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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

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Re: The day Windows died

#591

Post by anthk »

TylerE wrote: post #411
einr wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not work on the actual 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 was doing this stuff in Linux when I was… well, not 10, but 12. Today I work with computers. What do you think ”tinkering” means? I do…

In a lot of ways it was way easier back then as you didn't have the fragmentation. You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland), sysv init (no systemd), OSS or ALSA, not pulseaudio, you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE. Even unicode wasn't something most really had to care much about...world was still mostly ascii.

Ok, let's make a list.

X11: it sucked. Modelines.

ALSA: DMIX worked, fine.

XFCE: XFCE with XForms and the GPL'ed with GTK was fast as hell. XFFM was delightful to use.

ASCII: Wake up from the coma, please.

Re: The day Windows died

#592

Post by ayewo »

ab_testing wrote: post #214
localghost3000 wrote: post #167

I am sure I will get all kinds of hate for saying this: despite the extra up front cost, apple stuff is a better value. Lets take device lifetime: I have a 2013 MBP 15 and 2015 MBP 15. I use them for intensive things like music production. Both devices work flawlessly. I also a System 76 Oryx Pro which cost more than any mac I own. The webcam failed 5 months in, several keys don't work anymore, and it gets hotter tha…

Yeah . If you are comparing Apple to a company that sells less than 10k units a year, then sure Apple would hold better value. I had to look up what is a system 76 oryx.

Same here, first time I'm hearing of a System 76 Oryx.

Link for the lazy: https://system76.com/laptops/oryx

Re: The day Windows died

#593

Post by luckylion »

egeozcan wrote: post #552
syl_sau wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that was just the install process. Soon you'll start using it and you'll quickly come to despise anything Windows-related. A good tangent is this absolutely marvelous video put out by the Microsoft Teams people, where they compare the performance of the "classic" version to the brand-new version. A sight to behold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7nnXej2K4

I really thought this was satire, at first. How low are the expectations from 2020s hardware?

Maybe they made the original Teams version terribly slow so that they can remove some sleep statements to get it down to 9 seconds for 2x faster startup, collect fat bonuses, do nothing for three years and then remove another sleep 5 and release Teams 3 to start in 4 seconds for another 2x start time improvement and another round of bonuses.

Re: The day Windows died

#594

Post by majkinetor »

another_story wrote: post #443
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…

People always say this, but in the last half decade I've put Linux (ubuntu varieties) on multiple desktops with near 0 additional effort needed. At most I needed to install a proprietary Nvidia driver which was easily done without using terminal. I've spent far more time trying to decrapify Windows than getting Linux to work. Now laptops are a different matter.

That's because _people have different usecases for OS_, not hard to imagine, right?

Re: The day Windows died

#595

Post by elihu »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #551
fsflover wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/apple

The original poster was trying Windows, Android and Roku devices. If this sort of thing bothered them, they would never have even tried.

Yep, can confirm I have no interest in using Apple products. The user experience may be better and they might have a better track record in some regards than Windows and Android, but they're still a walled garden and they still behave in an overly controlling way. They're also plain expensive. I want to use an OS that's accessible to everyone at no cost other than the (cheap) computer and electricity/network access. I don't want to contribute to a world where the wealthy have "good" computers and the poor don't.

Re: The day Windows died

#596

Post by zamadatix »

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…

Something I try to spread general awareness for whenever someone posts a local account workaround:

The easiest and most foolproof workaround to get a local account is to attempt to use a banned account. Someone conveniently got "no@thankyou.com" banned so if you attempt to log in with it (use anything for the password, you're not actually trying to succeed in logging in) it'll dump you straight to the local account screen since they don't want a disabled user to create a new account.

Unlike other workarounds this is intended behavior so not only is it easy to trigger but it's far less likely to stop working when the installer is updated again.

Re: The day Windows died

#597

Post by jai_ »

piyush_soni wrote: post #399
einr wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not work on the actual 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 was doing this stuff in Linux when I was… well, not 10, but 12. Today I work with computers. What do you think ”tinkering” means? I do…

Not everyone is here to become a Computer Scientist or even a computer professional unfortunately, they want to study their favorite subject, do screen recordings, make nice presentations etc. Our company uses RHEL / CentOS distributions of Linux. And they still suffer from all these weird problems I don't find 'fun' to fix because I have actual work to do, but I have to anyway.

It feels like of bleak to discourage childish computer tinkering on a website named "Hacker News". Not entirely sure what this says about the direction of this website.

Re: The day Windows died

#598

Post by bambax »

Aeolun wrote: post #576
h4ch1 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about OP but they're significantly more expensive for me (non-US; Asia) than any other offerings, that I feel like I'm being scammed. That with more subscriptions for anything I might want to use (Spotify/Netflix/Prime) just make it kind of a pinch, and so for a lot of people in my country. Edit: for ex: the $799 iPad pro costs an equivalent of $994.35 in India.

To be fair, you can easily use apple hardware for 5 years, where windows is just completely dead and unuseable after 2.

I have a laptop from 2014 that runs Win8 just fine; and my main desktop machine runs Win7 with a motherboard from 2011 and many parts older than that. Everything works fine.

(And yes, as I'm sure people will feel obliged to remind me, I do know Win7 and Win8 are now "unsupported", but I feel that's more a feature than a limitation.)

Re: The day Windows died

#599

Post by ducknalddon »

AdeptusAquinas wrote: post #316
ChancyChance wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more people could have the experience of using Mac and Win11 on a daily basis for real work. I've been developing on Mac/Win11/Linux for 8 years. Win11 vs Mac/Linux is night-vs-day. But you really can't get a sense of how awful windows is without spending serious work time on both Mac & Win. It's not an exaggeration. The simplest things, like remembering settings, switching displays, or setting up hardware, Wi…

I'll do you one better, used Mac for two years, Windows for most of the rest, and a hell of a lot of Linux all throughout. Found the opposite regarding cognitive load with MacOS - it feels like a ten year old operating system full of weird quirks and I got annoyed with its almost-linux-but-not command line. Win11 with WSL2 is my preferred driver, both for hacking and development (primarily Rust/Go not Node so maybe t…

>Its all subjective though.

Apart from adverts. From a users or consumers perspective advertising is almost always a bad idea because it is so manipulative. You were sitting down to play a game or get some work done and right away the OS is trying to distract you.

Re: The day Windows died

#600

Post by matheusmoreira »

dncornholio wrote: post #528
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…

How is this Windows fault? Format the drive and install your own Windows.

It's Windows: a product sold to people by a billion dollar corporation. Literally everything is their fault. If you have to reinstall the OS to get rid of OEM shitware, might as well install Linux.
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