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“Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

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Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you plugged in an external monitor and not had an issue? I think that's not the norm even for that setup.

What do you mean by issue? After a couple of xrandr invocations to configure them, which could be automated by some GUI app if I were so inclined, I've never seen external monitors have issues on either of my Linux laptops.

Requiring an xrandr invocation equals to having issues. Perhaps it's a small problem, perhaps it's a very easy problem, but it definitely is a problem.

Not having issues means that you arrive at the hardware (which you may have never seen, e.g. at a customer's site), plug the wires, and it works immediately.

More importantly, not having issues means that you can rely on being able to just plug the wires and have it work, and that you don't have a risk of being unable to make it work immediately even if you forget the right invocations and are offline and can't look them up.

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has really pushed the bar up in terms of what users expect from their computers out of the box, and that has affected Windows as well, so in some sense Linux has been swimming upstream? treading water? In the mid-90s I remember endlessly fiddling with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to squeeze out that extra 30kb of conventional memory to run some game. Buying peripherals was such a crap shoot that 'Plug and Play'…

I like how you picked Arch, which is notorious as one of the few distros without an installer program, and the most difficult to install. I also highly doubt that recompiling kernels are the norm, though I may just be going off of a decade or so of experience...

This.

I'm a big fan of Arch myself, but if you look at the distro's philosophy, manually installing it is actually the point. There are enough other distros if you want to avoid that.

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#233
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us don't want any telemetry, or any crap. An idle OS should be idle...

Then get Debian or Fedora. I'm serious, if the OS is doing things so bad you're willing to execute untrusted code with elevated privileges to modify the OS, you've already lost.

Very few Linux users understand what all those daemons are doing on their system. I certainly don't, and - albeit a long long time ago (kernel 2.4) - I even wrote Linux kernel code (networking: firewall and NAT).

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by issue? After a couple of xrandr invocations to configure them, which could be automated by some GUI app if I were so inclined, I've never seen external monitors have issues on either of my Linux laptops.

Requiring an xrandr invocation equals to having issues. Perhaps it's a small problem, perhaps it's a very easy problem, but it definitely is a problem. Not having issues means that you arrive at the hardware (which you may have never seen, e.g. at a customer's site), plug the wires, and it works immediately. More importantly, not having issues means that you can rely on being able to just plug the wires and have it w…

> plug the wires, and it works immediately

How does it work immediately? How does it know of I want to clone or extend the display? If I extend, do I want the same resolution on both screens, or different? You'll have to set that somehow, and whether it's a GUI or a CLI tool doesn't matter.

Forgetting the invocations aren't really an issue anymore either, my shell (zsh) has autocompletion of xrandr outputs, modes and resolutions.

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everything just works" so long as your expectations around "everything" are essentially set by a desktop computer experience designed in 2005. Linux on desktops is fine (except from a physical security standpoint), but primitive in terms of UX. And it's still dependent on Mozilla or Google for its browsing experience. And if you want a portable computer (which by the way are demonstrably more secure in the face of p…

I agree with you, that the experience a lot of times not as efficient and that its not for laptops. I had some weird problems on 2015 Macbook pro (max config.) where the linux is not able to shutdown the system, and the whole experience requires a lot of experimenting. Apart from the above points that you mentioned its definitely not getting you the out-fo-box working functionality that windows gives. But i think i a…

Here's an interesting twist on the "out of the box experience": It doesn't just come down to drivers and configs. Yes, Windows might be better situated in that regard (although it also has its problems, try installing it on a PCI SSD the setup doesn't have a driver for...).

But: The time I use up in Linux to configure various things like that I easily waste on Windows while downloading/installing all the tools/graphics drivers I need by hand. The fact here is that Windows' tooling - if not entirely absent - is horrible. And although there are always alternatives that are easy to come by (sysinternals tools, 3rd party tools like Voidtools' Everything, Putty, DisplayFusion, Notepad++, a decent browser, etc.), the fact that their functionality is still not integrated (or there is at least a simple way to bulk-install them) still boggles my mind.

So, railing on about "out of the box" performance from a windows perspective seems a bit off to me. Windows as a blank slate is horrible.

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#236
post #3

I had been a long time Windows user, at home (W10) and work(7/Server/Datacenter). Windows had been getting just more and more intrusive like a malware since the last couple years. I hope they do something to stop that. I have recently moved to Fedora and it is just awesome. Pretty much everything works like amazing. Its not a complete replacement if you are gaming, nvidia drivers are a bit painful to install but ever…

"Everything just works" so long as your expectations around "everything" are essentially set by a desktop computer experience designed in 2005. Linux on desktops is fine (except from a physical security standpoint), but primitive in terms of UX. And it's still dependent on Mozilla or Google for its browsing experience. And if you want a portable computer (which by the way are demonstrably more secure in the face of p…

"But even updates work!"

Same people who love tiling window managers... you're the 1%!

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't provide that guarantee for any software that can update itself, Ubuntu could turn it back on tomorrow. This link shows you how to remove it now, I'm sure people give up on updating guides like this in the future. Currently it is possibly and easy to remove telemetry. And it only takes a few clicks to disable auto-update for Windows 10 by setting your wifi to metered, and a Google search to set your ethernet…

Possible and easy? I have to tweak the registry via shitty scripts like this one. Thats the opposite of how an OS should work

Incorrect. You could also use the default windows administration process of editing the Group Policy locally, or setting it via your domain controller. It only uses the registry here because that's the simplest way to do it with a script on any kind of machine setup.

If you'd rather do it manually, these steps do the same thing: http://i.imgur.com/HnFpmE6.png

Start > [group policy] > [enter] > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > All Settings > Allow Telemetry

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. I've read from several who have successfully replaced Photoshop with The GIMP. (I've done this, though I still do photo work in LR). Inkscape has come a long way, and there are multiple, competing (and very competent) Lightroom replacements for digital darkroom work. I don't know how fleshed out the DTP side of things are but as a amateur photographer and graphic designer I've been able to get away w…

> and there are multiple, competing (and very competent) Lightroom replacements for digital darkroom work The problem I have with most of the replacements is that none of them seem to put much/any effort into cataloguing and taxonomy. There's plenty of open source alternatives for the RAW exposure component of Lightroom but I don't think that's the reason people stick with it. Organising photos is hard and Lightroom…

Interesting. To me, those features are the ones I struggle most with in Lightroom. The workflow per se works great, but that a tool would dictate to me how I organize my pictures (as in: on the file system) is a big nogo. I use LR in a VM (since it doesn't run on Linux) and in such an environment, there's always a shortage of disk space. LR gives me exactly 0 possibilities to work around that - the only option is to create a new DB for each project, which negates all upsides to the system.

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an enigneer on Windows. We actually use the crash dumps and the more the better so we can prioritize reliability bugs. Usage telemetry helps us prioritize work, like which settings to migrate from Control Panel to Settings first, or to see if design changes actually made things better for people.

Unfortunately, the admirable removal of reliability bugs is in the same breath as migrating settings away from Control Panel, when the latter is another one of the things reducing the quality of the Microsoft/Windows experience.

He didn't say "away".

Re: “Reclaim Windows 10” Powershell Script

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everything just works" so long as your expectations around "everything" are essentially set by a desktop computer experience designed in 2005. Linux on desktops is fine (except from a physical security standpoint), but primitive in terms of UX. And it's still dependent on Mozilla or Google for its browsing experience. And if you want a portable computer (which by the way are demonstrably more secure in the face of p…

I agree with you, that the experience a lot of times not as efficient and that its not for laptops. I had some weird problems on 2015 Macbook pro (max config.) where the linux is not able to shutdown the system, and the whole experience requires a lot of experimenting. Apart from the above points that you mentioned its definitely not getting you the out-fo-box working functionality that windows gives. But i think i a…

>definitely not getting you the out-fo-box working functionality that windows gives

Oh come on, windows distro doesn't even have coreutils in it.

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