281–290 of 413 posts
Honest question here: Why tech community is so hard with Windows mandatory updates, and kind of flexible with other companies? Maybe its just me, but the ratio of posts and articles blaming Microsoft for this practice seems to be disproportional. I mean, my Mac asked me 875 times about accepting something about iTunes. No matter how many times i click on decline, it keeps appearing there all the time. Same thing with…
Some highlights: Microsoft installed an app in users’ system trays advertising the free upgrade to Windows 10. Not satisfied, the company eventually made Windows 10 a recommended update so users receiving critical security updates were now also downloading an entirely new operating system onto their machines without their knowledge. This is essentially equivalent to saying: You've been running whatever version of Win…
> Specifically, when prompted with a Windows 10 update, if the user chose to decline it by hitting the ‘X’ in the upper right hand corner, Microsoft interpreted that as consent to download Windows 10. Ah, that brings back memories. Back in the DOS days, when you ran "format", it replied something like "Ready to format disk X. Press any key to continue:" (with X being the drive letter). And it really meant press any k…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debian used to be quite good at not stuffing things up. Even on testing/unstable. For the past few months, my laptop pointer controls -- this is PS/2 mouse emulation, folks, what, 20+ years old? -- has broken thanks apparently to libinput. Middle mouse button is only partially functional. Not that I use that ever.... Making increasingly complex things, and failing to keep an eye on the ball, ends up bolluxing stuff.…
But libinput is a vital part of the new, improved Wayland future, so obviously it must be better. Because of this development of the existing touchpad driver has even been dropped in favour of it.
I swear to fucking god Linux has lost the beat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debian used to be quite good at not stuffing things up. Even on testing/unstable. For the past few months, my laptop pointer controls -- this is PS/2 mouse emulation, folks, what, 20+ years old? -- has broken thanks apparently to libinput. Middle mouse button is only partially functional. Not that I use that ever.... Making increasingly complex things, and failing to keep an eye on the ball, ends up bolluxing stuff.…
I've had lots of Debian updates breaking my sound system. And twice when they pushed NetworkManager into the KDE dependencies, and when they pushed idmapd into NFSv4, it broke my network shares. I can't remember anything else breaking on stable. It's been a much experience than updating Windows.
NetworkMangler joins a long list of other FooMangler tools which are best destroyed with extreme prejudice. I manage WiFi with an /etc/network/interfaces stanza, and it mostly works. Static wired interfaces are, of course, vastly simpler.
I agree that the Linux experience is hugely better than Windows, and the Debian experience hugely better than RPM-based distros. This is why having the mouse, THE FUCKING MOUSE!!!!!! fail is .... I'm beyond words.
That it's been months is the other problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't need illusions about their basic computing skills. They need a drive-by installer, malware, or "tips'n'tricks" guide that gets them to do this. People don't need to understand tools and systems to use them. Hell, they'll use things for millennia without knowing how they work (quite literally).
If they're running malware with administrator rights, they're already lost by definition. The kind of people that would leave settings like this at the default generally don't read tips n' tricks guides to tweaking windows. They simply don't care about that sort of thing. Of course _some_ do, as you would no doubt reply, but again it comes down to numbers-- that volume doesn't justify locking it down. They aren't clu…
All the children aren't above average. Your average computer user -- even those who are otherwise intelligent and capable of handling Shit The World Throws Them -- isn't particularly tech savvy.
It's like anti-terrorism defenses. The terrorist has to get lucky once. The defender has to be lucky always. Microsoft here are the defender, and they're trying to keep idiots from fucking up their systems. No slander intended, it's just reality.
Disabling safety systems (which is what we're talking about) is simply one of many ways to make larger-scale compromises of the system far more easy to do.
I'm not saying that it's impossible for Microsoft to offer this, or that they shouldn't. And I'd be hugely frustrated myself if I had to deal with this stuff (I don't run Windows, and won't. Hell these days I barely use computers if I can possibly help it, other than my own. And I hate those increasingly as well.)
But dealing with the public at billion-plus user scale is hard.
Microsoft seriously sucks. Yes I know, the options to turn these things off are there, but the fact that 90% of the people who use ms windows are not even aware of these options is insane.
And couple that with the soul sucking updates,Jesus Christ windows 10 is just a big no no.
As for the updates, you should seriously consider disabling the windows update service using the admin privileges. Especially if you are using a rate limited internet connection or hate having to wait 10-15 mins for your computer to shutdown or startup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet the game Overwatch doesn't have an OSX port so I have windows 10 setup as a dual-boot option. It seems that Microsoft has correctly deduced that users don't really give a fuck. They'll throw a hissy fit, they'll make all sorts of blog posts, but at the end of the day the majority are still staring at a windows 10 installation screen and dealing with it.
Once you stop playing games (it happens eventually for many of us), your need to have Windows around will drop considerably. Are there any killer apps other than games to have Windows around @home?
I guess that doesn't count as home use. Personally, I've been on Linux for over a decade. I don't feel like I'm missing out on any "killer apps", but there's always some odd bit of software that only works on Windows - like the freeware RC helicopter simulator I use. Wine's great.
It's just the path of least resistance for most people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this slightly understates just how sleazy Microsoft were about it, if anything. Before the dialog that interpreted closing it with the X in the corner as agreement to install Windows 10, they rolled out a similar-looking dialog where that was the only way to avoid install Windows 10 - clicking on any of the buttons in the dialog would cause it to be installed.
My freaking cat installed Windows 10 on my laptop - he pressed enter on one of those dialogs with his paw and Windows started updating. I was more or less resigned to do so anyways, so he didn't do anything I wasn't going to do eventually, he just hastened it. I wonder if EULA's accepted by a cat have any validity though :) PD: I googled that and Slashdot has a story on a hardware to have cats accept EULAs :) https:/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flip side, I run Ubuntu on my htpc, and have for several years now... there have been a couple times where the updates broke audio, and the fix took on average 2 days, though I can imagine some people having worse experiences... Getting an MCE remote (arguably the most common PC remote type) working with Kodi (formerly xbmc and very popular full screen media player) took some cumbersome steps. On average one a…
I've been running Linux on all of my home machines for many years, including an HTPC, and I've yet to have an update break anything. Should we trust your anecdote, because it has more words, or mine, because it mentions more than one computer?
It's not that I don't believe Linux is that reliable. I use it daily.
I don't believe any software is that reliable.
Maybe you're not using it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably true on some level, but from the outside, M$ now is M$ then.
I think DevDiv (Developer Division) is much more in line with Open-Source as a movement, with the business eye towards making Azure the prefered PaaS/IaaS option with their tools. Windows, and a lot of other bits are more consumer space, and moving closer to Google/Facebook model of customers being the product. I don't necessarily think it's entirely a bad proposition. From a web application developer standpoint, old…
Privacy without security is like a hut in the wilderness. Security without privacy is like prison. Where would you rather live?