631–640 of 679 posts
This is just another entry on a long list of reasons I personally do not use Microsoft unless I have to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pissing off people who love computers the most is a terrible idea. back when balmer jumped up and down in a presentation yelling "developers, developers, developers", they were still good (despite balmer's terrible leadership). I think they're just losing the battle for mindshare now. Users would more easily move to macs, if they're a casual consumer of tech, and linux if they're more hardcore. Windows has no raiso…
>Windows has no raison d'etre except for the gaming space imho Enterprise. Either cloud with Office 365 + Azure AD + Intune to get Office/Teams/Sharepoint/Onedrive echosystem and manage clients PC settings and updates over Intune. Or do it on-prem with Windows server, AD domain, Group policy, Fileshare server and all that. Some enterprise software that is not a SaaS may still require this.
I don't care what spyware/crapware microsoft chooses to add to the enterprise setting.
I'm not trying to call anyone out. I'm sure the negative experiences are genuine. However, it's worth pointing out Microsoft made some progress in improving things for some users, despite shockingly poor choices (task bar, I'm looking at you), and dark patterns for some users. It's still the closest thing to the "best" OS for a personal computer, depending on what things are important to you in the moment. I want that to be GNU/Linux/BSD but for me the FOSS OS' are just too distracting (always some sort of config chore needing to be done to address screen tearing, or why the touchpad won't work, or how to get the bluetooth stack working, or how to keep the configs in sync between machines, or how to reliably store and back up my files). It's an unfair playing field.
I used a GNU/Linux flavor (debian -> Ubuntu -> OpenSuse -> Arch) as my primary OS for around 5 years, before the build up of cortisol became too much.
If you're gonna pirate (well, use leaked activation keys) then install the enterprise version which has less of this crap to deal with. I hate start menu ads and edge default pages because they have animation which beings rdp to a crawl.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am a happy Windows "user". Specifically, I use it for its superior battery/power management on laptops, and mainly as a VNC client to connect to Linux desktops. As long as I'm in control of the firewall, it's also free from ads.
Any tips on setting up the firewall to block the MS-generated adds?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pissing off people who love computers the most is a terrible idea. back when balmer jumped up and down in a presentation yelling "developers, developers, developers", they were still good (despite balmer's terrible leadership). I think they're just losing the battle for mindshare now. Users would more easily move to macs, if they're a casual consumer of tech, and linux if they're more hardcore. Windows has no raiso…
When you start listening only to marketers/accounting and ignoring your engineers and users, you will eventually fail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This had been the opposite of my experience though. Maybe I got lucky with hardware, but I've never had issues with out-of-date drivers (outside of CUDA dependencies for research work) or having X or Gnome or whatnot break during an update. But, I need to use Windows at my employer, and it's horrible. I wish Windows were at a point where it was ready for development. Right now, the best dev setup is "install Linux in…
> Right now, the best dev setup is "install Linux in a VM" or "install this collection of incomplete ports/emulation/virtualization of Linux tools". Actually it's, "request a Macbook" or "work in a place where devs get Macs".
Side note to any Linux devs considering MacOS: Be expected to also request at least ~$200 of software for OS features we might otherwise take for granted. (Window management, per-app volume management, etc.) Other niche features might be totally unavailable (eg. moving windows between desktops with keyboard shortcuts, or speeding up input-blocking animations) because there's no API provided to make it possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 app…
What are you using for a music replacement app? My library is 32GB now and I don't think I'm using any of the other itunes features these days, just using it as the path to sideload MP3s.
After fighting a long time to own my music, I have to admit I got tired of maintaining a library, and mostly listen on Spotify these days. But I never liked the library-based model anyway, and so (when still dipping into my own library, and especially when watching movies) prefer an app like VLC that accepts that I might occasionally just want to play a media file without making a library. (Same thing with Books: for some reason, Apple can accept that I might just occasionally want casually to open a PDF in Preview, but finds it impossible to believe I might want to do the same thing with an ePub. I still haven't found a good non-library-based ePub app for macOS; I wind up just using the one that comes with calibre.)