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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

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Re: The day Windows died

#671

Post by luma »

benrutter wrote: post #585
raxxorraxor wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every corner. This also extends to the default landing page of Edge. This is the worst form of bullvard, it is a tiny bit better than directly advocating for penis enlargement on the internet. But not by much at all. There should be no ads on the OS level. Especially…

> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. There's genuinely no economic incentive for them not to sell their own OS down the river at this point. Mac has established itself as a only-on-mac-hardware market, which rules it out as an option for the majority of corporate and educational settings, and while I wish the year-of-the-linux-desktop was actually coming, most coorporations just are…

> I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share.

That might also have been around the last time when people expected to pay for a new operating system. The other thing Apple has done is to lower the cost of OS upgrades to the point where selling the OS itself has become economically difficult. Apple simply offsets that with insane margins on the hardware, MS doesn't have that option.

Re: The day Windows died

#672

Post by nashashmi »

hakfoo wrote: post #295
nashashmi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was life when vendors would pre install all sorts of crap. Then you would do a fresh install of windows and lose all of those stuff. (Tears!) Now this comes by default with windows. I think Microsoft too is feeling the blandness of its product without vendor crapware.

There was a time when Microsoft themselves realized the crapware experience sucked. Back in the Windows 8 days, Microsoft had a few physical mall shops trying to capture some of the Apple Store magic. One of their selling points was "Signature PCs"-- guaranteed to have nothing on there but Windows and drivers, no vendor bloat. Strange they don't recognize the spam when it's coming from inside the ~~house~~ multinatio…

Some people just can’t tolerate blank canvases. They want everything multi colored.

Re: The day Windows died

#673

Post by eqqn »

Windows 11 is on hysterical trajectory these days. Recently they pushed in a search bar in the taskbar by default. They should rename it to Bing OS to capitalize. Using windows start menu search will fire off 5 requests to bing, Edge embedded everywhere. Usability out of the box is not only bad, it's net negative. A lot of effort has to be put to disable distracting features. Meanwhile simple file compression support still relies on other applications. For a "professional" or "enterprise" OS that is unacceptable.

Re: The day Windows died

#674

Post by re-thc »

chongli wrote: post #643
raxxorraxor wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. If they really wanted to emulate Apple, they wouldn't fill their OS with trash in every corner. This also extends to the default landing page of Edge. This is the worst form of bullvard, it is a tiny bit better than directly advocating for penis enlargement on the internet. But not by much at all. There should be no ads on the OS level. Especially…

Comparing Microsoft and Apple seems appropriate because they both develop operating systems that compete in the consumer market. It’s really not. Apple is a hardware company that develops an operating system and services to add value to their hardware. They make nearly all of their money from hardware. For the longest time, Microsoft didn’t really make any hardware at all, apart from some peripherals like keyboards a…

> Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD!

I preferred them served on floppy disks. 5 inches too!

Re: The day Windows died

#675

Post by CoastalCoder »

mikro2nd wrote: post #653
fsflover wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My non-technical relatives are using Linux just fine. They wouldn't be able to install it themselves though: I did it for them.

I don't know why they wouldn't be able to install it themselves, tbh. The last n times I've installed (various distros) the install process went something like: select keyboard layout, select locale/timzone, go away while it installs, reboot. There was nothing there to do unless you want to get into customising disk partitions or something.

I just helped my brother install Linux on an XPS 13.

The main part he had trouble with was configuring the firmware to allow the installation, and then know about the new UEFI partition, and then forget about the no-longer-extant Windows boot partitions.

It wasn't obvious how to make that work even for me.

Re: The day Windows died

#676

Post by spaceman_2020 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #626
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinkpads are solid devices but they’re really falling behind in screen and trackpads. Most higher end Thinkpad models have 1080p screens with 300-400 nits of brightness at most. The base M2 Macbook Air is 2560x1664 with 500 nits brightness. And it’s cheaper than a Gen2 Thinkpad T14. And of course, all Thinkpads can’t hold a candle to Macbook trackpads

That is just wrong? Most of them have "3k" or "4k+" displays, aka more than macs. Heck, my 5year old Thinkpad has a 2560x1440 500 nit display. You can get 1080p as an option, but why do you want to? It also has a very nice glass track pad, which as far as hardware is concerned is arguably better than the mac one. The difference is software support, which is better on Mac.

Well, at least in my country, the Lenovo website has 53 Thinkpad models for sale. 23 of these 53 are 1920x1080. 27 are 1920x1200.

https://www.lenovo.com/in/en/dg/LAPTOPS?from=splitter&visibl...

Re: The day Windows died

#677

Post by tralarpa »

Toutouxc wrote: post #561
newaccount74 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't sell 128GB any more but 256GB isn't much better. Pretty much everyone apart from the most casual users is going to fill that up.

My 256GB Air, which is my work+personal computer, shows 94 GB free. That's my whole job, my paperwork, Apple Photos library with 5 years worth of data, all my apps and personal projects, all my ebooks, memes, notes, screenshots, cached music from Spotify, everything is in there. I do have a 4 TB NAS at home, but that's backups and childhood photos, no daily-driving stuff. I don't consider myself a casual user.

I have a 150GB temp directory on my laptop, and I don't consider myself a power user (no video/audio editing, no modern games, etc.). 256GB is really tiny, even for my mother who just keeps local copies of photos and documents etc.

("temp" like "stuff I occasionally need", not literally /var/tmp)

Re: The day Windows died

#679

Post by spaceman_2020 »

cujaneway wrote: post #652
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinkpads are solid devices but they’re really falling behind in screen and trackpads. Most higher end Thinkpad models have 1080p screens with 300-400 nits of brightness at most. The base M2 Macbook Air is 2560x1664 with 500 nits brightness. And it’s cheaper than a Gen2 Thinkpad T14. And of course, all Thinkpads can’t hold a candle to Macbook trackpads

You should check out what Lenovo is doing currently; I just picked up a X1 Carbon 6th gen for £340 and loaded Ubuntu on it. The machine runs incredibly well, the trackpad is fantastic and it's a very quiet machine. Literally blew me away with the value for money, coming from my experience with Dell / Huawei laptops they're great.

I currently use a Thinkpad T14 :)

Don't get me wrong - I like this laptop, especially it's keyboard.

But it simply doesn't offer enough value compared to the newer Macbooks.

Re: The day Windows died

#680

Post by r3vrse »

My 6yo has an iPhone which arrived OOTB with a News widget, accessible by a single swipe, including similar "breaking" content. No sign-in required. Just an internet connection. What does she want for Christmas? An iPhone 14 Pro Max. I kid you not.

Literally everyone she goes to school with has TikTok and are talking about content in that app day in and day out.

Do I like this? No. Are you a million miles from reality for pre-teens? Yes.

A song and dance about how this is a somehow simply a treatise on the decline of Microsoft is naive at best and highly disingenuous at worst. I really don't want to sound vitriolic but do y'all live in the real world? I wonder sometimes.

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