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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

421–430 of 884 posts

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#421
post #418

I read through the nearly 400 comments and no one brought up using the LTSC edition of Windows, which actually gets out of your way or that you don't own the OS when you use a proprietary operating system. I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others. I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaint…

> I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaints of Linux "still not working" in 2022 effortlessly glide over the obvious: you're already making it an unfair fight when you adopt an OS to a non-native machine I did as well, an Asus 1215B netbook, remember those? The wlan still has issues to work properly to this day, the graphics card should be able to do OpenGL 4.1/DirectX 11…

I think that's a cherry-picked example of a very old machine. I've had a bug-free experience with the XPS 13 Developer Edition and Purism's line of laptops (I won't comment on the hardware quality of Purism's laptops here because that's a separate issue).

I'm expecting a Framework soon, which touts official support for Fedora so looking forward to yet another bug-free experience there.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#422

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.

Same experience with my youngest sister.

I bought her a Minecraft account via my Microsoft one, getting her the necessary permission for multiplayer took an hour to do so, parsing through cryptic microsoft documentation which essentially consists of a maze of links that loop back to pages you already visited.

The funny thing is that one of my brother told me before I started that I could just download the pirated client, that way I wouldn't have to pay for Minecraft for the 938th time and the pirated client just works out of the box contrary to the official version.

It'd been years since I had to interact with anything Microsoft, I thought he was exagerating. What a shock when I realized pirates actually do a better job than MS at making their own products accessible.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#423

I read through the nearly 400 comments and no one brought up using the LTSC edition of Windows, which actually gets out of your way or that you don't own the OS when you use a proprietary operating system. I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others. I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaint…

Windows knows full well LTSC is pain free but also less profitable. Sales will act really difficult, to sell it to a business unless they complain they are doing something mission critical. Also as far as I know it's difficult to buy LTSC as a private costumer.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an officer worker, there are many many things I do that cannot be done in a web browser. File comparison tools, macros and complex excel queries, hard applications for both new and legacy critical programs... Can this be done on Linux? Frequently. Can it be done in a web browser? Rarely effectively and often not at all.

I can vouch for personal experience with macros and Linux, since I made my return to it this month. It's not ideal yet, but it's workable, and there's a generational transition taking place while moving from x11 to Wayland, since the two have different notions of input, so you have to wander through some compatibility stuff to find your way. This is annoying, but already much better than the Windows story, because yo…

They were talking about Excel macros, not sure if you're talking about the same kind of macros.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#425

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 featu…

No post body was provided.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#426
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaints of Linux "still not working" in 2022 effortlessly glide over the obvious: you're already making it an unfair fight when you adopt an OS to a non-native machine I did as well, an Asus 1215B netbook, remember those? The wlan still has issues to work properly to this day, the graphics card should be able to do OpenGL 4.1/DirectX 11…

I think that's a cherry-picked example of a very old machine. I've had a bug-free experience with the XPS 13 Developer Edition and Purism's line of laptops (I won't comment on the hardware quality of Purism's laptops here because that's a separate issue). I'm expecting a Framework soon, which touts official support for Fedora so looking forward to yet another bug-free experience there.

Why cherry-picked? It is what I got the fortune of owning, same thing can happen to anyone else.

XPS 13 Developer Edition you say?

https://medium.com/@AlexMichelOrg/like-linux-then-dont-buy-d...

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#427

I read through the nearly 400 comments and no one brought up using the LTSC edition of Windows, which actually gets out of your way or that you don't own the OS when you use a proprietary operating system. I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others. I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaint…

> consider paying for a volume license for LTSC

And if I just want a single Windows machine and not 5?

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#428

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.

The operating system would look consistent, but we would still have to deal with all the applications that decided they need to draw their own UI, including everything from Microsoft Office to all the web browsers to all the electrons apps.

It's too late for the Windows ecosystem.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that, it's basically what keeps Windows alive.

Win32 is on life support. Many new features added since Vista don't work with it at all, or require complex code to enable in Win32 apps.

No post body was provided.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#430
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to pull back the curtain too much or tramp on everyone's hopes, but Linux can't compete with Microsoft because of UEFI. The PCs being sold today only allow Microsoft's software to run. In order to distribute a Linux distro, you have to ask Microsoft to give you a shim where they've signed your private key, so that you can share your own signed kernel builds with others. Therefore you can't publish a Linu…

Source? I've installed Ubuntu on half a dozen newish UEFI computers, some of which came with OEM Windows, over the past few years with no trouble https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot

The source is in your own link. Also note, the person you replied to went on to emphasize 'consumer' in a followup comment, which I think makes the point much more salient.

[1]: "On Ubuntu, all pre-built binaries intended to be loaded as part of the boot process, with the exception of the initrd image, are signed by Canonical's UEFI certificate, which itself is implicitly trusted by being embedded in the shim loader, itself signed by Microsoft.

On architectures or systems where pre-loaded signing certificates from Microsoft are not available or loaded in firmware, users may replace the existing signatures on shim or grub and load them as they wish, verifying against their own certificates imported in the system's firmware."

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot#How_UEFI_Secure_Boot...

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