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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

#481

Post by asveikau »

disqard wrote: post #473
PostOnce wrote: post #324

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…

Don't worry, a bunch of Microsoft VPs got promoted for showing that this would boost revenue (and, unless MS experiences a serious exodus due to this latest round of shenanigans, such increa$es will materialize). So, yes, there certainly are MS folks who (unironically) think that they did a "great job" with this.

I think the exodus thing doesn't work the way you think. Sane people leave, and the staff is left with people who want to be there and to be pulling all these stunts, spinning them as success.

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

#482

Post by blibble »

pjmlp wrote: post #470
blibble wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

previously there wasn't an extremely profitable, market leading, privately owned gaming company with a founder that is completely and utterly determined to ditch Microsoft and share the result of that freely with the world

By creating a platform that emulates Windows, otherwise no one would bother to target their device natively. Those 2% market shared are filled with games that are developed on Windows, targeting Windows. Meaning those game studios will keep giving Microsoft money, and letting Valve do the needful to work on their platform.

> By creating a platform that emulates Windows, otherwise no one would bother to target their device natively.

this is a stopgap measure to bootstrap demand for the platform

because these days the target platform isn't Windows

it's the game development kits sold as a service, like Unity and Unreal Engine

both of which are now supported natively

> Meaning those game studios will keep giving Microsoft money

now you've lost me

(it's also bizarre that you pop up in every single "Windows bad" post right on cue to defend Microsoft's honour)

(edit: ah, found your linkedin, so you're an MS employee, I guess that explains it then)

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

#483

Post by wilsonnb3 »

PostOnce wrote: post #324

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…

> Now, recently I had a startling realization: it's actually easier now to get many of the games I love running on Wine (with or without steam) than it is on Windows. The performance is great.

I find this hard to believe unless you are talking about older or indie games.

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

#484

Post by josephg »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #420
binarycrusader wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unrelated, but something that staggered me: I have a pair of Bose QC35 headphones from 2016 or possibly 2017. They have bluetooth. One day, an update to Windows 10 prevented them from working with Windows. If I'm remembering right, they would still "connect", but they couldn't play anything other than the occasional glitchy click sound. This problem was never fixed. I verified that they continue to work with non-Wind…

There's every chance this is microsoft's fault, but bluetooth is also an ungodly mess of hacky junk that seems to get patched just enough to work with big hardware vendors, and then forgotten about.

My theory is that the bluetooth hardware community doesn't have any rigorous testing suite for compliance with the spec. Instead implementors just test with a few other vendors' half broken implementations of the stack, and then they patch their own hardware just enough to make it work and release things.

I bought a bluetooth keyboard and mouse a few weeks ago (both from different vendors). Neither device works over bluetooth on my linux workstation. I can get the keyboard to work by running some random commands I found on the internet, but it stops working when I sleep my computer. (A suddenly broken keyboard is the worst kind of surprise). The mouse has never worked over bluetooth. It just spits errors into my kernel's bluetooth stack.

Both devices are just plugged in via USB cables now.

I suspect linux's bluetooth stack is spec compliant, but its missing all the dirty workarounds for broken hardware that exist in macos and windows.

Anyway, Microsoft shouldn't have broken your headphones. But Bose is probably just as much to blame.

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

#485

Post by justaj »

PostOnce wrote: post #455
cageface wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitwig is available on Linux now and works great in my experience. I actually prefer it to Ableton anyway.

I thought I had tried all the linux DAWs, but I haven't tried Bitwig; thanks for mentioning it, I'll try it out this week.

Just a heads-up: Make sure to have enough time to mess around with it because it's a massive time drain. Especially if you like sound design. Exciting and fun time drain, but a time drain none the less.

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

#486

Post by RugnirViking »

binarycrusader wrote: post #268
vanous wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hey, sorry that happened, it should have preserved all of the default applications, etc. Thanks for your apology. I can imagine this could happen to some random unknown software team but not to the supposed leader of the desktop. I believe this is honest apology but I am not sure I can trust that the issue was a bug and not a feature.

I can understand why you might be skeptical. However, I have learned over the years as a developer investigating update issues that the constraints placed upon the update process to ensure compatibility and resiliency are complex. The nature of the process used for most Feature Updates requires user data and preference migration and transfer. Notably, an entirely new installation of Windows is created and then existi…

You seem to be responding with pretty thought-through responses, so I thought I'd ask you this: Given some people have mentioned its possible the confusion happened due to a "dark pattern" - i.e. a deceptive UI choice, or one where the concequences of what things do are not labelled in a seemingly deliberately confusing way, what is the thinking behind this at microsoft? Is it something they would consider changing if enough people struggle with it? How do things like this happen - I struggle to imagine that product developers on the windows team use these default apps themselves. Surely there must be internal dissent about such things?

I've been facinated by microsoft in recent years, they are really putting in a jekyll and hyde performance imo. They are consistently great at developer relations in some areas, with things like generous contributions to hackathons, visual studio code, github copilot, visual studio etc. But seem to make decisions in other areas, in my opinion particularly around the OS team, that needlessly antagonize a lot of people.

If I were living in a place where they had offices, working for MS is something I might consider one day, if only to be able to contribute to such important things that so many people use daily but I feel like I bounce back and forth on this opinion when such confusing decisions come out with seeming silence from microsoft's end.

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

#487

Post by doodlesdev »

matkoniecz wrote: post #393
FredPret wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely spot on. If only there was a way to pay money and then get printers / scanners / Bluetooth / wifi working properly on Linux, I'd definitely be doing that.

At this point printers and wifi work more reliably on Linux, at least in my experience. And wifi troubleshooting at Windows is basically impossible.

Bluetooth is still the one missing though, specially for audio. I'm not going back to Windows though, no matter what.

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

#488

Post by userbinator »

"Not-so-great"? How about "absolutely fucking horrible"? What's with this "softening" of language these days? Is "doubleplusungood" next? I've been noticing it more and more lately on technical articles and it really pisses me off because it's trying to downplay the insanity of the situation and if anything only encourages MS to continue down this terrible path ("they just think it's not-so-great, no worries...")

To get them to listen and change course, beyond mass migrations away from Windows, I don't think muted complaints will work; we need to complain more, louder, harder. With the same amount of energy they're shoving this shit down our throats. To paraphrase Linus Torvalds: Microsoft, fuck you!

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

#489

Post by nightski »

PostOnce wrote: post #362
bunbun69 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt Microsoft cares that you migrated away.

Not only do they not care, they don't know I exist. That doesn't mean I have to tolerate their behavior. Their empire crumbles anyway, that's why they're doing this to Windows, because they know the future is (sadly) on the web, and the OS is less relevant than the browser now, and more replaceable than it was 20 years ago.

No one said you had to tolerate it lol. They just said it's not really relevant to the discussion. Microsoft's empire is not crumbling.

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

#490

Post by WalterBright »

guitarbill wrote: post #476
WalterBright wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. EDLIN wasn't much different from the text editor I used on the PDP-10 just a few years earlier. Lots of people used EDLIN and saw no need for another. Also, Netscape was an extremely buggy browser - it crashed all the time. Explorer was far more reliable. It was better . 2. If it was doing essential OS tasks, then it was part of the operating system.

Maybe IE was better for a while. But for a long time it wasn't, and it wasn't allowed to stand by itself. That was the problem. It was the de facto standard, not by being good, but by being pushed via Windows. I hope we can agree a text editor is different that a browser, word processor, or an IDE (at least nowadays). Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoida…

What's unbelievable is Microsoft being charged with a crime for giving away free stuff that was significantly better than any other implementation out there.

As if giving consumers free tools was harming them. As if Microsoft ever prevented any other browser from being installed.

Never mind that today nearly every OS comes with a free browser. Even my Kindle comes with one.

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