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Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

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Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#531
post #59
post #20

This, and every other screw-up in the same vein, is why those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools? Cynically, it's amazing th…

Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least. Doesn't take much to put the shields back upto full. I just don't understand why people run windows. Maybe I just use computers wrong, having been on linux for the last 20 years, but my family (who I refuse to help with IT needs) are all far happier on chromeb…

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

Software that doesn't exist elsewhere (maybe OSX).

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only reason they stay in the Wintel ecosystem is for games. Is it still "Wintel" when a lot of gamers are going AMD now?

It is until AMD goes mainstream with an instruction set not developed by Intel.

Such as AMD64? :)

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#533
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I used to have a screen shot showing me running something like 5 different GUI apps on a Linux system, all of them trying to open a file, each with a completely different file chooser dialog. That's because one app used Motif, one use GTK, one used Qt, and I have no idea what the others used. But they all perform the same function of choosing a file right? What does it matter if they all look the same? I don't under…

It's not that there are aesthetic difference like pink sparkles on some. It's that some have a file type filter and some don't. Some show all files while others hide dotfiles and provide a checkbox to show them. Some show files and directories in the same pane while others show directories in one pane and files in another. Some show ".." in their directory list and you go up by opening that, others do not show ".." a…

Don't worry, soon it will be 'systemui' and there will only be one way to do anything. /s

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#534
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this, but modularity is one of the philosophies and benefits behind linux, with modularity unfortunately comes inconsistency. As many of the apps available on linux are open source and open source developers are mostly free to use whatever toolkits they want or are comfortable with, you're not likely to get the consistency you want with linux. With windows you have an API provided by windows for ui progr…

A standard API can provide more modularity and control than the current approach. You do this by having several available implementations of the API as dynamic libraries--one using Motif, one using GTK, one using Qt, and so on. There would be a per user config setting specifying which implementation the user prefers. If a program wants to put up a file chooser, it can read that, then load the right library and use th…

>You do this by having several available implementations of the API as dynamic libraries--one using Motif, one using GTK, one using Qt, and so on.

OK, now who's going to do this? At what level would this be implemented at? Would this be at the windows server level? Would I have to pull in GtK, motif, qt and every other library that this API will rely on just to install Wayland or xorg? Will it be at the window manager level? Will I need to pull in GfK, qt, motif etc. for every desktop environment and window manager relying on this API? Which versions of these libraries will this API rely on?

The last graphical app i wrote, I used dlangui for a GUI, should I have been forced to use Gtk or qt despite them being heavier and more complicated than what I needed?

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#535
I completely understand that this is not exactly what anyone wants to see in the Start menu or any other actively used feature of Windows. But I find this considerably less egregious than Microsoft buying Github, or "embracing" Linux, as if it only has the open source community's welfare at heart.

Microsoft is a for-profit, public company. They will do anything and everything in their own self-interest and to please their shareholders. While I have certainly posted my disdain in the past, especially for the Github buyout, I put this squarely in the same vein as when Canonical put Amazon search ads in the Dash on Ubuntu. It was a mistake for Canonical then, and it's a mistake for Microsoft now. If Microsoft truly want to show they're different, then they can put ads where the ads belong -- in the Microsoft App Store, or on television or other streaming media.

Still using Firefox? Of course, we are. And we will continue to do so.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#536
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least. Doesn't take much to put the shields back upto full. I just don't understand why people run windows. Maybe I just use computers wrong, having been on linux for the last 20 years, but my family (who I refuse to help with IT needs) are all far happier on chromeb…

I switched over to running desktop linux a couple months ago because I was so fed up with these things, but the truth is... it's just pretty bad. Like if I let my laptop go to sleep my touchpad will never work again. I had to do a bunch of weird kernel hacks to keep my wifi working when the device goes to sleep, and even then it's a hack (I had to enable the airplane mode button, and then make sure to hit it twice an…

I agree. And it's really, really sad. I have just switched to Debian with i3 and in so many ways it amazing. I have the most incredible shortcuts set up for managing my additional displays and sound devices, all run with bash scripts. I've managed to set up Syncthing to completely replace my reliance on cloud-based storage and I can do desktop gaming from in Linux or switch to windows by simply typing "windows" in a terminal. The breadth of open source source and the ability to run windows applications if necessary... it's just amazing. But it has been hella difficult to solve simple issues that for windows/mac os just work out of the box. A typical user is overburdened in Debian. Ubuntu is pretty sweet though, and with flatpaks, snap packages, and appImages becoming the norm, maybe it's only a matter of time before widespread adoption... for gamers we're surely on the cusp, Steam's proton is incredible.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#537
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it! I don't have the same laptop so I can't comment on your exact situation. That said, I have a Windows machine and I am not using a Microsoft account to log in so your experience is not universal.

A colleague just bought a new desktop and set it up last weekend. He ran into Microsoft wanting him to login to a MS account _on initial install_. He ended up having to go into the BIOS to disable networking so he could force the installer to let him initially setup a local account. I don't know if this is for every install and is just my anecdotal perspective.

It's a dark pattern. You can get around it, but it's not easy for normal people to do.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you MUST buy certified hardware [0], preferably with it pre-loaded with Linux [1]. Ultimately, Linux didn't make enough of a dent in the desktop hardware space in the 90's/00's. The level of interest from hardware vendors (ODM/OEM/component manufacturers) has gone down - that's why things are worse. If you don't use non-preloaded hardware you are NOT signalling to anyone that desktop Linux is important. This red…

Well, I'll definitely keep an eye on that piece of hardware. I do intend that the next system I buy can run Linux well. I mean I'm going to stick with it, even if it is bad. That said.. even though I'm pointing out hardware issues I don't think the free software world should get a pass on these things. I get that a lack of corporate sponsorship can make things hard, BUT, a lot of the issues I'm running into are thing…

Linux will always have unstable drivers (with a few exceptions where companies throw money at it) until linux kernel developers acknowledge that a stable driver ABI results in stable drivers.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#539
post #512
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. >Cynically, it's amazing that Microsoft collects so much personal data about each user -- and yet its "target" ads are hopelessly generic and tasteless. This doesn't surprise me. As someone else old enough to remember the Halloween documents, MS has long suffered from serious organizational incompetence. Just look a…

Organisation chart comic referred to: https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...

And for those who wonder like me, the original is still there: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

I guess linking to the web archive is just carefulness at this point.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#540
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A standard API can provide more modularity and control than the current approach. You do this by having several available implementations of the API as dynamic libraries--one using Motif, one using GTK, one using Qt, and so on. There would be a per user config setting specifying which implementation the user prefers. If a program wants to put up a file chooser, it can read that, then load the right library and use th…

>You do this by having several available implementations of the API as dynamic libraries--one using Motif, one using GTK, one using Qt, and so on. OK, now who's going to do this? At what level would this be implemented at? Would this be at the windows server level? Would I have to pull in GtK, motif, qt and every other library that this API will rely on just to install Wayland or xorg? Will it be at the window manage…

Your program in dlangui would do something like this (but in D rather than the C-like pseudocode I'm going to use...). At the place where you want to put up a file chooser dialog, which now presumably does something like this:

  char * result = dlangui_choose_file(...)
you would do this instead:

  char * result = 0;
  char * (*standard_choose)() = get_standard_choose();
  if (standard_choose)
    result = (*standard_choose)(...);
  if (result == 0)
    result = dlangui_choose_file(...)
get_standard_choose is a small function that would:

1. Check a standard set of configuration locations to see if the system administrator or user has configured a standard file choose dialog [1].

2. If a standard file choose dialog has been configured, the configuration information includes the path to a library that implements it. get_standard_choose() loads that library, gets a pointer to the standard_choose() functions from it, and returns that pointer.

3. get_standard_choose() returns 0 if no standard choose dialog is configured or it runs into problems trying to load it.

If the user wants GTK or Qt file chooser dialogs instead of dlangui file chooser dialogs, you don't have to use GTK or Qt. The user installs a GTK or Qt file chooser library and points to it in their standard dialog configuration.

(I'd expect at some point that toolkits like dlangui would incorporate get_standard_choose() functionality themselves. After that, you'd then just write

  char * result = dlangui_choose_file(...)
and it would deal with using the user preferred dialog if available. It would be completely transparent to the programmer using dlangui).

Same idea for other common dialogs, like color picking, printing, and font selection.

[1] Probably something like check an environment variable first. If it doesn't find a match there, probably then a config file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. If no match, then something in /etc.

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