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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

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Re: The day Windows died

#811

Post by znpy »

bluedino wrote: post #792
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 have a USB device that needs a Windows computer to run the software to pull data off of it. I've always kept an old Thinkpad around for it, first it had XP, then I upgraded and had Windows 7...my latest laptop has Windows 11 on it. I had to agree to Windows terms of service, refuse OneDrive and Office365 trial, tracking, windows experience, plus the Microsoft account...such an annoyance when I just want to install…

Had a similar experience with my kobo, but I was able to forward the usb port to a windows 10 virtual machine (using qemu kvm with the help of virt-manager). It might work for you too.

Added bonus: you could snapshot the vm and always have a working copy around.

Re: The day Windows died

#812

Post by mrguyorama »

Aeolun wrote: post #772
h4ch1 wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not true, I ran each of my "Windows" laptops for 6 years; a Toshiba from 2011-2017 and a Asus UX430UA from 2017 to this year. Bought a MSI GF65 Thin for a GPU, I refreshed Windows and installed only what was necessary and removed dead files/services, with constant HW health monitoring as long as I could; then migrated them to Arch/Fedora with i3wm; keeping as minimal of a setup as I could. I don't know…

Sorry, I misphrased that. The hardware might be fine, but the OS will not be. Re-installing windows every year is basically a must. Same for restarting every day. Linux or OSX? Leave them running for a year and nothing changes. To be fair, my last experience with Windows was 3 years ago.

>Re-installing windows every year is basically a must

This has been nothing but cargo-culting since the end of XP

Re: The day Windows died

#813

Post by diffeomorphism »

GeekyBear wrote: post #467
baq wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably goes without saying, but I feel it needs to be said anyway: 16GB must be a joke by the market segmentation folks in Cupertino. I can just barely do comfortable development with the 32GB version. If docker was native, mayyyybe 16 would be almost fine…

> 16GB must be a joke by the market segmentation folks in Cupertino. Isn't Microsoft still selling laptops with only 4GB of RAM?

For 2500? Nope.

Re: The day Windows died

#814

Post by piyush_soni »

_dain_ wrote: post #759
blkhawk wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that user-unfriendly? Didn't it work? Did you miss the ads and the tracking you cannot turn off, updates that ninja-popup and log your PC for half an hour if you not careful for half a second while writing something or the simplicity of selecting the type of user you want to setup by pulling the network cable or disabling your wifi?

>why is that user-unfriendly? Didn't it work? assuming you're not trolling, it's user-unfriendly because novices are used to changing settings in GUIs. changing settings in a bash script is a qualitative difference, and paradoxically leaves novices more helpless, despite being a more powerful tool in principle. they don't know any of the syntax or semantics of bash, so they may as well be pasting something written in…

Couldn't have explained better! Just because some people are well accustomed to working in bash files and terminal, they assume it's a child's play for everyone. There are multiple types of shells alone with each having different syntaxes for something as simple as redirecting error/output to a file. First you'd have to explain to them what is a shell, before telling them why the solution given on Stack Overflow doesn't work for them.

Re: The day Windows died

#815

Post by crimsontech »

guilamu wrote: post #527
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…

There most certainly won't be any ads in the LTSC version of Windows 11 (coming this year... probably).

How do you get a single user license for LTSC though?

Re: The day Windows died

#816

Post by pxc »

kuratkull wrote: post #382
pxc wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > good Linux phone to free me from Apple altogether > Isn’t Android Linux? Yes, but it isn't good, especially not in the ways that desktop Linux is good. Reminder: this thread is about avoiding anti-consumer behavior from manufacturers. Android is practically useless for that.

This seems like where RMS would chime in. Because what we're actually missing on Android are the GNU tools - we have the kernel, but not the userland tools that define the experience.

I've run semi-proprietary Linux distros that are (in practice) parasitic on Android but include a GNU userland as well, like Sailfish.

They are a lot better in some ways, but I think much of the issue is present in the kernel alone, where dependency on binary blobs and proprietary drivers means kernels are frozen in place forever.

The issue is software freedom in general, beyond just the missing parts of the desktop Linux software stack that we know and love, like our package managers, GNU utilities, Wayland, systemd, etc.

Re: The day Windows died

#817

Post by pxc »

fsflover wrote: post #745
kuratkull wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like where RMS would chime in. Because what we're actually missing on Android are the GNU tools - we have the kernel, but not the userland tools that define the experience.

GNU/Linux phones already exist, see Librem 5 and Pinephone.

I have one and the hardware is so slow and the software ecosystem is still so incomplete... I understand still holding out for a 'good' Linux phone despite those things.

Re: The day Windows died

#818

Post by Gordonjcp »

vetinari wrote: post #545
Gordonjcp wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> USB serial port working in Windows The whole FTDI hoopla happened only because FTDI serial driver was the only one shipped with Windows, so only one that was really plug and play.

It's not even FTDI, it's any of them.

And if you plug it into a different socket, it has to go on the Internet to find the driver all over again.

Janky.

Re: The day Windows died

#819

Post by egeozcan »

jodrellblank wrote: post #805
LorenDB wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine that fifteen years ago, nobody needed a document editor embedded in a chat app. In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app. As far as "automated transcriptions", they weren't necessarily practical fifteen years ago. And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever. And Matrix clients. And many other clients. In short: Teams is not all t…

> " And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever. " Where's the fifteen year old IRC client which does hardware accelerated video chat from a web browser? > " In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app. " What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Except we have evidence: given a choice of Teams or IRC, businesses choo…

Businesses chose Teams not because of anything listed in this thread of comments. Businesses also didn't choose IE because it's fast and had a lot of features.

People chose Skype because it was fast and it just worked. It stopped being fast and people moved over.

Re: The day Windows died

#820

Post by themadturk »

pengaru wrote: post #531
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. 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.

That's because we've lived in an advertising-saturated environment our whole lives. TV (where all pre-streaming shows were designed around ad breaks), radio, newspapers, magazines, and finally online. Americans are used to it, there's a certain comfort-level in it. My primary reason for blocking internet ads is that they physically get in the way of reading; the security/performance concerns are genuine but secondary in my quest to get those damn ads out of my way.
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