I'm with Ubuntu/Gnome3 and it's pretty fine. It took some plugin installing (very easy btw), but it feels pretty good. Time to switch?
Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
251–260 of 289 posts
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wine is always a viable option, especially for older games. With DirectX 11 support coming later this year, almost every Windoze only game should hopefully work.
it's still slower mostly. Mostly since they don't have any specification at all.
It is? I've personally seen better performance with Wine + Linux than with Windows.
Now, this isn't to say that Wine is totally up to par with Windows in terms of compatibility, but performance hasn't been a significant issue for quite some time.
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#253No wonder they intend to no longer describe what's in an update... Only using Windows in a VM still. Just set the network connection host-only. Didn't really need internet there anyway, and given these circumstances, I might as well get rid of it completely. I guess any inclination I had to think Microsoft is on the way up just vanished again. Too bad it also means I'm probably going to throw away my plans of diving…
Last I checked, F# works perfectly fine on non-Windows platforms with Mono.
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#254Happy linux desktop user here, I only need windows for turbotax once a year, so I will worry about this in Feb/Mar, anyone provides a cloud-based tax filing service?
Yeah, TurboTax does. I've done my taxes several times now entirely from Firefox+Linux. TurboTax will nag you about using an unsupported browser/OS combo, but you can just click the link saying "yeah, whatever, I know what I'm doing, sod off and let me do my bloody taxes" and it'll work perfectly fine.
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
GA doesn't record all my keystrokes and voice like W10 (and now W7-8) have been accused of doing in this thread. And there was an uproar when iirc Chromium was doing something similar with voice a few months back, which was pulled later.
You can turn Cortana off in Win10 too.
Which (allegedly) doesn't actually stop the data collection.
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can call it a key logger, and I understand why you would object, but sending search terms typed into a search box to a search engine is pretty much what people expect. Ubuntu does it. GNOME does it. Android does it. iOS does it. OS X does it. Windows is very nearly the last one to do it. Privacy is important, and I don't think either I or David Tomaschik would ever argue otherwise, and there should definitely be…
You didn't know that in Windows 10 until the news hit that disabling Cortana doesn't prevent that. Hell, I've never even seen Cortana since I'm in Dragon land (perhaps that's on the positive side for once) and I would've never thought the Start menu search isn't local only. Can I opt-out ? Nope. I can on Ubuntu, Android and iOS though.
It's really not that hard to opt out. The search is just a default program, and you can replace it with whatever you want, like Classic Shell.
You could argue as others have that there should be a default search which is local only, but why is it so important that everyone uses Microsoft's default programs rather than the millions of third party programs available? There seems to be a double standard where people say that it's important that Microsoft not push its own software over alternatives but also that Microsoft's default programs should fit every need of every user.
There's plenty that Microsoft does wrong, but providing a search that uses their search engine while allowing users to install whatever search they like is not so bad. You are already contacting their servers for updates and other things. Having to install an alternative search is really no worse than having to install a web browser. Now you might say that the menu is basic functionality but the browser is not, but what's really the difference?
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#257If I could figure out my wireless card/GPU drivers, I'd swap to Linux in a heartbeat. Plug-n-play drivers is the only reason I'm still on that closed-source OS. Just don't have the patience to hunt down third-party drivers.
> Just don't have the patience to hunt down third-party drivers.
For most modern distros, you don't have to hunt down third-party drivers; at most, you might need to enable some first-party or second-party "restricted" repo, at which point you can install the necessary drivers from there. And last I checked, Ubuntu and Linux Mint (among others) provide a "restricted hardware wizard" in the normal settings screen to do precisely this.
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#258Well I can see Russia putting alot more money into ReactOs
Or GNU/Linux, or OpenBSD, or something else privacy-aware.
But yes, ReactOS could certainly use some love, from Russia or otherwise. Can't wait for 0.4.0 to come out; should be a nice push toward general usability.
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can call it a key logger, and I understand why you would object, but sending search terms typed into a search box to a search engine is pretty much what people expect. Ubuntu does it. GNOME does it. Android does it. iOS does it. OS X does it. Windows is very nearly the last one to do it. Privacy is important, and I don't think either I or David Tomaschik would ever argue otherwise, and there should definitely be…
> sending search terms typed into a search box to a search engine is pretty much what people expect. Ubuntu does it. And Canonical has received a barrage of flak for it as a result. I outright stopped using Ubuntu as a result. Users expect the search box on their computer to search their own computer, not bombard them with ads. > GNOME does it. By default? Which distro? Last I checked, the GNOME search tool is limite…
GNOME searches whatever you want it to, but they heavily advertise integration with online sources as a feature. OS X Spotlight does online by default. Finder and Windows Explorer search local files. I said very nearly since, although they're great, BSD, KDE, etc. have very few users.
I'm not arguing that having control over your computer is important. I think people should be using exclusively free software, but it's really hard to sell them on that. Just about the only thing going for it is honesty and consistency. I'm worried that if people start exaggerating issues and get exposed for it, the free software side will lose credibility.
Re: Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a list of domains that came up in a previous discussion on HN (sorry, I don't recall it right away), and was also trending on pastebin.com, which contained all of the known domains Microsoft was using to report back from the OS. Presumably you could route those to "null" or the equivalent on your router and you'd be good to go. Edit: Here's the pastebin link: http://pastebin.com/RZW74Npk
You could always just do that in Windows' hosts file, too.
That's assuming that Windows doesn't circumvent such things because "well we know what we're doing and you don't".