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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

261–270 of 884 posts

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#261
I did not develop a graphical Windows application since around 15 years now. At the time it was mainly Win32, and WPF just starting.

I remember that Qt was a big thing though. They had this CSS like capability that would allow you to style your application after the fact. You could also just change the rendering backend at build time.

Is Qt not an option anymore to have all the various GUI details right?

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t wait for Proton to get better so I can ditch Windows for good. I know it’s already really good and it will run for most of the game I play, but I do like to dabble in competitive online or AAA once in a while :(

Proton is great, anticheat work fine with it. It's up to the producers of AAA games to enable it now.

I've probably played ~15-20 games on wine now and literally all have worked with, at most, minimal tweaking (Changing the proton version). I mostly play single player or indie multiplayer so I haven't had to deal with the anti cheat.

Only game that hasn't worked with Proton is Oneshot and its kina understandable considering the games context... It did have a linux version that mostly works out of the box though!

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#263
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ReFS has the stink of death all over it. It's been the "next generation" filesystem for Windows since 2012, with no signs of ever graduating to being the current filesystem -- in fact, a 2017 update to Windows 10 removed the ability for most desktop systems to create ReFS volumes.

ReFS is a poor man's version of btrfs much in the same way btrfs is a poor man's version of ZFS. It's also apparent that ReFS is basically abandoned.

It's not abandoned, but the intended use case is not consumer use:

https://gist.github.com/0xbadfca11/da0598e47dd643d933dc

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#264

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.

I use macOS + Windows + Pop!_OS (Ubuntu-based) on a daily basis and they're all better or worse depending on the task at hand. They're all useable but imperfect. For me, Windows is for gaming and some music production stuff, macOS is my work laptop and dev environment, and Ubuntu is for most other things like personal use, but also my desktop dev environment.

Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't work very well today (I have hope that we'll get there soon). Windows VMs work a lot better on my Ubuntu desktop, but a lot of our dev tools have mostly macOS users, so getting them to work with Ubuntu takes a bit of massaging at times. macOS is hard / unsupported to virtualize, so I basically have to use macOS when developing macOS software.

If we could run macOS as a VM, I'd choose Ubuntu / Pop!_OS for most things.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#265
Bought a high-end laptop recently and really wanted to give Windows 11 a try [after being a Linux user for about 7 years]. While the WSL and WSLg aspects of it along with development-related features have improved considerably, the base of the system as a whole was still the same mess.

So much telemetry stuff running in the background, so many unnecessary updates kicking in, heavy CPU and memory usage and the general perceived slowness of the OS have all immediately pushed me back to Linux. There's no bloat, the difference in performance is night and day, and I have to never worry about any privacy-related stuff.

Long live Linux Desktop.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the few really good things about some modern privacy laws is that this kind of defence carries almost zero weight. You don't get to do scummy things and then claim that the user "consented" because of some small print on page 50 of some document no-one ever reads before clicking the button they have to click in order to use the software they just paid for.

But the problem is that in practice I still don’t see those laws being enforced in any meaningful manner. Case in point, Microsoft is doing this - they’re not stupid, they’ve reviewed the legal implications that and rightfully decided that they’ll benefit more than the penalty from enforcement if it ever happens. Same with Google, Facebook, etc.

They're starting to be enforced but obviously the regulators particularly in Europe are underfunded and there are a lot of bad actors to chase. I imagine Facebook and Google both rate higher than Microsoft for now. That doesn't mean there won't be significant penalties later, particularly as governments come to realise how lucrative penalising these big tech firms can be under the rules they've created for themselves.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#267
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole OS market is pretty rough right now. This is my feeling over the past few years. No OS is in a great spot. But I have hopes for Linux being better supported with Valve using it on the Steam Deck. (Not the highest hopes, but more hope than I used to have)

I don't agree. KDE in particular feels more well rounded than ever before. I use it on FreeBSD but I use Linux on servers and I'm also very happy with that. Windows 10 is stable for me too though I was hit with the eTPM stutter bug (I use my Windows box exclusively for gaming, in particular VR which I didn't feel like figuring out in proton). But the windows dark patterns are surely there and I hate them. But as it's…

I recently got Apex Legends working and it's running perfectly at 144 fps in 2k on a 1080 ti.

I've also played FFXIV and Path of Exile extensively in Linux.

The only thing left is Adobe products which is honestly a matter of time. Just really takes hammering out some market share until Adobe relents.

A lot of the best kernel, driver, and gui shell improvements have only really hit their stride in the past 24 months.

Things are coming together rapidly.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use macOS + Windows + Pop!_OS (Ubuntu-based) on a daily basis and they're all better or worse depending on the task at hand. They're all useable but imperfect. For me, Windows is for gaming and some music production stuff, macOS is my work laptop and dev environment, and Ubuntu is for most other things like personal use, but also my desktop dev environment. Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't…

You can.

https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the few really good things about some modern privacy laws is that this kind of defence carries almost zero weight. You don't get to do scummy things and then claim that the user "consented" because of some small print on page 50 of some document no-one ever reads before clicking the button they have to click in order to use the software they just paid for.

But the problem is that in practice I still don’t see those laws being enforced in any meaningful manner. Case in point, Microsoft is doing this - they’re not stupid, they’ve reviewed the legal implications that and rightfully decided that they’ll benefit more than the penalty from enforcement if it ever happens. Same with Google, Facebook, etc.

It's funny how quickly they forget the lessons of https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21684329 and https://www.computerworld.com/article/2564087/european-commi... .

I guess we need higher fines to get the message across.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#270

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.

> you need spreadsheet software as good as Excel and a word processor that's 100% compatible with Word

IIRC I read an anecdote a few years back that if MS ever lost the code to their office products they couldn't re-implement it 100% compatible again since they don't completely abide by any standards like the Open Document Format.

I will always continue to harbor hatred for MSs Office products since when I had to write a big piece of homework for 9th grade in school (a "Facharbeit", kinda like a mini Bachelor's thesis as an intro to scientific writing) I then had to transfer the file from my computer via USB drive to my fathers' PC to print it out. Naive as i was, I didn't think to double-check the formatting after the transfer since it was the same software on the same version on the same OS etc. Ended getting a "1 (very good)" for content but the formatting grade was so bad it dragged the combined mark down to a "3 (satisfactory)". Since then I'll only print documents after converting to pdf and double-checking everything is ok and will never voluntarily use an MS Office product ever again.

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