Linux people keep peddling this, I'd say it'll never be the year of Linux on Desktop if you keep denying you have problems. Last I tried to dual boot my Windows gaming rig to Ubuntu Desktop earlier this year, it can't even do fractional scaling on my 4K monitor, making it completely worthless. You'd think HiDPI support is pretty basic stuff in 2019. Granted Windows HiDPI is still craptastic compared to macOS, as leas…
Of course, that's what I refer to as a windows dependent workflow, like gaming and graphics designing. And I do agree linux support for those stuff is still limited, but constantly improving(especially with Steam).
Using a 4K monitor in a sane way (things not small enough to the point of being unreadable or large enough to be completely in my face) is Windows dependent workflow? I never said I was dual booting for gaming.
While I'm glad these efforts exist, it's wrong to have to fight my operating system in this way. In my experience, it's a losing battle. Microsoft seem intent on having full control of your system, and they are in a position to take that control as and when they like. The occasional nods towards the technical crowd, for example WSL & VSCode are distracting us from the very large elephant in the room.
VSCode is a pure marketing effort, trying to convince people that Microsoft isn't all that evil. WSL is more sinister - it's a counter to "I want to run Linux on my desktop / laptop". It is a carrot to the stick of Secure Boot that's trying to make anything else than Windows impossible on PC.
I've always seen it as more of a life raft for people who simply cannot avoid having to use Windows. That crowd is getting smaller, but still sizable.
Linux people keep peddling this, I'd say it'll never be the year of Linux on Desktop if you keep denying you have problems. Last I tried to dual boot my Windows gaming rig to Ubuntu Desktop earlier this year, it can't even do fractional scaling on my 4K monitor, making it completely worthless. You'd think HiDPI support is pretty basic stuff in 2019. Granted Windows HiDPI is still craptastic compared to macOS, as leas…
Actually you can do this fairly easily by: 1) Learning nano/vim 2) Understanding what X window manager is and does 3) Understanding how config files work 4) Editing the appropriate config file to change DPI. Be careful not to do something wrong or you'll mess your system up So easy my grandma could do it.
Honestly can’t tell if this is sarcasm. This is probably sarcasm.
If it’s not, you’re welcome to actually point out the configuration files I need to edit. I tried many “solutions”, even edited boot parameters to no avail. According to sources I read, someone without an Nvidia graphics card might have an easier time.
I wonder what engineers working on vscode and wsl feel when they run into people working on OS monetization in the company restaurant... What do you need to say in your interview to be assigned to the latter team?
What do they feel? What about being thankful for being a revenue stream, it allows us to work on more free (as in beer) and open source developer tools
Its not free if we sell out with our data and attention.
Microsoft had the dominant consumer operating system since the 1980s. Using that advantage (and not innovation and quality !) they were able to grab substantial chunks of other markets: Word processing, commercial compilers, cloud computing etc. Next up is digital assistants and advertising. What is the alternative for average consumers ? Chrome books ?
> What is the alternative for average consumers ? Chrome books ? GNU/Linux! Any mainstream beginner friendly GNU/Linux distribution like Linux Mint or Ubuntu will be descent enough for average consumers. Unless you are heavily dependent on Adobe softwares(even then, you can consider dual boot), they are now much more elegant than windows. Getting quality support from forums is actually much easier with GNU/Linux. Las…
Can you recommend good laptop that come with Linux installed?
If you have oped out, as in your case and mine, the answer is none of your information will be used in this way. It's one setting, it's a complete opt out and you get prominently asked at install time. I've really not got any problem with that.
> you get prominently asked at install time Do you? I know the iOS setup wizard asks for analytics, but I don't recall it ever asking whether you want to turn on "limit ad tracking".
I was pretty sure it did, but if not that's even better. I didn't set this manually and it's off, so presumably that's just the default setting.
Just use LTSC. No Cortana, no Store, no Edge, and obviously no Candy Crush--in fact, no Metro apps to speak which, not even the Calculator (instead you get the one from Windows 7)
How do you get a license for that? As far as I know you can't easily. You need to find a reseller and there's a minimum amount of licenses you need to buy so you can't just buy one. I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this. There's basically zero effort involved in setting up a credit card payment form that gives out product keys, and there'd be at least some demand for it.
Because they know that it'll be incredibly popular and will force them to continue backporting updates. They want to move forward and users want to stay on one place. In the past users managed to keep Microsoft from moving forward. Now they want to force users to move forward. Nobody is happy in both cases, it seems.
The way I see it, "desktop-dependent workflows" overlap more and more with those "Windows-dependent workflows". Nowadays, most people don't need more than a web browser, and in that sense they do just fine with a tablet or phone (where iOS and Android dominate, and GNU/Linux is not really a viable option, at least not yet), or a Chromebook (yes, it's Linux, but it's mainly just Chrome). Most people I know with a legi…
I'm a software developer. I mainly work web and android. That,ofcourse, I can't do it on a smartphone and my Linux distro probably does it better than Windows. Installing and configuring CLIs and other development tools are much easier on Linux. I usually just install a linux distro as dual boot to my peers rather than figuring out how to get those stuff configured right on windows. There are ofcourse things like ASP…
I, too, develop for Android and, like you say, we have the "luxury" of being able to do it on both Windows and Linux (and macOS as well, if I wanted). Even .NET development is more cross-platform than ever, with .NET Core.
One of my points was precisely that developers were an exception in this regard, as our tooling is generally cross-platform. You can't say the same about people who do their work primarily using Adobe tools, for example.
And even developers sometimes don't have this luxury: for example, if you do iOS development, to publish on the app store, at some point you must use a Mac to sign the app. Of course you can use stuff like Xamarin and use the Mac exclusively to sign, but this is often inconvenient compared to just using the officially endorsed stack.
Overall, requiring a "traditional desktop operating system" to work is less and less the case for the general population.
A little bit irrelevant to the article: Unpopular opinion but, is opt-outtable telemetry that bad? Of course using tracked behaviors for add targeting is bad (which is why my opinion is irrelevant to the article) but using telemetry to do AB-tests, UX-tests, finding bugs, etc... what’s really bad about it? Every comment about telemetry in HN reads something like ‘Telemetry with opt-out is bad, so GitLab is bad, VSCod…
I, personally, love telemetry and always enable it everywhere. I want developers to know about my habits and consider it when deciding, for example, which features to delete.
What a load of shit. I love the guy trying to infer Microsoft's ad profit centers by trying to read between the lines of marketing copy. Entertaining stuff. But let's not confuse this for grown up analysis. Microsoft releases their financials, like every publicly traded corporation. Bing search ads are a small part of revenu, about 5% of what Azure earns, and stable. Desktop ads are a vanishingly small line item. Mic…
You’re right that I’ve not backed some of the claims with objective financial analysis. I searched for annual reports, then went off to finishing the post, in the interest of time. I thought that it would take a long time to read the reports to find out the revenue broken down into various business segments instead of “Microsoft Search Network” bucket. Furthermore, whether ad business is a 1/20th of Microsoft’s reven…
"And they’re openly advertising their products with Privacy motifs."
Because advertising is . . . trustworthy? Advertising copy is meant to sell products. Apple sees a niche market where people are calling out the invasive tactics of tech companies, so they want to aim for that market. Not that they actually have to provide a fully privacy-focused product; they just need to deliver an appealing message. All they really "have" to do (scare quotes because they don't really HAVE to do anything) to live up to this claim is implement some privacy-focused element to their products. At the same time, they can also implement very privacy-invasive elements. As long as they are less privacy-invasive as their competition, they can reasonably assert their claim as a privacy-focused company. That's still a very far cry from being a privacy-CENTRIC company. Bonus privacy invasive element is to pay some genius to text customers' nude photos to themselves.