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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

191–200 of 884 posts

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but shipping Microsoft Office onto the Mac makes it so much easier to leave if you're not playing video games.

Office on the Mac is awful. When I worked at apple I wasnt the only person who ran office in a windows vm. It was a supported config.

This was years ago now, but I got thru college with a Macbook Air using the "Office Online" apps because the native apps were so unbelievably sluggish and resource hungry. Somehow the web apps were more performant.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#192
I've been using Linux for 21 years. I currently have to deal with maintaining specialty software for 50+ computers.

From everything I've seen I dread upgrading to Windows 11 only slightly less than just figuring out how to convert it all to work on Linux somehow. I imagine like everyone I will put it off until the last possible second.

No need to reply about how you can do everything on Linux now, until wine works perfectly with $100k equipment that only works with Windows software from 2004 100% of the time it's too risky ;-)

The point is that I understand how much of a pain it would be to convert to using Linux and still think it could potentially be worth it compared to upgrading to Windows 11. I would never consider it at all if it was just an OS instead of an experience... what are the odds that the software works on Windows 11 perfectly anyway, my experience going from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was pretty miserable and that was 3 years after Windows 10 was standard.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else. You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.

You're not wrong, but office users should be locked to a browser in 2022 anyway. What do they need Windows for? They can all use a web browser. Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.

Beware what you ask for: Browsers are becoming an OS, and ARE far more abusive with users.

And that browser more likely is owned by oogle...

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#194

Complaining about Windows UX inconsistency sort of misses the point that the OS and the windowing system should be separate. The function of an OS is not to manage windows, it is to provide an abstraction layer between the applications and the hardware.

That's, just your opinion, man.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I made the same move (or at least finished it 100%) at the same time, and that's not a problem I've ever seen. Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.

But it’s linux, so one obscure setting in a config file or slightly different hardware can make all the difference. I say this as a linux user since WinXP. The whole OS market is pretty rough right now.

Projects like Proton and Lutris are making it so that most of the configuration work is encapsulated in installation scripts that make most of that grinding go away.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#198

Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely u…

There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone.

Some random examples:

Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure.

Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox.

Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR.

Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows.

To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ.

There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#199
post #24

This article nails a lot of the issues with Windows 11. I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards. - Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click. - I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical. - All a…

It seems to frequently be true that Microsoft releases a horrifying nightmare OS, polishes is up and removes hated features, and then releases a new version. It's been a bit of a pattern.

Windows 8 -> Windows 10

Windows Vista -> Windows 7

and even before that:

Windows Me -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP was a pretty solid chain that shows it over three releases (personally I think XP was buggier, I don't know what the idea was there other than to make some more money?).

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