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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

#301

Post by hnzix »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #163
TomMarius wrote: post #72

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…

> stoop to learning gimp?

Gimp is to Photoshop as Nano is to Emacs.

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

#302

Post by frankzinger »

cutler wrote: post #293
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #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 t…

I wish it was true but come on, Linux may be good for many uses but simple things like decent font rendering still aren't up to par with Windows or Mac so forget desktop Linux for the masses.

How long ago did you check? The font rendering on my Ubuntu installation is way better than "decent" and I prefer it to Windows' fonts.

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

#303

Post by thomastjeffery »

emodendroket wrote: post #266
thomastjeffery wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That, in itself, can be kind of annoying Of course, but is it more annoying than using Windows all the time? OP leads me to belive a growing number of windows users might think otherwise. It's also worth noting that rebooting is an order of magnitude faster than it was 10 years ago. > having to run updates for both Updates are a pain in Windows, but they are not in any serious GNU/Linux distro I have ever used. Thi…

> Of course, but is it more annoying than using Windows all the time? In a word: yes. I have at different points used Windows, Linux, and OS X as primary desktop operating systems, so I am not operating from a sense of total ignorance of what other systems are like. My experience with Linux was that I needed to do far more configuration because lots of hardware wouldn't work right out of the box and needed a lot of t…

When is the last time you used a major Linux distro?

From my experience, installing and using Linux has been the most straightforward, especially compared to windows.

And that's the point: we all have different experiences, so I think it's a bad idea to tell someone they are going to have your bad experiences of they try something new, because better software ends up getting a bad rap.

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

#304

Post by thomastjeffery »

emodendroket wrote: post #264
juliangoldsmith wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of what the sibling post said, but the incompatible filesystems isn't much of an issue anymore. In my experience, NTFS on Linux works very well. Certainly well enough for any average user.

Oh, the last time I tried it it came with a bunch of disclaimers to never mount an NTFS filesystem as read/write on a hard drive whose contents you weren't OK with losing, but it's good to hear things have gotten better.

Everything that deals with filesystems or partitions has that kind of disclaimer.

There fact is that you should always backup data you care about.

It's the same as saying they aren't responsible for your computer suddenly catching fire. Is that likely to happen? No.

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

#305

Post by thomastjeffery »

emodendroket wrote: post #267
thomastjeffery wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A not-super-technical user can learn to do these things. Is the liberty a free OS provides worth the effort to that user? That's entirely up to them. It's easy to disregard change as too difficult to approach, especially when coming from such a controling and abusive environment (Windows/OS X). In reality, GNU/Linux is so much easier to use than Windows; most people have simply learned the latter first.

> In reality, GNU/Linux is so much easier to use than Windows; most people have simply learned the latter first. That just isn't true. But don't take it from me; here's esr: http://web.archive.org/web/20180109063613/www.catb.org/esr/w...

Just because one piece of software was unnecessarily difficult for someone does not mean the entire ecosystem is broken.

The problem we have is that a similar problem in Windows is instantly forgiven, because there is nothing you can do about it; whereas in Linux people expect a higher standard (which is often met) because that arbitrary limitation no longer exists.

Sure windows has gotten a lot better since XP, but it has a long way to go to catch up to circa 2006 Ubuntu.

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

#306

Post by Sylos »

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…

I'm not sure how you would create a worse implementation of virtual desktops than Windows 10 has them:

- No indication of other workspaces existing.

- No indication of what applications are in those other workspaces.

- The keyboard shortcut for walking through desktops requires two hands (and in typical Windows fashion cannot be rebound).

I'm not familiar with macOS' implementation, so if you actually think that it's worse, then I would like to know how.

Also should be said, though, that you can replace the window manager on macOS, which should allow you to get most of the features of an actually good implementation of virtual desktops. I'm not aware of a way to do that on Windows.

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

#307

Post by dagw »

ThoAppelsin wrote: post #75
eitland wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just saw a game I'm absolutely sure I never installed voluntarily popping up on an old laptop yesterday or today. :-/

I have a laptop and a desktop running Windows 10 on my account. I use them both daily, one for entertainment, one for work. Both running on Pro and constantly up-to-date. I have been using one for exactly 2 years, and the other one for like 9-10 months. I am completely unfamiliar with the experience you had, with no apps having been installed on my behalf without me explicitly installing it through the Microsoft Stor…

I am completely unfamiliar with the experience you had

I'm wondering Microsoft is doing some sort of A/B or market segmentation testing. Perhaps testing different things in different regions.

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

#308

Post by nottorp »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #206
nottorp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it depends what you like. I never tried any of the Divinitys because I'm under the impression that the storyline is unimaginative and just game mechanics mostly don't cut it for me (let's not mention how much time i spend in Minecraft though). My 2nd place entertainment activity is reading, and there are few games that can approach a good book in storytelling.

I don't normally click on timestamps to add to a deep thread, but if you like good storytelling, check out Pillars of Eternity. If you're a pen-and-paper nerd, then it might be right up your alley and the storytelling is really well done.

I was on the kickstarter (same for II) and finished it a while ago, thank you :)

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

#309

Post by GordonS »

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.

A super-simple alternative is WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which let's you run Ubuntu in Windows 10 - I'm sure it won't work for some use cases (e.g running the docker daemon), but it's really rather good!

Bash is so much more powerful than the Windows shell, and try as I might I just don't like Powershell, so WSL gives me a great shell while running in Windows - no need for rebooting or VMs!

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

#310

Post by GordonS »

mykull wrote: post #104
giggles_giggles wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What hypervisor are you using to do this?

I do the same thing for a "virtual gaming pc" on proxmox with qemu/kvm. it was a pain to get working right with my specific hardware and with proxmox as a base, but is pretty nice now that it works. Many people use Arch linux or redhat distros to do this also, but pretty much any major distro should be capable. AFAIK it works on VMware ESXi too.

Wow, I just assumed virtualisation would kill performance - didn't realise it would even be an option
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