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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#741

Post by lproven »

mulmen wrote: post #370
segphault wrote: post #22

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…

WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.

Strongly agreed.

WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.

Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor? https://github.com/google/gvisor

Others have done it.

Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx

The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#742

Post by lproven »

mwcampbell wrote: post #147
QuantumSeed wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your point, the Programs and Features section of the Windows 11 Control Panel no longer lists Microsoft Teams as a product that can be uninstalled.

To be fair, that legacy control panel doesn't list any apps that use the AppX/MSIX packaging model introduced with Windows 8. I'm still not on Windows 11, so I don't know if Teams is listed in the newer list of apps available in modern Settings, but it's worth looking there.

There are loads of "modern" apps that can't be uninstalled from Win10. Some are in the list but you're not allowed; some aren't in the list.

But it's easy to copy-and-paste a bit of Powershell and just uninstall them anyway:

https://www.techsupportall.com/uninstall-built-apps-windows-...

There are 3rd party tools too: https://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10...

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#743

Post by justsomehnguy »

poglet wrote: post #179
MarkSweep wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> unsure of the legality of this.

I always have a laugh when I see this logic.

A product costing more than $200 and not available in the consumer market without some hoops to jump? Of course someone would resell it for $20 (including their profit) totally legally.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#744

Post by lproven »

yathaid wrote: post #572
rthomas6 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This article has a laundry list of things that annoyed the heck out of me. So I decided to try and dual boot to Ubuntu on my Surface Pro 7. This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken: - HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on t…

I still run Unity on a bunch of machines here, but it's old now and starting to bitrot. I haven't even tried on the 1 or 2 boxes that have hi-DPI displays: it's not worth it.

On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.

Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:

• GNOME Shell. No thank you.

• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.

• Cinnamon.

I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.

So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.

Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#745

Post by scarface74 »

digisign wrote: post #714
scarface74 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what can happen when you turn off SIP on the Mac. You can’t trust developers to not be careless and/or malignant. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...

Poor security design. App installers should definitely be sandboxed, "sip" or not. Preventing the local admin from making any changes due to lack of that, is fixing the wrong problem. Or perhaps not in a granular enough way.

So it’s “poor security design” when a user with root access specifically disables the security and bad things happen?

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#746

Post by lproven »

tssva wrote: post #343
rthomas6 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With Linux while sitting idle my laptop burns battery about twice as fast as it does on Windows while I go about my normal workflow. This is a laptop which is certified for both Fedora and Ubuntu.

Depends on the model and the up-to-dateness of its firmware.

My main travel laptop is still an old Thinkpad X220, because of the great keyboard.

It lasts considerably longer on Ubuntu 20.04 than in Windows 10 $LATEST. In Windows, it runs too hot to have on my lap, and the fans run constantly.

In Ubuntu, it runs cool and I rarely hear the fan at all.

Check your firmware is current: that's step 1.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#747

Post by makecheck »

I feel like the industry is really struggling with shipping “boring utilitarian things”. Rather than let software remain boring and just-plain-useful, it is forced to slowly transform into a nightmare of ads, pop-ups and other crap that is clearly NOT required for core functionality and ultimately the whole thing becomes awful to use.

Even when the intrusion is small, it is ridiculous because it is not required for the software to work (e.g. in the iPhone SETTINGS app, nothing about tweaking settings ever requires the user to view a stupid ad, and yet there they are, crappifying the UI).

And as I get older I am telling myself “this isn’t what I signed up for”: I want useful software that is free of garbage, especially when money is exchanged, and most certainly when a LOT of money is exchanged.

So tell these bean-counters to get the hell out, and let us make computers “only” useful instead of ad-spewing machines.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#748

Post by lproven »

smackeyacky wrote: post #304
GekkePrutser wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome has very excessive window borders though. They're so big they seem to be sized for touch, very wasteful when you don't have a touchscreen. And it has even less configurability than Windows.. Add-ons don't count because they often break.

I don't mind the big borders, although most of the time I'm using dual 2k screens. The borders don't seem that much bigger than the ones in Windows 10. As for the extensions, I've been enabling those via extensions.gnome.org and have no problems so far on Buster or Bullseye. This is the one that makes Gnome useable for me: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

Dash-to-panel helps, but it doesn't go far enough for me. It doesn't work well in vertical orientations: for instance, status icons should be arranged in horizontal rows. In a single column they take up far too much space.

Cinnamon suffers from the same problem, FWIW.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#749

Post by Quinner »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #251

I don't see any mention of Cortana or how hard that is to rip out of the OS, but I think it's worth mentioning. The tool called "Everything" by https://www.voidtools.com/ is so insanely better than Cortana and blazingly fast that I'm not sure why they're still trying to push Cortana. https://www.getblackbird.net/ helps a lot and it's one of the first things I do to Windows installs when I need to use them, but it can…

Search being broken for local files is infuriating. I've tried to do registry modifications to fix it and remove Cortana and it STILL won't find a file searched for by name in the root C: directory! But it'll give you random web results!

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#750

Post by lproven »

garethrowlands wrote: post #652
sgjohnson wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways is Windows desktop GUI better than macOS? The only thing Windows has going for itself is backwards compatability.

In my opinion, Window management on Mac is bad compared with everything that isn't Mac. On the other hand, there's lots to like about Macs, so I keep using them.

Spectacle used to fix that, until it went EOL. https://www.spectacleapp.com/

So I switched to Rectangle, which has optional Spectacle-compatible keybindings. https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

I also add RightZoom: https://www.blazingtools.com/right_zoom_mac.html

With them, window management becomes basically as good as any other desktop I use, and delivers most of what I like from tiling WMs.

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