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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#271

Post by taneq »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #229
artificialLimbs wrote: post #190

I stopped playing Minecraft recently again. I first quit a few years ago, but wanted to show it to my young son. Trying to go back and EVEN JUST INSTALL it now is filled with Microsoft-ian circles of login catastrophe and "upgrade your account" nightmares. The installation process was so difficult, I will never play again.

Minetest scratches that itch pretty well, open source and no MS nonsense.

Was going to mention Minetest, we’ve been running a family mineclone2 server for a couple of months now and it’s been great.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#272

Post by NeutronStar »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #204
ziml77 wrote: 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 don't even use a desktop environment. Gonna be using a window manager for ever. Most of everything is run on the command line anyway.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#273

Post by jiggawatts »

ripley12 wrote: post #227
jiggawatts wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featu…

> What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools I have no idea why you would say this. VS Code is an incredibly popular and well-liked product.

It is popular because it filled a niche where next to nothing existed, so for people in those fields anything is a step up.

For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.

For example, instead of making improvements to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), Microsoft marked it as deprecated and "forced" everyone over to Visual Studio Code, whether they like it or not. E.g.: it's the only Microsoft IDE with PowerShell Core (pwsh) support.

Despite being the only supported Microsoft PowerShell IDE, VS Code does not play nice with PowerShell. For example, if I open Code, it opens three(3!) PowerShell terminals for unfathomable reasons. One of those starts with errors, the other works, but the third one is the default and crashes if you look at it sideways. Tab-complete just... stops. Even when tab-complete "works", it'll often start mid way through the list, hiding all of the relevant items and showing your random garbage like "quick start snippets" that make zero sense in the given tab-complete context.

I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.

Then there's always the smart-ass that explains patiently that this is all my fault for not "customising" my VS Code experience with JSON configuration settings that are seven levels deep and documented only in some blog article from three years ago. Meanwhile, I've never had to customise anything in Visual Studio. It "just works" the way you'd expect a Windows application to work. Not some Linux-Windows hybrid intended to be the "embrace" part of the unholy "embrace-extend-extinguish" trio.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#274

Post by nwallin »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #66
rbut wrote: post #56

Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed. In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account. Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me th…

Looks like switching to linux when win 7 support ended was the right move. All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.

> All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason,

All?

My experience is that 90% work fine, 9% have weirdness, (for instance, voices in Skyrim are out of sync with mouth movements) and 1% of them have game breaking bugs.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#275

Post by freeone3000 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #214
the_snooze wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. All these posts that say "oh just use Linux, it's compatible!" must be from naive junior devs who never have had to to deal with external organizations (especially governments) that require you to use their Word templates and share PowerPoint slides on their Teams calls.

Teams works on Linux now. It's a pig of an app especially on Mac (haven't tried Linux enough to verify) but it runs. On my Mac it takes a minute to start (fast M1 system), randomly crashes or hangs and often uses more than half my memory. But it is supported :)

It kind of works on Linux now. The only way I was able to join a call as a guest (not to my tenant!) was to launch it in Edge -- the native client crashed on launch if invoked to join an external meeting.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#276

Post by seanp2k2 »

userbinator wrote: post #233
tcmart14 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it was going to save me. I do think I had a type that said 'good future.' I meant to put something along the lines of 'good probability of a future.' Chrome OS is going to be another user hostile environment for sure. But the point is, Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one d…

Chrome OS has a good shot at displacing windows not because it is better or less user hostile, but because it is putting cheap machines in the hands of kids who will one day, grow up, and enter the workforce and lead the workforce later on. That's even worse, because as the saying goes, those who never had freedom (or ownership, for that matter) won't miss it.

Fear not; they'll deprecate Chrome OS and Stadia in the next few years and add it to https://killedbygoogle.com/ , which I see has just added AngularJS recently. Google Cloud Print stuck out there too, since we had a big thing about rolling that out at work just a few years ago as the future solution for all our printing needs.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#277

Post by azangru »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #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…

> a high-end laptop recently

Oh, cool, a recent high-end laptop that works well with linux. Could you share the model?

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#278

Post by freeone3000 »

tcmart14 wrote: post #141
criddell wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of software not on Linux or that doesn't run well on Linux. People pick their OS based on what software they want to run, not the other way around. And they pick from what they can buy. Go into a BestBuy and you can choose between Windows machines, Apple machines, and a few Chromebooks. If you did manage to buy a Linux machine somewhere, you are going to be disappointed when you go back into that BestBu…

But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers. If Brother feels that there are enough people running Linux and want to own a Brother printer, they will make the driver. Maybe that is the issue we need solve, or at least the part we need to be vocal about. If brother gets a significant number of emails asking for linux support, perhaps they will finally make lin…

I think it's interesting you chose Brother here, because Linux support is a first class citizen -- they not only offer CUPS drivers, they offer Deb and RPM packages that also set up dependencies.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#279

Post by drpixie »

ripley12 wrote: post #227
jiggawatts wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featu…

> What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools I have no idea why you would say this. VS Code is an incredibly popular and well-liked product.

Popular is not the same as quality. That's something that MS seem genuinely unable to understand - examples of a better product are countered with "our product is X times bigger, it is better". Well, no - X times bigger is probably momentum, or network effect, or sneaky placement/contracts - it has nothing to so with the quality of the product.

Similar "well liked" very often really means "the only product I've used" or "the only product I know well" :(

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#280

Post by smackeyacky »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #224
smackeyacky wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft don't help themselves by making desktop app production very confusing. A huge range of possible GUI frameworks, every one looks like a trap/dead end like Silverlight. Microsofts successful cross platform apps like VSCode and Teams ignore all of them so following suit seems pretty sensible to me.

Teams is only successful because it's free and integrates with the M365 ecosystem. All its competitors are so much better. It wasn't actually so bad at the start, it was just a poor slack knock-off. (Poor because the visual density is much lower with these oversized chat bubbles) But now they are spending all their dev time cramming so much stuff into it without considering performance that it's become tooslow and cl…

I would agree Teams itself is a mess. I was just pointing out that Microsoft have successful apps across 3 different operating systems, and neither of them use Microsoft GUI frameworks.

I don't see why I should use a Microsoft GUI any more either. Once you stop using their libraries, you no longer need their OS at all. Pretty strange behaviour from MS if you ask me, encouraging your users to get off their systems.

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