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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

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Re: The day Windows died

#711

Post by javajosh »

dan-robertson wrote: post #603
pengaru wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how Microsoft can cheapen their main OS that much. I think the sad reality is a huge portion of the American population actually likes being fed commercial/branded b.s. Just look how common it is for folks to voluntarily affix things like Monster energy drink logos on their vehicles... The culture has no class, monster trucks dude.

I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class.

"I think you could do a better job of trying to empathise with people who are not like yourself and who do not conform to the norms of your social class."

This statement is extremely ironic. You are scolding someone about not empathizing more. Do you see it?

Re: The day Windows died

#712

Post by whywhywhywhy »

MBCook wrote: post #155
mikerg87 wrote: post #23

It’s not Windows. It’s the broken social contract the entire PC industry has in believing it’s ok flood us with ads and surveillance driven “marketing”. Any retail PC is a sewer of bloat and crap ware.

People want low prices, and care about little else. Possibly because it’s simply one of the easiest to understand metrics. How does a Ryzen 4678v compare to an i12363k? I follow computers and have no idea. Price matters a lot even if you do know all the ultra-technical things. How do you make computers cheaper than the next guy? Subsidizing. Who will pay? Ads and internet companies. People complain Apple stuff is ove…

> People want low prices, and care about little else

Yeah I mean look at the iPhone, this was key to the success of that product.

Oh wait no, its the opposite and testament that enough people don't just want the cheapest no matter what that a whole extra ecosystem from silicon to apps exists just to satisfy the pent up demand of it.

Re: The day Windows died

#713

Post by cubefox »

As someone who uses an Android tablet heavily, I really liked the Metro UI for Windows 8, where you swipe from the edges of the screen to perform various OS actions. Unfortunately Windows for tablets never worked out, and Metro got abandoned with Windows 10/11. I don't know about iPadOS, but Android is not anywhere near the usability of the Windows 8 GUI, years later. At least Google copied the permission system where you don't have to grant everything during installation.

It seems Window 8 was Microsoft's last attempt to really accomplish something with their OS. (Unfortunately users hated it, they didn't want tablets.) So I would say Windows died for me already with Windows 10.

Re: The day Windows died

#714

Post by safety1st »

jai_ wrote: post #597
piyush_soni wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly the direction of this website in recent years seems to be highly paid wage slaves bitching about not being highly paid enough. It has merely followed the direction of the industry. 15+ years ago the industry was smaller, pay was lower and you still had to be kind of a nerd or an iconoclast or something to get into it. Now it's filled with people who have no love for the tech and frequently even no knowledge of it, just showing up for the buck. So many people on HN now seem like people who would never start a business.

Re: The day Windows died

#716

Post by wrycoder »

onli wrote: post #157
wrycoder wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like simplicity, Alpine.

Just not if gaming is the goal. Steam would be only available as a Flatpak, says https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Steam . And the Flatpak version is problematic. Void would be a better choice if liking simplicity. Or to keep it simple, maybe Pop!_OS. Or Debian. Or Arch. Pretty much everything not Alpine ;)

I’ve used Alpine, Void, and Debian for years.

I certainly would never use Alpine for gaming, any more than I’d use OpenBSD. I don’t use it for multimedia, either.

My normal setup is i3 on Alpine. I like to think I have a good understanding of how an Alpine system is built up via its install scripts and maintained by its packaging system.

There’s not a lot of cruft lying around that I don’t need and didn’t request.

That’s what I intended by using the word “simplicity”.

Why would you think that Debian and Void are simpler systems than Alpine? They are much larger.

Re: The day Windows died

#717

Post by dr-detroit »

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…

[dead]

Re: The day Windows died

#718

Post by [deleted] »

javajosh wrote: post #708
zamadatix wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Out of curiosity, how does one get an account banned?

[deleted]

Re: The day Windows died

#719

Post by safety1st »

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…

This doesn't reflect my experience using Linux as my daily driver for 10 years, across many devices.

Especially these days, I get trouble from only two places - 1) driver issues on laptops that aren't advertised as Linux-ready, 2) adding 3rd party apt repositories and hoping everything will update painlessly down the road. It's hard for me to think of Linux problems I've had in the last... 5+ years? that didn't stem from one of those two things.

I'm not saying they don't exist but every OS has its share of bugs, I think the days of Linux randomly exploding for random reasons are long behind us.

Re: The day Windows died

#720

Post by throw_m239339 »

dagw wrote: post #632
throw_m239339 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like hell. They will quickly be turned away from Linux and want something simpler. Yak-shaving in lieu of work sounds cool, but it sucks when you really need to do stuff other than dick around in the terminal. Kids did fine with Amiga or Atari ST back in the days. Linux isn't a problem at all, they'll get used to it. And Valve/Steam proton platform allows them to run plenty of games.

Kids did fine with Amiga or Atari ST A tiny number of very interested kids did fine, most just ignored computers.

> A tiny number of very interested kids did fine, most just ignored computers.

This is false. It didn't take a genius to load a program just by putting a floppy disk into a floppy disk reader. It's even easier with linux. There is nothing difficult with Linux for a kid, nothing that is more complicated than windows.

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