Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 925 posts

Re: The day Windows died

#481

Post by Gordonjcp »

piyush_soni wrote: post #380
safety1st wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is basically about the author's nostalgia for his early days of computing with Windows 95 and how he wanted his son to have the same experience. This post is screaming out for Linux. Linux is the solution to his dilemma. If he reformats that drive and puts say Kubuntu on it - the kid's first PC experience is going to be a vaguely retro 90's style shell with a start menu, the start menu is going to have a Ga…

> And of course it's Linux, so there's infinite opportunity to get under the hood and tinker. - Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not do the actual work/study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I'm 40 and still horrified to deal with…

None of those have been a thing for 20 years.

Linux just works, straight out of the box, with pretty much any sane hardware.

Have you ever tried to get anything as outré as a USB keyboard, or USB memory stick, or heaven help you, a USB serial port working in Windows?

Re: The day Windows died

#482

Post by ctenb »

tester756 wrote: post #17

Windows 11 start menu search is slowest shit i've ever seen I can't stand when I type app name (e.g paint or vs) and it appears but click needs like 5-10 sec to be registered what the hell It worked perfectly fine on Win10 on the same hardware (my OS has been updated recently either automatically or by company). I'd call Windows 11 pretty OK once you tweak one or two things in register settings, maybe the lack of rig…

I can recommend Power Toys, which has a way better and faster search experience.

Re: The day Windows died

#484

Post by jwr »

safety1st wrote: post #353
apatheticonion wrote: post #332

It's really sad that there is no where for us to go in the desktop OS space right now. I, weirdly, daily drive all 3 OSes. MacOS; Work issued laptop and longish-time user (about 6 years with it). Windows; Desktop PC mostly for games. I've been using Windows since I could walk. Fedora; Desktop PC, dual booted which I use for most everything else. I cannot believe how much of a dumpster fire Windows has become. From th…

This post is basically about the author's nostalgia for his early days of computing with Windows 95 and how he wanted his son to have the same experience. This post is screaming out for Linux. Linux is the solution to his dilemma. If he reformats that drive and puts say Kubuntu on it - the kid's first PC experience is going to be a vaguely retro 90's style shell with a start menu, the start menu is going to have a Ga…

> This post is screaming out for Linux. Linux is the solution to his dilemma.

I'm not sure about that. Ubuntu at least is being slowly turned into adware. Apt already shows advertisements, the snap store is being expanded and promoted — and yes, these are small changes for now, but that's exactly how Windows started changing as well. Change like this happens, as the saying goes "gradually, and then suddenly".

Sad fact is that while we accept being treated as "consumers", we will be "consumers" and we will be fed crap that the advertising/marketing team wishes to feed us this week.

Re: The day Windows died

#485

Post by elihu »

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far:

I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course.

Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concatenated together, for services I might or might not even want. I don't know how long it is, but I began to suspect it might be tied with the Old Testament. Which you're theoretically supposed to read in a tiny box and agree to, but if anyone were to actually attempt to read every word they'd better clear their calendar for maybe the next couple weeks.

Next Windows wanted me to sign up for a Microsoft account. There's no obvious way around it, but fortunately a bit of googling directed me to a workaround that lets you create just a local account by disabling the network interface at the right time.

When I finally boot the machine up, the default wallpaper is a Red Bull ad.

I've had similar experiences buying a Roku (sorry, we won't let you use this device or access an account you already pay for separately unless you provide your credit card and tell us, for some reason, whether or not you have a penis) and a Samsung tablet (to use this device, you must agree that you have no privacy whatsoever). The people running these companies seem incapable of feeling shame.

I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future.

Re: The day Windows died

#486

Post by beebeepka »

StrangeATractor wrote: post #452
piyush_soni wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course it's Linux, so there's infinite opportunity to get under the hood and tinker. - Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not do the actual work/study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I'm 40 and still horrified to deal with…

It's 2023, do people still have driver issues on Linux? Last I had to worry about that was when Ubuntu was (Admittedly, I've done well by staying away from nvidia)

Some WiFi drivers are still not mainlined, so yeah, depending on the exact model, a brand new laptop may not have WiFi, regardless of distribution. I just bought one like that. It sucks.

All I have to do now is rebuild the driver after an update. "No Biggie"

Re: The day Windows died

#487

Post by teekert »

I was like this, always messing around with Windows 95, 2000, XP. Before that I "hacked" autoexe.bat on Dos. Then, in University (2003-ish?) a friend gave me a set of Mandrake CDs. A new world opened up, sleepless nights, Slackware, Gentoo, compiling Kernels, setting up my first Webserver, bricking the family modem to try to show it to friends (who somehow didn't see it on the address I sent them (192.168.1.2 or something ;)).

Re: The day Windows died

#488

Post by nyanpasu64 »

This is the reason I'm running Ameliorated Windows 10. I cannot vouch for the recently posted Ameliorated 11 builder, though I hope to test it out the next time I set up a new computer.

Re: The day Windows died

#489

Post by LeoPanthera »

elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

> I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future.

Apple makes laptops, TV streamers, and tablets. Is there some reason you're avoiding them?

Re: The day Windows died

#490

Post by LeoPanthera »

apatheticonion wrote: post #332

It's really sad that there is no where for us to go in the desktop OS space right now. I, weirdly, daily drive all 3 OSes. MacOS; Work issued laptop and longish-time user (about 6 years with it). Windows; Desktop PC mostly for games. I've been using Windows since I could walk. Fedora; Desktop PC, dual booted which I use for most everything else. I cannot believe how much of a dumpster fire Windows has become. From th…

> MacOS is better, but it still very annoying to deal with in a lot of ways. Apple are certainly set on degrading the user experience and in general neglect much needed feature additions.

Could you elaborate?

Post reply on HN