As soon as the copilot garbage was installed on my computer without asking , I made sure to quickly update group policies and registry to disable it. Just yesterday it popped up the dialog asking me to try out copilot again. Just another case of windows “forgetting” settings.
- Software compatibility.
- Wanting upgradable hardware that doesn't require new machine + $1000 expense atop it for double the RAM.
- JACK/ASLA/PulseAudio/GStreamer audio madness shouldn't be forced on mortal man.
Those are perfectly fine reasons, but I just wanted to share my experience as maybe things are better since last time you used the other popular OS that permits upgradable hardware:
- Thanks to infusion from Valve, Wine now works really well. The recent game Helldivers 2 constantly crashes on my friends's Windows PCs, but it has not crashed for me. The Windows users are asking a Linux user to host the game!
- This will almost sound like a joke, but after JACK/ALSA/PulseAudio/GStreamer did not do the job, now there is yet another, the new PipeWire. Anyway, it works great and its bluetooth headset support is better than what I have experienced on android/osx/windows.
Because until game devs will even try to support Linux, I’m sort of stuck with it.
Steam has done gods work with proton, and many games run shockingly well under it, but many game devs refuse to support Linux games (as usual, indie’s are the best) and do things as trivial as ticking the “enable EAC button on Linux”, gaming on Linux is a frustrating experience at times.
I game fairly regularly. I have given up on VR on Linux (valve gave up on it), and anti-cheat systems mostly do not work on Linux (valve is making some progress there). Everything else works perfectly for me, frequently with fewer crashes than the Windows systems of my friends.
The most annoying things about the anti-cheat stuff is that:
- most of them don’t even work
- EAC has Linux support, devs literally just need to tick a box in their configs. It’s so straightforward. EAC is junk for a bunch of other reasons, but that’s a side topic.
I’ve gotten many games to work shockingly well - even multiplayer ones, but the performance is like, 10-20 fps below the windows version (different m2, same computer),
The PC gaming market is 99% Windows. Ofc Indies and mid sized studios ignore Linux and Mac. You have to convince customers to use Linux first. Chicken/Egg problem. You can't expect Indies to solve it.
If anything, all the proton/deck work Valve did, gives Indies one more reason to not support Linux natively (game works on Linux anyway).
I believe OP said the opposite with regards to indies. In my experience indie games are the ones that run fine on Linux. Big studio games are not too bad either, but not as consistent.
copilot was installed on my computer a few weeks ago.
I turn on my laptop and login... and there is was, waving at me at the bottom of the screen... "Here I am, try me!" type of thing.
[I know, it was not "waving at me" but it was made obvious by popups]
Surprisingly, I was not angry or even thought to myself "I did not install this!"
I think that says alot about my views on Windows.. or Microsoft in general.
I am actually a GNU/Linux user but I do have 1 laptop purely for one company I work for. I am slowly moving it away from Windows (Windows Servers, Windows Programs, etc) to run on Linux.
As far as I am concerned, any job I get that are using Windows... they need to provide me a laptop.
Honestly just fed up it. I just accept that I really do not "own" my copy of Windows.
Windows aint that bad? But then, I'm occasionally reminded that if you don't have a corporate IT dept. jealously vetting every update, and instead use the shivers Super Happy Consumer Pachinko Edition Windows, things are very different.
Let me preface by saying that unlike many others here, I'm using windows on purpose, on my main machine, because I like it, and that since W95. And I'm still using it right now. I like how it's in a sort of spot between great customized but closed down experience of OSX, and completely open but very messy even today of Linux.
But for a long time, Windows struggled with some broken internals and screwed up stuff, drivers would destroy your computers randomly, security was essentially not a thing, virus and rootkit were more common than normal applications, the works.
Microsoft did a lot of great advance on that, Vista brought the great internals revamp, 7 cleaned it up and made it usable, ... But that's when they started having some "finished" part and let some idiot ruin them.
8 kept improving the internals, but the interface and settings were already fine so they let someone make it look and feel like a tablet OS, and a broken one at that. Then tried to hide it with 8.1, but the damage was done.
10 was, for me, the best Windows version; but with all the internals polished they now decided to add a veneer of crap on top, let's track users and install candy crush for them.
11 ... I have no idea what's happening. Forget the "apps like on phone" start menu brought by 8, now it's not even that good, also here are ads in it. The contextual menu is broken beyond belief, but there is a button to show the real working one. Changing browsers ? Oh no, people need to change the HTTP handler now ! And half of the stuff will ignore it and force-open edge anyway.
Microsoft was doing so much better with Windows when part of it was broken. They were working on fixing it. Since it's been done, they're now in the business of adding and changing parts of it just for the sake of it, and effectively breaking everything in the process.
Add to that, it was great for Microsoft the company to diversify away from Windows in revenue, but that lead them to consider it just one of their toys. They're doing to it what they did to Skype.
This kind of behavior is to be expected from a monopoly. And I understand where you're coming from about that sweet spot between restricted Apple hardware and troubleshooting Linux drivers. Windows may not be an absolute monopoly, but they're effectively close enough that they can make user hostile moves and their customers have no choice but to go along.
Microsoft under Nadella currently seems to be under the most competent leadership of the major tech companies. Apple under Cook is okay as long as they don't try to innovate too quickly, and Google under Pichai is a bonfire of wasted engineering capacity. Microsoft has a very good sense of how much leverage they can get out of their existing desktop and corporate enterprise compute markets to push into other markets. They will make use of this leverage.
So don't expect Windows to be any better than it has to be, to keep other potential options at bay.
I feel like 7 is really the last time I truly enjoyed using Windows. The additions felt like all net positives for my workflow (jumplists from the taskbar, thumbnail previews of taskbar windows, Aero Snap, VHD boot). Over time they have muddied it up with bad UIs or feature regressions. It just feels like a ship aimlessly floating around in the water with no real direction or destination in mind.
Microsoft is just a broken company. Their people really think they are making great stuff when in reality they're just coasting on their installed base. Nobody picks Microsoft because they're the best. They pick it because they're not bad enough to consider something else.
Implementing ms solutions is always a drag. They're always evangelizing so much and they have to because their stuff is not naturally appealing to users. But personally I really hate that fakeness.
Seeing this a lot lately. Maybe it's a warning sign of the economy. Maybe it's just interest rates going up. Either way it seems companies are having a hard time meeting their goals without tarnishing their brand.
Microsoft spent a decade turning their image around. Now the past few years they've been taking several steps back. Their software quality from Windows to new versions of software to Azure are getting to the point where I have a really hard time justifying their use. I say this as a long time Microsoft ecosystem user.
Growth at the expense of quality. At the expense of customer Goodwill. At the expense of employee happiness. I'm a full-blooded capitalist but our economy's addiction to growth will, I think, be our downfall.
It’s incredible to watch Microsoft squander the good will they created with WSL, VS Code, and the initial version of Chromium Edge (which was my browser of choice before they started its enshittification). It’s perplexing to think that some Product Manager is being evaluated on a single digit percentage point uptick in Edge usage at the expense of driving people away from the entire Windows product, right at the time where they have a potential reason to use Windows again with Copilot.
Been moving increasingly to macOS which at least doesn’t act like it’s adware when I’m using it.
I saw a "Do you want to try this new AI" in my Win 11 VM today, it's disgusting that they can send ADS into MY system with EVERYTHING shut off, I mean tracking, ads, statistics, usage, help, everything that can be turned off without doing anything extraordinary.
I dont know if this is causing the difference in your experience, but Microsoft puts a lot of guardrails around their GPT deployments to avoid giving "harmful" answers, so you do often get worse results than you do asking OpenAI's deployments the same question.
41 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 91.0 ms ] thread- Thanks to infusion from Valve, Wine now works really well. The recent game Helldivers 2 constantly crashes on my friends's Windows PCs, but it has not crashed for me. The Windows users are asking a Linux user to host the game!
- This will almost sound like a joke, but after JACK/ALSA/PulseAudio/GStreamer did not do the job, now there is yet another, the new PipeWire. Anyway, it works great and its bluetooth headset support is better than what I have experienced on android/osx/windows.
https://xkcd.com/927/
re: Bluetooh, my experience with it on Pop_OS! with PipeWire has been, not great.
Something in that stack seems to often misunderstand that when I switch from HDMI -> bluetooth headphones, I want the sound going to the headphones..
VLC, Firefox, even Steam seem to run into this so it doesn't appear to be isolated to a particular program.
So last decade.. PipeWire is the latest game in the town.
On a more serious note, PipeWire has worked really well for me and it really aims to unify all the previous usecases to one. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...
Steam has done gods work with proton, and many games run shockingly well under it, but many game devs refuse to support Linux games (as usual, indie’s are the best) and do things as trivial as ticking the “enable EAC button on Linux”, gaming on Linux is a frustrating experience at times.
- most of them don’t even work
- EAC has Linux support, devs literally just need to tick a box in their configs. It’s so straightforward. EAC is junk for a bunch of other reasons, but that’s a side topic.
I’ve gotten many games to work shockingly well - even multiplayer ones, but the performance is like, 10-20 fps below the windows version (different m2, same computer),
If anything, all the proton/deck work Valve did, gives Indies one more reason to not support Linux natively (game works on Linux anyway).
It runs the programs I use.
I turn on my laptop and login... and there is was, waving at me at the bottom of the screen... "Here I am, try me!" type of thing.
[I know, it was not "waving at me" but it was made obvious by popups]
Surprisingly, I was not angry or even thought to myself "I did not install this!"
I think that says alot about my views on Windows.. or Microsoft in general. I am actually a GNU/Linux user but I do have 1 laptop purely for one company I work for. I am slowly moving it away from Windows (Windows Servers, Windows Programs, etc) to run on Linux.
As far as I am concerned, any job I get that are using Windows... they need to provide me a laptop.
Honestly just fed up it. I just accept that I really do not "own" my copy of Windows.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39742058 ("Microsoft again bothers Chrome users with Bing popup ads in Windows")
But for a long time, Windows struggled with some broken internals and screwed up stuff, drivers would destroy your computers randomly, security was essentially not a thing, virus and rootkit were more common than normal applications, the works.
Microsoft did a lot of great advance on that, Vista brought the great internals revamp, 7 cleaned it up and made it usable, ... But that's when they started having some "finished" part and let some idiot ruin them.
8 kept improving the internals, but the interface and settings were already fine so they let someone make it look and feel like a tablet OS, and a broken one at that. Then tried to hide it with 8.1, but the damage was done.
10 was, for me, the best Windows version; but with all the internals polished they now decided to add a veneer of crap on top, let's track users and install candy crush for them.
11 ... I have no idea what's happening. Forget the "apps like on phone" start menu brought by 8, now it's not even that good, also here are ads in it. The contextual menu is broken beyond belief, but there is a button to show the real working one. Changing browsers ? Oh no, people need to change the HTTP handler now ! And half of the stuff will ignore it and force-open edge anyway.
Microsoft was doing so much better with Windows when part of it was broken. They were working on fixing it. Since it's been done, they're now in the business of adding and changing parts of it just for the sake of it, and effectively breaking everything in the process.
Add to that, it was great for Microsoft the company to diversify away from Windows in revenue, but that lead them to consider it just one of their toys. They're doing to it what they did to Skype.
Microsoft under Nadella currently seems to be under the most competent leadership of the major tech companies. Apple under Cook is okay as long as they don't try to innovate too quickly, and Google under Pichai is a bonfire of wasted engineering capacity. Microsoft has a very good sense of how much leverage they can get out of their existing desktop and corporate enterprise compute markets to push into other markets. They will make use of this leverage.
So don't expect Windows to be any better than it has to be, to keep other potential options at bay.
Where they do not have a monopoly is on consumer PCs. I guess "PC gaming" is still a monopoly of sorts, but that could change soon.
Implementing ms solutions is always a drag. They're always evangelizing so much and they have to because their stuff is not naturally appealing to users. But personally I really hate that fakeness.
https://www.bing.com/search?&iOS=1&auth=1&referrerig=E8B41E8...
Microsoft spent a decade turning their image around. Now the past few years they've been taking several steps back. Their software quality from Windows to new versions of software to Azure are getting to the point where I have a really hard time justifying their use. I say this as a long time Microsoft ecosystem user.
What are their goals exactly?
Been moving increasingly to macOS which at least doesn’t act like it’s adware when I’m using it.
I can use Bing GPT4 for free (at least for a while).
I would expect GPT4 to be better than the older version, yet the Bing version seems markedly worse than the OpenAI version.
Are they trained on different sets of data?
Why is one so much worse?