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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

871–880 of 925 posts

Re: The day Windows died

#871

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.

My kid likes monster trucks. I live in one of the wealthiest areas of Long Island. Tastes vary; thus the only thing IMHO that is defensibly low-class is something objectively a bad or unethical choice, like dishonesty. You're going to get into hot water ascribing specific tastes to class; I just read the other day that some of the most exclusive residences in Vegas have clientele with bizarrely specific yet very basic food preferences.

Re: The day Windows died

#872

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I'm fairly happy with my situation: Windows 10 work machine, I do almost everything in WSL. WSL is pretty impressive these days, with native graphical support and decent filesystem and device interoperability. Windows has come a long way; it has a decent terminal now and utilities like ssh and curl have been added to stock cmd.exe . I've been able to turn off all the awful ad stuff. Never crashes, and I can do vertic…

> I do almost everything in WSL. You can run Linux in a virtual machine on any OS.

Technically correct, and I even have couple of VMs to play around from time to time, but daily driver is WSL/WSL2 in my case - interop makes things different and GPU based workloads without passing any device are deal-breaker for some people too.

Re: The day Windows died

#873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These kind elitist comments surprise me. Tech should make one humble, you seem to have gone the other way round. This was the kind of condescending behavior I was talking about in my comment, and you just proved my point. Calling others 'highly paid wage slaves' and thinking they have no love for tech without even knowing them because they criticized your favorite OS? It can't get more lower class than that. And what…

Dude, someone wrote a blog post about how they wanted to set up a machine for their son because, I quote his post (which was a fun read), "I want him to be able to dig deeper. To explore. To try things out, misconfigure, crash, fix, and re-install."

I pointed out that Linux was the perfect OS for this and your reply was that you hate using Linux on your corporate job because you have to do all those things. I mean fine you can hate it, it's not right for your job, OK. But in addition to being negative, you were off-topic. It spawned a bunch of guys debating the merits of Linux in a corporate office which is not the freaking topic of the blog post and to the extent you want to rattle on about it, you're arguing with a straw man. It shouldn't be a huge surprise you got flak. Sorry if this comes across as elitist but in the context of what this post was about I don't really care that Linux sucks in your office, I did not suggest you should use it there.

What Linux won't do is shove mass shootings and Tiktok ads down his son's throat. Again I quote the post: "What the actual fuck? That kid is 10, and TikTok is one of the things I am actively trying to prevent from getting into his world as long as possible." I maintain: Linux sounds great for this guy and his son.

Re: The day Windows died

#874
post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't need any special tools or DD. Fresh format it with NTFS Is kinda special tool in non-MS world.

5 years ago it was.

Does anyone use NTFS that doesn't interface with Windows somewhere? Can't see why you would use it in a pure nix environment.

Re: The day Windows died

#875
post #671

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> 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…

I think you are off by at least a decade, MacOS X licenses cost low triple digits (cheaper if upgrading) well into the oughts.

Re: The day Windows died

#876
post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure which year you are from. Over ten years ago, it was definitely the case. But now, Windows 10, especially 11, bothers me much much more than Linux. Just in around 3 months, this is already the 2nd time that Windows 11 screwed up and I wanted to clean wipe it. I never imaged a triple hit before: a bad update f cked up the external display; then uninstall the update again f cked up the whole system; and at…

I use all three - Windows, Linux and macOS for work (and macOS and Windows for personal use). Last I had these problems with Linux was 2022. We don't use the more user focused Ubuntu/Fedora distros. We use RHEL/CentOS which still look like ages old even with their latest versions, and suffer from the same problems. I'd love to personally use Linux because it's much faster than Windows, but at the same time I'm talkin…

RHEL/CentOS are meant for servers/workstations aiming to run 24x7, and most of the instances might not event have GUI installed. I can understand why those problems were there as end user experience wasn't the priority. And you mentioned it was IT that updating the kernel, if I read it correctly, then it's the IT did not do their job properly as they did not test an update at all before rolling out. For 3rd party support, it's getting better, but as you mentioned, still a long way to go.

Re: The day Windows died

#877
post #624

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I'm one the verge. I switched all my secondary devices to Linux and all of a sudden, I hardly heard fans running any more. I literally had enough with Russian roulette like Windows Update, all kinds of spyware for a long time but it's really really hard to find substitution for some of the stuffs I use also the drives were not that good on Linux.

Switched over ~10 years ago. Was rough then -- pretty dang easy now. Fedora 36 is pretty smooth. Only issue was a nvidia driver update a couple of years ago, but was easy enough to unwind. Otherwise no issues. It's like that Neil Stephenson passage where he compares BeOS to the Batmobile, MacOS to a Lexus, Windows to a station wagon, and Linux to a tank, with the problem being that people are scared to learn how to d…

You were tough. I tried to switch a couple of times during the past decade or so, but had to give up due to various reason. This time I guess I might have to crack through as M$ really really pissed me off.

Re: The day Windows died

#878
post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switched over ~10 years ago. Was rough then -- pretty dang easy now. Fedora 36 is pretty smooth. Only issue was a nvidia driver update a couple of years ago, but was easy enough to unwind. Otherwise no issues. It's like that Neil Stephenson passage where he compares BeOS to the Batmobile, MacOS to a Lexus, Windows to a station wagon, and Linux to a tank, with the problem being that people are scared to learn how to d…

I switched from ubuntu to debian and from debian to fedora (37). Fedora is just great. And being a red hat certified sysadmin, I'm liking it even more.

There seems to be issues with Wayland graphics driver in Fedora 37, after switching to X the issue went away.

Re: The day Windows died

#879
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, they unironically posted a video that a chat application takes 9 seconds to launch. What is wrong with computing?

...and they're congratulating themselves on having reduced the memory overhead of a chat app from ~1GB to ~500MB.

For context running Slack with a medium sized company workspace:

* Slack takes 6.5s to load on my 2021 Macbook.

* Slack consumes 366MB of RAM - if I browse around that rises to 744MB of RAM.

For the longest time Slack would kill my machine if colleagues posted gifs in messages. I'm no fan of Teams but I think there's plenty of shame to go around living in a world of eight core CPUs running large Electron apps.

Re: The day Windows died

#880
post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from ubuntu to debian and from debian to fedora (37). Fedora is just great. And being a red hat certified sysadmin, I'm liking it even more.

My primary dislike is that gnome continually focuses on touch-centric UI over desktop UI and occasionally makes changes just for the hell of it which bother me and break extensions and themes. The recent changes to buttons just feel like they're chasing Android. Despite all of that, when combined with a few extensions and customizations it remains my favorite despite experience, despite the vanilla experience being s…

I don't know why, I never liked Gnome. I used to use KDE, now I'm mostly using LXDE.
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