Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If you must run Windows 10

tinyapps.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 214 posts

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#151

Post by LilBytes »

twiceaday wrote: post #97
eberfreitas wrote: post #94

There is basically one reason why I use a Windows machine and that is games . I know linux has seen a lot of movement in that area (tks Valve) but I've tried it, and it works great, but performance is better in Windows for my machine. So I bought this machine where I can game (it is not anything fancy) and I would really like to work on it as well. I have a notebook with Ubuntu installed and if you would ask me I wou…

The sneaky bit about gaming is that it means your most powerful computer is reserved for Windows. I'd love to treat my Windows pc as a gaming console and keep a Mac as my personal computer but that would cost a lot more money so I just put up with Windows.

Ironically I do the same, work provide a laptop for us that you're free to choose within reason and comes with a mandatory MDM (enforce encryption, remote wiping) and an anti-virus and that's it. Besides that you can use the laptop pretty close to a BYOD model.

I sold my Dell XPS 13 and now I use my work provided MacBook Pro for nearly all other purposes besides Gaming. It's my first Mac and I've found developing on it to be a dream after 10~ years of Windows use.

I'd love to run MacOS on my gaming PC for when I'm not gaming. Unfortunately, Hackintosh' is possible but seems like a time sink and I'd rather spend that time you know, playing games, or working on my homelab (e.g. breaking it).

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#152

Post by LilBytes »

user5994461 wrote: post #123
jiggawatts wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm facing this decision right now. To LTSC or not. I have to build a virtual desktop environment for an isolated network that is almost-but-not-quite a SCADA system. It's the monitoring and management bits, without the direct control. It's not ultra critical, but there's a strict uptime requirement, and a general preference for long-term service releases of everything where possible. Security and prevention of "data…

Actually, there were comments on hacker news the other day about the domain, the most likely explanation is that is was too cumbersome to provision new things on microsoft.com so the devs went with what they could get their hands on instead.

Which is ludicrous in it's self that they set entirely new domains rather than using a sub-domain with delegated access. But, we know how Microsoft works. That would require some kind of communication between departments and delegated trust.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#153

Post by jevgeni »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #150
jevgeni wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have enough alternatives. Free alternatives at that! If they don’t switch, then that’s their choice and they are obviously fine with it. The whole “Windows telemetry bad” meme is mostly just an excuse for a flame war.

No, being aware of something is the prerequisite of being fine with something. And for people who just walk into to a store and buy a computer with preinstalled OS, telemetry is pretty much the default, as you said previously. I guess you could say companies are obviously afraid of offering the choice, of offering the same product with and without telemetry, clearly labeled. > The whole “Windows telemetry bad” meme i…

Sorry, I didn’t mean to say you were mocking. But the whole narrative on HN does feel like that and is essentially a tribal, condescending thing.

I would think differently if I saw the same amount of criticism towards other products which commit similar if not worse “offenses”. MacOS does a comparable amount of telemetry. Ubuntu does telemetry (albeit presumably less).

If telemetry as done by OS providers is an offense, then half the tech industry is built on top of even more severe privacy offenses. Can you imagine any serious digital product NOT doing what is essentially telemetry? Imagine online ad companies NOT spying on you? I mean, if it offends you, then sure, voice your discontents. But if a collective in aggregate constantly criticizes minor offenses by one player but lets other players off the leash for way more, it’s not about privacy, sorry.

Also, I don’t agree that people are ignorant. Most of media coverage about Windows 10 revolved around its telemetry. It’s asked when you install it. It’s in the settings. I mean, if you don’t care about it after that then you don’t care.

Personally, I think telemetry is OK. So I’m not bothered, as long as it’s not outright spying. I’m also OK with paying more for Windows 10 Pro to not have the stupid ads.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#154

Post by jsmith99 »

esotericn wrote: post #104
owenwil wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'phones home' argument doesn't really add up—there's plenty of control over this at this point, and every OS is calling home, macOS included, to some degree. The advertisements thing happens out of the box, and is trivial to remove (if my memory is correct, Safari harasses you about being the default browser, too, if you try to change it). The updates to add features thing.... isn't an issue for me, but YMMV.

Control? My OS does not phone home. It contacts package mirrors when I ask it to and only when I ask it to. It contacts NTP servers because I specifically enabled that. That's it. By contrast Windows is a black box of nonsense. The copy I have running in a VM has the marketing name "Cortana" process running even though I specifically chose "no" at install. I enabled a data limit the other day and played some games. T…

The cortana process includes elements of local search indexing. Part of the cortana 'integration' included rebranding existing local functionality as cortana.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#155

Post by jsmith99 »

dTal wrote: post #62
owenwil wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'phones home' argument doesn't really add up—there's plenty of control over this at this point, and every OS is calling home, macOS included, to some degree. The advertisements thing happens out of the box, and is trivial to remove (if my memory is correct, Safari harasses you about being the default browser, too, if you try to change it). The updates to add features thing.... isn't an issue for me, but YMMV.

Oh yeah, plenty of control. Just book the afternoon off and follow this handy-dandy guide: https://github.com/adolfintel/Windows10-Privacy

People follow dangerous guides like this and then complain Windows doesn't work well. For example, following this guide turns off 'Let Windows track app launches to improve Start and search results'. You then see loads of posts on hacker news complaining that start menu search doesn't give them their most used apps at the top.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#156

Post by switch007 »

owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

WSL2 is going to cement this episode of Embrace, extend and extinguish, in part as it requires Hyper-V and therefore prevents the use of VirtualBox, VMware Workstation/Player etc. The freedoms of Linux (such as not having a boot loader assume it's the only OS on the disk) will be forgotten as people take the easy path of running WSL2 on the OS their computer came with. Is this a sufficiently-modern criticsm for you?

A blog post from late 2018, which references things like an October 2018 Windows update, counts very much as a modern experience with Windows. I don't think it's fair to try to smear the author in that way.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#158

Post by terragon »

krisrm wrote: post #61
charlesdaniels wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has used Linux (with a few brief stints into macOS and BSD) for quite some time (since about 2012) coming from Windows before that, I don't understand the people who constantly defend Windows in these types of posts... In principle, the feature set that Windows 10 ships could be useful. I don't find it appealing personally, but if it works well for you then that's great. The issue that I have had is th…

Anecdotally, I've had about the opposite experience. Never have been able to get a graphics card to perform well under any version of desktop Linux I've used, the sleep feature generally hasn't worked, fan control is all over the map, and I hate using terminal to configure everything . Windows has almost always just worked fine for me, as it does for ~80% of anyone using a desktop OS.

Agree a hundred percent! If I could get sleep/hibernate to work reliably, I would switch over to Lubuntu in an instant.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#159

Post by blub »

wayneftw wrote: post #91
eslaught wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safari harasses you about being the default browser But does it advertise to you by default? This seems not comparable at all. Pretty much every browser will want you to set it as default (and at least the option to stop the nagging is usually front and center). Maybe this is just me, but advertising by default in something as basic as a start screen seems very user hostile....

Every time you go to check updates for macOS you have to see ads in their app store. Not only that, but Apple installs a ton of apps I don’t need, which are essentially advertised by simply existing on my launchpad. Things just show up after an update and I don’t see a difference between that and some third-party apps that Microsoft puts on the start menu for you.

1. Updates are done through settings.

2. Advertising is communication about a product or service. A product is not advertising in itself, logic doesn't work like that.

It's also worth differentiating what one gets: free, quality apps with a decent privacy policy vs. pay to win games in Windows.

You're trying a too hard to excuse customer-hostile behavior and it's embarrassing.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#160

Post by blub »

jevgeni wrote: post #116
eslaught wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safari harasses you about being the default browser But does it advertise to you by default? This seems not comparable at all. Pretty much every browser will want you to set it as default (and at least the option to stop the nagging is usually front and center). Maybe this is just me, but advertising by default in something as basic as a start screen seems very user hostile....

macOS is way more expensive as well. Compare it with Windows 10 Pro for a fairer price point and ads are not a problem all of a sudden.

Ads are always a problem because they're manipulative communication.

Forcing ads through the OS os is also very aggressive and rude, because there's no way to turn them off.

Post reply on HN