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Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

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Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#401

Last week I allowed it to "upgrade" to Win 11 22H2. Part of the upgrade involved silently resetting a heap of my default apps. When the upgrade was done, Firefox was no longer my default browser, it was changed to Edge. Also, the default apps for PDF, JPG, PNG, TXT, MKV, and probably others that I haven't yet discovered, were set to their MS equivalent apps. Microsoft, this was not a nice thing to do to a user.

I've never had that happen to me in 20+ years of using and updating Windows. I suspected it's an urban legend but when a friend told me they experienced it with a feature update in Windows 11 I inquired further:

It turns out during the first startup after a feature update in Windows 11 (and 10) they sometimes show a bunch of new prompts, one of which is a very vague text with a big (default) "Recommended Settings" and a very small, differently rendered cancellation.

If you're one of the folks that just presses next / enter through a wizard without reading the instructions (which my friend was), you might have accidentally applied the "Recommended Settings".

And -of course- switching the browser to Edge is "recommended" by Microsoft.

Shitty dark pattern for sure but at least not forced settings change (yet).

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too my friend, I find mint a decent general desktop OS and I rarely touch windows for personal use. Still struggling with iTunes though.

Everyone struggles with iTunes. And every update makes it worse. I’ve used it on Mac and Windows and both suck

> Everyone struggles with iTunes. And every update makes it worse. I’ve used it on Mac and Windows and both suck

It's technically no longer even there on macOS, thank God. It was becoming a sort of kitchen-sink dumping place, and I am glad that I can now manage my iPad through Finder (though I still wish I could just treat it like any other bulk-storage device, as I can on Windows, at least it's there). There are apps called "Music.app" and "TV.app", if I want to access my music and videos the Apple way, but I can and do just ignore them if I don't want to use them.

There are probably a multitude of other features that were in the old iTunes app that I never even noticed or have forgotten, but I think that a lot of users who used to be forced into using iTunes on macOS now can avoid both it and its replacements.

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#404

Microsoft did a tremendous amount of hard work to convince me to make the effort to migrate away from Windows at home and at work. They want to lease me a word processor. They want to put ads in my digital filing cabinet. They want to take 30% of my software revenue, and when they realized they couldn't have it, they said they'd settle for 12%. No dice. There are zero Windows machines in my home or in my business rig…

What DAW are you using that is Windows-only?

Ah yes, you can also use Mac for most.

I meant, rather, that I don't think any of the Linux audio production stuff is great. Reaper and Waveform are good, Ardour is not yet (in my opinion, it's buggy and requires too much configuration that is not required in other software, but they'll get there).

The big-name software is genuinely better than what is available on Linux and is worth using, and the latency introduced by VMs makes that idea useless, and using Wine for that task is non-trivial.

I'm just a hobbyist though, my job is not music-related. I have used a midi controller as an industrial process controller though :)

Like everything else on Linux though, it'll get better over time. I do screw around with LMMS on linux because it's completely intuitive to me. It works, it's just not as complex and feature-complete as Ableton / etc.

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#405

Last week I allowed it to "upgrade" to Win 11 22H2. Part of the upgrade involved silently resetting a heap of my default apps. When the upgrade was done, Firefox was no longer my default browser, it was changed to Edge. Also, the default apps for PDF, JPG, PNG, TXT, MKV, and probably others that I haven't yet discovered, were set to their MS equivalent apps. Microsoft, this was not a nice thing to do to a user.

Hey, sorry that happened, it should have preserved all of the default applications, etc. There are multiple suites of tests and processes that exist to try to ensure updates preserve user data and preferences but clearly something went wrong here. I’m just a developer, not a spokesperson, but I want to ensure that this is investigated if possible. If you file a bug in feedback hub under the Windows Update category it…

No offence but it is difficult to take bug report invitations such as this seriously when long standing bugs aren't fixed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c).

There is something deeply flawed with the culture at Microsoft / the Windows development team, and it has been that way the better part of a decade now. Stop milking your users for cents by turning Windows into malware.

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows is still my favourite OS Now there's an unpopular opinion if anything. I've heard the "yeah it's kind of shit, but the games/applications I use only really work with Windows" a million times, but this one is kind of new. Edit: this comment was indeed intended to be read in the context of HN crowd.

"kind of shit" - in what way? I'm dying to hear an intelligent complaint come from somebody because so far everything I'm reading (for Windows 10 at least) are mob mentality pitch-forky type of comments. You can read my comment on it to another post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33946821

I can at least provide you with my usual favourites. I use Windows on my work computer and Linux on personal.

1. Auto updates. Get a pop up every 1-2 hours reminding you that by the next morning the computer will restart. If you do it now, you get rid of the pop up, but will spend the next 15 minutes waiting for the update to apply. If you forget about it, you will find all your programs closed the next morning. This never happens on Linux, although I don't know how much of this is due to the laptop being a company one.

2. Customizability: I wanted to customize the keyboard layout to my own preference. Could not do it. In Linux it was 5 mins on Google and one config file edit. Don't even care to think how this changes when one wants to start customizing further.

3. No tabs on file browser or power shell/cmd. This one is the most baffling one, such a low-hanging fruit to improve UX.

4. Microsoft data collection from usage: more of a theoretical concern to me, but still doesn't make me like it any better.

5. I'm not a fan of the office tools you're forced to use with corporate Windows: for some language reason outlook refuses to believe that I want to write "to the" and not "tot he", even if I explicitly tell it not to correct it. And unfortunately Excel is the de-facto standard for office spreadsheets. It has a rather primitive way to handle dates and can't open files with more than some 1 million or so lines. I can't help but think that if MS didn't have such a monopoly on office software, we would have similar variety and quality as we see for IDEs in spreadsheet software.

The last point is not exactly better in any other OS, but it still is a firmly Windows thing, so I feel it's justified to be added to the list.

Ah, lastly, using Linux I can be pretty comfortable that my OS experience will stay more or less the same for years to come. If bit, just change the distro to something relatively similar. Not so much with Windows. So far I haven't read a single positive thing about W11, and would like to hear your thoughts on having ads and whatever else you have to put up with when you're forced to do the switch.

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#407

Linux/*BSD may still be that awkward friend who sometimes misreads your intentions and causes awkward moments or knocks glasses over, but at least tries to respect you (snapd excepted). Windows these days doesn't seem to respect you. There's a difference in my mind between struggling to make your computer do something (because nobody made it easy yet) and struggling to make your computer do something (because a marke…

Precisely. I get frustrated with computer interfaces that are hard to use all the time. But at least then it’s just the program which is stupid; I don’t have to get mad at anyone. But to have to deal with things that are actively working against me due to deliberate design decisions? That’s outright infuriating.

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#408

Microsoft did a tremendous amount of hard work to convince me to make the effort to migrate away from Windows at home and at work. They want to lease me a word processor. They want to put ads in my digital filing cabinet. They want to take 30% of my software revenue, and when they realized they couldn't have it, they said they'd settle for 12%. No dice. There are zero Windows machines in my home or in my business rig…

I am similar, except one thing. I have separate hdd with offline windows 10 installation for gaming. It never gets internet access, never gets updated. Everything totally offline. I dont have a stomache to deal with Wine.

I just use Lutris now and it all works, there's no more screwing around with Wine for me; if you had problems with Wine in the past, I suggest you try Lutris, you might find it is no longer a hassle.

If you use Steam, it's all automatic and transparent in the background, but I don't use Steam for everything.

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#409
We use windows at work because people need MS Office, CAD, and because it is the easiest platform for me to develop desktop apps for our scientific equipment.

Win 10 issues in this vein were a bit annoying but no too terrible

I've been dreading having to move to 11 someday. All the bad parts of 10 get cranked up. We can't even create local accounts (as is appropriate for a single-user / shared machine.)

I have been liking other Microsoft software the last few years. But why are they ruining Windows for any professional use?

Re: Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My computer ran well with Linux with one display after instaing Linux. Then I tried to use a second, daisy chained, Displayport display. And the mess began. Confusing tips on forums, confusing and experimental drivers to install... And so on. Didn't manage to get it running.

The thing with Linux is it gets blamed for lack of vendor support. If something doesn't work with Linux it's Linux's fault, if something doesn't work with windows it's the vendors fault. That's never seemed fair to me. Those confusing and experimental drivers you mention are unlikely to be provided by the vendor and are likely a volunteer's best efforts to reverse engineer the driver As a counter point my old wireles…

My point isn't about who's at fault; it's the result.
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