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Windows needs a change in priorities

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#171

Post by Silhouette »

rthomas6 wrote: post #101
Silhouette wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do. Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnin…

What is wrong with Linux nowadays? I've used it as my main driver for long enough that I can't see the big problems that are preventing everyone from switching. Like, it seems easier than even WSL to me. Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. If a person has good hardware compatibil…

Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else.

But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at least 90% of the time doesn't cut it. Free instead of paying a few hundred bucks for the extra percentage points isn't even a question worth asking from a business perspective.

Linux has great software, sometimes the best available on any platform, in certain areas. Developer tools is an obvious one. Servers is another. Some of the multimedia stuff is good. The picture for running games is getting better all the time even if most of them are still ports of some kind rather than truly native applications.

But as much as I hate to say it, the reality is that in most areas that most users are going to care about the Linux ecosystem is still lacking in both quality and quantity. I'd bet on the evolution of web technology disrupting Windows long before the Linux desktop does. But that is hardly a solution to the phone-home and forced-update problems that a lot of us don't like about modern Windows.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#172

Post by wildrhythms »

Sakos wrote: post #77
userbinator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding? The people who worked on the design use Macs. Seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

When I first heard about this, everything that's ever bothered me about the Windows 8-10-11 evolution makes so much more sense. They're turning it into MacOS.

The difference is that Mac OS actually looks somewhat consistent and has kept much of its familiar paradigms (Spotlight, System Preferences, the menubar, context menus...) the same over the past decade. Microsoft seems to have lifted the aesthetics of Mac OS without any of the UX.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#173

Post by wildrhythms »

worewood wrote: post #10

If they shipped a version of Windows sporting the Windows-11 kernel, so running all the recent software, but with Windows 2000 UI for a thousand dollars I would buy it immediately.

Not Windows, but you might get a kick out of the Serenity OS project: http://serenityos.org/

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#174

Post by LegitShady »

I have been a relatively happy windows 10 user since its release. Lots of small issues but overall very solid and no serious concerns.

Windows 11 doesn't seem to justify its existence in any way, and since the decision to require a microsoft account, I've decided I won't be upgrading to Windows 11 for any reason.

When windows 10 reaches EOL I will find an alternative. If its osx, ok. If its linux, ok. But Microsoft seems to continue to make their product worse and worse and pretend they're upgrades.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#175

Post by nicoburns »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #93
userbinator wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway. On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.

If you want Linux to compete, you need spreadsheet software as good as Excel and a word processor that's 100% compatible with Word. I tried to use LibreOffice for a while but Calc ins't there yet and I had tons of formatting problems when I sent documents to Words users. After dealing with this for a while you just give up and start using Office again.

It’s a shame Office went to the continually updated subscription model. Older versions of office ran excellently under wine.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#176

Post by jeroenhd »

bsder wrote: post #71
jeroenhd wrote: post #4

You've got to admire Microsoft's support of open source software. They're doing their best to push users to Linux! By making their UI as ugly and difficult to use as possible so that users don't feel too much of a bump in usability when they try Linux. I'm sure MS can get the job done and kill off their OS with just a few more years of obnoxious bullshit forcefully shoved into their operating system!

Agreed. Windows 11 and macOS 12 finally gave me the kick necessary to switch to Linux full-time (Lenovo Carbon X1). macOS 12 cannot maintain a USB 2.0 connection. Not by dongle. Not by dock. Not by monitor. Not with 3rd party. Not with Apple-approved hardware. No way, no how. This is known, reported and totally Apple's fault (some of the earlier macOS 11 builds work fine ). And this is the standard problem with Apple…

My conclusion is that all mainstream operating systems are now iterative and constantly in a state of semi-breakage, just like all modern apps, in an attempt to be more "modern" and to cut down on costs. I'm especially disappointed in Microsoft for their obsessive data collection. I've never experienced the "good old days" Apple fans seem to be referring to, so I can't comment on macOS (other than that it's clearly not for me).

It's quite absurd, really, because while the Linux desktop environment is certainly good for novices and advanced Linux users, anyone that falls between those categories (and that's a lot of people!) will definitely struggle when they try to switch to Linux. You're either content with the default setup, or need to dive into the terminal at some point, and the fact commercial operating systems are making their UX worse than Linux would be impressive if it wasn't so disappointing.

For what it's worth, I've managed to get Fusion360 running on Manjaro with a script a friend linked me online. I can't remember where I got it from exactly, but it involved auto downloading a bunch of Wine requirements and then just running the setup.

If you're not interested in tweaking your system, feel free to skip over the rest of the comment. If you're willing to give it a go, I've got some experience with Windows stuff on Linux that you may be interested in.

I barely use Fusion360, but the few times I used it, it worked pretty well in Wine. Even had decent 3D acceleration, though you can probably get a lot better performance with more trickery (DXVK etc. to enhance the 3D acceleration for example). Lutris (https://lutris.net/) has an install script (https://lutris.net/games/autodesk-fusion-360/), I recommend you give it a try. Lutris can help enable performance tuning tricks for productivity software quite easily, even if it's originally developed for playing video games. Might work for you, or it might not; if it does, it might just cut down on more unnecessary reboots. If it doesn't, you'll at most lose the time it takes to download the installer and remove the failed installation.

As for the video conferencing, you might be interested in Cassowary (https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary), a tool to run Windows executables in a Windows VM through RDP, with suspend/resume of the VM on demand to cut down on resources used when you're not using Windows. It requires a bit of setup, but the guide is quite comprehensive in my opinion. You can forward your webcam to the Windows VM through USB forwarding to get it to work with video, and modern RDP should just be an RDP stream so there shouldn't be too much quality loss. Even if the Cassowary setup doesn't work, you can probably use the VM anyway.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#177

Post by hpcjoe »

eek2121 wrote: post #63

Going to disagree. I will agree once Apple allows you to ungroup windows of the same application in the dock. Until then, I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system. Sure, Apple has a different workflow. Pro-Apple peeps insist I should 'learn it'. Why? I know the Apple workflow. In my eyes, it is inferior to the one offered by Windows, and KDE on Linux. Everyone has their opinions of course. I respect pe…

> I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system.

Glutton for punishment I see. Seriously, I used WSL2 under Win10 for a year as a (very) poor man's linux for $dayjob. Recently switched to a Mac. I do keep pressing on getting Linux laptops, having run them for work for the last 22+ years ...

WSL2 is garbage. Pure and simple. Even on an 8 core 16 thread 64 GB monster with Nvidia graphics. My view on it is that it is an attempt by MSFT to staunch the flow of developers off their platform. To say "hey, see, we do linux within windows". But then you use it. And get bitten in the behind, repeatably, by the memory compaction bit, even after tuning the overall memory usage of WSL2.

I was able to get a rough linux desktop by using MobaXterm, single root display, and then running Xfce4 (which I had to build myself, as our corporate approved WSL2 distro was/is broken in so ... so many ways). This setup regularly crashed WSL2, and often windows.

When I mentioned this in various fora, windows fans claim that the OS isn't buggy, it must be the hardware. Many BSOD, many hangs, crashes, etc. Couldn't be the OS. Had to be hardware. Or drivers.

Yeah. About that.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#178

Post by mberning »

I ponied up for a win11 pro license so I could run the ARM version in Parallels on my M1 mini. All this just to run an old piece of CAD software. If it weren’t the M1 I’d still be running that CAD software in a Win7 VM. Microsoft is living well of of similar scenarios all across the world. It’s terrible within the enterprise. It starts off with the premise that people need windows desktops and laptops. Then it turns into you need AD. Now you need an AD team with half a dozen engineers and even more severs in your “forest” Now you need exchange. Hire a team for that. Might as well get teams too. And so on and so forth. Then accommodating all of these shitty Microsoft products has you paying millions of dollars in engineer salaries and even more in licensing costs. And every year MS just keeps bending you over with worse software and higher costs. Some day enterprise customers will get tired of supporting all this crap and start making long term decisions to reduce their reliance on windows on the desktop and therefore this leviathan of bullshit that infests their organization.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#179

Post by poglet »

MarkSweep wrote: post #35
worewood wrote: post #10

If they shipped a version of Windows sporting the Windows-11 kernel, so running all the recent software, but with Windows 2000 UI for a thousand dollars I would buy it immediately.

It’s not quite Windows 2000, but the LTSC edition has much of the bullshit stripped out. It does not support the store therefore Candy Crush is not installed by default. And I don’t think it’s quite $1000, if you can figure out how to buy it.

Windows 10 LTSE was under $20 on ebay, unsure of the legality of this.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#180

Post by judge2020 »

creakingstairs wrote: post #109
WithinReason wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it getting raised at meetings?

Not working in MS but I would guess everyone knows about how bad it is. The problem is so colossal (technically and organisationally) thus no one person has the political capital to push for change. It’s a kind of thing where the usual growth metrics “looks fine”, so it’s hard to justify big initiatives to fix it, yet everyone knows it’s broken. One day, those metrics will start looking bad and then they will try to…

I imagine the bigger problem is that you have to have hard user research to back colossal changes like this one up, especially if the change would do something like invalidate a possibly three-digit large engineering team's years of work. The only thing that saves this is Microsoft's continued commitment to win32 apps, which will probably continue for eternity at least until MS recreates the _entire_ os from the ground up.
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