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Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking

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191–200 of 342 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are several systems where your only option is Windows, unless the situation has changed drastically since I last looked into it. I remember Dreamcast, Saturn, DS, PSP, and PS2 being in this category, and also the options for N64/PSX not being very good, the last time I was interested. Of course, someone can respond to arguments about any program being missing with "well, I don't care about those," but you can't…

Dreamcast: https://github.com/reicast/reicast-emulator

Saturn: https://yabause.org/

DS: https://desmume.org/

PSP: http://www.ppsspp.org/index.html

PS2: https://pcsx2.net/

All of these are open source, support Linux, and have good compatability.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great. As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows. > "way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience. Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will l…

>As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows. The only one that comes to mind is that one Wii U emulator. Xenia doesn't support Linux but it's open source and the lack of support more a reflection of its relative immaturity than not being possible (I'm certain a Linux port will come eventually, I was even working on it myself for a while). >Yeah, because your expe…

In some contexts it is a big deal, though. I suppose the answer to that is that everyone who uses Word should learn to use Latex instead but that's not realistic.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't disagree with anything else you said, admin'ing windows boxes is a terrible experience. Active Directory is really powerful in a way that, as far as I know, alternatives are not.

Agreed, it's awesome. I'm saying we didn't need it, and if you are a startup you probably don't need it either.

Yeah, fair enough. I started my career in the world of computers doing Windows desktop administration stuff and I was kind of surprised to learn how primitive the competition seemed to be.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about AutoCAD, Inventor, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Lightroom, ...?

Autocad/inventor->OpenScad/FreeCad Photoshop->Gimp or just run it with wine Lightroom->Darktable Here's a few other pretty awesome art tools you might want to know about BTW: Krita Blender Inkscape If we're doing "what abouts" though, what about: freely interchangable desktop layouts native docker support a user-friendly terminal an os kernel that is designed to be malware resistant Like seriously buddy, the GUI desk…

> Like seriously buddy, the GUI desktop is now ~40 years old and windows /still/ can't support uninstalling the default desktop and installing your own.

Actually, it is worse: you used to be able to replace the default desktop and install your own from the first versions of Windows up until recently. Now you can't and with Windows 8 Microsoft removed a ton of functionality when it comes to customization (e.g. you cannot disable DWM and you cannot use the classic theme - which was the only one with support for totally customizable color schemes).

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

#195
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never that simple, especially for professional users and gamers. Those whose applications are only available for Windows. Sure, there are some open source alternatives, but they are only rarely as good, and even more seldom better, than their Windows counterparts.

>It's never that simple, especially for professional users and gamers. Those whose applications are only available for Windows. I'm both, and you're definitely wrong. 155 of my 343 steam games have direct native ports. I've just stopped playing stellaris and started playing KSP. I've been a linux gamer for the last three years and it's been a better experience, not worse. I dominate on ballistic overkill because the…

Unity is probably the big reason why many games have native linux & macos versions today.

On macos, the mac versions tend to be slower than the windows versions on the same hardware.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So basically you want me to setup dual boot, teach, offer free support for the rest of their lives, for every person that I know? Because that's the only group who could do what we are talking about. Or maybe you want me to convince them they should pay someone else to do that because Stallman was right. I'm sure some people are lucky enough to have friends and family who would accept your values instantly, learn the…

Did you even read my comment?

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

#198

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.

Trvial once you choose your distro :)

funny thing is when you install various distros you have a look at what's installed and you go "geeze it's installed a bunch of crap apps"

I used to run dual boot, but then got annoyed with that, then used windows primarily and VM'd linux, and now I use the linux subsystem in windows and occassionally fire up the VM.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd switch to Linux in the blink of an eye if I didn't have to worry about my games working. WINE is great and all, but it's still not 100% compatible.

Do you also own a PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii, and a Nintendo Switch? Do you miss the exclusives on them? You'll survive without the handful of games you have to leave behind.

The only exclusive that I've remotely cared about is Last of Us, and I'm not about to buy a console for 1 single game.

And the number of games I'd leave behind in Linux is way more than a simple handful.

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

#200
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just snapshot the vms in a clean, updated state and reset them from there when needed?

Good point - didn't work because of clock skew, which I assume was related to activation. Also, we didn't want to cheat the licensing, by whichever measure.

Did you play around with the different clock timers available to you in your VM' xml template? You may have been able to override the system time.
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