241–250 of 426 posts
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These are what Microsoft calls "suggestions" (aka adverts). I think they only actually install when you first click on them. Fortunately they're UWP apps so are easy to completely remove. Turning off the "Show suggestions" settings will stop them coming back.
Then they all come back with the next update.
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Unfortunately, this "vendor crap" is now part of the OS.
It's even worse than that. There's 2 types of crap now: vendor crap and Windows crap. You can avoid vendor crap by reinstalling a fresh version of Windows from Microsoft, but you'll still get Microsoft crap (i.e., various apps from the Microsoft store pre-installed with links prominently displayed on the Start menu).
A consequence of this is that MS has always focused on making their OS and applications useful for businesses, at a great sacrifice in ease of use and security for consumers. Apple jumped in to focus on ease of use and security, but their computers have always been too expensive for mass adoption.
Now Google is going for the mass market with a secure and easy to use OS. Microsoft can't really fight back because to do would mean abandoning the business market. And it understandably doesn't want to do that because that's where the big bucks are. So we should expect to see ChromeOS steadily gaining in popularity, though it is an open question as to how far it will also go in the enterprise.
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I think that's more of a sign that most people don't need more than 4GB to 8GB of RAM, and that storage isn't about TB anymore but about speed (HDD vs SSD). SSDs are roughly 100x faster than HDDs, so they're superior despite offering less TB. Unless you're a gamer constantly downloading new 50GB games, most people are fine with ~300GB of storage. People want faster storage, as opposed to more storage.
I want both . I want 2TB of space and the speed of an SSD, and I don't want to pay much. Hybrid hard drives seemed like the perfect solution (a few GB of flash, combined with a 2TB drive). Sadly, nobody managed to get decent performance on hybrid drives. As far as I'm aware, none really had a good grasp of the filesystem, so none could make decisions like 'these small dll files will likley need low latency reads, sti…
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Why should Apple care about the other 85% of the market if all the profit margin is in the 15% they have?
I guess apple is totally okay with being a minority of the market then since they're doubling down on proprietary sensors and apps that only work in their own ecosystem. they can ignore the 85% if they want. The 85% of the market will ignore them back in turn.
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I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to r…
> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? GalliumOS[1] is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution optimized for Chromebooks with a huge list of supported devices[2]. > Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, bu…
Chromebooks have one fatal flaw: Microsoft Office on them sucks. You're stuck with side-loading in the Android edition, which is an app with a simplified UI and requiring always-online connection. All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.
There's even an Office support page: https://support.office.com/article/how-to-install-and-run-mi...
Also, the Office apps do work offline.
Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…
> On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the b…
One can now throw tabs from one account context to the second logged in account. Left click on the top to the left of the tabs, (while the Chromebook is signed into two accounts) and it offers moving the tab to the other account.
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> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so yo…
Maybe you know the answer to this question I have always wanted: I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other. So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up... OR Ideally - I want to b…