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Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

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

#151
post #73
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…

Microsoft is not, contrary to popular opinion, stupid. MS knew nobody was going to pay $€200+ for an OS anymore. So they had to find another way to monetize Windows.

Nobody ever paid that really. OEM rates were much lower. The real problem they face is two-fold: 1. People spend more time on phones and less on desktops/laptops, and 2. Computers have pretty much stopped getting faster so people don't replace them as frequently.

Since Microsoft made money from new computer sales and those are less frequent they have to move to a subscription type system.

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>games

See pretty much every other reply in this thread for my take on this

>video game console emulators

Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.

>office productivity applications

"way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.

>document publishing

I don't know what this is supposed to be. LaTeX is pretty good, though.

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

#154
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is very unprofessional. Sadly iOS suffers a similar fate with Bluetooth.

It, reinstalls Bluetooth?

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trivial to install both but a real hassle to actually use both.

Not really. You reboot your computer, and press a key to pick which one you want.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is the only remaining OS for general purpose desktop computing that has a non-negligible market share.

When my old acer laptops hard drive crashed, I tried to get my hands on reinstalling Windows with my OEM license: no go. I installed Linux Mint. My new laptop with Windows 10 became so slow I also switched to Mint. Couldn't be happier.

This kind of problem is why my conscience is clear when I use KMS cracks. I legitimately own about two or three Win10 licenses, but can't actually use any of them for various reasons.

Life's too short to put up with bureaucratically obstructive licensing schemes.

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

#157
For the last 15 years or so i've earned my money doing Linux stuff. Before then I was doing VB/.NET/SQL Server etc.

January 2016 I worked at a secure facility that wanted an entire system doing malware analysis. The bare servers were running Linux, but some of the software used Windows so there were Windows VMs there. Usual KVM stuff.

Bear in mind this is a closed system and the Windows VMs were ephemeral, i.e. had to be discarded and reset after each malware run where we did static code analysis etc. So we used the Professional (hah) version, with AutoUnattend.xml or whatever it was to automatically reset them.

This worked fine until after a certain point with WSUS - we obviously applied security updates - where the VMs wouldn't boot. Turns out that a point in Windows 10's life they decided you needed a better version of Windows to be able to do the equivalent of a preseed or kickstart. 4 months of work disappeared, plus the additional licence cost; need to run a domain etc etc.

Luckily I left soon after but trust me - at any future role I will look at every possibility before Windows. I moved a subsequent client (large international appliance manufacturer that you've heard of) to Linux servers precisely because of this sort of shit.

Windows is done, it's just a case of when it disappears. This is exactly why Microsoft are pushing Azure and Office - they know the outcome, they're just squeezing the pips until it happens.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Open source video game console emulators are certainly not worse. If anything, the best by far emulator (Dolphin) is open source, but even beyond that almost every open source VGC emulator is also open source and those emulators tend to be the most long running ones (almost always because the developers of the closed source emulators lose interest). For some systems, you have only open source emulators.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people whose brains are not fried by dual booting should be dual booting and moving the platform steadily forward to reduce the excuses for the people whose brains are fried by dual booting.

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

#160

Windows 10 is a cancer. M$ removed the control from the user, and placed it to their money-hungry baboons. It was clear since 8 and 8.1 that M$ will go for the "app model", where you are no longer the administrator on your own machine 'for your own protection'. I hope they come around, or they will just lose all their tech-savy customers. I guess it's their turn to rip off their customers private-date/lives, just as…

"M$" Instantly ignored.

It's definitely a blast from the internet commenting past, but given their recent user-hostile design decisions which can't be justified by anything other than abject greed at my expense, I think it's about ready for a comeback...
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