791–800 of 884 posts
As an engineer working at Microsoft in Windows, I 100% agree...it's just as frustrating seeing these from inside as well (edit: from throwaway as a protective measure)
just wondering 1 thing.. is there anyone in microsoft that looks at the feedback hub or forum at least? They never seem to listen to ANY feedback..
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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.
The latest LTSC actually doesn't have as much stripped out anymore. Telemetry choices are the same now and also MS accounts are there. I was really disappointed when I tried it.
Well, what are you going to do. Not use Windows? Linux still barely works in 2022 (and if one distro will become really popular, with a big investment of money like Ubuntu did once, they will ad ads, like Ubuntu added Amazon), and MacOS works just on Apple HW (and has ads for Apple services baked-in too, just less obnoxious). You can use ChromeOS! Which is literally ad tech. Pick your poison.
Yes, occassionally there is a problem. HW incompatinility (new laptops), missing drivers (rarely as I am explicitly trying to buy well-supported HW), won't boot after a bad update (messed up ramdisk or config file) but easily fixable. You have to get used to couple of annoyances. But KDE DE is awesome, KDE Connect for Android too and lots of software works perfectly and let me do jobs I daily do. I have zero need to switch to Mac or Windows (used both before as well) and I enjoy having more control over my computing, updates, configuration. I can pick almost any HW I want on the desktop. I am not limited by a single range of badly-built, heavy and easy to dent macbooks, etc.
But people are different with different needs. It is not for everyone. Though I am really a happy linux user and do not plan to change that and I don't care about any M1 marketing bullshit, truetone or windows defender, cortana or whatever. Those may be nice-to-have, provide couple of fancy slight conviniences but in the end the actual hard work is done by all your skills, not the machine or OS.
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I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome with two tweaks (put the min/max buttons back on the window header and move the main menu to the bottom of the screen so it works like the old win 10 task bar) and it's streets ahead of Windows 11. It's a great blessing in disguise when Microsoft decide your old laptop won't support Windows 11.
Wait, is streets ahead a real saying? I thought Pierce on Community invented it.
https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf
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The one thing I find the most terrible is the "10 different UI conventions" thing. Dig enough and I bet you'll find a control panel or some other thing the has Windows NT 3.1 look and feel. It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.
Open "ODBC Data Sources" from the start menu Click "Add..." Click "Finish" with "Microsoft Access Driver" selected (no, you're not finished) Click "Select..."
Wonder if it can be found anywhere else. I did try the old progman.exe (via x86 compatability), and while it worked, it uses the modern API for the file dialog.
Except for some details , I really REALLY like Windows. Really what I'm liking is computing, and Windows is a big part of that because I selected Windows instead of Linux. Over the years there have been some changes: So, we have new hardware, some HUGELY important new communications standards, a huge effort on computer security, etc., and it is crucial that Windows has kept up with the changes. I like that. And I lik…
> So far, I like .NET. I do wish Microsoft had explained, just explained in simple text, just what the heck .NET CORE was. By now I've come to a guess that .NET CORE is irrelevant to me and I should f'get about it -- would have been nice to have had some EXPLANATION. I would say that .NET Core is certainly relevant to you and shouldn’t be ignored. As for a simple explanation, another user on this site wrote this whic…
https://dusted.codes/dotnet-basics
.NET Basics
Microsoft, this document is HELPING you a LOT with me. Did I mention, my view is that the biggest problem in my software writing, startup, Microsoft, the US economy, the future of computing, and progress in civilization now is in just one word, DOCUMENTATION that is missing for Microsoft's software. This is not funny or a joke but very serious.
Okay, .NET Foundation, through version 4.x, was for writing software only on Windows, and CORE was for writing software on nearly any operating system. Now at .NET version 5, Foundation and CORE have become the same thing.
Okay. I suspect that with CORE/.NET version 5, my old code written using .NET 2.x and 4.x and ASP.NET and ADO.NET will still run as before, mostly or entirely except maybe a lot faster. Okay.
I would make some suggestions about
.NET Basics
(2) Say that jargon is a word used with a meaning not in a standard dictionary and used with a narrow meaning in a narrow field. Well, the document would be better defining more of its jargon. Same for acronyms.
(3) Apparently software can run "on" a platform or "under" the CLI or CLR. Using both on and under makes no sense -- stick with one or the other. Since software stack is so common, maybe stick with on and drop under.
(4) The description of interpreted software is nothing like what I have long understood. The document seems to claim that interpreted software is much the same as just in time complied software; here there is a new sequence of machine instructions generated (the instructions are not new but the sequence is). In total contrast, my understanding is that interpreted software is having a program, the interpreter, run the user's software simply by directly doing what that software says. It is like a human reading the software and doing what it says -- no new sequence of machine instructions generated. A good example of interpreted software is the scripting language Rexx. I'm fairly sure, and due to computer security certainly hope, that JavaScript software is executed interpretively.
(5) It seems that the document is claiming that for writing programs with .NET it necessary to use Visual Studio. Gads, I HOPE NOT! I just checked and see that I wrote 11 million bytes of .NET software, and I never used Visual Studio. I fully intend never to use Visual Studio. Instead, all my software source code is just simple plain text I type in with my favorite plain text text editor KEDIT -- ALL of it.
NO WAY do I want any usage of Visual Studio. I tried it once: There was a LOT to learn just to consider writing the standard "Hello World". And for the initial project to write Hello World, I got some huge file system tree with maybe 50 million bytes of I don't know what the heck. And when something went wrong, I'd have to work through 50+ million bytes of undocumented I don't know what. I see writing the software for my startup on Visual Studio a threat like my being lashed to a railroad track with freight train at 80 MPH 100 yards away coming right for me. NO WAY.
I just checked: The way I got my .NET code compiled was just run as a command line the .NET VB compiler EXE program
Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\vbc.exe
Worked fine. Got to "Hello World" right away. Worked fine for 300+ .VB programs. Used TCP/IP, ADO.NET, etc. -- just fine. The compiling on a very cheap AMD processor with a 1.8 GHz clock was really fast. I was a super happy camper, thrilled, and NO Visual Studio in sight.
Debugging? Didn't have any problems a little print tracing didn't easily solve.
Documentation for using .NET objects? Put the tree name on my disk of the relevant Web page I'd downloaded from MSDN in my source code, and with one key stroke my editor would run a macro that did a little parsing and displayed the MSDN Web page. Worked great. No problems.
Now, however, that macro won't work: Somehow Firefox now floods me with popups about "safe mode", "Do you want to ..." and refuses just to display the Web page. So, will have to revise my editor macro to use the old version of Google's Web browser Chrome to display the pages. Firefox messed up, big time, and is no longer qualified to be my "default browser".
A lot of people with famous software have convinced themselves that it is really good NOT to do the work the user is requesting but, instead, to stop the work of the user, refuse to do the work, and put up various windows, popups, video clips, etc., lots and lots of stuff other than the actual work involved. Of course I avoid such software as much as I can. Adobe did that with Acrobat, and now there is NOTHING by Adobe on my computer. Firefox did some of that, and now Firefox is no long my default browser. This popup and "Do you want to ..." stuff is a really good way to get OFF my computers.
THANKS again for the reference. Remarks (1)-(5) aside, the good stuff in
.NET Basics
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 t…
Think about say, Microsoft Word (only word, not office). Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version. But, where would all the "product development" arm of the Word application go if they declared it as such? The only required people would be "project managers" to manage bug fixes projects, and the development chain (programmers, QAs, etc)...
But these people have to eat, so they keep adding crap to an otherwise good product, they keep shuffling things around and "experimenting" to maintain their job.
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This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97. If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft. Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
> This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97 Sadly, while some parts of the Linux Desktop have come a long way since the 90s, many others have not. > If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft. Presumably people use software to do something , and many times there simply isn't alternative software that does what you wan…
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It's like being in an abusive relationship. Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced. I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things). Linux has glitches but Microsoft mani…
While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions. Personally I'v…
I have the opposite feeling: installation by search engine and speculative .exe downloads feels so dirty. There's the Windows store but it doesn't seem to actually work very often.
Then again, following StackExchange or blog posts to add keys and deb repos for Ubuntu is no better. The AUR is also similar, but I trust that a bit more than a random blog post since at least there's a flagging mechanism.
FWIW, I rarely have issues with rolling releases on Arch, certainly fewer issues than I have with Ubuntu repo package versions.