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The End of Windows

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Re: The End of Windows

#571

Post by vetinari »

Silhouette wrote: post #566
sjellis wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What Microsoft doesn't seem to understand is that when they screw with Windows and deprioritize the needs of its users, they're also screwing with the rest of us who live, work, and play in their ecosystem." That is the part that baffles me. Visual Studio Code is a fantastic advert for the Microsoft brand: every day it shows every developer who uses it that MS can produce genuinely great software. It makes Azure mor…

Visual Studio Code is a fantastic advert for the Microsoft brand ... If people have a bad experience with Windows, why would they be inclined to get other services from MS? Ironically, we decided not to try out VS Code specifically because of privacy/security concerns about Microsoft that have been heightened since Windows 10. We checked Microsoft's written policies to see what sort of telemetry data was being upload…

Put:

"telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false, "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false,

into vscode settings and you are fine wrt telemetry.

What concerns me more is that the .rpm build is consistently later than other builds. Usually it means, that the user is staring 2 out of 4 weeks every month on update notification, that cannot be used, because the build is not ready yet.

It brings back the memories of MSIE and WMP that used to be available for Solaris and HP-UX, always slightly later... until they weren't and the users were left in the dark.

Re: The End of Windows

#572

Post by vetinari »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #393
majewsky wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that? Those inflexible workers are also those who make the purchasing decisions. A shop full of Windows admins will not switch to Linux unless forced to (and vice versa).

And many will eventually be outsourced. In fact, systems administration as a profession is on the downswing due to the cloud. This site itself is largely focused on "disrupting" inefficiency with automation.

Not only due to cloud; even if you have local bunch of immutable OS instances like CoreOS or RHEL atomic running containers, you don't need a big staff babysitting server OSes.

Re: The End of Windows

#573

Post by _khau »

RX14 wrote: post #293
dannyw wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume a large portion of users are software engineers or tech people. You may consider a 16GB ‘bare minimum’, but not everyone needs that - nor can even afford that (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750).

My brand new thinkpad with 16gb ram and a 1080p ips display cost only £670. These specs aren't expensive any more. That being said, my parents are perfectly happy using Google chrome on 2gb ram with a core 2 duo. And that's not with only a few tabs.

The average person won't spend that much on a mobile device.

Re: The End of Windows

#574

Post by ionised »

hypertextcoffee wrote: post #562
coonery wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4k is overrated. 27" 1440p is good enough, plus current GPUs are able to push 100+ FPS with such resolution (they fail miserably with 4k resolution).

>(they fail miserably with 4k resolution) I use an external GTX 1070 over Thunderbolt 3 on a 2017 Dell XPS 15, and have 2 2160p monitors. 4K gaming is no problem at the refresh rates that 4K offers (usually 60Hz)

> 4K gaming is no problem at the refresh rates that 4K offers (usually 60Hz)

Subjective. Depends entirely on the settings you are using and the resulting frame rate at that resolution.

Re: The End of Windows

#575

Post by crtasm »

RX14 wrote: post #293
dannyw wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume a large portion of users are software engineers or tech people. You may consider a 16GB ‘bare minimum’, but not everyone needs that - nor can even afford that (or a laptop more than, say, new or used for $750).

My brand new thinkpad with 16gb ram and a 1080p ips display cost only £670. These specs aren't expensive any more. That being said, my parents are perfectly happy using Google chrome on 2gb ram with a core 2 duo. And that's not with only a few tabs.

You can't walk into/click onto a high-street store and buy that though, and my assumption is that's where most people buy laptops.

£670 is much more than people I know want to spend on a new machine. None of them have ever mentioned screen resolution when i've asked what they want in a laptop.

Re: The End of Windows

#576

Post by Shorel »

alkonaut wrote: post #102
asveikau wrote: post #33

I still can't wrap my head around everything that was wrongheaded about Windows 8, and I was working there for most of its dev cycle. One wonders what would have happened if they just sort of let Windows be Windows. I.e. if they had continued iterating on core stuff but left UI and general philosophy resembling Win7's trajectory and not tried to force people into WinRT/UWP/store. Even though Win10 attempted correctiv…

They bet the farm on “store”. Why? Because they must have done the math and realized that the enterprise and “creative pro” desktop with classic expensive desktop apps is a dead end. Was that calculation correct? Who knows. But I have to think they did that analysis very carefully.

Yes, but the solution would be to do something like Steam, and sell normal Windows software in the store.

Selling only WinRT software made all their efforts worthless.

Forcing developers to provide Win32 and WinRT versions of software alienated software developers.

Some of the calculation was correct. WinRT was not.

Re: The End of Windows

#577

Post by isostatic »

prolikewhoa wrote: post #76
bigmanwalter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux on desktop is pretty amazing. Haven't looked back in 3 years.

Linux is definitely ready for full time Desktop use as long as gaming isn't needed. 7 years only Linux and I feel great about it. I highly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone just starting out.

I play KSP and Civ on Linux just fine. I stopped playing games shortly after civ 3 (which I installed windows specifically for, lasted about a year) - until about a year ago when I decided to check out KSP.

Re: The End of Windows

#578

Post by WorldMaker »

cm2187 wrote: post #465
WorldMaker wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how simple I think it is: Out (but not gone/forgotten): Win32 (hand-coded C, C++ MFC, C++ ATL and related alphabet soup [aka back in the day the choice wasn't easy, either], VB6, .NET WinForms, etc), WPF/Silverlight (a .NET only XAML platform) In: UWP (C++ with XAML, C#/.NET with XAML, JS with HTML/CSS) Just three UI platforms to consider (Win32, WPF, UWP), two of which are mostly deprecated and not recommende…

Except that with Win7’s dominance your UWP isn’t going to run on most of your clients for many years. In a corporate environment it sorts of kills it from the outset. I think Microsoft made a big mistake by not making UWP win7 compatible.

Windows 7 doesn't have "many years" left. Windows 7 has less than two years left in its support lifetime. (2020 is when extended support ends.)

In the mean time, if you, in a corporate environment, must Windows 7 until the bitter end in 2020, you can use WPF as a bootstrap step towards UWP. The XAML is similar between them and a lot of the coding paradigms are same (MVVM patterns), and if you architect well (.NET Standard 2.0 libraries) you can share 100% of your business logic between a WPF application and a UWP application.

Xamarin.Forms also has an open source WPF renderer if you'd prefer to further go the cross-platform route. (Xamarin.Forms supports UWP, iOS, Android, macOS.)

I agree that I think Microsoft should have had the .NET Standard, XAML Standard, WPF Xamarin.Forms development stories in place sooner to better leverage developers that need to support older Windows, but many of those pieces are in place now if that is what corporate developers were waiting for.

Re: The End of Windows

#579

Post by apolymath »

bhauer wrote: post #243
cpeterso wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...

That hardware report is surprising to me in many ways. * In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category. * In 2018, the most popula…

Most corporations can’t afford to upgrade hardware and most likely run on very old hardware running windows xp or if they’re lucky, windows 7.

Re: The End of Windows

#580

Post by apolymath »

kuzimoto wrote: post #514
deno wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1440p is a resolution for gaming, not work. You can get 24" 4k (2160p) 180ppi 60Hz for $300 e.g. LG 24UD58.

Just purchased two 1440p monitors and I love doing work on them. 25" and the PPI is just perfect for me. Anything higher resolution-wise requires a much larger display to be readable at 100% scaling. I'm adamantly against using scaling.

A 4K screen with 150% scaling is liquid smooth and other-worldly
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