Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking • Hacker News Board

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#131

Post by keithnz » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

titanix2 wrote: post #98

tmorton wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

boggle What? NO. Just no. This doesn't "anticipate the things I need". It doesn't "anticipate" anything. It's not "the things I need", it's whatever MS decides to promote. There's a vaguely similar feature, that would be vaguely defensible - but this isn't it. This is malware, plain and simple.

Totally agree. My computers are my things and should be under my control only. That’s why I’m wary of Win 10 which forces system replacement, install softwares without consent, display advertisements, can preload UWP apps in memory, etc. All this things might be an acceptable comprise on mobile for some people (which include myself) but is a big no go on anything desktop or server class. My harware is not here to be…

your computer is your thing, install whatever OS you like. If you want a non consumer experience and want windows, go with a server product.

People are never gonna be happy with change. Not so long ago they took paint (which they insisted on us having whether we wanted it or not) out of the base install of their "botnet / malware" and people lost their shit. Now windows dynamically asks you whether you want a program and people are again losing their shit. In both cases it's microsoft making a call on what apps are on your machine. In both cases you can uninstall them.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#132

Post by thomastjeffery » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #92

makecheck wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes “but” how do expect open alternatives to become better? Contribute to a project (with a very low bar for “contribute”, anything from “file a bug” to “fix the documentation” to “make artwork”). Yes, some big companies also push Linux forward but individuals who want good alternatives can do something to make those alternatives happen.

An open source project for external customers (i.e. us) operated by a bunch of unpaid volunteers will never really be able to compete with an application with paid developers, invested users, and the supporting departments. I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good. For a corollary: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936629310785437696

> An open source project ... will never be able to compete with ... pays developers ...

There are plenty of examples where they have done just that. Blender is probably the most obvious.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#133

Post by duncan_bayne » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #97

duncan_bayne wrote: post #89

Many (most?) people on Hacker News might be too young to remember the Halloween Documents. They were internal Microsoft documents describing their proposed strategy for dealing with competition from then-new Free Software alternatives: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/ If you want to understand why Microsoft is acting the way they are, read those documents. It's not that I think they are still executing the strategi…

Those memos are over 20 years old. You can't point to something 20 years old and say "see, they did it before therefore that's what's happening today". I'm not a fan of what they're doing with some of the Windows 10 defaults. But you gotta be crazy to not see the user improvements they've done in so many other areas. They are a very, very different company than they were back then. I'm not saying that excuses anythin…

The underlying theme is _exactly_ the same: they will chuck their users under the bus for what they see as important strategic goals. It was true 20 years ago, and everything I can see suggests it's still true today.

This is part of the reason I gave up developing for Windows and .NET after around a decade of doing it. I prefer to work on a stack with which I'm at least partially values-aligned. (Same reason I abandoned Linux for FreeBSD, actually).

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#134

Post by itwy » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

beached_whale wrote: post #76

I use Windows when I have to now. I used to use Visual Studio as it is really good. But since Windows 8 and more so Windows 10 they have started taking from me. I paid for Windows 10 Pro, but I am subjected to the task of repeatedly removing software, or adverts for software, that I explicitly said remove. This is repeated when major updates go through. Plus the extra data and processing to get a system that isn't us…

Your last sentence doesn't make any sense.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#135

Post by emodendroket » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #101

falcolas wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An open source project for external customers (i.e. us) operated by a bunch of unpaid volunteers will never really be able to compete with an application with paid developers, invested users, and the supporting departments. I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good. For a corollary: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936629310785437696

>I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good. Hah, this is rich. Many open source products are far better than their proprietary alternatives, especially developer oriented products (which is natural considering that developers tend to use open source and tend to improve their own tools).

On the other hand, when it comes to categories like games, video game console emulators, office productivity applications, document publishing, etc., the open-source alternatives are generally way worse.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#136

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #115

m_fayer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their OS as the relentless foot in the door for getting there. To me it's another nail in the coffin of general purpose computing. We've accepted that mobile devices/OSs are not for general purpose computing and expect that they come with a "lifestyle" to hawk, now o…

Is OS X any different? I feel like Microsoft's largely playing catch-up in that regard.

Yes it doesn't install trash like Candy Crush and Farmville, or even Facebook. It does try to ram iCloud down your throat but that's just about acceptable given that it is an Apple product and doesn't spam you.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#137

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #105

jbigelow76 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their OS as the relentless foot in the door for getting there. I think the irony of that statement is from Windows 3.1 and on Windows (25-ish years) was already THE defacto PC platform. I was a pretty big MS fanboy for a long time (and make my living with .NET and th…

Indented text in HN is monospace and respects newlines (no word wrapping). This makes it unreadable on mobile unless the lines are very short. The generally preferred way to quote on HN is to begin the line with a > and wrap the quote with * if desired. It's an issue that comes up too often that HN needs to fix, but here we are.

The reason HN does indented text that way is for code. People on HN post code snippets as a fairly regular thing, and having code snippets word wrap (or eat white space) is really confusing.

The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#138

Post by youseecomrade » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #121

youseecomrade wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people who could use Linux exclusively (only need a browser, don't need Office compatibility, nothing fancy) buy a "just works" Windows laptop or tablet and I bet 99% of them don't even know what Linux is. Even then you get some weird cases like banking software not working on Linux and they ask you to install Windows again. And kids wants to play what their friends are playing, it's hard to break the…

I'm getting sick of this dichotomy. It's trivial to install both. Keep windows 10 on a partition big enough for your games/Netflix/etc., and use Debian/Archlinux/NixOS/whatever for everything else.

I don't understand your point. If you're talking about my setup it doesn't really matter (I only use Windows for gaming and at work). If it's about maintaining friends and family computers with dual boot then good luck with that. For the rest and vast majority of people, that panics when a desktop icon moves, dual boot will fry their brains.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#139

Post by falcolas » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

jwagenet wrote: post #55

falcolas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people use monitors with 144hz refresh rates. And increased FPS means you can turn graphics up, or enable more sophisticated anti-aliasing solutions, without impacting absolute performance.

This is not true: If you increase your target FPS to meet a monitor refresh rate, you must turn down your AA or other graphics settings to compensate when using the same hardware. Going from a 60 Hz to 144 Hz monitor more than doubles the FPS required for Vsync, which requires double the hardware performance to take advantage of the high refresh rate.

If you have 160FPS on a 144hz monitor, you can turn things up. If you have 145FPS on a 144hz monitor, you can't.

That's the only point I was trying to make there.

Re: Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

#140

Post by dboreham » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

tjalfi wrote: post #112

jbigelow76 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it shows how little value Windows is to Microsoft anymore. Office 365 and Azure are where the money is at for the company now. I use Win 10 Enterprise at work so I don't have to worry about any of the Candy Crush or FB malware trash on my PC but no way would I buy a consumer Windows based laptop anymore.

I use Windows 10 Enterprise at work and our image team had to specifically remove Candy Crush. It’s actually more annoying than that, the semiannual OS updates cause Candy Crush to be reinstalled.

Now if they installed Minecraft that might be ok ;)