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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

#231

Post by thomastjeffery »

youseecomrade wrote: post #186
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #159

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…

> 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?

Do you handle all of their Windows-related technical issues?

Are they incapable of learning to do it themselves?

Really?

Are you absolutely sure?

It's all-too-common for people to become dependent on technically-minded friends/family like us, but the fact is that it really isn't difficult for them to do it themselves.

The main barriers they face are:

1. I haven't done this before.

2. I don't immediately see the benefit.

What it comes down to is self-reliance. We can teach people to rely on themselves instead of rely on us.

As the saying goes:

> Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

... something like that, anyway.

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

#232

Post by thomastjeffery »

soared wrote: post #171
thomastjeffery wrote: post #121

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 for someone who could use linux. 99.9% of computer users don't even know dual booting is possible. Also my laptop literally cannot have linux installed on it thanks to UEFI.

> Also my laptop literally cannot have linux installed on it thanks to UEFI.

Does it have "secure boot" that can't be disabled/other keys added?

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

#233

Post by reaperducer »

vbezhenar wrote: post #211

Those articles are funny because for me all previous Windows versions were unusable, but I've found Windows 10 just the best OS. I don't have Facebook preinstalled and even if it was, I couldn't care less about it. There are bazillions of DLLs and other stuff preinstalled, what's the deal with one HTML page that I don't even run. I value other things, real usability improvements (for example virtual desktops are much…

>what's the deal with one HTML page that I don't even run

You sound like I spammer I once knew. He would always say things like "What's the big deal with one e-mail that you're not going to read anyway. Just delete it."

The mail icon in his Mac's dock showed over 29,000 unread messages. Spam just didn't bother him the way Windows popping up ads for Facebook doesn't bother you.

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

#234

Post by falcolas »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #184
gmueckl wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is just the worst example that you could have picked. It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field. It is like GIMP: just enough for those with simple needs. KDE 3 would have been a much better example. But these days are gone, too. What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?

> It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field. How so?

To be honest, it can be summed up with one sentence:

Blender is striving to meet the features and capabilities of Maya and 3ds Studio, not the other way around.

A more "business" orientated sentence:

Blender is required to to split its focus to provide a complete movie/game making package including a movie editor, shader editor (i.e. photoshop), and animation editor, an audio editor, a physics editor, a compositing editor, and a game editor; Maya and 3ds Studio do not.

Blender just can't keep up. It's a good tool, no doubt about it, but few professional users will end up using it to make money.

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

#235

Post by Timothycquinn »

Had similar experience with not being able to disable the windows store for my kids accounts. It was simply not possible and I followed all the Microsoft recommended procedures and external suggested ones to no avail. I just gave up and stopped using Windows for my family computer and spun back up an older mac Mini. This kind of lock in is very bad for the ecosystem and is a security nightmare. I don't know if I will ever use consumer grade windows for my personal computers any longer.

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

#236

Post by gmueckl »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #184
gmueckl wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is just the worst example that you could have picked. It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field. It is like GIMP: just enough for those with simple needs. KDE 3 would have been a much better example. But these days are gone, too. What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?

> It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field. How so?

Oh boy, this is going to get depressing.

Blender cannot cope with the kind of stuff that is thrown at commercial DCC tools in feature production. Parts of it don't scale, others fall short of what would be required. Many features are kind of there on paper, but are not fleshed out that well.

Blender faces a sort of a chicken and egg problem: if you don't push it, you can't find out what needs fixing. But nobody in the industry is willing to try because they know that it will break too easily.

This is sort of why the Blender Foundation creates these open source movie projects: they are there to figure out what needs fixing. A ton of new features had to be created for each new short. Last time I bothered to check, many of these features were stuff that would have been considered absolutely essential in VFX workflow at the time the Blender developers managed to implement it.

The downside to these projects is that they also lead to the addition of features like compositing and editing workflows that are out of place in a DCC tool (especially the editing part). Blender started to overextend itself and ended up with too few developers to push all of these areas equally well.

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

#237

Post by EpicEng »

emodendroket wrote: post #208
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But apart from AD the rest of Windows is primitive compared to the competition. Windows usage will decline - Azure will increase - it's all a case of how it works out for Microsoft in the end.

For instance? I actually think most of it is quite good now. I particularly like PowerShell.

PowerShell is good, if a bit verbose imo (small con, no big deal). The problem is the philosophy behind windows since its inception.

On a linux box I can do _everything_ I need to do as long as I have a terminal. Windows is coming around, but it's not there yet. New stuff is better, a lot of old stuff still sucks, but not everyone can dump the old stuff.

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

#238

Post by EpicEng »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #174
EpicEng wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Windows is done Your use case is very niche compared to how MS makes most of its money on Windows licenses. Windows isn't going anywhere until it's no longer pre-loaded on every machine, enterprise customers stop buying it completely, and Linux is much more user friendly on the desktop. I don't disagree with anything else you said, admin'ing windows boxes is a terrible experience.

How the loving fuck can you expect to change the terms of engagement with your OS after it's released and not expect to lose business? I know for a fact the malware analysis software we used are now planning a Linux version. I've literally persuaded a multinational to not continue using .net and Windows servers because of my argument that it's not sustainable. They alone are tens of thousands of Windows licenses that…

>How the loving fuck can you expect to change the terms of engagement with your OS after it's released and not expect to lose business?

Lock-in, that's how. The customers they care about don't always have practical solutions, and most aren't able to make a call that will benefit everyone in e.g. 5+ years after spending a massive amount of money.

Also, what are you replacing the desktops/laptops with?

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

#239

Post by twostoned »

funkymike wrote: post #224
dyukqu wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to disable both "fast startup" and "secure boot" in order to install linux. (I installed Ubuntu 17.10 alongside Win10 few weeks ago on my UEFI laptop.)

I gave up on dual booting on a regular basis when Windows 10, once again, turned fast startup back on with a forced update. Now I use linux for everything at home. Windows 10 is basically malware at this point.

I agree about the malware, I often make this analogy. I was in an exam today and people went to turn on their computers to write the test, we have two hours, and Windows decides to do an update. No asking, no options. These aren't power users; these people struggle with basic computing and are trying to get through school. So the administration worked with them so they could actually write the test but come on. You don't have control of your machine with Windows and I find that inappropriate.

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

#240

Post by thomastjeffery »

falcolas wrote: post #234
thomastjeffery wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a tiny toy compared to the commercial packages in that field. How so?

To be honest, it can be summed up with one sentence: Blender is striving to meet the features and capabilities of Maya and 3ds Studio, not the other way around. A more "business" orientated sentence: Blender is required to to split its focus to provide a complete movie/game making package including a movie editor, shader editor (i.e. photoshop), and animation editor, an audio editor, a physics editor, a compositing e…

I can comprehend what you are saying, but I disagree.

Over the past decade or so, Blender has been on par, and even ahead of "industry standard" tools.

It isn't required to split its focus. It is able to. That is something proprietary software from a company would fail at. It's something that free software and collaboration succeed at.

The biggest benefit is that it has all of these tools in a cohesive environment.

Instead of a photoshop/GIMP-like menu of functions, Blender is a cohesive manageable UI.

There are, in fact, a wide variety of professionals using Blender to make money. You don't hear about it, because telling you what they use is not their perogative.

What features to Maya/Max/etc. have that Blender is really behind on today? I can't think of any.

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