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

Reclaim Windows10

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 207 posts

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#191

Post by vort3 »

Joeri wrote: post #151
gigel82 wrote: post #117

Generally, I don't think Windows 10's telemetry features are privacy-violating. Most of the telemetry (especially if you choose the "required only" option in setup) is just for crashes and basic usage data (they won't use it for advertising for example, like Google or Facebook); that said, I use pi-hole as my DNS which blocks a lot of the Microsoft URLs used by telemetry. However, my biggest issue is simply bloat. Wi…

Windows 2000 was bloatware compared to NT4, which ran comfortably in 32 MB of RAM and had basically no limits on 128 MB. (All of office, photoshop and visual basic multi tasking at the same time smoothly.) I don’t understand why modern OS’s need multiple gigabytes of RAM just to boot. I get that they do more than NT4 and windows 2000 did, but still, why isn’t a gigabyte enough? I would like to read an OS engineer’s t…

Everything is bloated.

You need 3GB RAM to open some web pages in your browser nowadays and that's insane.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#192

Post by vort3 »

criddell wrote: post #173
gnulinux wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> frankly all the major ones are fine these days. No Windows version since XP has been fine. They varied from utterly unusable crap to barely tolerable. I honestly never understood why people use Windows, is there an argument other than "I'm used to it"? I still have a small Win partition installed for rare Win-only things and every single time I interact with Win 10 I remember how utterly broken it is. Like the mome…

> is there an argument other than "I'm used to it"? Yes. The argument is "I want to run X and it only runs (or runs best) on Windows|Linux|macOS. People don't fire up their computer because they want to use Linux or Windows, they fire it up because they want to play Assassin's Creed or XCode.

Can confirm, one of my friends really wanted to use Linux (because she doesn't trust microsoft and tired of windows being bloated, she has a rather slow laptop), but her colleagues constantly send her some .docx/.xlsx files that simply won't work with openoffice or other alternatives.

She tried very hard with Wine, PlayOnLinux, tried all sorts of alternative offices, VMs, but gave up and had to install Windows anyway because majority of people simply refuse to use open data formats and use proprietary closed formats.

I'm also running Windows because I have to do some CorelDraw drawings and don't want to bother with wine etc. Otherwise I would be running Linux for sure.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#193

Post by 112233 »

abrookewood wrote: post #186
rasz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but why would you let indexer run at all when Everything ( https://www.voidtools.com ) runs faster, is more accurate, and is a small standalone executable?

Please try Everything if you have never tried it before. It is BLAZINGLY fast. From memory it runs off the File Allocation Table to achieve its speed.

Looks like it still needs to build index of file names for searching.

If you need to search local ntfs drive, try https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/

It does not build any indexes, and always shows up to date results (by scanning MFT)

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#194

Post by fsflover »

criddell wrote: post #180
fsflover wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called "walled garden" actually.

No it isn't. If you wanted to call iOS a walled garden, I wouldn't argue. I would also say it's not necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn't call Windows, Linux, or macOS walled gardens.

> I have never met a single person in my entire life who likes using Windows. Everyone I know claims "yeah it's crap but this CAD/Industry standard software works only in Windows".

If this is not a walled garden, I don't know what is. Linux is certainly not a walled garden.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#195

Post by haswell »

vetinari wrote: post #174
haswell wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, most of the criticism I've seen has been specific, and examples been provided that explain why the specific settings are problematic.

> examples been provided that explain why the specific settings are problematic. I've seen some opinions, but none could be objectively evaluated as really pointing out problematic settings. They were more in the area of subjective preferences.

> They were more in the area of subjective preferences

But this is exactly the point behind the criticism. The script is presented as “run this to make Windows better/safer”. If you did that without evaluating and understanding these subjective preferences, you might end up in a worse state than you started in, because maybe some of those preferences don’t really match your needs.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#196

Post by jiggawatts »

You get really good at this kind of thing when you're building large scale virtual desktop systems. Suddenly, the random updates, scans, or whatever translate to a million IOPS on the SAN and a widespread outage of unrelated systems.

In my experience, most editions of Windows 10 are simply unredeemable. You have to start with an LTSC edition, which behaves more like XP used to: Very little bloat, no forced patching, everything except what you actually need turned off by default.

Meanwhile, Microsoft recommends that you don't use LTSC. Prefer the normal editions. Use LTSC only if required. Please don't use LTSC. Don't disable Telemetry! LTSC is for special customers only. Use the Current Version for the latest features. The Current Version has many benefits that users enjoy! Consume Soylent Green! Eat it. Eat it.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#197

Post by criddell »

fsflover wrote: post #194
criddell wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. If you wanted to call iOS a walled garden, I wouldn't argue. I would also say it's not necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn't call Windows, Linux, or macOS walled gardens.

> I have never met a single person in my entire life who likes using Windows. Everyone I know claims "yeah it's crap but this CAD/Industry standard software works only in Windows". If this is not a walled garden, I don't know what is. Linux is certainly not a walled garden.

In computing, a walled garden is a closed ecosystem controlled by the platform owner.

None of Windows, macOS, or Linux are walled gardens because all of them allow anybody to publish software for those platforms. You don't need approval and you don't need to distribute through a central authority.

iOS, on the other hand, can only load apps from the App Store and that store only carries software approved by Apple.

What you are talking about is proprietary software. That's a different beast.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#198

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

rasz wrote: post #139
sumtechguy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vista RTM and sp1 turning off indexer was a great solution. It was monster on the drive and memory (5-10 min startups on computers that should be up in 30-60 seconds and were after you turned things like that off). They fixed it in sp2. Superfetch was just as bad as well as the windows defender. Most of that was fixed in win7. I now let all 3 of those services run. The issues were fixed... The problem is these 'so…

but why would you let indexer run at all when Everything ( https://www.voidtools.com ) runs faster, is more accurate, and is a small standalone executable?

They are completely different products. Everything searches just file names, while Windows indexer also searches file contents. It is a much more time consuming task.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#199

Post by fsflover »

criddell wrote: post #197
fsflover wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have never met a single person in my entire life who likes using Windows. Everyone I know claims "yeah it's crap but this CAD/Industry standard software works only in Windows". If this is not a walled garden, I don't know what is. Linux is certainly not a walled garden.

In computing, a walled garden is a closed ecosystem controlled by the platform owner. None of Windows, macOS, or Linux are walled gardens because all of them allow anybody to publish software for those platforms. You don't need approval and you don't need to distribute through a central authority. iOS, on the other hand, can only load apps from the App Store and that store only carries software approved by Apple. Wha…

Maybe you are right in terms of strict definitions, but in reality the proprietary software effectively creates the walled garden from which the users can't escape.

Re: Reclaim Windows10

#200

Post by selfhoster11 »

gnulinux wrote: post #162
criddell wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about operating systems any more? That seems like a solved problem and frankly all the major ones are fine these days. Computers are chosen based on applications. If you want to play games, you are probably buying a Windows PC. Developing iOS apps? You want a Mac. If you just need a browser, then a Chrome Book or iPad is probably a good choice. I'd bet a lot of people here use three or more operating system…

> frankly all the major ones are fine these days. No Windows version since XP has been fine. They varied from utterly unusable crap to barely tolerable. I honestly never understood why people use Windows, is there an argument other than "I'm used to it"? I still have a small Win partition installed for rare Win-only things and every single time I interact with Win 10 I remember how utterly broken it is. Like the mome…

I consider Windows 7 about the only acceptable version of Windows after XP. Everything else between XP and 10 (inclusive) has been a failure to some degree (with Windows 8.1 perhaps being a minor failure compared to what 10 became later on).
Post reply on HN