomputer or tenforums has covered, it’s a nightmare to find an answer for Windows problems. The difference is that most people are scared of the CLI, so they think Linux is harder because of that. When, in actuality, it saves you several seconds of clicking, and gives you far better error reporting.
Windows is a fucking joke of an OS, and that’s why nearly no one defends it on its merits. It’s always defended on the stance of compatibility because of things like O365 and Adobe products. It has nothing to do with the quality of Windows as a platform because as a platform, it’s a pile of shit, and everyone knows it. We’re just forced to deal with it if we want to game, edit photos and music, etc., without a ton of config changes and other hassles.
Command line and config files are really not a great way to learn a system, once you know what you are doing its faster, but arranging the actions you can take in space with something that represents the current state of the system is by far superior for anything new. There are bad GUIs but fundamentally I believe a system where you can see what is going on will always be easier to learn.
M$ forgot whats actually good about their OS, its been slowly metastasizing, but even so I dont think desktop linux is the answer. There are some real advantages to the windows paradigm, the idea that the program and the window are the same thing is important; the application should always show what its doing and what you can do. Settings are selected from all the possible options (you dont need to know whats available in advance)
I have always found that personally as I become more capable I get stranger and more obscure problems with computers, but never less problems. The edge cases and weirdness that you can get help with in an active forum is greater for sure.
When talking about common problems, I mean truly common, the things an average high-school student runs into like joining an online classroom or editing a document (or even playing a game!). These things do fail on linux, and without being a power user that knows where to start and some keywords to search getting past square one is not so easy.
The only data point I have, is my non-technical partner, who has had far fewer issues since moving to linux than on windows. It's a data point of n=1, and I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for everyone.
I was more than happy to recommend it for her since I know if there is any issue she has, I'll be able to solve it quickly and easily. The fact is though after throwing a standard ubuntu system on the machine I don't think she's had any issues past the first week or two of figuring out where the settings were, and what program does what.
There might have been the odd libre office question maybe?
The fact is, I'm pretty much the family tech support. My linux "support burden" is far lower than my windows "support burden" was when she used that (both in frequency, and for me, complexity). I still get a fair few macOS or iphone questions from my parents from time to time, but almost never things about linux.
You plug in your phone, indicate file transfer is ok (on your phone itself, which I assume must be the same for windows) and nautilus gives you the option to browse it.
nautilus, nemo, etc support MTP and have done so for many years. You just plug your phone in and navigate to it in your file manager, which is the same thing you'd do on Windows.
Video editing, photo editing, connecting a Focusrite to the machine. Connecting a midi keyboard. Connecting a remote printer. Connecting a Bluetooth headset. Getting usable battery life. Installing software that allegedly supports Linux. All this and more are issues I've had with my Linux installations. Yeah I could have used a different distro, and yes many of these u could solve. But it sure was a pain learning it all.
Trying to disable mouse acceleration for touchpads when running Ubuntu 20.04 (and derivatives) made me lose more than 6 hours of my life.
The culprit was libinput, which, for some reason, ignored the "flat" acceleration profile for touchpads. It was eventually fixed, but the fix didn't hit an LTS version of Ubuntu until this year.
Solution: Office 365. Since it runs in the browser Office 365 will work for the average home user of MS Office on Linux. No it's not the full fat versions of office, but for most home users it's fine.
A lot of them. Have you tried to fill out forms (for stuff like homeowner taxes, personal income tax, etc) prepared by the government office in MS Word using LibreOffice Writer? It doesn't work at all, and if it at least opens, the document as well as output is completely fucked.
Anything a tiny bit smarter than your usual document (with scripts and/or macros) won't work too.
I mean, in the past 3 years I've sold a home, rented a place, and bought a home, and filled out my taxes and other forms from .gov websites and haven't had an issue to be honest.
Thank the US government, they're pretty good with the digital things. The EU governments are much worse with computers - Word documents and Excel tables that don't work in LibreOffice are usual here.
I've always found a mixture of google docs and libreoffice to suffice for me, but I'm not a particularly heavy MS office user.
There's definitely pieces of software that aren't available for linux, and if you require that to do your job, it probably isn't the best solution for you. For me, and my partner (who is a classic browser + office software user, as I suspect 90%+ of computer users are), it's never been a problem (and office software has never been an issue for me personally).
I've worked for a non-profit that is officially Microsoft Office based, and our policy manual say all field staff (who provide their own laptops/computer hardware) need to be able to interact with MS Office file formats. I and an number of colleagues I know have used LibreOffice for years without ever having incompatibility issues with MS Office; for me its been at least 10 years since I've had MS Office on any of my machines... I run Debian or an old ThinkPad, and Mac OS X with MacPorts.
It's not beside the point. The usability of Windows vs. Linux must factor in the availability of software. I would literally be unable to do my job on Linux
You don’t have to reboot for every update - for a server it would be mostly kernel updates that require a reboot. If you enable live patch or subscribe to another live kernel update service you don’t need to reboot for most security patches.
I don't think I've ever seen a Debian or Ubuntu "stable update" / "patch" (apt-get upgrade, not dist-upgrade - what is enabled by default these days) break anything - I've been using various variations of Debian since around Debian 3(? 1.2/1.3-kernel era).
There has been a few (documented!) issues with major upgrades, like lilo-grub transition and Ubuntu changing system group ids.
But there are no forced lts-to-lts upgrades - and generally they are quite stable.
As sibling comment mentions, canonical even have a live-patch service for kernel updates without reboot (not that I would recommend that - doing a reboot after patch is a nice way to verify that the system still boots ok - which it should - but easier to debug when you know there's just been a patch..).
AFAIK it's ran via cron/systemd - so it should only affect login if the computer was off before login? And apt update / download should not impact a reasonable system (maybe something with really slow storage, like a microsd card, though?).
There are countless examples of people having problems post-update. Its understandable that you personally haven't gone out of your way to look, but its easy with a quick internet search. (BTW I don't mean to attack you personally, I just wanted to present examples.)
Two of these seem unclear if update or just reboot triggered an error? The last one (middle one, machine boots but is unstable) - is also unclear - as far as I can tell the user doesn't report if the system still runs OK with old kernel? (and all of these appear to affect other distros than stable Debian or lts Ubuntu - I've certainly seen a few issues when running Debian testing or sid. Updates without the "stable" part aren't always stable!).
Okay fair enough, my general point was that its not exactly rare (as many have implied) for Linux users to have problems with updates. A cursory internet search links to forums filled with people having issues.
Oh, I've had issues with Manjaro Linux for example (I inherited a laptop at work that I didn't immediately reinstall) - but Arch/Manjaro are rolling, bleeding edge distros - it's like using beta channels of windows or being an early adopter of macos releases.
My point was specifically about Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS.
Ed: And of course errors found and bugs filed in Debian sid(unstable) or testing - or Ubuntu non-lts contribute to those bugs not affecting those that run stable releases.
I mean switching away from an operating system that has a chance to randomly brick your computer to one that doesn't seems pretty damn reasonable to me? I guess YMMV.
It's a very fair point, and it is most _definitely_ possible (and not even particularly hard) to brick a linux system.
However, I think the difference is that it's always due to an action you take.
I do think this is something qualitatively different to when your machine decides to automatically update to windows 10, when your machine is not compatible with windows 10, and it bricks itself.
If you randomly turn on a computer and it says "hold on, I'm updating" and then never turns on again without you ever agreeing to an update, I think you'd quite rightly be somewhat upset with it.
Now, I don't even mind windows that much. I prefer other things, but I recognize the strengths of windows and I understand why people like to use it. At the same time, I think it makes sense to recognize the frustrations that windows can sometimes bring to some users.
Yes, there is a difference, but the auto-scheduling part is not the one that has the bug.
The bug is that OS is in a borked state, and the update infrastructure cannot deal with it. This is what ends up bricking the system. (Using the loose definition of the term here, I understand that it doesn't literally damage the hardware)
The overall big picture is the fact that most users don't want to be system administrators; they just want it to be managed automatically. However a subset of users, do want to administer the system and have a level of control, and this is where Microsoft screwed up, by not providing us those tools.
At work we have our IT manage the updates on all of our machines, and they have managed to apply some kind of policy where they can control the updates. I am assuming this is only possible in a domain environment, and not on a stand-alone PC.
Very sorry to hear about your father's illness, and how the situation was made even the worse by such brazen disrespect for user experience. My parents also have to regularly go through what I think amounts to violence by their electronic devices, but nothing as horrifying as this.
This terrifies me, TBH. I'm almost 50 and a little bit technical (used to admin Solaris boxen), and I just know the day will come when I haven't a damned clue how any of this works any more. For the time being, I'm happy using Linux as a bootloader for Emacs; will that be enough to see me through to my personal end? I sadly doubt it.
Already happened to me, I have less and less idea how my linux system works now. I haven't kept up with all the various systemd rewrites, buses and random shit I don't know about and it's annoying when I actually want to do something
has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever or am I just an idiot? when I restart nginx I want to know if it failed, why , what's the syntax error. instead old reliable /etc/init.d/nginx configtest no I have to dig around
Right, then I have to relearn my userspace setup... well maybe it's time - but I've been on debian longer long before I met my childs mother, before I even grew a single hair on my chest, before I had a bank account, a job, or a cell phone. But perhaps you are right, it's time to quit it
MX Linux (Debian-based, uses sysvinit with systemd shims) and Devuan would seem to be obvious alternatives that wouldn't require changes to your setup.
I'll check it out. I have all sorts of weirdness with this system. snap is great because debian doesn't package a lot, yet then all my snap programs are sandboxed in a non useful way. (like mysqlworkbench won't save passwords in a keystore because that hookup doesn't work - and it cant run without a working keystore. like firefox will start once, but if you run the firefox command, it'll error out that firefox is already) lots of annoying little things
Yes, a well run / nice project. KDE3 seems far better than anything in the KDE or Gnome world since.
(I don't use kwin, but instead a different window manager, and only part of trinity for this and that, but that's not due to a lack of quality, I just prefer to mix and match.)
If a process or service is using systemd to start and stop it (e.g. You start it with `systemctl start $SERVICE_NAME), I often do `systemctl status $SERVICE_NAME` to get the service-specific logs. For me, it seems to get the job done much better than journalctl.
> has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever
It can be useful when there's potentially multiple things leading up to the error in whatever you're running, as it is showing and explaining nearly every action that's recently happened in the system log. But if you're just wanting to look at logs related to nginx starting at the most recent then just query for niginx's system log instead of the whole system.
If you can set up nginx to do what you want, you can learn how to use systemd. In my experience it is quite usable once you get a handle on it. I'm sure there are plenty of "getting started" kinds of introductions that could make it useful to you after maybe half an hour of time investment. Other commenters have answered your specific question.
# Output all logs since boot
journalctl
# Follow all logs in real time
journalctl -f
# Output logs for a given systemd unit
journalctl -u $unit
# Combine follow and unit flags to follow logs for a given systemd unit
# Easy to remember: You are saying F*** U to a broken piece of software
journalctl -fu $unit
# Output kernel logs
journalctl -k
# Follow kernel logs
journalctl -fk
# Tip: Use -b flag to see logs from previous boot cycles
# Learn more, including advanced filtering and formatting
man journalctl
You can also add that configtest command as an ExecStartPre to the unit, and it will run that before starting nginx and optionally fail early if it finds an error.
YMMV. I find systemd a lot easier to work with (I actually started wrapping daemons in proper services instead of sticking everything into nohup or tmux sessions).
> and I just know the day will come when I haven't a damned clue how any of this works any more
I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?
I have family in their 90's who can navigate whatever tech you put in front of them, because they think it's important to figure things out when they get stuck. My father can barely turn his phone on because at the slightest frustration he gives up and waits for someone to "fix it" for him. Certainly different folks have different aptitudes, but choice and working through things plays an exceedingly large role.
> I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?
The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently. Learning a new interface just isn't as important to us as spending that time doing something enjoyable.
Imagine if car companies randomly update the way you drive a car overnight every 7 or 8 years. You go out one day, and suddenly instead of a steering wheel and pedals you have a stick with paddles, then a few years later its changed to something that looks like an oar. Eventually you too might say to hell with it.
> The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently.
> Eventually you too might say to hell with it
I agree 100% and that's even kind of my point. You're choosing not to care about that stuff, which is fine (honestly, probably even healthy at a certain point), but it's not as if there is some biological imperative that as you age you are less able to use technology.
The irony is that if a vendor can't provide a consistent experience every time, why should I remain loyal to that vendor on the next update?
If Windows is going to change their user interface every other year, why would I relearn their UX-du-jour when I can just re-learn once on a Mac and be good for a few years (if not longer)?
If I use hosted Gmail and my UI changes every other month, it just tells me that I should host elsewhere where the UX is more stable.
If you abuse users long enough with this everchanging, constant-beta UI nonsense, you are just telling them to move on to a platform that isn't so unstable, where you only have to learn the UX once, not every X months.
I’d point out that it’s not necessarily those people’s problems. It’s the tech makers’ problems. Hardly any of this stuff needs to change so wildly and so often.
The somewhat recent FaceTime updates have befuddled even my brother and I. And there’s zero reason for any of the changes. They were just changes, not improvements, and were probably even regressions.
I am typically able to poke around and figure out why something broke so I can fix the dependencies. And I can search online to figure out where some feature I depend on was moved to, or what extension I need to re-enable it. But I nevertheless resent this kind of mandatory administrative overhead that comes with relying on computers.
On the flip side, I enjoy learning new techniques, languages, and approaches to advance my craft.
The difference is that the former is dictated by developers and required on a periodic basis just to tread water, whereas the latter is self-directed and helps me become more capable.
A coworker of me never switched from DOS to Windows (he told me he tried it a few times but... meh), recently i helped him getting his new(-ish) Lenovo workstation set up with FreeDOS 1.3.
So... it IS possible to stay on a system where you are comfortable with, if you are willing to make concessions...
He mostly uses it for embedded programming, but also does the finances for a club he is in via a spreadsheet (As-easy-as) and does write the occasional letter in (if i remember correctly) wordstart. For emails and web he uses Arachne (with a hack that allows arachne to fetch https via wget).
I am an active engineer and software developer, and I already feel like I don’t have a clue how any of it works already. I am being a little bit hyperbolic of course, but that’s the feeling.
And to be honest, I don’t think it’s me. It isn’t clear to me that the people who make all this stuff know how it works either. Nothing works as intended in technology. At least some form of technology doesn’t work as it should every day, from your work machine’s OS, or some program, or your smartphone, or Android Auto or Apple Car Play, or your TV, or your Internet provider or WiFi router, or that website you visit, or your smart thermostat, and on and on. And that’s stuff just plain not working or encountering bugs. It doesn’t even address the usability of all this.
We are just shitting out technology left and right, all at the alter of scale. In my opinion, capitalism is part of the problem. The other is human nature. There are no incentives to get this right. And these days, large companies do not care that they get it right. Statistics of failure and user frustration are explicitly part of their business models. They don’t want to even know if there’s an issue with their product. They just let some statistics drive their decision making.
It’s all just a tragedy and comedy all in one. Amazon has their 12 principles they hire with that makes it seem like they hire geniuses left and right. And they can’t even get book selling right these days. And there’s no way to report issues. They do not care.
It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when his/her bonus depends on not understanding it.
Most of these bonuses are probably tied with frivolous, often highly unpopular and unwanted, feature updates. I doubt people get bonuses (or as large bonuses) for fixing usability bugs or improving quality.
> it updated itself to Windows 10 without his explicit consent.
it's bs how they can just do this. Microsoft thinks that just because they aren't legally liable for their software breaking a user's system, that they can just do anything like these automatic updates.
I think it's really high time that there be regulation on software and their reliability - that is, some sort of consumer protection, where an update such as this breaking becomes a liability for microsoft. And of course, this doesn't just apply to microsoft, but apple and google and any other software manufacturer.
We're actually lucky that the current global political & economic system allows governments to enforce this. Companies can weasel out of paying taxes to the country in which they operate, but they generally can't escape the local country's regulation with regards to how they render their services.
All we need is political momentum to enact the regulation - and that's easier said than done.
This is the type of thing I imagined could happen, but hoped it never actually would happen.
The worst example I had heard until today was an update that caused a friend to lose a good chunk of her dissertation. Windows 10 decided that final week was an excellent time for an update. She had no option of saying "no" and was just looking to use Word uninterrupted.
Software is too important now for this level of user hostility.
And curiously enough, this was the moment she converted to being an Apple user. She expected and found the same quality on her Mac as she did on her iPhone.
> There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.
There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
>There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s.
>A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga.
>What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
A great point, BeOS was basically the last attempt anybody had at creating a new desktop OS, and when it failed, so did the last vestiges of anybody else's appetite for trying again.
I love my Mac, but really enjoyed GEM on my Atari ST too.
And people wonder why I still hold a grudge against Microsoft. We still live with the consequences of three decades of bad behavior. A little deathbed conversion doesn’t mean as much as some think it does.
Is OSX on average more reliable than Windows though?
I've never had much experience with it but heard some stories about its bad backward compatibility and not-too-pleasant upgrades. Thinking about finally getting a Macbook instead of my current Linux/Windows dual boot since Macs have the unique combination of professional-grade display, very powerful hardware and full support of proprietary apps that I need. And I mostly dislike Apple UX choices.
The "Backwards compatibility" issue is an interesting one. For years, companies like Adobe used OSX upgrades as an excuse to force paid upgrades. Hardware manufactures did (still do?) this with Windows drivers. The other side is that Apple deprecated 32bit support around 2011, dropping it in 2019/20. They've also introduced and deprecated a few frameworks in this time. They have always announced well ahead of time. People get caught short by not paying attention.
With regards to OS upgrades, there has always been a vocal minority that likes to complain, ever since the System 7 days, sometimes not without reason but it's minor. Overall, the upgrades are decent, but I'll agree it's not always plain sailing for everyone. The thing with macOS is last year's Lemon is next year's gold. Rose tinted glasses are abundant online, especially with competing OSs.
> Is OSX on average more reliable than Windows though?
In my personal, anecdotal experience, macos is more reliable than windows. Neither is as reliable as my 14-year-old but constantly updated and fresh today Gentoo/Linux install. But the things that a laptop needs, macos is better. So I have a macbook and a Gentoo/Linux workstation and I generally feel like I get the best of both worlds.
I also often just run a debian in qemu on my macbook rather than installing a bunch of software from macports or homebrew, which has worked very nicely.
Yes, it is. I used to be very into windows but after the same upgrade issue (they just swapped me up without asking for permission and ruined some projects I had), along with how annoying it was to deal with different vendors, driver issues, I just said it wasn't worth my time and I wasn't enjoying tinkering there.
Mac has been great. My 2015 MBP is still going strong, it was many updates behind and I resisted for a while but I eventually just upgraded to the latest (2-3 major versions) and it went perfectly smoothly.
Every company and ecosystem will have its quirks. But some are way more hostile than others, and I've never seen that level of hostility from apple (yet).
Ports can be annoying though but I'd rather take minor annoyances over big problems like this.
BTW -- one of the bigger problems with the forced Win10 upgrade was that it changed the UI / icons and for older folks caused a lot of grief, because they felt lost on top of everything else.
I have not reinstalled MacOS since I bought my laptop, 5 years ago. And before that it was the same with another 5 year old laptop. These laptops feel pretty snappy still.
I bought a secondary laptop - a 12 inch Macbook Pro - and it took a few hours to set up. I didn't have to turn a bunch of things off. I didn't have to find the button that wouldn't send my entire life to a tech company. Just a few clicks and done. It's decently fast for such an old, underpowered machine, too.
Absolutely. I've owned many machines and driven two Mac OSX, basically every Windows since 3.1, Linux Mint, Ubuntu 14.4-20.4, and several generations of Android. OSX for me wins reliability and user experience, hands-down. XP service pack 2 is probably my favorite Windows experience, followed by 7. Linux is nice for control but not winning any awards for stability or smooth updates (headless/cli is fine, but GUI linux desktops are always a bit buggy).
The big thing to remember is that Apple owns the entire stack. This has good and bad parts but one thing it means is that they can’t play support games where Dell and Microsoft point fingers saying it’s the other one’s fault, and because they make revenue after the initial sale Apple doesn’t have the same incentive to push you to buy new hardware every year or two. This thread started with some crapware Lenovo bundled to get another revenue stream, which Apple doesn’t need to do and knows would hurt their reputation.
MacOS (which is what it's called now, OS X name got retired) will annoy you, changes annoy people, but if you buy an Apple product it'll actually work for quite a few years. Not 15, unless you're unusual, they're not supported that long. If you want your software or hardware accessories to be supported forever, they won't be. If you have really opinionated positions on how something will function forever, you'll be disappointed.
But out of the box it works. Hard crashes are very rare. User hostile things like forced updates don't happen.
The worst things are much much less likely to happen than with hardware that runs Windows, and if something happens the tech support at Apple stores is pretty good. If you want a good Windows machine you have to do extensive research to figure out how not to get crap, and you still end up wrong sometimes. If your grandma wants a computer, you can just tell her to go to an Apple store and get whatever she wants and it'll work.
It wasn't that many months ago that I had a conversation with a customer that if they wanted to continue to use email (outside the browser) then the best option was to buy a new mac because their current mac version don't support the new certificates required for modern tls and in order to get a new macos version they need to buy a new device.
If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?
They may have bought it 5 years ago, but it wasn't 5 years old. Also for future reference you can update the certs on older OS X versions to get a few more years out of a system for someone thats happy with it: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/422332/how-do-i-up...
An interesting hack. We went with a different hack to accomplish a working solution, but good to know there is alternatives.
The idea in the link is that one transfer the System Root certificates from another (more modern) Mac to which the customer should already own. In theory I guess we as a email provider could continuously buy the latest version of mac and use that as the transfer host (hopefully do not transferring any account specific certificates). It must work without any corner cases (not overwriting anything on the customer end), the script need to work in future macos versions, and the assumption is that the first group of certificates is the relevant ones, and that it doesn't break anything on the customer end.
For those who has not read the link, this do not update the System Roots keychain since users are not allowed to do that in macos. Instead this adds a trustRoot certificate. A nice trick. One of the comments say that it didn't fix the problem for them but who know what their situation was.
Yep. My wife's still running a MBP from 2012 that I think finally got its last update to Big Sur (released 2020) without issue.
Looking at the compatibility charts, everything from 2015 on-ward supports Monterey (2021, the latest version). The last laptop that couldn't update past El Capitan was 2009. As far as Macbooks (non-pro), last one stuck on El Capitan is the 2009 model as well.
And it's not even that Apple broke anything on the 13 year old laptop, it's just that the rest of the world moved on and they're no longer fixing it.
email is not the same as the web. HTTPS seem a bit more permissible than smtp/imap. That said I know that some banking sites do reject old version of browsers on the basis of security.
Some providers (email and others) can also continue to support deprecated/broken security for a very long time in order to not having to deal with customers using old deprecated software. 512 bits RSA public keys for example was used a very long time, long past where different standards and recommendation had a much higher minimum. Algorithm and key attacks are quite rare so companies can keep a low security standard for many years/decades before anyone exploits it. For customers that could be seen as a positive or a negative depending on perspective.
> If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?
My 2015 MacBook still runs absolutely fine.
For that matter, I'm considering (but probably not) buying a new iPad to replace my TEN YEAR OLD iPad that I'm still using every single day, as it can no longer update to the latest iPad OS.
But my 7 year old (soon 8 years old) laptop is as good as the first day I bought it.
My 2012 MBP that I'm using to write this piped up to disagree. It retrieves mail from a variety of sources every day, including work email, and there is never a problem. All using the stock Mail app that comes with the OS. So I'm guessing some details are being mis-remembered by the 2nd-hand information supplied by a person who doesn't sound technically-inclined enough to have gotten the story right in the first place.
IOW, if one is going to supply anecdotal data, probably best to make sure it's your anecdote, maybe?
I would, if Apple would just make a MacBook w/ a stylus --- I don't want the hassle of multiple devices, but I'm not willing to give up a stylus --- at this point, I'm considering just breaking down and getting a Mac Mini and Wacom Cintiq Pro 16 and giving up portability/battery.
What applications do you want to use a stylus with? iPads are really good at what they do, and Apple makes integration with their laptops straightforward. You can easily share files back and forth.
In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you could use an iPad as an external display with the Apple Pencil, but I haven’t researched that.
No, that is why people turn to Linux (and *BSD to a much (, much) smaller extent) after having been thoroughly disgusted by these practices whether they come from Microsoft (Windows et al) or Apple or anyone else. It is the only "platform" where you can be really free from this type of behaviour. They first install it on the hardware previously used for Windows or Mac OS and quickly find out their old hardware could perform much better than it did when burdened by those marketing strategies disguised as operating systems. The next step comes when they buy new hardware on which they directly install some Linux distribution, usually keeping the factory-installed Windows or Mac OS around where it tends to languish. When they then decide to boot into those factory images they are immediately hit with the upgrade hammer which only increases their determination to stay away from those systems as much as possible. This is easier for those who used to run Windows than for those who need to use Mac OS to develop for one of the other Apple brands since these all mandate the use of Xcode [1] which needs Mac OS which "needs" [1] Apple hardware.
[1] as in "is only licenced for", there are ways out of this...
"When people had a choice in updates, too many would postpone them. This left our OS susceptible to attacks which made for some bad press for us. If we force updates, this won't happen."
- some exec, probably
They were wrong in the sense that they used it to condition people to accept non-security updates and they were wrong in the sense that some people are better placed to determine whether any form of update is an unacceptable risk.
As things stand today, I only trust updates from community driven open source software projects. With exceptionally few exceptions, commercial software seems to offer the guarantee of delivering undesirable payloads.
I work for one of those very large commercial software companies. In general, I think we do a pretty good job. We absolutely fuck some things up, for sure, for a lot of different reasons.
But I promise you there is never any kind of Machiavellian multi-year plan to condition people for upcoming bad behavior. Most of the things we do screw up are from lack of foresight; we are definitely not strong enough at long range planning to run psyops on customers.
If by "bad press" you mean "other users getting fucked over by an entire homogeneous ecosystem of the same OS being a breeding ground for gigantic botnets that criminals were able to turn on services to knock them off the internet," yes.
The only real way to address it without the mandatory updates was for the ecosystem to diversify; can't use a Windows exploit to compromise a Mac OS machine.
You can imagine why that solution was not on Microsoft's list of recommendations.
The real way to address this would be to not make users hate updates.
That would mean doing as much of the work as possible in the background in a way that doesn't impact the user and making sure the reboot where it actually gets activated doesn't take noticeably longer. It would also mean not doing things that are against the user's interest like moving things around, installing new ads or misfeatures, or breaking things.
I don't know anyone who hates or wants to disable Chrome updates, for example (I'm sure such people exist, but it's much less common than Windows updates), despite Chrome updating way more often than once a month.
Of course, overcoming the aversion people built over years because of past bad behavior is going to be hard, but forcing people against their will and making updates more disruptive isn't going to help with that aversion. People really dislike being forced to do something, even if they don't actually mind the thing itself that much.
This is the key. Lots of systems have seamless updates where the only real interruption is a reboot.
Android does an A/B update and after a only slightly slow reboot is in the new version. It then does some optimization in the background that can have a slight performance impact.
NixOS must be the gold standard here. It downloads and completely installs the new version in the background then a regular-speed reboot is enough to be running the new system. (~10s on my system)
But Windows and macOS both have crazy slow update processes. When I had a mac for work I was dumbfounded by how slow the update process was. It regularly took >30min! Those machines are crazy fast, it seems like it could have written a TiB of data in that time so IDK what it is actually doing.
If memory serves: point-symbol optimizations to make code calls into The objective-C libraries performant.
Under The hood, objective-C really does use strings to reference library functions. So when the OS is updated, the string interning table is updated and all of the installed software has to have its string to symbol caches rewritten to account for the new API.
There are almost certainly better ways to do this but if I understand correctly, Apple inherited the existing solution without putting enough thought into how it would scale and now changing the solution would break an indeterminate amount of software depending upon the current implementation.
When a new version of the OS is installed, the OS re-runs prebinding for applications to the dynamic libraries they rely on because the dynamic libraries may have changed. The alternative is to have a big latency bump every time an app is launched for the first time as the caches are rebuilt on-the-fly.
(I think this is the step that used to be called "Making Your Macintosh Happy" during an install, but the veracity of that notion has fallen too far down the Google search hole for me to easily pull up a reference to confirm or deny it).
Yes, it’s been like this since the 10.0/public beta days at least. I remember wondering about it back then. I believe the command the system updater always runs is something like update_prebinding -root /
I think practically all the problems with Windows will go away with one simple change.
Do not ever reboot a computer without a user's consent.
Any feature that requires automatic reboot should be opt-in.
However, this exposes the real challenge.
We cannot have informed consent without informed users.
I think this problem will haunt us repeatedly in the future.
We need users to know at least a little bit about their options.
Only then can they make informed choices on what option to pick.
This means people can't glaze over the details and not worry about them.
This does not mean you have to be a computer wizard.
You just need to know what you want and pick an option that is good for you.
For example, I run this on Fedora:
Any update requires a reboot.
However, I am ok with it because I am positive each update comes after a lot of testing.
More importantly, I am in control of when to run this update.
I can't accidentally run it because it requires my sudo password.
I used to wonder why no corporation complains about Windows Update.
Then I learned that virtually all companies use group policy to change Windows Update behavior to suit their organization.
Therefore, this is a non-issue for them.
Welp.
> Do not ever reboot a computer without a user's consent.
That also includes never crashing, which Microsoft has historically struggled with.
If you don’t reboot in an orderly way, then the machine crashes while the user is doing something, and when it restarts everything is different. “Don’t restart” is insufficient for good UX here.
The problem here is that a modern OS should only need to be rebooted when the kernel is updated, and Microsoft's security model requires updating the kernel all the time. On Linux, kernel security updates are usually, "Hey, update this when you get a chance, because a bad actor already on your system could escalate privilege in a rare scenario." With Windows, it's an almost-weekly, "Hey, update right now, because someone in another country is pwning all unpatched machines that aren't air-gapped from the internet."
It doesn't nag me at all other than ask me for my sudo password.
It is perfect.
Here is what I understand about dnf offline-upgrade
> The process of restarting, applying updates, and then restarting again is called Offline Updates. Your computer boots into a special save-mode, where all other systems are disabled and where network access is unavailable. It then applies the updates and restarts.
> With Windows, it's an almost-weekly, "Hey, update right now, because someone in another country is pwning all unpatched machines that aren't air-gapped from the internet."
I see.
I feel like I don't quite understand the extent of the problem.
In any case, I am not qualified to even attempt to propose a fix.
My mode of thinking was Google Chrome and derivatives are able to slowly walk along
with increasingly scarier visible warnings asking users to restart the web browsers
but they don't (as far as I know) reboot the web browser while the user is still using it.
Even Google Chrome OS didn't do that (well, it didn't back when I had my cr-48).
When I updated Mozilla Firefox on my Fedora machine, existing tabs continued to work.
New tabs would come with a warning for me to close Firefox and open it again.
This is the kind of warning I was getting rid of with offline-upgrade.
I agree with my parent comment though.
Updates are too bloated.
Windows updates should be very fast
with a modern processor (Intel eighth gen, AMD equivalent or greater), enough memory, and a fast SSD.
Even DNF which has a very renowned reputation (at least among Fedora users) of being slow, is pretty reliably fast.
I think the point that my parent comment was making was make people not dread rebooting their machine.
My thought was
1. educate the users why reboots are essential
2. allow the users to postpone reboots indefinitely
However, I don't know what to say if there is an active remote command exploitation in the wild.
It is important to get the update to the user before the exploit.
However, that goes against everything I've said so far.
I guess this leads us to the status quo.
Those who have the know-how to use group policy can opt out of certain Windows Update behavior.
The rest can either learn to do this:
and set up their own Windows Update server?
Periodically check CVE and gate update releases?
Not sure how it works...
The reason I hesitate and say automatic reboot should be OPT-IN
is sometimes I like to do some simple long running task
like stitch photos I took into a video using ffmpeg.
It can take hours on a slow laptop processor.
It would really suck to do something like that
and come back to see the computer rebooted itself.
> The real way to address this would be to not make users hate updates.
That's basically not possible in some cases. Not all of us are on super-fast broadband, even in places that are nominally 'first world'. The _best_ my parents can get is 8Mbps on DSL. Every time an update starts auto-downloading, you know immediately because all other connections grind to a halt.
(Now why a minor point update security fix for Monterey is 1.6GB I have no idea. But presumably that's not something Apple is capable of/interested in fixing)
>I don't know anyone who hates or wants to disable Chrome updates
That would be me for one. I hate it when google sneaks in privacy reducing preferences that are automatically turned on. I like to occasionaly go through settings to see what has changed and was surprised when an update showed up a whole host of new active features.
Why on earth should usb ports on my laptop be automatically exposed to any web page that demands it? Chrome can do that now. And not just usb/serial/midi ports, and motion sensors, chrome has also enabled 'presence' (a way for sites to know when you're actively using the browser). I found that creepy.
My first thought ends with 'enabling yubikey-style mfa', but it seems that some [0] hardware vendors use webusb to enable a binary protocol, rather than translating their usb sensor output into (keyboard) scancodes.
Software companies' bad behavior has trained me to no longer trust updating. I would love to auto-update my software if I had some kind of assurance that all I was getting in those updates were security fixes. But instead, companies abuse auto-update to shovel everything else at me too: Unnecessary UI changes, new features I don't want, removal of old features I regularly use, larger binaries, slower binaries, and so on.
More software companies need to get on board with the idea of having a separate maintenance branch and "next version" branch. Too many of them just develop on trunk and every time you update for bug fixes and security, you get all the other crap their developers have been working on too.
Funny enough, I was trained off of that not by software companies, but by the open-source community.
Too many instances of installed Linux distros breaking because some foo relied on some bar that the distro declared should work fine but must have slipped through the testing cracks somehow. Or I'd gone off-book on some custom project or other because it relied on library versions that weren't in the distro, then I forgot I did that and updating the distro libs broke my project.
Chrome seems to me to be an example of how some users will never update regardless of how easy upgrading is. I can't count how many colleagues, when screen sharing, always have the red icon in their Chrome window showing that they need to update. It doesn't matter how easy it is - they just won't do it.
Just to be clear, this isn't an argument that as a result updates should be forced.
It’s not just software execs, I’ve actually heard customers asking for auto-update recently as approving and updating it themselves was too cumbersome, or they relied on a department for this that had no time to do this soonish. They literally asked for “auto updates like chrome or Firefox”…
Auto updates are fantastic if, and only if, the developer can be trusted not to break things for fun. Firefox's auto-updates consist of downloading stuff in the background, prompting me to "restart when you want to apply the update", and then changing next to nothing about my experience of the application between updates.
That is the perfect update story. Everyone loves it: the users aren't having their workflows upended, the developers are able to push updates regularly for security problems and the like, the only loser is the graphics designer who got hired because daddy owns the company and needs to constantly re-design the user interface to justify their job. (seriously, people in companies that do this kind of shit, what is it with re-designs? Why?)
I lost some work a while ago because in Win 10 home you can't easily turn off automatic updates. The amount of hate I got on some forums for suggesting that automatic updates are bad was beyond me. I just upgraded to Pro instead and turned it off in group policies, but I still got hit with an automatic restart at some point.
While I have upgraded to Pro and turned off those settings myself, I have not experienced my whole system restarting to do an update. I have had to neuter the TPM modules in my BIOS to prevent Windows 11 from automatically installing though.
However the issue that I've had was my Terminal App shutting down by itself, I thought it was a crash but it turns out it was because the Windows Store decided to update it.
Now that is complete BS! How can a store arbitrarily decide to update an app while it is still running without asking, without waiting? Even Steam waits to download and update games for when you're not playing one. If it ever did the same thing as what the Windows Store does then there'd be a riot for sure. I guess that it means the Windows Store is just not being used by people at all.
For those interested the "fix" for not having Terminal app restart for an update is to download the MSI package, extract it to a directory, and run it from there. That's directly from the Developer's words on Github.
Automatic updates to address real issues and security risks are fine, unless you're talking about updates that can't be postponed if you're in the middle of something.
What we see, of course, is exactly what the twitter thread posted mentions: some "dickweasel" hijacked the update system to push crapware or do something user-hostile for purposes completely unrelated to what the user would want.
James Williams discusses this in his book "Stand Out Of Our Light", and likens it to a GPS that takes you off to places that you never wanted to visit in the course of (maybe) getting you to your intended destination. Of course, you arrive late, if ever, and burned way more gas (or battery) than you needed. But the GPS got you to drive by a specific set of billboards that they wanted you to see.
In my situation, I was doing GPU intensive work that took about two weeks to complete and got hit with an automatic reboot overnight at some point far into the run. It hit me again overnight while I hadn't saved something, which is my own fault, but it still bugged me. I update my system when I need to update it, but I don't like that it happens without my consent and that there is no way to turn it off.
It's when they try to launder in a bunch of "feature" updates (i.e. more spyware, more crapware) with needed security updates.
They force the user to make a decision: Do I skip this update and avoid having new "features" from crippling my machine, or do I download the update to prevent my machine from being hacked?
If vendors really gaf, they would make is so that you could download needed security updates w/o the rest of the garbage. But then they couldn't force more malware on you.
In their defense, it would be difficult to keep security updates fully separate from feature updates since sometimes replacing a vulnerable feature with a new feature is the easiest fix rather than pushing the new feature, but also issuing a separate fix for those that don't want the new feature.
In other words, it's only reasonable to expect security updates for a certain length of time and not indefinitely.
Somehow windows devices are ok at installing security updates and most apple phones are on the latest os version.
I’d be interested to know what the actual story at MS was for this. I think the executives there in the past demonstrated pretty good decision making. Here’s[1] someone claiming something about PM’s thinking they knew better than users and maybe there is some hidden OKR incentive driving that reasoning, but my weak understanding is that that person wasn’t really involved in what happened so I don’t know how true it is.
this is much more minor than a cancer patient missing his last damn holiday, but I have a device running android tv, and every few days it auto-redownloads “Android TV Home”, which is an advert-infested replacement home screen run by (I assume) Google.
every time, I have to go into the Play Store and uninstall it again. uninstall the home screen! how illogical is that? and how would I have known how to do that if I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to find a reddit post telling me how?
every time, this resets my normal home screen, and I have to set it all back up again, removing the semi-advertising “channels” that are already in the less-bad default home screen.
the device this is on cost more than £500, and yet I’m still paying out in attention because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders
Just side load an Android app called "NetGuard" which is a free firewall app on Android (though it's only available on the Android phone, but you can still sideload it on the Shield TV). Download the NetGuard APK file and then install it on your Shield TV using a 3rd party file manager app (you can find the NetGuard .APK file on Google search, or you could use an APK extractor and extract the NetGuard app from your Android phone after downloading it from the Play Store). You might need to also download a 3rd party launcher to see the side loaded Android apps as it will not appear on the stock Android TV home launcher. Then open the NetGuard app and disable network connections to the "Software Upgrade" app, then switch on the NetGuard toggle and it will block the "Software Upgrade" system app from accessing the internet, therefore it cannot download the software update and then prompt you to install it with an annoying pop up screen message.
If you get a software update message and the software update gets downloaded, just go to the app settings of "Software Upgrade" and delete the app cache and data.
Once you have the NetGuard app enabled, it should auto start every time you boot up the Shield TV and it will always run in the background. I suggest that you regularly open the NetGuard app and have it in the background so just incase Android OS puts it to sleep.
Additionally, I suggest you go to Google Play Services and the Google app and disable all the app permissions to access storage or change system settings (though if you use things like Google Assistant or voice search, you may need to leave the microphone permission on). Do the same for the other Nvidia apps which you might think may try to control or change settings on your Shield TV without your permission.
I'm still on Android 8.0 on my 2017 Shield and I'm happy with it. I don't really need any extra features and nothing needs to be fixed. This is the only method I found to work. I have tried to delete the "Software Upgrade" app package from my computer using Android ADB but I just couldn't do it (maybe Nvidia blocked it). So the firewall method is the only option. I don't know if Nvidia made changes and blocked this method in newer updates, but try it and let me know if it works.
Samsung has now decided that for me to use the camera on my Android phone, i must give full permission to something called Nearby Devices. Thankfully, i can live without the camera but for the first time, i mulling over moving to Apple.
Samsung has fallen far. I switched to a cheap version of the pixel last time I got a new phone. Much longer os update cycle, and they essentially always get rom support first of all the phones. There is certainly better hardware put there but it only has google adware not the vendor's and Google's adware. And roms with no google are am option. I think I may consider an iphone when it gets usb-c but I would miss having a fedora install on my phone to do weird stuff. If they gave me a way to get a terminal where I could have rootless docker or jails on an iphone. I'd be on it. Bonus for having the usbc recognize keyboards, thumb drives and Ethernet adapters.
" For the past five years, Apple has been setting up for what will soon be its most profitable product line. It's not a new phone or computer: it's advertising. "
As some C-suite suit bonus will depend on that, you can be sure that the various protections will evaporate over the years.
Fearmongering or maybe you just haven't been watching? Apple has already been doing advertising for years now. They make it quite easy to disable any tracking you might be concerned about. There's zero reason to think they'll change that.
Pest or cholera - that's what happens when there is a monopoly and the monopoly buys out or sue every competitor. Google and Apple are laughing all the way to the bank, Just like Microsoft for PC.
> I suggest that you regularly open the NetGuard app and have it in the background so just incase Android OS puts it to sleep.
Shouldn't happen since NetGuard works as a ‘vpn client’ to pass connections through the app—so afaik reasonably it should stay working as long as the pseudo-vpn-connection is up.
(Not to be confused with actually connecting to a vpn server, which it doesn't do.)
I run blokada on my phone, which also acts as a pseudo vpn, and that does have problems with dying randomly and needing to be restarted. not sure if it's a bug in the software or a general android issue.
Perhaps Blokada doesn't properly run the background service, with a persistent notification. The notification is necessary since around Android 9 or so—and while NetGuard's ‘vpn’ is indicated in the status bar, it also still has a notification.
Some apps have a setting to disable the notification, but all that achieves is that the app doesn't stay running in the background.
By the way: I semi-randomly landed again on the dontkillmyapp site, and it notes that killing background apps works differently on different phones—presumably first of all between various manufacturers, since they tend to modify Android somewhat deeply: https://dontkillmyapp.com/google
More to the point, the site reminded me that you might want to verify if Blokada is exempted from ‘battery optimizations’ (works via app info —> ‘Battery’ —> ‘Battery optimization’ for me). I checked NetGuard on my phone, and sure enough I have the ‘optimization’ disabled for the app.
(Let me know if you see this comment, or I'm gonna notify you manually.)
hey, thanks for following up! I checked and blokada is set to "unrestricted battery use", so I'm going to guess it's just buggy (the previous version didn't have this issue)
Wow. I think your reply demonstrates the crux of the issue perfectly. I can't tell if its satire or not.
It is insane that this level of workaround and hacks is required to avoid advertising and crapware on a £500+ _television_. Normal people have almost no hope for a good experience when you consider something like a Lenovo laptop from the OP.
You have the manufacture-installed adware, windows 10 + edge nonsense constantly nagging you, and then there is just the state of the web itself. Its all just too much.
It's one thing to hack for fun or to find new uses for hardware and software. It's another to live in a world where we purchase devices for hundreds of dollars, only to have a bait-and-switch on the software and suddenly we get ads on our splash page and a slower UI.
I'm glad there are workarounds, but they _shouldn't be needed_.
The thing that amazes me is the sheer amount of money that seems to be in advertising. It’s sometimes more profitable to surveil or shoehorn in ads than to sell products.
Could this be somehow related to two decades of cheap money and the bloated corporate budgets it created?
It works, there wouldn't be so much advertising without the gains. Of course in this process lots of companies and business, amateurs in advertising, loose money, and of course big companies try new stuff everytime and they loose money too. I'm a marketer and I really feel the ad sector is like a disservice to humanity, trowing money to the script driven money factory when lots of people can't even eat every day.
I really don't think it was that bad. I'd put it in a DIY category with self-install of internet service or hooking up your own car alarm or other such "beneath the surface" technical things non-technical people manage to do for themselves every day by following youtube videos or whatever.
Either way do we need a new post every hour making this same point from yet a different angle?
It's getting harder and harder to turn this stuff off. Firefox wants to talk to its Sync and Pocket servers. I still have an Android phone with F-droid, no Google account, and all Google services turned off, but I don't know if that will work in my next phone.
I am not doubting you, but I'm surprised that it was cheaper. Every time this is discussed here on HN, or on other forums, the prevailing narrative is that it is increasingly difficult to buy a non-smart TV, and that the only option is to look for "industrial display panels" (or some similar designation), which, people claim, are rather expensive.
Note that I am only recounting hearsay, and I haven't done my research on this, as my three PC monitors cover my needs completely, and I have no need for a TV. I'm only "idly curious" about this topic, because one day I may need such a dumb TV.
HN consists of many different people in many markets.
For US folks, yes, you generally have to go for an industrial display panel which is slightly more expensive than a smart TV [whose lower price can be subsidized by the data they're eventually selling].
Maybe for the previous poster who is in the EU, faces a completely different market than the US, a market which is more favorable to non-smart TVs.
I have a 'smart tv' (HiSense) - and while it has a bunch of smart stuff that isn't that bad, the best thing is it starts on the input you left it on. So for me it always opens as connected to hdmi1/chromecast, and I never have to see the smart stuff and the tv itself has no internet connection
My 2018 Sony X900F behaves similarly. Have never connected it to the internet, and its near-stock Android TV install doesn’t nag me about that. When I turn it on it starts on the last used input and you don’t see any “smart” UI unless you explicitly summon it with the home button on the TV remote.
I’ve been using it with an Apple TV 4K and it’s been great.
“Dumb TVs” can still be found in the US, but they tend to be quite low spec, using panels with mediocre at best performance. That’s not a problem for a lot of people but anybody looking for a nicer panel is probably stuck buying a smart TV.
Current Sony TVs offer a “basic TV” mode that disables all the smart stuff though, so they’re a decent option for more discerning buyers looking for a dumb TV.
the reason for the expensiveness being that “industrial display panels” are specifically built to prevent the burning in of an image, as consumer tvs will retain an image if held on that same image for too long
don’t bother with a firestick. firesticks used to be good, but last year they forced an update that did pretty much the same thing as Android TV, but worse. a massive ad-banner across the top of the home screen that you can’t get rid of, with your apps relegated to a tiny ribbon, followed by semi-adverts underneath
at least with android TV it’s sort of, somewhat a choice, for now, but this is flat-out immutable. you used to be able to sideload an alternative home screen, but another forced update removed that option too
buying a firestick is buying adverts for inside your house
>because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders
I sometimes wonder, if the founder has controlling voting shares, or the shareholders on public exchange / stock market are non-voting shares. Would the company still have to please their non-voting shareholders?
Yes (to the extent that it's reasonably possible). Voting rights give you power, but you have a contractual obligation to use that power in the interest of _all_ your shareholders.
It's the same reason why, at least in theory, VC founders can't structure a deal that devalues everyone else to ~0 and pockets the extra money in a side-channel transaction. They definitely have the power to do so, but if you can prove that better options existed and have the inclination to take that to court then you have a decent shot at recovering damages.
Non-voting shareholders can and will sue, and in the US they will probably win. This pretty much forces companies to please shareholders as much as possible at the expense of everything else.
Yeah, I abandoned Android on my TV for this exact reason and now I use the TV as a dumb screen for an external streaming box (also running Android TV, but one that's less locked down and allows me to install my own launcher and control the UI).
I wish dumb TVs with good panels were easier to buy.
I'm getting close too, starting with the cancellation of my YT Premium subscription. All I wanted was to be able to watch my subscriptions in peace on my tv (e.g. bigclivedotcom) but instead I get random breaks (e.g. only the home page shows on the yt app, no access to subscriptions), daily reset of my playback speed preferences, etc. I hope the people who think it's cool to experiment with paying customers get to experience the same for the rest of their lives.
I really have to wonder what the corporate process behind implementing this was. they must have known people wouldn’t like it. they must have known they were literally making their product worse. when these decisions were made, did they feel bad? did they not care? did they delude themselves that people want “recommended content” against their will? did anyone at any point say “hey maybe we shouldn’t do this?”? I bet at least one person who was involved is on hacker news. maybe they’ll see this and can comment. or maybe someone who’s been in a similar position at a company
> did they delude themselves that people want “recommended content” against their will?
Probably. In fact, I think you're underestimating the degree to which they can.
Very few evil people actually think they're evil. Most think they're legitimately doing good and helpful things, while being extremely misguided as to what is good and helpful.
Was not expecting the level of animosity for this app. The last update in August apparently forced a ton of ads on the interface, even if people had paid subscriptions that would remove ads.
Absolute trash. In their boundless greed, Google decided to force endlessly cycling ads onto the home screen, and had the temerity to highlight it as a feature. I give two @$#@$# about the content they are highlighting, from a Christmas movie (in July) to the latest teen pablum. Pretty sure I had automatic updates disabled, and that was overwritten without my consent (with no way to roll back to the prior version). I took a chance on the Android ecosystem with this device (NVIDIA shield), and that's the last time I make that mistake. I'll be tossing that out and not looking back...
Unbelievable. They added unremovable ads right in the home screen. The "Staff Picks" takes over the top 30% of your screen advertising random videos from apps that I don't ever want to install. No way to turn off. How quickly my $2k TV turned from pleasant to ad infested junk. The only solution I had was was to uninstall updates in App manager. If this is the future of Android TV, I'm certainly not buying another TV with this OS again.
I paid a hefty sum for a top-end TV, then again for the most expansive TV box one can find, and what did I get? Ads! Ads that blink and distract. Ads that take more than a third of the screen, pushing what I want to see on the second page. Ads for movies I cannot be less interested in, on services I have absolutely no intention to subscribe to. Ads that have been trying to sell me the exact same three movies in genres I don't care about since they appeared. Evil greedy corporation at its worst.
IANAL but some of this stuff might be class-action-worthy. if you’ve paid to remove ads and they forced them back upon you, surely that’s an infringement of some variety?
I would think this would fall under the "false advertising" laws in any given state:
Minnesota Statue 325F.67 FALSE STATEMENT IN ADVERTISEMENT.
Any person, firm, corporation, or association who, with intent to sell or in anywise dispose of merchandise, securities, service, or anything offered by such person, firm, corporation, or association, directly or indirectly, to the public, for sale or distribution, or with intent to increase the consumption thereof, or to induce the public in any manner to enter into any obligation relating thereto, or to acquire title thereto, or any interest therein, makes, publishes, disseminates, circulates, or places before the public, or causes, directly or indirectly, to be made, published, disseminated, circulated, or placed before the public, in this state, in a newspaper or other publication, or in the form of a book, notice, handbill, poster, bill, label, price tag, circular, pamphlet, program, or letter, or over any radio or television station, or in any other way, an advertisement of any sort regarding merchandise, securities, service, or anything so offered to the public, for use, consumption, purchase, or sale, which advertisement contains any material assertion, representation, or statement of fact which is untrue, deceptive, or misleading, shall, whether or not pecuniary or other specific damage to any person occurs as a direct result thereof, be guilty of a misdemeanor, and any such act is declared to be a public nuisance and may be enjoined as such.
They advertised there would be no ads, then promptly started serving ads while still collecting monthly subscription revenue I think fall into this area.
I have given up the fight. I have pihole. It blocks ads. I can see the broken ad square on my sony android tv/google chrome. I disabled the recommendation. I just scroll down to my favorite app "Emby" and start watching my stuff.
It's gotten a bit better, but I still remember booting up my machine (after not using it for a while), getting a "WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPDATE NOW OR IN 10 MINUTES?" dialog, and sure enough, after 10 minutes, the system force-rebooted, discarding any unsaved work (!), and spent the better part of the hour I had available to finally play a game on installing an update.
Might have been the same update that reset my privacy settings.
Well, "better" here means you get the chance to start the update by yourself withing a few days. No warning is displayed on those few days, and if you fail to update by yourself, the system still force-reboots and loses any unsaved work.
Also, my impression is that the updates have become much less reliable. So your computer may not be back at all. Or something you need never work anymore.
That's why friends don't let friends run Microsoft software. In return for your money, you get to follow their orders, watch their ads, and generally compute in whatever way they want you to this quarter.
Windows is a control mechanism that, for now, runs third party code.
Not only can you not say no, sometimes the computer will wake itself from suspend in the night and update - or fail trying. And you can't stop it (except for pulling the power cord) because Windows won't provide an option to shutdown without update. It's so incredibly disrespectful towards users.
The only way I know of to reliably prevent forced reboots is to use Reboot Blocker, a background service which continually shifts the configured (mandatory) daily time window for reboots, so that you’re always outside of that window.
I still regret that when Fall Creators Update came out, that I assumed that my active stylus (Staedtler Noris Digital, purchased as a bundle w/ my Samsung Galaxy Book 12) being used for scrolling and becoming unable to select text was a bug, so I simply rolled back, assuming it would be eventually be fixed.
If I'd realized that that was a feature which would be pervasive for all future versions of Windows, I would have returned the machine.
I've rolled back to 1703 twice now, and am managing to stay there by the expedient of keeping my hard drive too full for Microsoft to download any further updates.
I despair of replacing this device --- it wasn't quite the replacement I wanted for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 --- no daylight-viewable transflective display.
Why is it so hard to purchase a device which has:
- a good quality stylus (Wacom EMR)
- a high-resolution display (the 2160x1440 on a 12.something inch display is fine, though I'd love more)
- decent battery life
- reasonable size/thinness
- reasonable price
- access to the file system and the ability to install arbitrary software, esp. opensource stuff
I'd also like a daylight viewable display, but that's probably not happening.
Not that I want to defend MS, but the longest I have ever seen it take to update is a couple of hours. Annoying, yes. Should it be user postponable? Yes.
Actually, it is user postponable, you can tell the update to wait up to 5 days by default. It should still allow you to wait unlimited time of course, but you can always press that button once.
5 days! How magnanimous of them!
(Snark not directed at you personally at all) But I write as a person who once had to make idle chitchat with an audience of 300 for 8 minutes when a university presentation computer decided that it had to restart RIGHT NOW.
I worked for the computer store on my University's campus during the initial rollout of Win 10. Many such cases. There were also TOO many instances of Dell computers doing a BIOS update in the background and booting to bitlocker because the drives come from factory encrypted.
I hate bringing this up, because that loss should never have happened. But I ensure all such data lives on the cloud as well as locally because there could be a catastrophic hardware failure, natural disaster, or other external cause of that same problem regardless of Microsoft’s obvious negligence.
That is a good point. However, when I am working on my thesis or even a piece of code that resides on OneDrive folder, I usually pause sync for at least 24 hours. This is because OneDrive will often lock files or otherwise interrupt running/saving code so that it can do continuous sync, like frequently ramping the CPU usage up to 100%, send the fan on frenzy or cause other distractions. And a lot can go wrong in that 24 hours, or even 8 hours which is the lowest setting.
Conventional and unconventional behavior can both have unwanted consequences. We each pick our poison.
Another senior here.
As a child I scratched my father's guitar with a belt buckle I had been told to wear. I learned to distrust adult judgment, I still don't wear belts half a century later, and I have a successful research career for which I partly thank this errant belt buckle. I lost a potential life as a rock God, but I've been protected from ever buying Microsoft products. This story horrifies me but it doesn't surprise me; I made a fair trade.
So you did not learn to weigh consequences correctly.
Wearing belt keeps you from a lot more inconvenience than scratching a guitar.
Besides unless it was IDK some kind of guitar that Jimmy Hendrix was playing I would not scold kid for scratching it - so much that he would stop touching guitars for life or stop wearing a belt for a life.
Buying Microsoft products save you a lot of inconvenience as well.
Removing windows and putting a user friendly Linux distro changed everything. No more invasive software in her way and her aging PC was brought back to life. At first we were a bit scared that there might be technical challenges with Linux that might appear but so far nothing of that sort.
Sorry for your loss, such a horrible story. The small things really do make a difference and this isn't even small but a major nuisance.
But...
Are you really saying he didn't just buy a new laptop for his last holiday!? Just buy the new laptop, even if the plan was it'd immediately go to someone else in inheritance.
The internet is not the only place to buy things. It's also not strictly necessary to buy a computer solely to access the internet. For instance, you could ask your neighbour if you could use theirs for an hour or two or go use one at the local library. Especially if it's just to book a, what seems to be, very important trip while you're dying of cancer.
To quote the parent post, "He was too tired to go through the process of getting it sorted out".
I don't know if you've ever been really sick (or just been around someone who's really sick or suffering from chronic pain), but being on chemo is a thing that completely shuts you down. I fully believe that going out to the store and buying a new laptop and getting it set up was beyond what the parent-poster's father felt capable of. Similarly, going out to the library and doing it all from a shared computer would be entirely too much. Anything that's not the well-worn familiar path would feel insurmountable.
My father was indeed too tired to do anything much in the immediate aftermath of chemo. I would cheerfully have booked and paid for the holiday myself, but he didn't tell me about it at the time. He wasn't much one for asking for help.
what in the world could that upgrade have possibly fucked up for an "email and e-commerce" machine.
I completely understand how things get fucked up for engineers and serious tool users or users who have needs for very specific hardware that require very specific operating systems to run. but an email and e-commerce machine?
what could possibly have broken email and e-commerce?
also I'm very impressed that the very first comment I read on this article has twisted the topic of "value-add software that hardware vendors put on is garbage" blaming Microsoft in record time.
It's amazing how good the vocal HN commenters are about things like this.
And yet you'll still get technical folks parroting mindlessly "Updates are good! Make sure you always update! Muh security!"
No, updates are objectively not all good. Updates frequently break things. This is colloquially referred to as your user experience being "enhanced." Any solution begins with an honest appraisal of these realities.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I went through chemo less than two years ago, and while I don't use windows, quite a bit of technology became outright hostile to me. I even fell for a scam on Instagram and lost $40 trying to buy a gift for my son.
I keep day dreaming about designing systems that focus on stable, simple, consistent interfaces. That don't even give application developers a choice in the interface. Where service providers aren't even tempted to become user-interface developers. If I could afford to take a year or two off, this is what I would work on.
>That don't even give application developers a choice in the interface.
Then you get the crowd of “indie developers” crying about how the platform has taken away user choice and that they should be able to use every API of the OS to do whatever they want, user-be-damned.
Apple doesn’t go nearly far enough and every “indie developer” working in adtech constantly cries about the entire OS should be accessible to every application developer on the planet.
This is a good example of why there should always be an alternative way to access services besides a website or app. There's always an assumption that a computer or a phone is available to do things as simple as making an appointment right through to something as complex as planning and buying a vacation, which is fine up until it's not an option any more. In the past 20 years more and more companies have started to fail at this. It's practically impossible to do anything more complex than buying something from a local shop without access to tech now.
> Microsoft's unfriendly us-first, customers-second process
Fortune 1000-first, themselves second, and customers last.
Thankfully, Apple has recognized that their devices and software are -- at least philosophically -- designed for people, not companies. A phone is a distinctly personal device. I think the reason Windows Phone flopped is that it was ultimately designed to deploy in corporate fleets, with all the usual "the company owns your device and everything on it" experience that most of us have with the corporate laptop. You can say that Microsoft's monopoly in businesses pushed Apple in this direction, but at least they have capitalized on the distinction, and didn't sacrifice user experience to try to court the "corporate purchaser."
This is why I HATE Gartner "market share" numbers. It lumps in corporate purchases (to Microsoft's overwhelming benefit), which completely distorts the view of how people are using operating systems "on the ground." It's my gut-level impression that Apple is leading at least 4-to-1 in individual purchases, and Windows is something everyone but gamers just put up with to do their jobs.
I'm sorry to hear about this. I wonder if there was anything you could have done for him. Like, if you knew he was having such difficulties, why not drop by one day and book the vacation for him?
It really does seem that Microsoft is now in the business of trolling its users. The degradation of "Pro" with ads and uninstallables (like frikking Xbox) is beyond disgusting. When a post mortem of its lost os dominance is done in the (hopefully near) future, I have a feeling that these anti patterns will features prominently. Edit: I'm sorry for your loss.
Microsoft also decided to wipe my entire inbox because I didn't log into my hotmail account all the time.
This was the first time an email company this big pulled some shit like this in the internet era.
All my correspondence from my high school years to my mid-twenties were gone, including cherished back-and-forths with people that were now deceased. It felt like someone came and burned down my house while I was on vacation.
Just thinking about it continues to paralyze me with rage.
Everytime Microsoft forces its product upgrades (I'm not talking about security patches) on people and through shady dark UI patterns, it turns thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of peoples' lives into shit.
The fact that they keep insisting on repeating this awful practice, year after year, even perfecting it at each iteration, can only be explained by a company being run by sociopaths, in my humble opinion.
Microsoft has absolutely no sense of responsibility when it comes to its retail market, its product owners would rather compromise the integrity of any senior's computer to make it unusable than just accept the fact that most people on earth don't need a new Windows every two years.
Windows 10 LTSC + Snappy Driver Installer Origin + Firefox + uBlock Origin + TinyWall removed my family PC support burden by 95%. Vast majority is used business class Lenovo hardware. No ads, no spyware, no bloat, no tracking, no telemetry, no viruses. Add an older, pre chip Brother laser printer/scanner and home computing for frugal non technical people is almost bearable.
Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?
Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter? I need a laptop, a table and a phone. I have been looking for over a year and I cannot find anything I like.
0. I don't want arbitrary software running on my personal devices, fullstop.
1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software.
2. I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities.
3. I don't want to pay a $1000 premium to be able to do this.
This is one of the biggest market failures of our generation. All we have is fake choice, but not a single manufacturer wants to deliver plain open hardware. If you look at buying a car you will end up in exactly the same situation. In fact all consumer hardware of all sorts has the same problem.
RMS was right back then, but the problem has recently become much more serious. Back then it was only about laptops. Now I have to worry about my fridge spying on me.
"Just get a Macbook" isn't really a solution. Sub-1000€ customer grade hardware is plenty capable for a lot of tasks people might want, and some other users want the ability to run the OS of their choice too.
Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.
If you just need a computer to connect to the internet and occasionally entertain yourself, you can get an OK looking laptop for $500AUD or about $300USD/300EUR. Never mind sub 1000EUR. That’s kind of an insane price when you think about it. And it is too good to be true, because they load it up with junk.
But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.
I bought Dell Latitude 3410 for $600. It was loaded with Ubuntu with zero bloatware as far as I can judge. Just some Dell logos and some module blacklists. I upgraded it with SSD and RAM, replaced Ubuntu with Fedora and now it's a little beast which can back me up if my main laptop would die.
In order for that consumer-grade hardware to be that cheap, the vendors add bloatware from other vendors to augment the loss of profits by selling at close to cost, or at least a severely limited margin. This has a knock on effect of making what would be decent enough as a simple daily driver have extremely poor performance.
> 1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software.
and Apple in general is the chief abuser of this user freedom, less so on Mac devices, but extremely so on iPhone/iOS devices: it allows to run only vetted software, often against the interests of the users, and, in some cases, retroactively altering the deals [0], so "doing a market research" prior to buying the device, as many regular HN users suggest, won't really help.
Apple just recently removed from AppStore one of the most popular map application (2GIS). It contains absolutely unique information for my city, lots of reviews, etc. It's hard to imagine my life without this app nowadays.
Now I'm thinking about Android phone, as my iPhone 8 started to throttle and I think it's time to upgrade.
To put this in context: the developer of 2GIS is a Russian company with headquarters in Novosibirsk, owned mostly by Sberbank. They have most likely been sanctioned due to Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don't think Apple had any choice in the matter of removing it.
Apple has had choice to allow side-loading. And some rumors that they're working on it is the only thing that keeps me interested in this platform, honestly. That's not the problem with Android, for example. Google can remove all they want from their Play Store, installing APK is easy.
PS it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.
> Google can remove all they want from their Play Store, installing APK is easy.
Please, let's not act like this is a real solution. It's definitely better than not having that option at all, but:
- 99.5% of users don't even know it exists or how to do it because it's intentionally hidden away
- Because of the above fact, it's generally not viable to develop an application that can only be sideloaded, anything that gets removed from the Play Store usually dies
- Google has recently been moving away from the traditional APK format and towards their new "split APK" structure meaning you cannot sideload apps that were downloaded from the Play Store without a third party app to handle it
They had that choice, and they've chosen not to. This, on one hand, keeps you from side-loading 2GIS, but on the other hand, keeps seniors' iPhones from crapware (as per TLA).
> That's not the problem with Android
The wider problem is what will happen when your side-loaded APK will need to make a TLS connection to 2GIS website, but its TLS certificate has been declared invalid by the cert authority (because sanctions). Or what will happen when the BGP routing protocol will direct the traffic to 2GIS website to go to a sinkhole (because sanctions). Or what will happen when 2GIS web servers from HP and Dell will be rendered inoperable by a remote command (because sanctions).
> it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.
No doubt Linux, OpenOffice, and RISC-V will be of tremendous help to Putin's Russia.
Apple had a choice to NOT have a restrictive policy on not allowing app sideloading. It wouldn't be an issue for users if they could just download the app themselves.
This way Apple could comply with sanctions, removing the app from the AppStore, and not causing their users any real harm.
This would also allow users in China to use messaging apps like Signal.
Macs just have different annoyances. Ever since the notarization crap was added, programs randomly either start instantly or take several second. For some reason this randomness is even more infuriating to me than being constantly slow. Another probably unrelated thing: It takes up to 10 seconds on my new M1 Mac for the first debug session to start in Xcode. Of course this is not the sort of evil malware the article is about, but for me as a user it's just as frustrating to wait for anything on a 21st century computer. An M1 Mac is so fast compared to a 30 years old computer that everything should always happen instantly.
All in all I like my Mac better than my Windows PC or Linux laptop, but Apple software is just regressing a bit slower than the others.
I have a running theory about software developers: the average programmer makes code just fast enough that it doesn’t feel slow on their own machine.
Of course, us software engineers usually buy very expensive computers! The end result is that the average software will always run slowly on the average hardware, forever, no matter how fast hardware gets.
It’s a tragedy and I hate it. I feel like software engineers need “slow CPU thursdays” or something, where every Thursday your cpu is intentionally throttled down to run at the speed of a below average user’s computer. If we don’t feel our user’s pain, we will never understand it.
(Though this would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow. Hm! I wonder how you’d implement that!)
From a development point of view, you may have a point, though mechanisms to circumvent this are addressed in this thread. But for the typical user, or indeed other 'Pros', these are not showstoppers. Since the topic of the whole thread is about poor performance generally for typical users, I think your (valid) concers are somewhat moot. What is distressing is that in order to get something that is easy to self-manage, Apple is the only choice. Microsoft try to be all things to all people, and linux is still too complex for the majority of everyday users to manage. The closest is Ubuntu, which is often treated with distain by the vocal OSS purists.
Mac also comes with all sort of crap installed you cannot get rid of. It may be a bit less intrusive than Microsoft, but it's basically the same strategy, just that they control the hardware and you don't notice it that much.
Linux gives you full customizability on the other hand, but it's not for everybody (yes, in theory there are some very simple and usable distros, but in practice users often need software that is not available on them, like Office).
At least a modern Mac is smooth and usable out of the box - which is more than I can say for just about any big brand windows laptop you can buy today.
It feels like theft when a windows laptop is advertised based on its CPU, except when you take it out of the box 60% of that cpu is consumed all the time with some terrible HP bloatware or something. What an utterly terrible experience.
Most of the preinstalled apps (Home, Maps, Siri, Stocks, ...) cannot be uninstalled by dragging them from the Applications folder to the Trashcan. I don't have any use for any for those apps, so I would really like to get rid of them instead of cluttering up my Applications folder.
For some others it works (for instance Numbers and GarageBand). The randomness (why can some preinstalled apps be uninstalled, but other not) is pretty close to a dark pattern.
I don't think you can uninstall Cortana or Calculator from Windows. The stocks app I will grant is a little weird.
The uninstallable apps on macOS also are never required to have open and running. So yea, it's 4 or 5 extra items in your main ~/Applications folder, but that seems like a small price to pay for all of the other benefits.
I see. Agree you should be able to delete those, but even if you don't use them, they're a far cry from "crap" especially in the context of the discussion about exploitative bloatware that runs constantly and makes low-end laptops unusable.
None of the extra Apple apps do anything unless you run them, so the worst case they take some storage and mental space (when you see them in your Applications folder). And they're obviously included because Apple thinks they're actually useful to enough people, even if you disagree.
Yea, I can't think of anything off the top of my head that cannot be uninstalled. Perhaps iMessages/Facetime. Maybe they are referencing the fully populated Dock? Those apps can all be uninstalled though. It's not different than Windows or Linux showing you the default apps that come with the OS.
My Macbook spends first 10 minutes after boot by trashing CPU and disk with some sketchy mds_stores process. I have no idea what it does it do. Every single time. Looks like some kind of indexing for me which I didn't ask for (and I tried to turn related options off which didn't help al all).
Spotlight indexing (for Spotlight search: ⌘+Space). In System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, you can add folders or disks to prevent Spotlight from indexing them.
I turned it off, it did not help. It still starts on boot and spends minutes indexing who knows what. I never use this Spotlight feature. I guess it looks for forbidden files on my disk, I heard that Apple does that and you need CPU to compute hashes.
FWIW my very expensive 2017 iMac has the same behavior. CPU pegged 24/7 by "mds" and "mdworker_shared". Just opening Activity Manager right now, I see about 20 mdworker_shared processes, each claiming ~11% CPU. I think disabling Spotlight get this under control, but then again, I like and use Spotlight. Surely Apple is capable of writing software that doesn't need to run full blast constantly.
Yea, trust me, it's annoying. I have no idea why it's happening, and web searches and stack overflow have not been particularly helpful. I have resigned myself to just living with a warmer room and having my mac's fans running constantly. This problem has been going on for years, and it's obviously not on Apple's Radar (pun intended).
Lol! If you live near a store, take it in. I’ve had lots of good experiences with Apple stores and soft/hardware issues. The ‘geniuses’ can be a a bit full of themselves, but all in all outcomes are good.
Apple has service centers everywhere. Go have them look at it.
I’ve gotten probably $10k worth of repairs for free across my apple devices. I’ve even purchased broken apple devices in warranty to walk them to the Apple Store to walk out with new hardware.
Obviously it's a software issue and has nothing to do with hardware. Why would I waste my time and risk my laptop being damaged by incompetent workers. I have had enough bad interactions with service center to not visit them unless absolutely necessary.
Except that in cases where Apple devices don't just work you are screwed. A few years back a friend of mine had her MacBook Air's system language suddenly change and wasn't able to change it back as the option panel to do so just froze each time. I had to do an extensive Google search as most answers I found were generic variations of "bring it to an Apple shop" or "reinstall and use a backup" (which we did, didn't fix the issue). In the end I had to edit some config file to switch the language back. Safari's language was still wrong afterwards, but she could live with that.
That does suck, but one of Apple’s strengths is that you can walk into an Apple Store and have stuff like that fixed- usually quickly and often for free.
Every single workday for over a decade. Mac is never the issue. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster but I got those replaced with overnight shipping both ways.
The company that would do those things wouldn't get investment or would be actively railroaded; that's why. There are plenty of underserved markets with huge market demand, you identified one of them, and they will remain underserved, because they are in direct opposition of present-day ruling class interests of real-time granular control.
> I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities.
This would cost enormous amounts of money for practically no benefit whatsoever to the manufacturer. Modern hardware is complex so drivers are costly and Linux-on-desktop enthusiasts are an incredibly, incredibly small niche. Which, I must add, is just getting smaller and smaller as WSL and ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex subsumes many of the use cases. In fact, I am not even sure what is left.
The amount of work to get a driver use a modern chip to full capabilities is really huge. It almost never happens with volunteer written drivers, whether the manufacturer is friendly or not. The fragmentation is just too big.
The market fails in almost every respect, and it's nothing new. We get sold crap clothes that discolor when it's perfectly known how to make them not to, crap food with all kinds of nasty ingredients like trans fats, etc.
I don't know how people can still think that the market optimizing and giving us the products we want at an adequate price is the default, when it's clearly the exception.
It is because most people don't actually care about those issues (discolored clothing, crap food ingredients etc.) to any measurable degree. They might in theory, but in practice they exert zero effort to educate themselves on these issues and learn how to discern better products from worse ones. And if the consumer doesn't care, why should companies care?
Also being able to care and then act brings the assumption that you have the free time to spool up a mini research project on each and every consumer good you buy.
It's easy to hide lower quality but very difficult to hide higher prices.
Game theory suggests that the vast majority of consumer goods will be nearly free, relative to their high quality counterparts, at the minimum viable quality.
> We get sold crap clothes that discolor when it's perfectly known how to make them not to,
I cannot remember the last time my clothes discolored, and I buy what I think are cheap clothes by US standard (Uniqlo/Next/Express/Macys/ASICS/Adidas).
But to address your point, I would rather pay $30 for a pair of jeans that maybe has a little discoloration in 5 years, which I currently do, than $100+ for a high quality pair of jeans that might last 20 years but I have to pamper and take care of.
Where the clothing market does not work is addressing the externality of plastics pollution, since it’s all short term benefit to individuals now at long term cost to society later.
>crap food with all kinds of nasty ingredients like trans fats, etc.
Trans fat is really minimal to non existent in most developed countries. But is a good example of when regulators need to intervene to protect the public.
I'm not even talking about the color fading in 5 years, I'm talking about clothes that shed pigment from the first wash and not only discolor, but ruin the rest of your laundry...
If you don't experience it often, I imagine it might be a Europe vs. US thing. I have often heard that clothes for sale in the US tend to be more robustly made (maybe because of the widespread use of tumble dryers?). In Spain what I said above is definitely a common occurrence, and you don't even get rid of that by paying for good brands, I have had clothes from e.g. Lacoste do that. And the reason is that they skimp on a chemical that fixes the dye. It's perfectly avoidable, but they just don't bother.
> I have often heard that clothes for sale in the US tend to be more robustly made (maybe because of the widespread use of tumble dryers?).
Maybe, although the Next brand I wear a lot gets shipped to me from UK. I throw my unsorted clothes in the washer and then the dryer and then fold them and put them away.
My British family spends a lot more time sorting by color, turning jeans inside out, washing them on specific water cycles, then line drying them, then ironing them.
I figured I was just buying clothes that need less work.
The only time that’s happened to me was maybe 11 years ago when someone bought me a red t-shirt in Mexico. Red everywhere. That’s literally never happened to me in the US.
Counter argument, the market is getting exactly what they want.
It’s just not aligned with what you want them to want. They want fast fashion that lasts a couple weeks, because that’s how long fashion trends last, and they want foods that taste good over is healthy. The market is just giving them what they want.
And hear me out, if people are going to be throwing clothes out every couple weeks regardless of quality, it's better that they're made as cheaply as possible.
It's true that the market gives people what they "want", in the sense that they choose to buy that. That's almost a tautology.
But most of the time they choose to buy that because they don't have enough information, or they have misleading information.
No one wants a pair of pants to ruin the rest of the laundry. And there is food without trans fats that tastes as well if not better, but it's easier to just put trans fats or whatever the next crap product is and not inform the consumer.
Pretty much all consumers know excess sugar, carbs, oil, salt, and calories in general are bad for them. Yet they still want to consume them.
I went to a party last night where there were several obese healthcare professionals (doctor level). Yet they ate pizza, and one even put ranch dressing on it.
The market is selling plenty of healthy food. People do not want it though, for the same reason a dog or other pet will engorge themselves if they were offered unhealthy amounts of easy calories.
Taste is learnt. Some people consider junk food to taste good only because they’ve been conditioned to eat it when they were growing up. If junk food was not a regular thing in your life, I doubt you’d consider it particularly tasty. Due to health issues when I was a child I couldn’t eat a lot of things at all growing up which for others were just not that healthy. I always ate at home. As a result I don’t consider junk food particularly tasty. Quite the opposite, home-cooked meals made out of raw ingredients are the most delicious thing I can think of. I also have a group of friends a bit older than me who grew up before McDonalds and KFC entered my country. For them too stuff sold by those places isn’t particularly pleasurable to eat. On the other hand I saw plenty of families who these days go to McDonalds every Saturday/Sunday, where the children are conditioned to expect regular visits to those places and will make a huge drama if it doesn’t happen. If you’re in US, from what I’ve heard even normal food in supermarkets is already more processed and the fresh stuff may somehow even be more expensive, so that’s a whole other can of worms.
It's not selfish if they mean they "can't" rather than they "don't want".
If someone doesn't want to spend $2000 instead of $1000 on something that does what they want/need better than the $1000 version; I'd argue that they don't really mean they "don't want" to, they mean they can't financially, whether literally or justifiably.
I can't justify spending $2000 on a phone that does things I want it to do better than the $800 equivalent (which we shouldn't forget is also quite a premium to many), so I buy the "cheaper" one and "make it work".
If the difference between $1000 and $2000 were inconsequential to me, then I don't see why I wouldn't "want" to pay that premium.
So, I argue, GP isn't selfish as you put it, they just choose their words poorly on this point; or you take them too literally.
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?
Counter-question: did you really think the free market was actually working for the consumer ?
A free market relies on multiple points:
- consumers are rational
- consumers have time and energy to compare alternatives
- alternatives exist
- it is essentially free to create an alternative, and alternatives take 0 time to become mature
- consumers have enough money to buy exactly what they want
None of those are true. Consumers aren't rational, or else there wouldn't be a multi billion dollars ad industry whose point is exactly to instill artificial demand. Consumers have too little free time to spend on chores, family, going out; they won't spend a weekend spreadsheeting a smartphone. The last competitor to the current duopoly failed because it didn't gain traction, and it was a multi billion dollar company. The income inequality keeps rising, people have to make a choice between paying rent and buying a new smartphone.
The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life but of shareholders' profits. A barely working, ad-ridden, slow as molasses smartphone that prints money just by being turned on is the expected outcome of those incentives.
> The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life
No economist would claim that (and I seriously ask from where you got the "markets maximize consumers' quality of life" claim). Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.
> Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.
Where, in practice, "efficient" is conveniently circularly defined as "whatever the market decides". In the case of the OP, there's nothing "efficient" about grinding a computer to a halt under an oppressive layer of crapware, thereby wasting the user's time and energy (in both a literal and a figurative sense). The stark lesson of the modern age is that markets are hopeless at pricing in externalities.
They don't decide this is what they want, they decide this is the least bad they will bear.
I don't like Android, I don't like iOS. What do I buy ? Not the one that is best for me, because I don't have a real choice, but the one I will hate the least.
> I don't like Android, I don't like iOS. What do I buy ?
Not buying is also a possible decision. You should of course choose this choice if all other available option have a negative net value for you. The fact that you decided for Android or iOS shows that both of these choices have a positive net value for you - so what are you complaining about?
If I don't buy anything, I'm out of the market system and the whole argument of "the market is best" falls down: it means the market hasn't solved my problem.
> The fact that you decided for Android or iOS shows that both of these choices have a positive net value for you - so what are you complaining about?
Android suits me more, but I would like to be able to run multiple VPNs at the same time. What do I buy ?
I didn't buy Android because this is what I want, but because it's the closest. But how do I drive the decisions to where I want ? Am I supposed to wait that a million alternatives are created and have the same level as Android, then only can I buy what I need ? This just doesn't work.
> If I don't buy anything, I'm out of the market system and the whole argument of "the market is best" falls down: it means the market hasn't solved my problem.
This means the vendor makes no money from you. If a lot of people decide this way, the vendor will have to adjust or go bust - this is called "market adjustment".
The fact that you did buy tells the market that what you bought is of net-positive value for you.
That's like an AI recognizing Bugs Bunny as a cat and not as a chair, at least it's an animal, it is a net-positive over the alternative. That's still not what I want.
I applaud the efforts, but it's not there yet and still, look how long it took to be where they are today. Look at the lost efforts of webOS, Maemo, Symbian, FirefoxOS. Most of those have working forks, but only commercial ones are still living and are still not what I'm looking for.
Indeed, it's very much work in progress, but in my opinion it's very far already and people who are concerned about having alternatives should support such efforts (I do).
The most efficient usage of resources is the constraint, not the goal. It means markets will use fewer resources for building 10 smartphone than an ad-hoc system, but it will not decide whether the 10 smartphones are needed or what kind of smartphone are needed.
Also it doesn't imply it'll use the least amount of resources, it implies it'll use the least amount of _money_, which means the cost will be exported to countries that can't afford to say no... Are we really surprised at the amount of slave labor in the world?
In the sense that those who are willing to pay the most get preferred resource allocation in a way that is self-adjusting.
If a company is able to pay more for their commodities, it means that it is able to create more of an economic value of the commodities than a competitor (otherwise it would not be able to pay this price). This leads to a more efficient and effective use of the commodities that are traded on the market.
It also encourages slavery. Who sows your clothes? Who assembles your phone? Who picks the vegetables you eat? Really it's all the same person: The cheapest option.
Indeed, if slavery turned out to be more efficient, it would.
But I think that the claim that slavery is more efficient does not hold, since opressing people binds a lot of ressources; also opressed people tend to do work as minimally as possible.
So it is much more efficient to give people the illusion of freedom instead of enslaving them.
Efficiency in this case defined as "extracting as much money from consumers at as low a cost as possible", not "providing as much value as possible to consumers at as low a price as possible". The latter can, under the right circumstances (a competitive market) be the most effective way to achieve the former, but those conditions do not always occur, and most companies, for obvious reasons, do all they can to get into a position where they don't.
>
Efficiency in this case defined as "extracting as much money from consumers at as low a cost as possible", not "providing as much value as possible to consumers at as low a price as possible".
"providing as much value as possible to consumers at as low a price as possible" is exactly the opposite of efficiency since as a company you don't have to invest that many resources for the given price.
Pre-installing spyware gives money to the vendor of the laptop. The developer of the spyware can afford to give this money to the laptop vendor since he can use the collected data to make even more money.
The parent said that they want a specific kind of smartphone, and questions why the market doesn't provide it. They essentially ask why the market doesn't provide something that suits them better
I’m commenting because I can’t upvote twice. Other commenters are apologists working hard to defend their capital-religious beliefs. And, I’m here to support the statement that “the free market has always been a fable”.
I think the legacy of trust busting from the late 1800's and early 1900's carried over pretty well into the post-war boom in the 50's and 60's, and that's why we have so many stories about how home appliances lasted for 30, 40, and 50 years back then. I think our system started falling over with the deregulation under Reagan in the 80's, and it's being a steadily-increasing decline ever since. Matthew Stoller on Twitter is closely following Lina Kahn at the FTC, and she seems intent on restoring the balance between consumers and corporations, but I'm afraid that if she actually does something noticeable by the general populace in this regard, she'll simply be replaced by a "sympathetic" administration, and the organization "steered" back into compliance. If so, the people who do this should just disband them. It doesn't do us any good to have regulatory gatekeepers on the payroll, if they're only acting like the ratings companies in the MBS fiasco and subsequent meltdown.
Also- just because it's a big deal to you and me, doesn't mean it actually is. How much does it actually hurt you? That's why people don't care. In the grand scheme of things is a wicked "first world problem". We live extremely privileged lives if this is really a huge annoyance (it is to me btw).
I wish things were more open. Would the entire streaming community ever have happened without a general purpose computer? It is hard to know what alternate future we have been robbed of by being force fed closed and locked down platforms.
The requirements sound like you want Linux and open-source BIOS. All doable with today's consumer-grade laptops, although I never cared enough to install custom BIOS.
My personal devices are a Fairphone with e/OS and a Purism laptop. The laptop probably fails no. 3, but they do fulfill 0.-2. imho. There are alternatives. And for the prices I suspect that there is not enough demand for prices to come down.
Our family laptop and my personal desktop run Linux Mint. Those do not have open firmware, but that's it.
Good question, I don't run any banking apps on Android out of principle. I don't like authenticator apps either but they are better than SMS verifcation which I despise. Where possible, I use a Yubikey or other separate read-only device.
Banking is only done on a laptop booted from a read-only stick and with a TAN-generator.
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?
The most common type of market failure is monopoly/oligopoly: you can choose Microsoft or Apple. They have a suffocating grip on OEMs, making it very difficult to develop alternatives.
The real question is: Why is human society tolerating oligopolies on software, CPUs and hardware in general?
The market isn't failing, it's just that the subset of users that care about such things but aren't just switching to linux dwarfs the number of people who don't care about this at all. There is no incentive for companies to cater to the wishes of this minority.
There's also a group (maybe the largest group?) that might care if they knew what the benefits are. Alas, free software doesn't have a lot of money to spend on marketing.
Easy Answer: consumers decide on one factor and one factor alone: price.
And no need for the exaggeration, in many cases you can buy an iPad for less than that crappy windows laptop with all the spyware. Even for a fully featured Air, the price difference is way less than $1000
It seems like every other commenter is missing this. People would rather pay for a $200 TV and complain about the ads on it than buy a properly priced TV.
>Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?
This is just typical late stage capitalism, no? The step after commoditization isn't "and then they just quietly settled for being treated like a utility and not having huge profit margins anymore". It's more often "and then they tried to find other ways to monetize by selling ads and demographics information" or "then they bought up their competitors and raised prices again" or "then they formed a cartel with their competitors" or "then they tried to de-commoditize the product category by charging 200% more for a 20% performance improvement, while stopping production of the previous version" or "then they started charging more for related services and maintenance" (cf. printer ink cartridges and razor blades). Being the "winner" or "last/biggest company standing" of a product category means you get to do all of the above consumer-hostile fuckery to try to keep profit margins high.
"Let the market decide" doesn't work, that's the gist of it. It's only capitalist-idealists that still believe that.
I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. Since websites didn't self-regulate when it came to tracking people, legislation came in to make them do so, making everything worse for everyone because then instead of removing the trackers, corporations decided to apply dark and annoyance patterns to make people just hit the easy accept button.
Even self-regulation doesn't work. A decade ago, MOST of the smartphone manufacturers self-regulated and settled on using micro-USB for charging. Apple refused to cooperate, so now legislation came in.
So, funnily enough, there's a secret ME disable that Intel made specifically because someone at the CIA or NSA got cold feet about the whole "secondary boot-up processor that can pwn the main processor cores" thing.
I don't even think it's the Fed's cooking. Large enterprises were asking for a way to detect, wipe, and reset a compromised machine, remotely, while the compromised OS was still running. Intel ME was their solution to this.
If it was not intended as a universal backdoor I think there would be some way for the hardware's owner to disable it or buy hardware without the baked-in backdoor.
The free market always tends to fail if there’s a monopoly. A duopoly is apparently also a failure mode, here (regarding phones).
But in the case of laptops, I’m not sure the market has failed. Apple is selling MacBooks like hotcakes. The Framework laptop is attacking at a different angle, and I have high hopes for System76 and friends.
Yes, there’s loads of hot garbage, but there are really good alternatives.
The market failed in part because it appears to goose up productivity when you cut team size, outsource, and OKR your way to "measurable performance." Nobody was left with any willingness to call this crap out. Nobody was incentivized to say the bloatware was causing product returns.
How to fix this? It has to come from every CEO, down through management, to empower the people who ask expensive questions like "Why is the bloatware so shitty?" This doesn't happen because most CEOs cannot grasp that that is how Apple gets to charge so much more for their laptops, and that they have to give up managing by the numbers to get there. (Not that Apple hasn't got numbers people, especially on the supply chain side.)
You don't need open source systems to get there. Open source in commercial systems can help, but it isn't fundamental to getting the bloatware under control. Microsoft does it with Surface in part to put pressure on their OEM customers, like Google does with Pixel. This isn't just to be good to their end-users. They would probably kill their OEMs if they could and be more like Apple, if they could.
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?
In my environment, more and more people are switching from $BRANDXYZ to Apple (or Linux). To me, it doesn't look like the market is failing, rather the opposite. But of course, this is not a Representatione evaluation.
The problem is, however, that not everyone wants to or can afford this.
It comes down to incentives. No one on the supply side is incentivized to make a product the average consumer WANTS. They are incentivized to make something that the consumer will wind up BUYING. And all of their incentives are extremely short-term, from the CEO on down, and UP, to the shareholders. All we care about is stock price. That's it. Everything, inside and out, tracks back to the singular god of share price. You can say that the trade press cares about something else, but, no, they don't. If internal metrics are making middle managers hit their KPI's, then that tracks with share price, no matter how screwed up those KPI's are. It's all just so perverse and incestuous.
One of the reasons is the value assigned to spyware/crapware subsidises the cost of the physical product and increases over time in a race to the bottom. It's especially clear on items that the market suggests you need to upgrade every couple of years to keep them competitively priced, but even long cycle items like laptops and tvs are suffering from it.
To start with it looks like you're getting a discount from one manufacturer, but you can spend more for a clean slate, then they all abandon the clean slate models and you can't even buy control.
Can you even buy an everyday consumer Windows laptop from without crap on it these days?
I know people dont want to hear that but none of these problems would happen if people installed Linux. Windows is just a bottomless pit of malware either by third parties or MS themselves
I've seen many younger people get tripped up too much with Linux laptop (typically installed/sold by a friend) when they do just fine on Windows. There's little chance the senior in question will do well if you had given them a linux machine.
If all they need is a web browser, any Linux distro is fine. If they need to install apps, then a bit of training is required to find the app store and how to install downloaded DEB files.
Plain suers don't want to deal with an operating system. They expect that a machine they buy for $$$$ is useable for what it is supposed.
(And if large computer vendors would start preinstalling Linux they'd add their crapware there to "build their relationship" with the customer and selling a few ads or whatever)
Windows is fine if you do the install yourself, but every major device manufacturer does this to some extent.
When you issue a computer for work IT will almost always, without fail, emulate this by installing a bunch of their own junk spyware and “security” software.
Reviewers of laptops do a fresh install of Windows before reviewing like that is normal consumer behavior.
My grandma bought a mid-prized Android phone. All she does is lookup recipes on Youtube and Whatsapp her family.
After 2 months (!) she came to me with the phone. Somehow she now had ads on her lockscreen, her default browser was hijacked by some other browser app with ads, and multiple apps had persistent notifications and were running continuously. Among them AVG anti-virus, some cleanup tool...
I have no idea how they got there. Probably because they pop-up in Ads with texts like "YOU NEED TO INSTALL THIS".
My grandma can't differentiate between an Ad like that and a serious System update notification.
It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device. For all their faults at least they protect you from this kind of nonsense. The Lenovo is just the same, really. A profound disrespect for their own users and the usability of their own product.
I'm not sure how much protection this affords, but I'm aiming to only buy phones that are on the LineageOS support list, and can have their bootloader unlocked.
Weird how things that the manufacturer would consider insecurities, eg unlocked bootloader, allow end users the kind of control that can increase security and privacy (admittedly, maybe conflating privacy and security). Highlighting the disconnect between industry security and user interest (even though users, by and large, aren't interested in their own interests).
I treat use of SafetyNet or attempting to detect root as actively malicious and give apps that do that 1-star ratings on Google Play.
I realize there's a theoretical risk the OS could be compromised or malware could have superuser permissions, but my previous attempts to find any significant data breaches or user harm caused that way have come up empty. If anybody knows of one, I'd be interested to read about it.
SafetyNet doesn't protect me from having my personally identifiable browsing data sucked away and sold off, and that happens daily to all users of their devices. Google can't even sanitize their own ad platforms.
What are you attempting to protect me from then SafetyNet? Oooh, I get it, you're trying to protect apps created by companies that collect and store sensitive data to minimise the chances of said companies being sued for, and having to publicise, a data breach. Ok, why didn't you just say that? Yeah, you're right, it doesn't play anywhere near as well to the great unwashed.
SafetyNet sounds like shit to me:
> requires Google Play Services to be enabled on the device for the API to function smoothly.
> SafetyNet works in combination with the snet service on Android devices which collects data about the integrity of the device and constantly ping Google about the safety status of the device.
> Google offers many other options like application sandboxing, encryption, app-based permissions and so on to secularize apps but none of them are considered as an all-inclusive solution.
(GPS permissions required for wifi scanning? Fix your basic shit first!)
> By identifying devices which are currently in the non-tampered state the API provides an assurance that the device on which the app is running is neither rooted nor using a custom ROM.
The absolute worse for me was when I found myself trying to explain to my grandma that you must ALLOW cookie preferences, but you must absolutely DENY notification permissions. For trying to read some news online... The web is a harmful mess.
i hope you understand the inherent irony of your second suggestion, but if you missed it: I Don’t Care About Cookies just got bought by one of these companies known for similar types of abusive UX (surveillance-ware).
There is a fork by the community "I still don't care about cookies" (note the "still") that should avoid any evil stuff Avast would do to the original extension.
The shitty thing is, she'd probably be better served by denying cookie preferences... but despite whatever regulations say, companies find impressively difficult ways to keep the user from answering "no, please don't spy on me".
Every cookie banner that I've ever clicked "no" on has let me proceed to the main site. The user is still a potential viewer of ads, even if they can't be microtargeted, so it's worth it to the site to let them proceed.
I had the same thing with my mother. She plays Candy Crush, actively uses WhatsApp, Youtube, Facebook, takes photos to share with friends/family and not much else.
Tapping adds apparently lead to installing these things called "Launcher" which are essentially complete phone UI and those launchers have ads that lead to even more hideous apps. They also lie about the thing you are installing, she was trying to get some emojis and I checked back then, the launcher in question was disguised as emoji thingy. You need to carefully read the text to understand that you get the emojis together with complete phone UI replacement.
I can't stand the Android way of doing things. How it is possible to replace the main user interface of the device? I understand the desire to completely control your device and I do support it in principle but this sort of modifications should be possible only by going through scary screens that let only people know what they do achieve that sort of device modifications.
One has to grant permissions to install unknown software. That means going into settings and flipping a toggle. Are you saying these ads somehow bypassed that?
Who said anything about unknown software? Unless of course by unknown you mean software on Google Play store, then yes that switch is probably switched to install Candy Crush and WhatsApp. It's not a 2007 Nokia after all, some "unknown" apps are needed.
These days on Android when sideloading things the installer will give you instructions and then can automatically send you to the correct settings screen and scrolls down to the correct toggle, and it may even highlight it I believe, it's been awhile.
Similar story for my mom. She was used to windows because at work she used locked down, centrally managed, IBM thinkpads for many years. The trick is that those were secure and managed. If anything didn't work, they just got swapped by IT for another clean one.
But she always had problems with her private laptop, and no assistant or IT department to fix it. We thought she needed a windows one because that is what she knew, but the switch to a macbook air took maybe a week or so to adjust to.
It was a bit of a gamble, since I don't own a mac so supporting one via phone would be very tricky. But she has had the macbook now for years and I've had to do absolutely zero tech support on it. For emails, Word documents and some web browsing it really just works.
My dad had never used a Mac in his life until I helped him buy an M1 Air. He loves that thing. The only thing I did was install Brave and make it the default browser.
I think he gives Apple credit for how fast his internet is, when really it’s due to Brave. But the rest of the experience— no crap ware, no spyware, no ads in the system— that’s on Apple.
Edit: forgot the main point, which is that he needed no handholding. Given how often he had to replace his crapware-ridden netbooks in the past decade due to performance degradation or something physically breaking, I showed him the trivial math that made the MacBook look like an economic decision as much as a QoL decision.
Safari with a content blocker like Wipr is very fast too, and easier on the battery compared to chromium based browsers.
My dad’s life is made easier with a MacBook Air + iPhone combo because all his 2FA SMS codes get auto inputted into the 2FA field so he does not have to type out the number.
My dad accepts every websites request to send notifications. His phone is just constant chime after chime. I went into his Chrome, removed them all, and disabled the option, but somehow it finds itself on and his phone loaded with them every couple months.
It's because people assume that these things are benevolent because they were made by people. Gen X on down are natural skeptics so we don't end up with as much garbage on our phones, it's still possible to accidentally click a pop up when you were getting ready to hit a link.
> possible to accidentally click a pop up when you were getting ready to hit a link.
I personally believe that some sites are designed to shift just a bit to cause this. Like they've used analytics to know how quickly people push the link and now they've designed a slow loading image to shift the page at that point.
And yet every time mobile Safari comes up people on this site go off about how it's "broken" because it does not support notifications from websites. There are legit uses of website notifications, but 99% will be spam like this.
what's messed up is these apps are in the play store, rated e for everybody (so parental controls can't filter them) and have 5 star ratings from thousands of users.
Apple isn't for everyone, but it's a lot more consumer focused than Android is.
It's one reason why Apple phones still do really well on the secondhand market.
My parents both had Android tablets (Samsung iirc), but they didn't use them for very long, switched to iPads, and used them at the dinner table for years afterwards - just checking news, playing games, that kind of thing.
My dad bought a laptop the other day to play games and watch F1 with - at least the pre-installed shit wasn't too bad. Still had to talk him out of getting both AVG and some other virus scanner though, that would've bogged his system down and make him lose trust, because virus scanners these days are scareware - that is, if they don't pop up every once in a while pretending to be useful, people will get rid of them.
On the other hand, it’s hard to make great innovative leaps with a mature product. The iPhone is something like 15 years. And I’m happy that they don’t change things just because they think they should.
And it looks like their laptops actually found the path again.
At the same time, they keep adding useful features. I noticed something new in the Notes app the other day. I had entered a recipe as a note and all the recipe quantities (e.g. "1 tbsp", "5 cups", etc) had a faint underline. I tapped it and got an overlay with the units in a bunch of variations: liters, CCs, gallons, pints, etc.
Sometimes Apple products just have these really nice touches. Other times, it's confounding where the gaps are and leave me wondering if Apple even uses their own product. I have two garage doors that I've HomeKit enabled and if I tell Siri "close the garage door" I get asked which one, even if only one is open. Even if I say "close both garage doors" or "close all garage doors" I still get prompted.
I'm coming from a techy 30-something person with Android for years, but also had iPhone for work from 2014-2019.
The UI of Nova Launcher on my S21 is so much more intuitive than Apple. Apple does everything through swipes. Swipes suck for several reasons, one of them being that I must swipe certain positions at certain speeds to get everything done. I miss buttons. Related: After two weeks of owning an iPhone 14, I was complaining about how I can't move my cursor in the URL field. It just kept highlighting words! My friend told me the super-intuitive iOS experience: hold down Spacebar to move your cursor. I'm glad that was covered in the non-existent tutorial.
Then there are the anxiety inducing badges, the fact that settings is an app instead of a system menu, the fact that control center (or whatever the system drop down is) can't have nearly the function of Android's system drop down, the fact that notification center doesn't feel trustworthy or consistent, the fact that notification center shows me notifications from blacklisted apps even in focus mode...
Android's UI just makes so much more fucking sense. And I hate that I am tempted now to go back to my S21 with inferior camera and DAC/bluetooth stack just to have software that makes sense.
I acknowledge this is a rant and not as well put-together as most of my comments, but effing Hell, iOS is a mixed bag.
> one reason why Apple phones still do really well on the secondhand market
Apple products do well on the second-hand market because Apple usually doesn’t cannibalize that market by selling low-end devices. By positioning themselves as a premium brand and ensuring that the low end of the market is not served with new products, they ensure that the low end will be served by the second-hand market. PC/Android can’t do this because they don’t control the hardware and there’s always some brand that will sell new low-end devices which compare favorably to any used device.
In the few cases where Apple has deviated from this strategy of not serving the low end, resale values have suffered. The iPhone 8 and iPhone X were released at basically the same time. But the X currently sells for roughy 25% of its original price whereas the 8 sells for closer to 15%. This is due to the introduction of the SE which is basically just a cheaper and better 8.
Have you used one? I know someone who bought one because she wanted an easy-to-use device, and it was nearly unusable. The thing one had like 1 or 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage which was quickly filled by photos (on crap quality camera). The thing somehow became slower than molasses to operate.
Thankfully I was able to copy off the pictures, and I bought her a Pixel 4a, installed a tempered glass screen protector and thin/minimal TPU case, went through the settings with her, and even showed her screenshots of more user-friendly third party launchers. She opted to keep the default launcher, and it's been smooth sailing since. (I also installed Firefox and uBlock Origin on it.)
> It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device. For all their faults at least they protect you from this kind of nonsense. The Lenovo is just the same, really. A profound disrespect for their own users and the usability of their own product.
Be careful what you wish for. For many power users, overlays and replacing the default browser are 100% essential. Removing them just for the sake of user safety would be a grave mistake.
Google is already pushing to replace overlays with "bubbles" for example.
I find the best solution for people who accidentally click on ads is ad blockers.
Firefox for Android has AdBlock plus support now. The browser itself is somewhat slower than chrome on Android but totally worth it for the ad blocker.
I have the exact same issue with mine. As a workaround I set a password to install apps from the play store and it works, she never download new apps so it's not an issue.
That's why you should install an adblocker for any relative.
Brave will kill all ads, and many apps like Trackercontrol offer a local DNS server that will block any ad - related domain.
> It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device
It’s usually not even “expensive” when you consider the frequency with which people replace low-end hardware. All of my Android-using relatives replace their phones and tablets 2-3 times more frequently so they end up paying more for slower hardware and then having to spend time playing tech support instead of using their devices.
To be clear, that’s not Android’s fault in the sense that the market is broken: Apple is fine with you having a 6 year old device because you’re probably using the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, etc. There’s also some lesson about how consumers want the ability to install things outside of the App Store but statistically a large fraction of us can’t do that safely.
An iPhone SE isn't "expensive" if you value your time at all.
I got all of my older relatives and in-laws to buy one (eventually) and they've been 99% problem free ever since. With Androids it was even worse than trying to get their "got it from the store on sale" Windows-laptops cleaned up.
My mother is on her second iPhone SE, she used the first one until it didn't get software updates (5 years IIRC). If everything goes as usual, she'll be using it until 2025.
"expensive Apple device" I know it's a lot of money for some folks, but a new iPhone SE is $400, and old iPhones remain serviceable for an absurdly long time — the iPhone SE 1st gen was compatible with latest-versions on release date for seven freaking years.
How is a $400 device that lasts seven years more expensive than even $200 budget Androids that have to get replaced every two years?
I would immediately reinstall a just bought laptop from scratch, as in through a Windows/Linux ISO, not through their own recovery, especially from Lenovo, they have been caught with Superfish adware/malware before:
That's fair, I would recommend a MacBook, Chromebook or iPad to senior folks, even though I loathe the companies, they're perfectly fine for those who do not want to tinker.
I bought an external monitor two months ago or so. Since then there were a total of three firmware updates, each one throwing out the display driver before showing the update dialog which, when closed without confirmation, had to be fished out of the bloatware again for the procedure to continue and actually re-install the drivers.
My question is, why does a monitor even need firmware updates? I didn't gain any features, nor did I get an update report.
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but I am really satisfied with my Framework laptop. It came with the RAM not installed, I assume so they'd "force" me to open it up and familiarize myself with the process. It took all of one minute to watch their video, unscrew five screws, pop the keyboard out and install the RAM.
The machine itself feels really solid, I was expecting a few rough edges from a first-time manufacturer, but it feels as good as my old Macbook Air did. I just love it, and I am really enjoying how repairable it is. All the stuff has stickers and QR codes internally to explain what components are and link you to how-to videos.
Well worth whatever premium I paid for it, if it ensures that the company continues to make products.
I'm just waiting for them to build a 15" model and ship to Europe.
If they are reading this thread, an option with no numberpad and hardware buttons on the touchpad. I'm paying an extra for that. The language of the keyboard is much less important. Thanks.
830 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadWithin a few months of her using it she complained it’s slow, takes ages to turn on etc. After removing almost everything from the manufacturer it was usable. But even now she barely uses the machine and never installs anything and it’s unusable slow with essentially zero usage after a couple of years. She’s not even ran any updates. It wouldn’t surprise me if these machines are built to die.
But, to be honest, the guy that sold it put some super bare Win10 on it and that also felt pretty fast.
In any event, for email and web-browsing I think Ubuntu is just perfect. I have it on our HTPC and the whole family uses it without thinking twice. And it stays fast.
Oh, our family laptop (the one the kids use, and I do on occasion) is a Dell Latitude E5450, first introduced in 2015(!), I got it 2nd hands in 2019, it looked barely used. I put Ubuntu on it (but recently I installed Arch, when I regularly use a machine myself I prefer it), the thing still feels like a fast new laptop, the kids went through Covid with it, using Teams (for Linux) and doing online homework. I use it for dev work on the side. Love the machine.
My advice: Get a second hand business model from a good source (some local trader that gets good reviews, or you can visit, we have a lot of local IT people gathering on a website here that sell older business hardware [0, Dutch website]). Plus, it's nice to give stuff a second life instead of buying cheap throw-away shitware for cheap.
[0]: https://tweakers.net/laptops/aanbod/
Having said that, many devices just need to sync with your phone and not computer, so there's maybe less of an issue than before. For example, my bike computer doesn't need to be Win compat since it syncs with an app on my phone.
I'm really impressed with this distro and use it as my own daily driver. One of the few times where I do very little tweaking to get the UI/UX just right for my own preferences.
The only thing I've had to help him with across that time are little things like setting his Firefox home page and finding some files "I definitely saved in Documents" but turned out to be in Downloads. I can deal with those.
How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care.
I've moved to Mac but back in days I used Windows, the VERY FIRST thing I did was to install a fresh copy of Windows, then install any necessary drivers which are absolutely required for proper function (I remember just finding the driver files and installing them manually from add hardware dialog instead of installing bloatware of the manufacturer).
Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't.
And of course I'm tech savvy. I don't see any less-savvy senior being able to solve this problem; it should be regulated in a way that there should be a mandatory and ugly label showing all the crapware included with the device while buying, perhaps even extra taxing for each crapware included, discouraging manufacturers from including them.
You need to add the EI.cfg and PID.cfg [0] files to the installer medium before booting it. Once you have those files present with the correct syntax, it will install the version you want, but I can't imagine a non-tech person being able to figure this out on his own.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.
I switched to Linux also for work laptop sometime after that so I wouldn't know when that stopped.
However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807
Also, I stopped using MSI when their motherboards weren't properly supporting Piledriver/Steamroller AMD cpus power and thus thermal requirements. At least, on some of the mid-high tier boards. (It said it could handle a 8350. That apparently was a lie.)
Slap some RGB on things that don't need it and charge an extra 50 bucks, easy money
Immediately returned the ASUS board and got something else. It sucked to tear apart a computer I just built but I don't trust then hardware in my machine now.
It's called Windows Platform Binary Table, and lets the firmware provide an EXE for Windows to execute on boot. So even if you install a clean OS, this will run, and there is no mandatory prompt (if it's run through this approach and you see a prompt, then the software that was run was nice enough to ask, it was not Windows asking you to confirm whether that is OK).
When I was in college it was called a hardware rootkit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...
Those are usually slow as molasses thanks to mandatory <s>crapware</s> sorry antivirus.
Otherwise pure clean install on these machines, Windows is not slow. I mean, not fast, but not that slow either.
Incidentally, this kind of thing is why my personal laptop is a Microsoft Surface, and my personal phone is a Google Pixel.
So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters.
How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
Lenovo isn't even an American company. Wikipedia lists their global headquarters as in Beijing.
The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph.
The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz.
The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.
We no longer have browser toolbars. I remember a time when I had customers come in with 4, 5, or even 6 different browser toolbars. The Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the McAfee toolbar, the Because-We-Fucking-Can toolbar, etc. Most laptops came with at least one toolbar pre-installed.
Edit: To be clear I'm not defending the companies, they shouldn't put all this crapware on there. I'm just saying most customers won't notice it on a new laptop.
In most cases on new laptops their crapware doesn't make a huge difference, because there is enough CPU headroom. The people who are doing so much that they would notice probably will reinstall fresh Windows anyway.
The problem here was that it was a used laptop.
How do you know this? I would expect a $500 used lenovo laptop to have decent-enough specs.
they have two customers:
- the people who pay them for the computers
- the crapware people who pay for the bundling
sometimes the profit from one or the other is unexpected.
for instance, in another area, visio makes more money from the snooping data than the tv sale
My last computer was a 32 core 128gb RAM Threadripper from ChillBlast.
Surprisingly the Threadripper had a slower single core performance than the Intel NUC.
I also use a Ubuntu virtual machine in VirtualBox with Vagrant for development machines to do DevOps.
But I also use IntelliJ and it is fast enough on the NUC and it's SSD and 32GB RAM. I don't play games. But I write multithreaded software so I get 12 logical cores to play with. (6 physical cored and 12 hardware threads)
I think the innovators dilemma has occurred with mobile technology. Mobile chips such as my NUC and ARM chips in phones are good enough for development. (See apple silicon) I can run 6 virtual machines without slowdown.
Admittedly my IntelliJ is running on a small repository. I suspect it I was working on an employer's project it would slow down due to all the files.
Most of the time the computer is waiting for IO and the CPU can be different levels of idle. I recommend the Gist "latency numbers every developer should know"
https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
I would recommend people buy from manufacturers that don't preload stuff into their laptops. Such as Framework, System76, ChillBlast, Novatech.
EDIT: I had an ASUS but I installed Ubuntu on it and I cannot remember if the windows had lots of manufacturer software on it. I rarely booted into windows.
Never. Literally had broken trackpad drivers on Lenovo for years. They were aware of the issue, it was "normal" on the model I had. This was around 2013.
I will never ever again recommend anything from Lenovo. Trackpad was a minor issue compared to other problems that I had with that same laptop.
I managed to fix wifi issues with extra dongle, but how sad is that? Trackpad was always an issue.
You think I’m speaking badly of Lenovo just for fun?
My family has several 'copies' of a laptop from the same company, one of which is the newer model, by one year. The newer model is flimsy and has required multiple repairs to the display, hinges, keyboard, case, etc... Parts are easy to source for the newer model but impossible to find for the older one, although naturally we haven't needed any yet.
To which I replied "It's the lack of control."
Sounds like I'm not the only one growing old who is feeling tired about having to treat every new hardware device as an adversary.
I've long believed that most computers sold cheap as consumer devices simply aren't fit for purpose, sure, most people here could take one and make the changes required to remove bloat and spyware, but it's out of the reach of a typical consumer
The user was a little hesitant to use Firefox, quickly adapted and I've not had any calls for help since.
Pre-installed Office package just in case we will buy a license in the future?
I think this problem is more with the consumer line.
I've been in the same situation as OP before though with computers from parents and friends, and it's unbearable. A straight reinstall of Windows after buy is the only viable option. I had to diagnose a not-so-old pc sold with all kinds of crap installed, 4GB of RAM, Windows 10 and a rotating 5400HDD thrashing all the time.
That's my experience as well. So if you need a cheap Windows laptop, a used corporate class laptop is often a better path than a cheap new consumer class one.
Not even all of their consumer products are bad. It's often the cheap (sub $600) laptops that I suspect gets subsidised by the crapware that comes preinstalled.
When people ask me for recommendations for a laptop for around $400, I always say "second hand" or "save up a bit longer" because these days spending less than $600 is often a recipe for disaster.
This is the best advice you can give, but I'd include the option of an iPad/Chromebook. And even with a Chromebook anything <$300 is asking for trouble. Realistically, a decent laptop that will be performant and cheap that is well made doesn't exist. You're looking at ~$800 before you get get anything relyable.
A few years later, when he had been diagnosed with cancer and was on chemo, it updated itself to Windows 10 without his explicit consent. It completely fucked up the install, and was unusable for him from then on. He was too tired to go through the process of getting it sorted out, and was thus unable to book a vacation that he had intended to take to recover from that round of chemo.
Microsoft's unfriendly us-first, customers-second process robbed him of his last holiday and I will not easily forgive them for it.
If a seasoned developer can be robbed of quality of life by this flavour of bullshit, what chance do the non-technical types stand?
What a flaming POS.
I mean, it's one Google search away, so not a big deal, but they do push hard for MS account.
I think in general Microsoft is suffering from an incentive problem. Unlike Apple they don't really have any revenue stream from users except for the up-front cost of the installation but still incur costs for patching etc. so they do all this trickery to at least get access to data and metrics to improve their paid line of products (Office etc.)
AKA so you can't really encrypt your own computer without someone else also be able to unlock said encryption "if they really have to".
Win 11 still sucks but this makes it much much better.
I'd really like to able to send invoices to Microsoft and other companies like Dell who pull this bullshit for wasting time in my life to work around this stuff (and I wonder how much potential productivity is used up by these practices)
I have to unplug lab cables when flashing a machine or I don’t get a choice.
But maybe that's my inner (outer, now?) old man talking? I mean, Minesweeper, patience and a couple of others, maybe even a pinball game always came with Windows.
Windows never came with fortune though, which is the best "I didn't ask for this, but would have if I'd known" default I've come across. Yep, old man is now outer and child is inner.
The point of putting Solitaire + Minesweeper on the machine was to demonstrate the OS's capabilities + get people used to using either a computer or a GUI. Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed for the user, Candy Crush was installed for King.
Windows 7 was actually an amazing OS, everything since then has been hot garbage. I have no experience with Windows 11, but that's on purpose.
When my son was ready for his own laptop, I originally set it up with a Microsoft Family account. That was a terrible mistake. Microsoft Family causes only pain and misery and completely fails at what it's supposed to do.
Microsoft bought Minecraft and recently forced everybody to migrate from perfectly functional Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts, which makes everything more complicated. My son's Minecraft account ended up on my wife's Microsoft account, and suddenly I'm called UnshavenFiber (though not entirely incorrectly, I've got to admit).
I now have n+1 accounts on my Windows system because I had the kid who did that leave that account just to use Minecraft and created a new account for everything else.
I'm pretty close to going to Linux on this system. It was the house game system but I just got a Steam Deck, which is fulfilling that role nicely, and that leaves Windows hanging on only by a thread of my personal laziness/business (depending on how charitable you are); everything else that system does is either equally doable by Linux or better done by Linux.
[1] At least, no warning I saw and/or understood, and I think it's fair to say that if I didn't realize that's what going to happen, neither did 99%+ of the user base. I'm sure lawyers have their bases covered somewhere but I don't care.
Well, I'm one step ahead of you. As of last weekend, I purchased and returned 3 games due to unplayability on Windows 10 (yes, patched, all drivers updated, msconfig nothing running, ran exclusive/un-bordered/windowed, every recommended change and sfc checks ok), and they all crashed regularly at irregular intervals.
I've partitioned the SSD and have installed Ubuntu. Now to learn how to use Proton to make games work.
That was my last Windows machine. Goodbye Microsoft.
edit: Just to add...I'm the most technical of my group of friends and typically lead the way. If this works, I'll have 5 other guys migrating in the next 12 months with me, they too have been complaining since leaving Windows 7.
It's massively reduced the amount of tech support I need to do, and when it does come up, it's much more straightforward for me to deal with.
...and then even claim that Linux requires more effort. For power users, sure, but for basic users it's a different thing.
EDIT: no point in dogpiling comments listing your favorite windows-only software. It is entirely besides the point of this comment.
Patch day is once a month and takes 15 minutes at worst, sometimes only a reboot after the work day.
edit: Not to mention how upgrading Firefox on Linux-based systems through the console forced me to restart my Firefox mid-day, because "it works that way". Never had that on Windows.
Not everyone has top of the line or even mid-range hardware.
People like to dramatically exaggerate how long Windows update bind you each month. Probably no Windows users but it's an easy target.
You can defer it.
Update and reboot? Update and shutdown? Reboot/Shutdown without updating now? All three are possible, so it's fine.
Again, computers are our servants, not our managers.
- Everyone knows that car tabs have to be renewed by a deadline and everyone knows Windows has forced updates by a deadline.
- Everyone knows how to pay to renew their car tabs and everyone knows how to check the Windows update so that it updates when you have free time for it. And if they don't, it's just 5 seconds of Googling to find either.
- Everyone knows what is going to happen if they don't renew their car tabs or allow the reboot by a certain date.
- Everyone knows that neither the vehicle licensing authorities nor Microsoft is going to change their policies. It doesn't matter what people think the policy ought to be because it isn't that way and they know it.
So basically, they picked up a gun, took careful aim at their foot, pulled the trigger, and are shocked and angry that there's a bleeding hole? Sure, they can go ahead and change operating systems but it isn't going to fix the fundamental problem, if you know what I mean.
Also; where the do you live such that there isn’t a grace period on registration renewal? Do you think a car just stops working when that happens in the middle of your commute to work?
"Whoosh", as the kids these days say.
> "Also; where the do you live such that there isn’t a grace period on registration renewal?"
There's a grace period for forced reboots for Windows updates too and these users blithely ignored that. So what's your point?
What’s your point again, with all this bullshit car analogy? And why won’t you post your bad opinions under your real name?
The time locked in update is undefined because the first time an update is available, Windows will never terminate downloading and unpacking it.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/MOTILE-14-Performance-Laptop-FHD-...
Installing updates takes less than five minutes once a month.
I don't do media on it, so I've been quite happy running 9front lately.
There's your problem. Even the cheapest of SATA SSD will massively outperform almost any laptop hard disk drive when it comes to random I/O. And it'll probably increase your battery life a smidge as well.
I wouldn't put applications on any spinning rust these days, especially laptop 5400 (or worse!) drives.
$40 for a 512GB SATA SSD that'll blow the socks off whatever spinning drive you have.
https://www.microcenter.com/product/659868/inland-profession...
I do think my point still stands though. I don't think it's acceptable for software to run this slow, even on this. I'm talking windows has been idling for hours and basic tasks like clicking on the volume slider are sluggish.
On a side note: I'm fascinated HOW cheap SSD storage has become. Really looking into changing my backup drives to SSDs instead of good old spinning drives...
For example, I can't think of one RAW image processor from the original manufacturer that's available on Linux. Honestly, if there was, it would actually be a good reason to switch to that brand.
Also yes, I'm aware of RawTherapee and DarkTable. I use RawTherapee regularly, it's absolutely excellent and I highly recommend it, but it's also absolutely useless for certain use cases.
Nowadays I tend to use linux apps on Windows, thanks to WSL. For example, Windows' file browser crashes frequently on my setup, so I use Dolphin instead.
I'm active in a few photography spaces online and I don't think I've talked to a single person who actively uses one of those. Most people use Lightroom or Capture One, which are also not available on Linux.
I'm curious as to what value you get from OEM RAW processors.
Exactly (or almost) the same render as from SOOC images.
I hate it when I deliver SOOC preview images that the customer really likes, but wants some small tweaks (remove a fly from the image, for example), and the colors or contrast on the resulting image is different because I didn't use the same processing engine or color profiles.
From what I remember, Nikon RAW files don't retain any changes you made to them in-camera unless you remove them from camera using the OEM app.
(Things may be different these days. My knowledge is from 2015.)
Also, some of those software are mission-critical for me, and I can't really afford to use something that may break unexpectedly when I need to deliver images same day.
The idea that you can slap wine on the few things that you need is a weirdly repeated fiction, it wont make it true by repeating it, stop doing it.
It’s amazing how people tolerate the poor usability of windows and then prefer the poor usability of Linux.
But after being unable to even _install_ the Win7 downgrade that was promised with my purchase of a Win10-only machine (several years back), I decided Microsoft's obsession with licenses and stuff was just getting in my way. I grabbed Ubuntu and haven't looked back.
Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment. But those seem easy enough to opt out of, I can tweak a few things and I'm largely fine day-to-day.
Updates tend to break things in weird ways, but I can always just reinstall, or decide it's time to try a new distro, restore /home/ from backup, and go on with my life. A Windows reinstall is usually a multi-day affair and barely works afterward.
My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs. There's an image viewer apparently just called Image Viewer, and if you think that's fucking obnoxious to search for help about, you're right! Ditto with pretty much all the other default GUI tools. I think the file manager is probably called Nautilus but you can't get it to tell you that, you have to just infer that from googling error messages and finding them mentioned in issue-trackers for something called "nautilus". Aaaaagh.
Oh no they didn't.
That's just Ubuntu.
> My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs
Again it's Ubuntu-specific.
This is all re: vanilla Gnome, not whatever Ubuntu delivers.
For common problems in windows you can find a current guide with pictures in seconds, on linux you are more likely to find a slightly out of date forum. And thats ignoring the complexities of different desktop environments and hardware compatibility.
This actually isn't my experience. It's possible that I only ever have had less common problems on windows, but invariably whenever I've looked something up for that, I've usually found terrible windows support forums with incorrect information and usually no correct solution at all.
For linux, and again I'd consider myself a power user so am familiar with most things, I usually find the information easily and it's quite straightforward. I believe part of this is due to the more technical nature of linux users, and due to there being active stack overflow resources e.t.c. which is far better than windows support forums (both in quality of questions and answers).
Obviously this is a very opinion based position, but I find the opposite to what you've asserted.
Windows is a fucking joke of an OS, and that’s why nearly no one defends it on its merits. It’s always defended on the stance of compatibility because of things like O365 and Adobe products. It has nothing to do with the quality of Windows as a platform because as a platform, it’s a pile of shit, and everyone knows it. We’re just forced to deal with it if we want to game, edit photos and music, etc., without a ton of config changes and other hassles.
M$ forgot whats actually good about their OS, its been slowly metastasizing, but even so I dont think desktop linux is the answer. There are some real advantages to the windows paradigm, the idea that the program and the window are the same thing is important; the application should always show what its doing and what you can do. Settings are selected from all the possible options (you dont need to know whats available in advance)
When talking about common problems, I mean truly common, the things an average high-school student runs into like joining an online classroom or editing a document (or even playing a game!). These things do fail on linux, and without being a power user that knows where to start and some keywords to search getting past square one is not so easy.
The only data point I have, is my non-technical partner, who has had far fewer issues since moving to linux than on windows. It's a data point of n=1, and I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for everyone.
I was more than happy to recommend it for her since I know if there is any issue she has, I'll be able to solve it quickly and easily. The fact is though after throwing a standard ubuntu system on the machine I don't think she's had any issues past the first week or two of figuring out where the settings were, and what program does what.
There might have been the odd libre office question maybe?
The fact is, I'm pretty much the family tech support. My linux "support burden" is far lower than my windows "support burden" was when she used that (both in frequency, and for me, complexity). I still get a fair few macOS or iphone questions from my parents from time to time, but almost never things about linux.
And yet I clearly wrote "basic user"...
Bluetooth, email, music, writing, video chat. Everything is just plug and play these days.
The culprit was libinput, which, for some reason, ignored the "flat" acceleration profile for touchpads. It was eventually fixed, but the fix didn't hit an LTS version of Ubuntu until this year.
I know that there's LibreOffice but MS Office definitely beats it in reality.
Yes, I know there's Wine, but I worry (possibly unfounded) that it won't work, or will stop working with some future Office update.
Anything a tiny bit smarter than your usual document (with scripts and/or macros) won't work too.
There's definitely pieces of software that aren't available for linux, and if you require that to do your job, it probably isn't the best solution for you. For me, and my partner (who is a classic browser + office software user, as I suspect 90%+ of computer users are), it's never been a problem (and office software has never been an issue for me personally).
Hours is weird way to spell 5min on pc over half of decade old.
But yes, it doesn't crash or force-reboot.
There has been a few (documented!) issues with major upgrades, like lilo-grub transition and Ubuntu changing system group ids.
But there are no forced lts-to-lts upgrades - and generally they are quite stable.
As sibling comment mentions, canonical even have a live-patch service for kernel updates without reboot (not that I would recommend that - doing a reboot after patch is a nice way to verify that the system still boots ok - which it should - but easier to debug when you know there's just been a patch..).
It should really be delayed by 10 or 15 mins so that the user has a chance to start working on their immediate tasks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/y9fly1/lapt...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/r9w1he/os_bricked_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ManjaroLinux/comments/sdf5sg/new_up...
My point was specifically about Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS.
Ed: And of course errors found and bugs filed in Debian sid(unstable) or testing - or Ubuntu non-lts contribute to those bugs not affecting those that run stable releases.
that's like moving underground because you once got a sunburn.
After 12 seconds of searching; but many such issues have littered the internet fora. I don't think its unusual for a complex system to have bugs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/fv4c40/bricked...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/qjn9v1/latest_updat...
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=382222
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=259582
However, I think the difference is that it's always due to an action you take.
I do think this is something qualitatively different to when your machine decides to automatically update to windows 10, when your machine is not compatible with windows 10, and it bricks itself.
If you randomly turn on a computer and it says "hold on, I'm updating" and then never turns on again without you ever agreeing to an update, I think you'd quite rightly be somewhat upset with it.
Now, I don't even mind windows that much. I prefer other things, but I recognize the strengths of windows and I understand why people like to use it. At the same time, I think it makes sense to recognize the frustrations that windows can sometimes bring to some users.
The bug is that OS is in a borked state, and the update infrastructure cannot deal with it. This is what ends up bricking the system. (Using the loose definition of the term here, I understand that it doesn't literally damage the hardware)
The overall big picture is the fact that most users don't want to be system administrators; they just want it to be managed automatically. However a subset of users, do want to administer the system and have a level of control, and this is where Microsoft screwed up, by not providing us those tools.
At work we have our IT manage the updates on all of our machines, and they have managed to apply some kind of policy where they can control the updates. I am assuming this is only possible in a domain environment, and not on a stand-alone PC.
has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever or am I just an idiot? when I restart nginx I want to know if it failed, why , what's the syntax error. instead old reliable /etc/init.d/nginx configtest no I have to dig around
Try trinity as a desktop with sysvinit.
(I don't use kwin, but instead a different window manager, and only part of trinity for this and that, but that's not due to a lack of quality, I just prefer to mix and match.)
It can be useful when there's potentially multiple things leading up to the error in whatever you're running, as it is showing and explaining nearly every action that's recently happened in the system log. But if you're just wanting to look at logs related to nginx starting at the most recent then just query for niginx's system log instead of the whole system.
or: or:https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Using_units
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Journal#Filtering_o...
YMMV. I find systemd a lot easier to work with (I actually started wrapping daemons in proper services instead of sticking everything into nohup or tmux sessions).
I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?
I have family in their 90's who can navigate whatever tech you put in front of them, because they think it's important to figure things out when they get stuck. My father can barely turn his phone on because at the slightest frustration he gives up and waits for someone to "fix it" for him. Certainly different folks have different aptitudes, but choice and working through things plays an exceedingly large role.
The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently. Learning a new interface just isn't as important to us as spending that time doing something enjoyable.
Imagine if car companies randomly update the way you drive a car overnight every 7 or 8 years. You go out one day, and suddenly instead of a steering wheel and pedals you have a stick with paddles, then a few years later its changed to something that looks like an oar. Eventually you too might say to hell with it.
> Eventually you too might say to hell with it
I agree 100% and that's even kind of my point. You're choosing not to care about that stuff, which is fine (honestly, probably even healthy at a certain point), but it's not as if there is some biological imperative that as you age you are less able to use technology.
I think the problem is that this is only fine in a world where we aren't forced to rely on these things.
If Windows is going to change their user interface every other year, why would I relearn their UX-du-jour when I can just re-learn once on a Mac and be good for a few years (if not longer)?
If I use hosted Gmail and my UI changes every other month, it just tells me that I should host elsewhere where the UX is more stable.
If you abuse users long enough with this everchanging, constant-beta UI nonsense, you are just telling them to move on to a platform that isn't so unstable, where you only have to learn the UX once, not every X months.
The somewhat recent FaceTime updates have befuddled even my brother and I. And there’s zero reason for any of the changes. They were just changes, not improvements, and were probably even regressions.
On the flip side, I enjoy learning new techniques, languages, and approaches to advance my craft.
The difference is that the former is dictated by developers and required on a periodic basis just to tread water, whereas the latter is self-directed and helps me become more capable.
So... it IS possible to stay on a system where you are comfortable with, if you are willing to make concessions...
And to be honest, I don’t think it’s me. It isn’t clear to me that the people who make all this stuff know how it works either. Nothing works as intended in technology. At least some form of technology doesn’t work as it should every day, from your work machine’s OS, or some program, or your smartphone, or Android Auto or Apple Car Play, or your TV, or your Internet provider or WiFi router, or that website you visit, or your smart thermostat, and on and on. And that’s stuff just plain not working or encountering bugs. It doesn’t even address the usability of all this.
We are just shitting out technology left and right, all at the alter of scale. In my opinion, capitalism is part of the problem. The other is human nature. There are no incentives to get this right. And these days, large companies do not care that they get it right. Statistics of failure and user frustration are explicitly part of their business models. They don’t want to even know if there’s an issue with their product. They just let some statistics drive their decision making.
It’s all just a tragedy and comedy all in one. Amazon has their 12 principles they hire with that makes it seem like they hire geniuses left and right. And they can’t even get book selling right these days. And there’s no way to report issues. They do not care.
Most of these bonuses are probably tied with frivolous, often highly unpopular and unwanted, feature updates. I doubt people get bonuses (or as large bonuses) for fixing usability bugs or improving quality.
it's bs how they can just do this. Microsoft thinks that just because they aren't legally liable for their software breaking a user's system, that they can just do anything like these automatic updates.
I think it's really high time that there be regulation on software and their reliability - that is, some sort of consumer protection, where an update such as this breaking becomes a liability for microsoft. And of course, this doesn't just apply to microsoft, but apple and google and any other software manufacturer.
All we need is political momentum to enact the regulation - and that's easier said than done.
The worst example I had heard until today was an update that caused a friend to lose a good chunk of her dissertation. Windows 10 decided that final week was an excellent time for an update. She had no option of saying "no" and was just looking to use Word uninterrupted.
Software is too important now for this level of user hostility.
There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.
> There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.
There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
>A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga.
>What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
A great point, BeOS was basically the last attempt anybody had at creating a new desktop OS, and when it failed, so did the last vestiges of anybody else's appetite for trying again.
I love my Mac, but really enjoyed GEM on my Atari ST too.
I've never had much experience with it but heard some stories about its bad backward compatibility and not-too-pleasant upgrades. Thinking about finally getting a Macbook instead of my current Linux/Windows dual boot since Macs have the unique combination of professional-grade display, very powerful hardware and full support of proprietary apps that I need. And I mostly dislike Apple UX choices.
You can implement malware check in many ways. This one is the worst; it also introduces a huge attack surface.
With regards to OS upgrades, there has always been a vocal minority that likes to complain, ever since the System 7 days, sometimes not without reason but it's minor. Overall, the upgrades are decent, but I'll agree it's not always plain sailing for everyone. The thing with macOS is last year's Lemon is next year's gold. Rose tinted glasses are abundant online, especially with competing OSs.
In my personal, anecdotal experience, macos is more reliable than windows. Neither is as reliable as my 14-year-old but constantly updated and fresh today Gentoo/Linux install. But the things that a laptop needs, macos is better. So I have a macbook and a Gentoo/Linux workstation and I generally feel like I get the best of both worlds.
I also often just run a debian in qemu on my macbook rather than installing a bunch of software from macports or homebrew, which has worked very nicely.
I would say yes, but perhaps the worst-of-worst stories in this thread are prejudicing me. Things like in this thread don't happen on OX though.
(I honestly don't know what you're referring to about "bad backwards compatibility")
But if you mostly dislike Apple UX choices, you probably are going to mostly dislike using it as a daily machine, so.
Mac has been great. My 2015 MBP is still going strong, it was many updates behind and I resisted for a while but I eventually just upgraded to the latest (2-3 major versions) and it went perfectly smoothly.
Every company and ecosystem will have its quirks. But some are way more hostile than others, and I've never seen that level of hostility from apple (yet).
Ports can be annoying though but I'd rather take minor annoyances over big problems like this.
BTW -- one of the bigger problems with the forced Win10 upgrade was that it changed the UI / icons and for older folks caused a lot of grief, because they felt lost on top of everything else.
I bought a secondary laptop - a 12 inch Macbook Pro - and it took a few hours to set up. I didn't have to turn a bunch of things off. I didn't have to find the button that wouldn't send my entire life to a tech company. Just a few clicks and done. It's decently fast for such an old, underpowered machine, too.
For the most part, the OS gets out of the way.
I have Windows machines that do all the weird things people are posting in this thread.
Windows is a bother of epic proportions compared to MacOS. It's not even close.
But out of the box it works. Hard crashes are very rare. User hostile things like forced updates don't happen.
The worst things are much much less likely to happen than with hardware that runs Windows, and if something happens the tech support at Apple stores is pretty good. If you want a good Windows machine you have to do extensive research to figure out how not to get crap, and you still end up wrong sometimes. If your grandma wants a computer, you can just tell her to go to an Apple store and get whatever she wants and it'll work.
If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?
The idea in the link is that one transfer the System Root certificates from another (more modern) Mac to which the customer should already own. In theory I guess we as a email provider could continuously buy the latest version of mac and use that as the transfer host (hopefully do not transferring any account specific certificates). It must work without any corner cases (not overwriting anything on the customer end), the script need to work in future macos versions, and the assumption is that the first group of certificates is the relevant ones, and that it doesn't break anything on the customer end.
For those who has not read the link, this do not update the System Roots keychain since users are not allowed to do that in macos. Instead this adds a trustRoot certificate. A nice trick. One of the comments say that it didn't fix the problem for them but who know what their situation was.
Looking at the compatibility charts, everything from 2015 on-ward supports Monterey (2021, the latest version). The last laptop that couldn't update past El Capitan was 2009. As far as Macbooks (non-pro), last one stuck on El Capitan is the 2009 model as well.
And it's not even that Apple broke anything on the 13 year old laptop, it's just that the rest of the world moved on and they're no longer fixing it.
The customer must be running some truly ancient version of Mac OS for this story to be true.
Some providers (email and others) can also continue to support deprecated/broken security for a very long time in order to not having to deal with customers using old deprecated software. 512 bits RSA public keys for example was used a very long time, long past where different standards and recommendation had a much higher minimum. Algorithm and key attacks are quite rare so companies can keep a low security standard for many years/decades before anyone exploits it. For customers that could be seen as a positive or a negative depending on perspective.
My 2015 MacBook still runs absolutely fine.
For that matter, I'm considering (but probably not) buying a new iPad to replace my TEN YEAR OLD iPad that I'm still using every single day, as it can no longer update to the latest iPad OS.
But my 7 year old (soon 8 years old) laptop is as good as the first day I bought it.
[0]: https://macresearch.org/dst-root-ca-x3-expired-mac/
IOW, if one is going to supply anecdotal data, probably best to make sure it's your anecdote, maybe?
In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you could use an iPad as an external display with the Apple Pencil, but I haven’t researched that.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380
Luna Display is a more premium option.
https://astropad.com/luna-display-vs-apple-sidecar/
The former isn't available for the iPad, the latter predates it, and I find the nearest analogue, Serif's Affinity Designer not quite right.
I also like having access to a file system, and the ability to run arbitrary opensource tools such as OpenSCAD and OpenSCAD Graph Editor and RapCAD.
[1] as in "is only licenced for", there are ways out of this...
As things stand today, I only trust updates from community driven open source software projects. With exceptionally few exceptions, commercial software seems to offer the guarantee of delivering undesirable payloads.
But I promise you there is never any kind of Machiavellian multi-year plan to condition people for upcoming bad behavior. Most of the things we do screw up are from lack of foresight; we are definitely not strong enough at long range planning to run psyops on customers.
The only real way to address it without the mandatory updates was for the ecosystem to diversify; can't use a Windows exploit to compromise a Mac OS machine.
You can imagine why that solution was not on Microsoft's list of recommendations.
That would mean doing as much of the work as possible in the background in a way that doesn't impact the user and making sure the reboot where it actually gets activated doesn't take noticeably longer. It would also mean not doing things that are against the user's interest like moving things around, installing new ads or misfeatures, or breaking things.
I don't know anyone who hates or wants to disable Chrome updates, for example (I'm sure such people exist, but it's much less common than Windows updates), despite Chrome updating way more often than once a month.
Of course, overcoming the aversion people built over years because of past bad behavior is going to be hard, but forcing people against their will and making updates more disruptive isn't going to help with that aversion. People really dislike being forced to do something, even if they don't actually mind the thing itself that much.
Android does an A/B update and after a only slightly slow reboot is in the new version. It then does some optimization in the background that can have a slight performance impact.
NixOS must be the gold standard here. It downloads and completely installs the new version in the background then a regular-speed reboot is enough to be running the new system. (~10s on my system)
But Windows and macOS both have crazy slow update processes. When I had a mac for work I was dumbfounded by how slow the update process was. It regularly took >30min! Those machines are crazy fast, it seems like it could have written a TiB of data in that time so IDK what it is actually doing.
Point updates of macOS take 20+ minutes on an M1 Max with 32GB of memory and a blazing fast SSD. What could it possibly be doing?
Even iOS updates are a bit faster.
Is apple even interested in fixing this?
If memory serves: point-symbol optimizations to make code calls into The objective-C libraries performant.
Under The hood, objective-C really does use strings to reference library functions. So when the OS is updated, the string interning table is updated and all of the installed software has to have its string to symbol caches rewritten to account for the new API.
There are almost certainly better ways to do this but if I understand correctly, Apple inherited the existing solution without putting enough thought into how it would scale and now changing the solution would break an indeterminate amount of software depending upon the current implementation.
EDIT: a sibling comment jogged my memory; the thing I was doing a bad job of remembering was prebinding. https://opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-622.5.1/...
When a new version of the OS is installed, the OS re-runs prebinding for applications to the dynamic libraries they rely on because the dynamic libraries may have changed. The alternative is to have a big latency bump every time an app is launched for the first time as the caches are rebuilt on-the-fly.
(I think this is the step that used to be called "Making Your Macintosh Happy" during an install, but the veracity of that notion has fallen too far down the Google search hole for me to easily pull up a reference to confirm or deny it).
However, this exposes the real challenge. We cannot have informed consent without informed users. I think this problem will haunt us repeatedly in the future. We need users to know at least a little bit about their options. Only then can they make informed choices on what option to pick. This means people can't glaze over the details and not worry about them. This does not mean you have to be a computer wizard. You just need to know what you want and pick an option that is good for you. For example, I run this on Fedora:
Any update requires a reboot. However, I am ok with it because I am positive each update comes after a lot of testing. More importantly, I am in control of when to run this update. I can't accidentally run it because it requires my sudo password.I used to wonder why no corporation complains about Windows Update. Then I learned that virtually all companies use group policy to change Windows Update behavior to suit their organization. Therefore, this is a non-issue for them. Welp.
That also includes never crashing, which Microsoft has historically struggled with.
If you don’t reboot in an orderly way, then the machine crashes while the user is doing something, and when it restarts everything is different. “Don’t restart” is insufficient for good UX here.
You can still choose to reboot for every update. The point though is that it is a choice.
It doesn't nag me at all other than ask me for my sudo password. It is perfect.Here is what I understand about dnf offline-upgrade
> The process of restarting, applying updates, and then restarting again is called Offline Updates. Your computer boots into a special save-mode, where all other systems are disabled and where network access is unavailable. It then applies the updates and restarts.
https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/
> With Windows, it's an almost-weekly, "Hey, update right now, because someone in another country is pwning all unpatched machines that aren't air-gapped from the internet."
I see. I feel like I don't quite understand the extent of the problem. In any case, I am not qualified to even attempt to propose a fix. My mode of thinking was Google Chrome and derivatives are able to slowly walk along with increasingly scarier visible warnings asking users to restart the web browsers but they don't (as far as I know) reboot the web browser while the user is still using it. Even Google Chrome OS didn't do that (well, it didn't back when I had my cr-48). When I updated Mozilla Firefox on my Fedora machine, existing tabs continued to work. New tabs would come with a warning for me to close Firefox and open it again. This is the kind of warning I was getting rid of with offline-upgrade.
I agree with my parent comment though. Updates are too bloated. Windows updates should be very fast with a modern processor (Intel eighth gen, AMD equivalent or greater), enough memory, and a fast SSD. Even DNF which has a very renowned reputation (at least among Fedora users) of being slow, is pretty reliably fast. I think the point that my parent comment was making was make people not dread rebooting their machine. My thought was
1. educate the users why reboots are essential 2. allow the users to postpone reboots indefinitely
However, I don't know what to say if there is an active remote command exploitation in the wild. It is important to get the update to the user before the exploit. However, that goes against everything I've said so far. I guess this leads us to the status quo. Those who have the know-how to use group policy can opt out of certain Windows Update behavior. The rest can either learn to do this: and set up their own Windows Update server? Periodically check CVE and gate update releases? Not sure how it works...
The reason I hesitate and say automatic reboot should be OPT-IN is sometimes I like to do some simple long running task like stitch photos I took into a video using ffmpeg. It can take hours on a slow laptop processor. It would really suck to do something like that and come back to see the computer rebooted itself.
Chrome updates approximately every month unless there is a security issue that has to be pushed out faster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_version_history
That's basically not possible in some cases. Not all of us are on super-fast broadband, even in places that are nominally 'first world'. The _best_ my parents can get is 8Mbps on DSL. Every time an update starts auto-downloading, you know immediately because all other connections grind to a halt.
(Now why a minor point update security fix for Monterey is 1.6GB I have no idea. But presumably that's not something Apple is capable of/interested in fixing)
That would be me for one. I hate it when google sneaks in privacy reducing preferences that are automatically turned on. I like to occasionaly go through settings to see what has changed and was surprised when an update showed up a whole host of new active features.
Why on earth should usb ports on my laptop be automatically exposed to any web page that demands it? Chrome can do that now. And not just usb/serial/midi ports, and motion sensors, chrome has also enabled 'presence' (a way for sites to know when you're actively using the browser). I found that creepy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebUSB
More software companies need to get on board with the idea of having a separate maintenance branch and "next version" branch. Too many of them just develop on trunk and every time you update for bug fixes and security, you get all the other crap their developers have been working on too.
Too many instances of installed Linux distros breaking because some foo relied on some bar that the distro declared should work fine but must have slipped through the testing cracks somehow. Or I'd gone off-book on some custom project or other because it relied on library versions that weren't in the distro, then I forgot I did that and updating the distro libs broke my project.
I basically never run the apt updates these days.
Just to be clear, this isn't an argument that as a result updates should be forced.
That is the perfect update story. Everyone loves it: the users aren't having their workflows upended, the developers are able to push updates regularly for security problems and the like, the only loser is the graphics designer who got hired because daddy owns the company and needs to constantly re-design the user interface to justify their job. (seriously, people in companies that do this kind of shit, what is it with re-designs? Why?)
However the issue that I've had was my Terminal App shutting down by itself, I thought it was a crash but it turns out it was because the Windows Store decided to update it.
Now that is complete BS! How can a store arbitrarily decide to update an app while it is still running without asking, without waiting? Even Steam waits to download and update games for when you're not playing one. If it ever did the same thing as what the Windows Store does then there'd be a riot for sure. I guess that it means the Windows Store is just not being used by people at all.
For those interested the "fix" for not having Terminal app restart for an update is to download the MSI package, extract it to a directory, and run it from there. That's directly from the Developer's words on Github.
What we see, of course, is exactly what the twitter thread posted mentions: some "dickweasel" hijacked the update system to push crapware or do something user-hostile for purposes completely unrelated to what the user would want.
James Williams discusses this in his book "Stand Out Of Our Light", and likens it to a GPS that takes you off to places that you never wanted to visit in the course of (maybe) getting you to your intended destination. Of course, you arrive late, if ever, and burned way more gas (or battery) than you needed. But the GPS got you to drive by a specific set of billboards that they wanted you to see.
If you set your internet connection to "metered" it exposes an option to disable automatic updates.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/139722-turn-off-download...
It's when they try to launder in a bunch of "feature" updates (i.e. more spyware, more crapware) with needed security updates.
They force the user to make a decision: Do I skip this update and avoid having new "features" from crippling my machine, or do I download the update to prevent my machine from being hacked?
If vendors really gaf, they would make is so that you could download needed security updates w/o the rest of the garbage. But then they couldn't force more malware on you.
In other words, it's only reasonable to expect security updates for a certain length of time and not indefinitely.
I’d be interested to know what the actual story at MS was for this. I think the executives there in the past demonstrated pretty good decision making. Here’s[1] someone claiming something about PM’s thinking they knew better than users and maybe there is some hidden OKR incentive driving that reasoning, but my weak understanding is that that person wasn’t really involved in what happened so I don’t know how true it is.
[1] https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1504567911565824000 nitter: https://nitter.fly.dev/danluu/status/1504567911565824000
every time, I have to go into the Play Store and uninstall it again. uninstall the home screen! how illogical is that? and how would I have known how to do that if I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to find a reddit post telling me how?
every time, this resets my normal home screen, and I have to set it all back up again, removing the semi-advertising “channels” that are already in the less-bad default home screen.
the device this is on cost more than £500, and yet I’m still paying out in attention because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders
Just side load an Android app called "NetGuard" which is a free firewall app on Android (though it's only available on the Android phone, but you can still sideload it on the Shield TV). Download the NetGuard APK file and then install it on your Shield TV using a 3rd party file manager app (you can find the NetGuard .APK file on Google search, or you could use an APK extractor and extract the NetGuard app from your Android phone after downloading it from the Play Store). You might need to also download a 3rd party launcher to see the side loaded Android apps as it will not appear on the stock Android TV home launcher. Then open the NetGuard app and disable network connections to the "Software Upgrade" app, then switch on the NetGuard toggle and it will block the "Software Upgrade" system app from accessing the internet, therefore it cannot download the software update and then prompt you to install it with an annoying pop up screen message.
If you get a software update message and the software update gets downloaded, just go to the app settings of "Software Upgrade" and delete the app cache and data.
Once you have the NetGuard app enabled, it should auto start every time you boot up the Shield TV and it will always run in the background. I suggest that you regularly open the NetGuard app and have it in the background so just incase Android OS puts it to sleep.
Additionally, I suggest you go to Google Play Services and the Google app and disable all the app permissions to access storage or change system settings (though if you use things like Google Assistant or voice search, you may need to leave the microphone permission on). Do the same for the other Nvidia apps which you might think may try to control or change settings on your Shield TV without your permission.
I'm still on Android 8.0 on my 2017 Shield and I'm happy with it. I don't really need any extra features and nothing needs to be fixed. This is the only method I found to work. I have tried to delete the "Software Upgrade" app package from my computer using Android ADB but I just couldn't do it (maybe Nvidia blocked it). So the firewall method is the only option. I don't know if Nvidia made changes and blocked this method in newer updates, but try it and let me know if it works.
Recommend GrapheneOS for your Pixel phone. It is so good I wonder how long it will last.
https://grapheneos.org/
And yes, I get it, they're not perfect, but they're the better of 2 bad options.
https://www.thespl.it/p/apples-sleeping-advertising-business
" For the past five years, Apple has been setting up for what will soon be its most profitable product line. It's not a new phone or computer: it's advertising. "
As some C-suite suit bonus will depend on that, you can be sure that the various protections will evaporate over the years.
Pest or cholera - that's what happens when there is a monopoly and the monopoly buys out or sue every competitor. Google and Apple are laughing all the way to the bank, Just like Microsoft for PC.
Shouldn't happen since NetGuard works as a ‘vpn client’ to pass connections through the app—so afaik reasonably it should stay working as long as the pseudo-vpn-connection is up.
(Not to be confused with actually connecting to a vpn server, which it doesn't do.)
Some apps have a setting to disable the notification, but all that achieves is that the app doesn't stay running in the background.
More to the point, the site reminded me that you might want to verify if Blokada is exempted from ‘battery optimizations’ (works via app info —> ‘Battery’ —> ‘Battery optimization’ for me). I checked NetGuard on my phone, and sure enough I have the ‘optimization’ disabled for the app.
(Let me know if you see this comment, or I'm gonna notify you manually.)
It is insane that this level of workaround and hacks is required to avoid advertising and crapware on a £500+ _television_. Normal people have almost no hope for a good experience when you consider something like a Lenovo laptop from the OP.
You have the manufacture-installed adware, windows 10 + edge nonsense constantly nagging you, and then there is just the state of the web itself. Its all just too much.
A lot of us love this stuff, irony acknowledged.
It's one thing to hack for fun or to find new uses for hardware and software. It's another to live in a world where we purchase devices for hundreds of dollars, only to have a bait-and-switch on the software and suddenly we get ads on our splash page and a slower UI.
I'm glad there are workarounds, but they _shouldn't be needed_.
Could this be somehow related to two decades of cheap money and the bloated corporate budgets it created?
Either way do we need a new post every hour making this same point from yet a different angle?
I found one from a brand named “OK” (sold by mediamarkt/mediaworld) and it’s just awesome.
No software, if I ever want new features I’ll get a firestick from amazon or some xiaomi dongle i can plug into one of the two hdmi inputs.
I love it (and i hate smart tvs).
Bonus: it also costed way less! About 250-280 Euros iirc, for a 42" panel with full-hd resolution.
Note that I am only recounting hearsay, and I haven't done my research on this, as my three PC monitors cover my needs completely, and I have no need for a TV. I'm only "idly curious" about this topic, because one day I may need such a dumb TV.
HN consists of many different people in many markets.
For US folks, yes, you generally have to go for an industrial display panel which is slightly more expensive than a smart TV [whose lower price can be subsidized by the data they're eventually selling].
Maybe for the previous poster who is in the EU, faces a completely different market than the US, a market which is more favorable to non-smart TVs.
I’ve been using it with an Apple TV 4K and it’s been great.
(I know I could leave the TV on standby but I don't like doing that, especially just to work around poorly designed software.)
Current Sony TVs offer a “basic TV” mode that disables all the smart stuff though, so they’re a decent option for more discerning buyers looking for a dumb TV.
Same here. I want to buy things without software and Touch Screen.
(I'm in the market for a dumb TV and am not having much joy.)
Make dumb tvs, and maybe put a firestick or similar piece of tech in the box.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
at least with android TV it’s sort of, somewhat a choice, for now, but this is flat-out immutable. you used to be able to sideload an alternative home screen, but another forced update removed that option too
buying a firestick is buying adverts for inside your house
I sometimes wonder, if the founder has controlling voting shares, or the shareholders on public exchange / stock market are non-voting shares. Would the company still have to please their non-voting shareholders?
It's the same reason why, at least in theory, VC founders can't structure a deal that devalues everyone else to ~0 and pockets the extra money in a side-channel transaction. They definitely have the power to do so, but if you can prove that better options existed and have the inclination to take that to court then you have a decent shot at recovering damages.
The reviews on it are quite something to see.
I wish dumb TVs with good panels were easier to buy.
Probably. In fact, I think you're underestimating the degree to which they can.
Very few evil people actually think they're evil. Most think they're legitimately doing good and helpful things, while being extremely misguided as to what is good and helpful.
Was not expecting the level of animosity for this app. The last update in August apparently forced a ton of ads on the interface, even if people had paid subscriptions that would remove ads.
Absolute trash. In their boundless greed, Google decided to force endlessly cycling ads onto the home screen, and had the temerity to highlight it as a feature. I give two @$#@$# about the content they are highlighting, from a Christmas movie (in July) to the latest teen pablum. Pretty sure I had automatic updates disabled, and that was overwritten without my consent (with no way to roll back to the prior version). I took a chance on the Android ecosystem with this device (NVIDIA shield), and that's the last time I make that mistake. I'll be tossing that out and not looking back...
Unbelievable. They added unremovable ads right in the home screen. The "Staff Picks" takes over the top 30% of your screen advertising random videos from apps that I don't ever want to install. No way to turn off. How quickly my $2k TV turned from pleasant to ad infested junk. The only solution I had was was to uninstall updates in App manager. If this is the future of Android TV, I'm certainly not buying another TV with this OS again.
I paid a hefty sum for a top-end TV, then again for the most expansive TV box one can find, and what did I get? Ads! Ads that blink and distract. Ads that take more than a third of the screen, pushing what I want to see on the second page. Ads for movies I cannot be less interested in, on services I have absolutely no intention to subscribe to. Ads that have been trying to sell me the exact same three movies in genres I don't care about since they appeared. Evil greedy corporation at its worst.
Minnesota Statue 325F.67 FALSE STATEMENT IN ADVERTISEMENT.
Any person, firm, corporation, or association who, with intent to sell or in anywise dispose of merchandise, securities, service, or anything offered by such person, firm, corporation, or association, directly or indirectly, to the public, for sale or distribution, or with intent to increase the consumption thereof, or to induce the public in any manner to enter into any obligation relating thereto, or to acquire title thereto, or any interest therein, makes, publishes, disseminates, circulates, or places before the public, or causes, directly or indirectly, to be made, published, disseminated, circulated, or placed before the public, in this state, in a newspaper or other publication, or in the form of a book, notice, handbill, poster, bill, label, price tag, circular, pamphlet, program, or letter, or over any radio or television station, or in any other way, an advertisement of any sort regarding merchandise, securities, service, or anything so offered to the public, for use, consumption, purchase, or sale, which advertisement contains any material assertion, representation, or statement of fact which is untrue, deceptive, or misleading, shall, whether or not pecuniary or other specific damage to any person occurs as a direct result thereof, be guilty of a misdemeanor, and any such act is declared to be a public nuisance and may be enjoined as such.
They advertised there would be no ads, then promptly started serving ads while still collecting monthly subscription revenue I think fall into this area.
I learned to let the users pick the right time for update on my first job. ( by having to drive and fix my mess )
But we were a tiny software shop. No MS I guess.
Might have been the same update that reset my privacy settings.
Also, my impression is that the updates have become much less reliable. So your computer may not be back at all. Or something you need never work anymore.
Windows is a control mechanism that, for now, runs third party code.
My motto with “computer help” is “ok, let me install Linux on that, we’ll see what I can do”
Usually that works. ( people get scared and I’m off the hook)
But the older part of my family is running exclusively on Linux since a decade. Not much support needed.
If I'd realized that that was a feature which would be pervasive for all future versions of Windows, I would have returned the machine.
I've rolled back to 1703 twice now, and am managing to stay there by the expedient of keeping my hard drive too full for Microsoft to download any further updates.
I despair of replacing this device --- it wasn't quite the replacement I wanted for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 --- no daylight-viewable transflective display.
Why is it so hard to purchase a device which has:
- a good quality stylus (Wacom EMR) - a high-resolution display (the 2160x1440 on a 12.something inch display is fine, though I'd love more) - decent battery life - reasonable size/thinness - reasonable price - access to the file system and the ability to install arbitrary software, esp. opensource stuff
I'd also like a daylight viewable display, but that's probably not happening.
Actually, it is user postponable, you can tell the update to wait up to 5 days by default. It should still allow you to wait unlimited time of course, but you can always press that button once.
Want to compel a user to update/reboot? Mess with the aesthetics.
Disable their wedding-photo background. Change the UI to something horrendously ugly (pink-on-green?). Toggle high-contrast mode every hour.
Another senior here.
As a child I scratched my father's guitar with a belt buckle I had been told to wear. I learned to distrust adult judgment, I still don't wear belts half a century later, and I have a successful research career for which I partly thank this errant belt buckle. I lost a potential life as a rock God, but I've been protected from ever buying Microsoft products. This story horrifies me but it doesn't surprise me; I made a fair trade.
Wearing belt keeps you from a lot more inconvenience than scratching a guitar.
Besides unless it was IDK some kind of guitar that Jimmy Hendrix was playing I would not scold kid for scratching it - so much that he would stop touching guitars for life or stop wearing a belt for a life.
Buying Microsoft products save you a lot of inconvenience as well.
Removing windows and putting a user friendly Linux distro changed everything. No more invasive software in her way and her aging PC was brought back to life. At first we were a bit scared that there might be technical challenges with Linux that might appear but so far nothing of that sort.
But...
Are you really saying he didn't just buy a new laptop for his last holiday!? Just buy the new laptop, even if the plan was it'd immediately go to someone else in inheritance.
EDIT: Grammar
And it's take not much more effort to order a laptop than to comment about it on HN.
I don't know if you've ever been really sick (or just been around someone who's really sick or suffering from chronic pain), but being on chemo is a thing that completely shuts you down. I fully believe that going out to the store and buying a new laptop and getting it set up was beyond what the parent-poster's father felt capable of. Similarly, going out to the library and doing it all from a shared computer would be entirely too much. Anything that's not the well-worn familiar path would feel insurmountable.
I bought my dad a laptop this summer and he's quite healthy.
I completely understand how things get fucked up for engineers and serious tool users or users who have needs for very specific hardware that require very specific operating systems to run. but an email and e-commerce machine?
what could possibly have broken email and e-commerce?
also I'm very impressed that the very first comment I read on this article has twisted the topic of "value-add software that hardware vendors put on is garbage" blaming Microsoft in record time.
It's amazing how good the vocal HN commenters are about things like this.
No, updates are objectively not all good. Updates frequently break things. This is colloquially referred to as your user experience being "enhanced." Any solution begins with an honest appraisal of these realities.
I keep day dreaming about designing systems that focus on stable, simple, consistent interfaces. That don't even give application developers a choice in the interface. Where service providers aren't even tempted to become user-interface developers. If I could afford to take a year or two off, this is what I would work on.
Then you get the crowd of “indie developers” crying about how the platform has taken away user choice and that they should be able to use every API of the OS to do whatever they want, user-be-damned.
Apple doesn’t go nearly far enough and every “indie developer” working in adtech constantly cries about the entire OS should be accessible to every application developer on the planet.
Fortune 1000-first, themselves second, and customers last.
Thankfully, Apple has recognized that their devices and software are -- at least philosophically -- designed for people, not companies. A phone is a distinctly personal device. I think the reason Windows Phone flopped is that it was ultimately designed to deploy in corporate fleets, with all the usual "the company owns your device and everything on it" experience that most of us have with the corporate laptop. You can say that Microsoft's monopoly in businesses pushed Apple in this direction, but at least they have capitalized on the distinction, and didn't sacrifice user experience to try to court the "corporate purchaser."
This is why I HATE Gartner "market share" numbers. It lumps in corporate purchases (to Microsoft's overwhelming benefit), which completely distorts the view of how people are using operating systems "on the ground." It's my gut-level impression that Apple is leading at least 4-to-1 in individual purchases, and Windows is something everyone but gamers just put up with to do their jobs.
W11 is going to lose a lot of people, and some of those will be in that category.
Why wasn’t someone able to help get the vacay scheduled on his behalf? Did he just not tell anyone until after it was too late?
This was the first time an email company this big pulled some shit like this in the internet era.
All my correspondence from my high school years to my mid-twenties were gone, including cherished back-and-forths with people that were now deceased. It felt like someone came and burned down my house while I was on vacation.
Just thinking about it continues to paralyze me with rage.
Everytime Microsoft forces its product upgrades (I'm not talking about security patches) on people and through shady dark UI patterns, it turns thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of peoples' lives into shit.
The fact that they keep insisting on repeating this awful practice, year after year, even perfecting it at each iteration, can only be explained by a company being run by sociopaths, in my humble opinion.
Microsoft has absolutely no sense of responsibility when it comes to its retail market, its product owners would rather compromise the integrity of any senior's computer to make it unusable than just accept the fact that most people on earth don't need a new Windows every two years.
Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter? I need a laptop, a table and a phone. I have been looking for over a year and I cannot find anything I like.
This is one of the biggest market failures of our generation. All we have is fake choice, but not a single manufacturer wants to deliver plain open hardware. If you look at buying a car you will end up in exactly the same situation. In fact all consumer hardware of all sorts has the same problem.RMS was right back then, but the problem has recently become much more serious. Back then it was only about laptops. Now I have to worry about my fridge spying on me.
It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop).
Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.
Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.
But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.
> 1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software.
and Apple in general is the chief abuser of this user freedom, less so on Mac devices, but extremely so on iPhone/iOS devices: it allows to run only vetted software, often against the interests of the users, and, in some cases, retroactively altering the deals [0], so "doing a market research" prior to buying the device, as many regular HN users suggest, won't really help.
[0]: Pray they don't alter it any further.
Now I'm thinking about Android phone, as my iPhone 8 started to throttle and I think it's time to upgrade.
PS it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.
Please, let's not act like this is a real solution. It's definitely better than not having that option at all, but:
- 99.5% of users don't even know it exists or how to do it because it's intentionally hidden away
- Because of the above fact, it's generally not viable to develop an application that can only be sideloaded, anything that gets removed from the Play Store usually dies
- Google has recently been moving away from the traditional APK format and towards their new "split APK" structure meaning you cannot sideload apps that were downloaded from the Play Store without a third party app to handle it
They had that choice, and they've chosen not to. This, on one hand, keeps you from side-loading 2GIS, but on the other hand, keeps seniors' iPhones from crapware (as per TLA).
> That's not the problem with Android
The wider problem is what will happen when your side-loaded APK will need to make a TLS connection to 2GIS website, but its TLS certificate has been declared invalid by the cert authority (because sanctions). Or what will happen when the BGP routing protocol will direct the traffic to 2GIS website to go to a sinkhole (because sanctions). Or what will happen when 2GIS web servers from HP and Dell will be rendered inoperable by a remote command (because sanctions).
> it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.
No doubt Linux, OpenOffice, and RISC-V will be of tremendous help to Putin's Russia.
The crapware they install is from the official app store, not "sideloaded" apps.
This way Apple could comply with sanctions, removing the app from the AppStore, and not causing their users any real harm.
This would also allow users in China to use messaging apps like Signal.
All in all I like my Mac better than my Windows PC or Linux laptop, but Apple software is just regressing a bit slower than the others.
`sudo spctl --master-disable`
Turning off Gatekeeper also turns off the notarization checks.
Of course, us software engineers usually buy very expensive computers! The end result is that the average software will always run slowly on the average hardware, forever, no matter how fast hardware gets.
It’s a tragedy and I hate it. I feel like software engineers need “slow CPU thursdays” or something, where every Thursday your cpu is intentionally throttled down to run at the speed of a below average user’s computer. If we don’t feel our user’s pain, we will never understand it.
(Though this would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow. Hm! I wonder how you’d implement that!)
Well, a slow compiler means you write less code and pull in fewer dependencies to solve a problem, win-win ;)
Linux gives you full customizability on the other hand, but it's not for everybody (yes, in theory there are some very simple and usable distros, but in practice users often need software that is not available on them, like Office).
It feels like theft when a windows laptop is advertised based on its CPU, except when you take it out of the box 60% of that cpu is consumed all the time with some terrible HP bloatware or something. What an utterly terrible experience.
For some others it works (for instance Numbers and GarageBand). The randomness (why can some preinstalled apps be uninstalled, but other not) is pretty close to a dark pattern.
The uninstallable apps on macOS also are never required to have open and running. So yea, it's 4 or 5 extra items in your main ~/Applications folder, but that seems like a small price to pay for all of the other benefits.
None of the extra Apple apps do anything unless you run them, so the worst case they take some storage and mental space (when you see them in your Applications folder). And they're obviously included because Apple thinks they're actually useful to enough people, even if you disagree.
I’ve gotten probably $10k worth of repairs for free across my apple devices. I’ve even purchased broken apple devices in warranty to walk them to the Apple Store to walk out with new hardware.
Now I understand that Apple just works when Windows/Android often don't, and iOS/MacOS are generally more user-friendly for non-tech people.
As for hardware failures, again, good for you. Here it's more like 3-4 days before getting it fixed or replaced.
This would cost enormous amounts of money for practically no benefit whatsoever to the manufacturer. Modern hardware is complex so drivers are costly and Linux-on-desktop enthusiasts are an incredibly, incredibly small niche. Which, I must add, is just getting smaller and smaller as WSL and ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex subsumes many of the use cases. In fact, I am not even sure what is left.
I don't know how people can still think that the market optimizing and giving us the products we want at an adequate price is the default, when it's clearly the exception.
Game theory suggests that the vast majority of consumer goods will be nearly free, relative to their high quality counterparts, at the minimum viable quality.
I cannot remember the last time my clothes discolored, and I buy what I think are cheap clothes by US standard (Uniqlo/Next/Express/Macys/ASICS/Adidas).
But to address your point, I would rather pay $30 for a pair of jeans that maybe has a little discoloration in 5 years, which I currently do, than $100+ for a high quality pair of jeans that might last 20 years but I have to pamper and take care of.
Where the clothing market does not work is addressing the externality of plastics pollution, since it’s all short term benefit to individuals now at long term cost to society later.
>crap food with all kinds of nasty ingredients like trans fats, etc.
Trans fat is really minimal to non existent in most developed countries. But is a good example of when regulators need to intervene to protect the public.
If you don't experience it often, I imagine it might be a Europe vs. US thing. I have often heard that clothes for sale in the US tend to be more robustly made (maybe because of the widespread use of tumble dryers?). In Spain what I said above is definitely a common occurrence, and you don't even get rid of that by paying for good brands, I have had clothes from e.g. Lacoste do that. And the reason is that they skimp on a chemical that fixes the dye. It's perfectly avoidable, but they just don't bother.
> I have often heard that clothes for sale in the US tend to be more robustly made (maybe because of the widespread use of tumble dryers?).
Maybe, although the Next brand I wear a lot gets shipped to me from UK. I throw my unsorted clothes in the washer and then the dryer and then fold them and put them away.
My British family spends a lot more time sorting by color, turning jeans inside out, washing them on specific water cycles, then line drying them, then ironing them.
I figured I was just buying clothes that need less work.
It’s just not aligned with what you want them to want. They want fast fashion that lasts a couple weeks, because that’s how long fashion trends last, and they want foods that taste good over is healthy. The market is just giving them what they want.
And hear me out, if people are going to be throwing clothes out every couple weeks regardless of quality, it's better that they're made as cheaply as possible.
But most of the time they choose to buy that because they don't have enough information, or they have misleading information.
No one wants a pair of pants to ruin the rest of the laundry. And there is food without trans fats that tastes as well if not better, but it's easier to just put trans fats or whatever the next crap product is and not inform the consumer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
Pretty much all consumers know excess sugar, carbs, oil, salt, and calories in general are bad for them. Yet they still want to consume them.
I went to a party last night where there were several obese healthcare professionals (doctor level). Yet they ate pizza, and one even put ranch dressing on it.
The market is selling plenty of healthy food. People do not want it though, for the same reason a dog or other pet will engorge themselves if they were offered unhealthy amounts of easy calories.
https://www.insider.com/discarded-fast-fashion-clothes-chile...
Efficiency!
That part is I think selfish. I do want to pay a premium to be able to do all that, but that market doesn't really exist.
If someone doesn't want to spend $2000 instead of $1000 on something that does what they want/need better than the $1000 version; I'd argue that they don't really mean they "don't want" to, they mean they can't financially, whether literally or justifiably.
I can't justify spending $2000 on a phone that does things I want it to do better than the $800 equivalent (which we shouldn't forget is also quite a premium to many), so I buy the "cheaper" one and "make it work".
If the difference between $1000 and $2000 were inconsequential to me, then I don't see why I wouldn't "want" to pay that premium.
So, I argue, GP isn't selfish as you put it, they just choose their words poorly on this point; or you take them too literally.
I'd be interested to hear from GP in this regard.
Counter-question: did you really think the free market was actually working for the consumer ?
A free market relies on multiple points:
- consumers are rational
- consumers have time and energy to compare alternatives
- alternatives exist
- it is essentially free to create an alternative, and alternatives take 0 time to become mature
- consumers have enough money to buy exactly what they want
None of those are true. Consumers aren't rational, or else there wouldn't be a multi billion dollars ad industry whose point is exactly to instill artificial demand. Consumers have too little free time to spend on chores, family, going out; they won't spend a weekend spreadsheeting a smartphone. The last competitor to the current duopoly failed because it didn't gain traction, and it was a multi billion dollar company. The income inequality keeps rising, people have to make a choice between paying rent and buying a new smartphone.
The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life but of shareholders' profits. A barely working, ad-ridden, slow as molasses smartphone that prints money just by being turned on is the expected outcome of those incentives.
No economist would claim that (and I seriously ask from where you got the "markets maximize consumers' quality of life" claim). Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.
Where, in practice, "efficient" is conveniently circularly defined as "whatever the market decides". In the case of the OP, there's nothing "efficient" about grinding a computer to a halt under an oppressive layer of crapware, thereby wasting the user's time and energy (in both a literal and a figurative sense). The stark lesson of the modern age is that markets are hopeless at pricing in externalities.
And increasingly, consumers have become resources rather than market participants.
By their buying decisions, they actively decide that this is what they want.
I don't like Android, I don't like iOS. What do I buy ? Not the one that is best for me, because I don't have a real choice, but the one I will hate the least.
Not buying is also a possible decision. You should of course choose this choice if all other available option have a negative net value for you. The fact that you decided for Android or iOS shows that both of these choices have a positive net value for you - so what are you complaining about?
> The fact that you decided for Android or iOS shows that both of these choices have a positive net value for you - so what are you complaining about?
Android suits me more, but I would like to be able to run multiple VPNs at the same time. What do I buy ?
I didn't buy Android because this is what I want, but because it's the closest. But how do I drive the decisions to where I want ? Am I supposed to wait that a million alternatives are created and have the same level as Android, then only can I buy what I need ? This just doesn't work.
This means the vendor makes no money from you. If a lot of people decide this way, the vendor will have to adjust or go bust - this is called "market adjustment".
The fact that you did buy tells the market that what you bought is of net-positive value for you.
This doesn't mean the market is efficient. It means the market misunderstands itself.
As an example, I hate every option available for phones right now but I can't just not have a phone. I have no real choice.
Whichever decision I make will send the wrong signal to "the market" and won't influence it to improve.
Thanks 'free market'.
Not to mention lineage means no verified boot
This is what buyers decide about via their buying decisions.
Most efficient usage of resources in what sense?
If a company is able to pay more for their commodities, it means that it is able to create more of an economic value of the commodities than a competitor (otherwise it would not be able to pay this price). This leads to a more efficient and effective use of the commodities that are traded on the market.
Indeed, if slavery turned out to be more efficient, it would.
But I think that the claim that slavery is more efficient does not hold, since opressing people binds a lot of ressources; also opressed people tend to do work as minimally as possible.
So it is much more efficient to give people the illusion of freedom instead of enslaving them.
"providing as much value as possible to consumers at as low a price as possible" is exactly the opposite of efficiency since as a company you don't have to invest that many resources for the given price.
Pre-installing spyware gives money to the vendor of the laptop. The developer of the spyware can afford to give this money to the laptop vendor since he can use the collected data to make even more money.
Windows Phone and Fire Phone.
Also- just because it's a big deal to you and me, doesn't mean it actually is. How much does it actually hurt you? That's why people don't care. In the grand scheme of things is a wicked "first world problem". We live extremely privileged lives if this is really a huge annoyance (it is to me btw).
I wish things were more open. Would the entire streaming community ever have happened without a general purpose computer? It is hard to know what alternate future we have been robbed of by being force fed closed and locked down platforms.
Our family laptop and my personal desktop run Linux Mint. Those do not have open firmware, but that's it.
Banking is only done on a laptop booted from a read-only stick and with a TAN-generator.
The most common type of market failure is monopoly/oligopoly: you can choose Microsoft or Apple. They have a suffocating grip on OEMs, making it very difficult to develop alternatives.
The real question is: Why is human society tolerating oligopolies on software, CPUs and hardware in general?
And no need for the exaggeration, in many cases you can buy an iPad for less than that crappy windows laptop with all the spyware. Even for a fully featured Air, the price difference is way less than $1000
This is just typical late stage capitalism, no? The step after commoditization isn't "and then they just quietly settled for being treated like a utility and not having huge profit margins anymore". It's more often "and then they tried to find other ways to monetize by selling ads and demographics information" or "then they bought up their competitors and raised prices again" or "then they formed a cartel with their competitors" or "then they tried to de-commoditize the product category by charging 200% more for a 20% performance improvement, while stopping production of the previous version" or "then they started charging more for related services and maintenance" (cf. printer ink cartridges and razor blades). Being the "winner" or "last/biggest company standing" of a product category means you get to do all of the above consumer-hostile fuckery to try to keep profit margins high.
Just like the market is "failing" when people complain about bad airline experiences… but continue to buy the cheapest flights/seats they can find?
Why do you think the seats are so cheap?
I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. Since websites didn't self-regulate when it came to tracking people, legislation came in to make them do so, making everything worse for everyone because then instead of removing the trackers, corporations decided to apply dark and annoyance patterns to make people just hit the easy accept button.
Even self-regulation doesn't work. A decade ago, MOST of the smartphone manufacturers self-regulated and settled on using micro-USB for charging. Apple refused to cooperate, so now legislation came in.
If NSA / CIA types don't have access to the Intel Management Engine backdoor, I will eat my own mouth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
Thanks, government oversight.
Although "disable" is not the same as "remove" it is better than nothing.
https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/disabling-intel-m...
But in the case of laptops, I’m not sure the market has failed. Apple is selling MacBooks like hotcakes. The Framework laptop is attacking at a different angle, and I have high hopes for System76 and friends.
Yes, there’s loads of hot garbage, but there are really good alternatives.
How to fix this? It has to come from every CEO, down through management, to empower the people who ask expensive questions like "Why is the bloatware so shitty?" This doesn't happen because most CEOs cannot grasp that that is how Apple gets to charge so much more for their laptops, and that they have to give up managing by the numbers to get there. (Not that Apple hasn't got numbers people, especially on the supply chain side.)
You don't need open source systems to get there. Open source in commercial systems can help, but it isn't fundamental to getting the bloatware under control. Microsoft does it with Surface in part to put pressure on their OEM customers, like Google does with Pixel. This isn't just to be good to their end-users. They would probably kill their OEMs if they could and be more like Apple, if they could.
In my environment, more and more people are switching from $BRANDXYZ to Apple (or Linux). To me, it doesn't look like the market is failing, rather the opposite. But of course, this is not a Representatione evaluation.
The problem is, however, that not everyone wants to or can afford this.
Because the market is too free, and needs some additional,heavy and very restrictive regulation.
I hope the EU will do something in this sense, sooner or later.
Runaway capitalism has fucked the promotion of the interests of consumers.
It didn't. There are Apple stores all around the world, full of people ready to help seniors in person or over the phone, on a really nice computer.
Hmmmm
To start with it looks like you're getting a discount from one manufacturer, but you can spend more for a clean slate, then they all abandon the clean slate models and you can't even buy control.
Can you even buy an everyday consumer Windows laptop from without crap on it these days?
(And if large computer vendors would start preinstalling Linux they'd add their crapware there to "build their relationship" with the customer and selling a few ads or whatever)
When you issue a computer for work IT will almost always, without fail, emulate this by installing a bunch of their own junk spyware and “security” software.
Reviewers of laptops do a fresh install of Windows before reviewing like that is normal consumer behavior.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TronScript/
After 2 months (!) she came to me with the phone. Somehow she now had ads on her lockscreen, her default browser was hijacked by some other browser app with ads, and multiple apps had persistent notifications and were running continuously. Among them AVG anti-virus, some cleanup tool...
I have no idea how they got there. Probably because they pop-up in Ads with texts like "YOU NEED TO INSTALL THIS".
My grandma can't differentiate between an Ad like that and a serious System update notification.
It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device. For all their faults at least they protect you from this kind of nonsense. The Lenovo is just the same, really. A profound disrespect for their own users and the usability of their own product.
Weird how things that the manufacturer would consider insecurities, eg unlocked bootloader, allow end users the kind of control that can increase security and privacy (admittedly, maybe conflating privacy and security). Highlighting the disconnect between industry security and user interest (even though users, by and large, aren't interested in their own interests).
I realize there's a theoretical risk the OS could be compromised or malware could have superuser permissions, but my previous attempts to find any significant data breaches or user harm caused that way have come up empty. If anybody knows of one, I'd be interested to read about it.
What are you attempting to protect me from then SafetyNet? Oooh, I get it, you're trying to protect apps created by companies that collect and store sensitive data to minimise the chances of said companies being sued for, and having to publicise, a data breach. Ok, why didn't you just say that? Yeah, you're right, it doesn't play anywhere near as well to the great unwashed.
SafetyNet sounds like shit to me:
> requires Google Play Services to be enabled on the device for the API to function smoothly.
> SafetyNet works in combination with the snet service on Android devices which collects data about the integrity of the device and constantly ping Google about the safety status of the device.
> Google offers many other options like application sandboxing, encryption, app-based permissions and so on to secularize apps but none of them are considered as an all-inclusive solution.
(GPS permissions required for wifi scanning? Fix your basic shit first!)
> By identifying devices which are currently in the non-tampered state the API provides an assurance that the device on which the app is running is neither rooted nor using a custom ROM.
(cough Magisk cough)
Above excerpted from an article admittedly with rose-coloured glasses view of the subject: https://www.hexnode.com/blogs/safetynet-android-security/
I don't use my phone for banking, but I do have a crypto wallet that refuses to run on a rooted device, but Magisk solved that for me.
For the cookie thing you can just install “I don’t care about cookies”
Tapping adds apparently lead to installing these things called "Launcher" which are essentially complete phone UI and those launchers have ads that lead to even more hideous apps. They also lie about the thing you are installing, she was trying to get some emojis and I checked back then, the launcher in question was disguised as emoji thingy. You need to carefully read the text to understand that you get the emojis together with complete phone UI replacement.
I can't stand the Android way of doing things. How it is possible to replace the main user interface of the device? I understand the desire to completely control your device and I do support it in principle but this sort of modifications should be possible only by going through scary screens that let only people know what they do achieve that sort of device modifications.
It's a general-purpose computer like a PC, not an appliance like a game console. That's not for everyone, I guess.
But she always had problems with her private laptop, and no assistant or IT department to fix it. We thought she needed a windows one because that is what she knew, but the switch to a macbook air took maybe a week or so to adjust to.
It was a bit of a gamble, since I don't own a mac so supporting one via phone would be very tricky. But she has had the macbook now for years and I've had to do absolutely zero tech support on it. For emails, Word documents and some web browsing it really just works.
I think he gives Apple credit for how fast his internet is, when really it’s due to Brave. But the rest of the experience— no crap ware, no spyware, no ads in the system— that’s on Apple.
Edit: forgot the main point, which is that he needed no handholding. Given how often he had to replace his crapware-ridden netbooks in the past decade due to performance degradation or something physically breaking, I showed him the trivial math that made the MacBook look like an economic decision as much as a QoL decision.
My dad’s life is made easier with a MacBook Air + iPhone combo because all his 2FA SMS codes get auto inputted into the 2FA field so he does not have to type out the number.
I personally believe that some sites are designed to shift just a bit to cause this. Like they've used analytics to know how quickly people push the link and now they've designed a slow loading image to shift the page at that point.
1: https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-16/features/
I have yet to see one
Complete and utter failure on Google's part.
Whenever I use a new platform with a new UI paradigm, I’m a little like that too.
Even first time on fresh iOS I installed a “lite” app with ads that was definitely not what I thought it was.
It's one reason why Apple phones still do really well on the secondhand market.
My parents both had Android tablets (Samsung iirc), but they didn't use them for very long, switched to iPads, and used them at the dinner table for years afterwards - just checking news, playing games, that kind of thing.
My dad bought a laptop the other day to play games and watch F1 with - at least the pre-installed shit wasn't too bad. Still had to talk him out of getting both AVG and some other virus scanner though, that would've bogged his system down and make him lose trust, because virus scanners these days are scareware - that is, if they don't pop up every once in a while pretending to be useful, people will get rid of them.
Apple products UX is so much better than anything currently available on the market, but its slowly eroding due to lack of Steve Jobs.
He had a huge drive to make perfect UX. Newer designers lack this and you can just feel it from how new versions of iOS look like.
And how new iphones design is just small changes or bigger screen. They no longer have that spark like they used to with Jobs.
RIP Steve, visioners are not looked upon kindly.
And it looks like their laptops actually found the path again.
Sometimes Apple products just have these really nice touches. Other times, it's confounding where the gaps are and leave me wondering if Apple even uses their own product. I have two garage doors that I've HomeKit enabled and if I tell Siri "close the garage door" I get asked which one, even if only one is open. Even if I say "close both garage doors" or "close all garage doors" I still get prompted.
The UI of Nova Launcher on my S21 is so much more intuitive than Apple. Apple does everything through swipes. Swipes suck for several reasons, one of them being that I must swipe certain positions at certain speeds to get everything done. I miss buttons. Related: After two weeks of owning an iPhone 14, I was complaining about how I can't move my cursor in the URL field. It just kept highlighting words! My friend told me the super-intuitive iOS experience: hold down Spacebar to move your cursor. I'm glad that was covered in the non-existent tutorial.
Then there are the anxiety inducing badges, the fact that settings is an app instead of a system menu, the fact that control center (or whatever the system drop down is) can't have nearly the function of Android's system drop down, the fact that notification center doesn't feel trustworthy or consistent, the fact that notification center shows me notifications from blacklisted apps even in focus mode...
Android's UI just makes so much more fucking sense. And I hate that I am tempted now to go back to my S21 with inferior camera and DAC/bluetooth stack just to have software that makes sense.
I acknowledge this is a rant and not as well put-together as most of my comments, but effing Hell, iOS is a mixed bag.
Apple products do well on the second-hand market because Apple usually doesn’t cannibalize that market by selling low-end devices. By positioning themselves as a premium brand and ensuring that the low end of the market is not served with new products, they ensure that the low end will be served by the second-hand market. PC/Android can’t do this because they don’t control the hardware and there’s always some brand that will sell new low-end devices which compare favorably to any used device.
In the few cases where Apple has deviated from this strategy of not serving the low end, resale values have suffered. The iPhone 8 and iPhone X were released at basically the same time. But the X currently sells for roughy 25% of its original price whereas the 8 sells for closer to 15%. This is due to the introduction of the SE which is basically just a cheaper and better 8.
An iPhone XS (from 2018) has the single-core performance of the most expensive 1000$+ non-Apple phone you can find.
iPhone 11 (from 2019) is still unbeaten.
iPhone 8 and X will still have a much more powerful CPU than most phone models on sale today.
Thankfully I was able to copy off the pictures, and I bought her a Pixel 4a, installed a tempered glass screen protector and thin/minimal TPU case, went through the settings with her, and even showed her screenshots of more user-friendly third party launchers. She opted to keep the default launcher, and it's been smooth sailing since. (I also installed Firefox and uBlock Origin on it.)
Be careful what you wish for. For many power users, overlays and replacing the default browser are 100% essential. Removing them just for the sake of user safety would be a grave mistake.
Google is already pushing to replace overlays with "bubbles" for example.
Yes.
Firefox for Android has AdBlock plus support now. The browser itself is somewhat slower than chrome on Android but totally worth it for the ad blocker.
For YouTube there is YouTube Premium or NewPipe.
It’s usually not even “expensive” when you consider the frequency with which people replace low-end hardware. All of my Android-using relatives replace their phones and tablets 2-3 times more frequently so they end up paying more for slower hardware and then having to spend time playing tech support instead of using their devices.
To be clear, that’s not Android’s fault in the sense that the market is broken: Apple is fine with you having a 6 year old device because you’re probably using the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, etc. There’s also some lesson about how consumers want the ability to install things outside of the App Store but statistically a large fraction of us can’t do that safely.
I got all of my older relatives and in-laws to buy one (eventually) and they've been 99% problem free ever since. With Androids it was even worse than trying to get their "got it from the store on sale" Windows-laptops cleaned up.
My mother is on her second iPhone SE, she used the first one until it didn't get software updates (5 years IIRC). If everything goes as usual, she'll be using it until 2025.
How is a $400 device that lasts seven years more expensive than even $200 budget Androids that have to get replaced every two years?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/19/super... https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/ps500066-s...
My question is, why does a monitor even need firmware updates? I didn't gain any features, nor did I get an update report.
The machine itself feels really solid, I was expecting a few rough edges from a first-time manufacturer, but it feels as good as my old Macbook Air did. I just love it, and I am really enjoying how repairable it is. All the stuff has stickers and QR codes internally to explain what components are and link you to how-to videos.
Well worth whatever premium I paid for it, if it ensures that the company continues to make products.
If they are reading this thread, an option with no numberpad and hardware buttons on the touchpad. I'm paying an extra for that. The language of the keyboard is much less important. Thanks.
Ostensibly in a "well-functioning" market, selling computers that become very slow would make people not buy them.
Is there no better competition? If there is better, why aren't they winning?