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The Windows 11 Trash Party

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Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#81

Post by linguae »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #75
StillBored wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, few enterprises have asked for any of this trash either. I'm pretty sure that most of them would be perfectly happy with a windows 98 style GUI, that supported modern hardware. They don't want all this churn either, they want something that is stable, doesn't change very fast and doesn't require them to constantly retrain their staff or waste their IT admins time fighting with whatever new options require a new…

I think the point was that the big enterprises pay for licenses that don’t display this garbage. The rest, Microsoft is trying to monetize. I agree big time. We pay for licenses so none of this crap is shown. However, most businesses get the Windows license that is included with their hardware purchase and this crap is shown to them.

The sad thing is that you'd think the revenue coming from license sales to OEMs would be enough for Microsoft to not resort to these blatant attempts to make Windows an advertising platform, but I guess it's not.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#82

Post by taneq »

I can turn off all the UI trash. What I can't turn off is this stupid bug where it intermittently generates spurious keystrokes. I thought until recently that it was the trackpad on my laptop doing it but it happens with an external mouse and keyboard too. It's just intermittent enough that it's hard to pin down, while being frequent enough to be infuriating.

The worst part is that sometimes one of the meta keys will get 'stuck down' and I'll have to press them all until I find the one that's 'stuck'. A couple of times I've even had the right mouse button think it's being held down.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#83

Post by bodge5000 »

The ending of the article this one links to (The Day Windows Died) perfectly sums up my view of modern Windows.

I've been using Linux (Fedora) for a few years now, and occasionally I do look back to Windows. I have my issues my linux (for the record, macos fixes a lot of them but introduces entirely new issues), and maybe with a debloater and some tinkering, I could fix my initial problems with Windows. But as the article says, even if I can fix them, my biggest issue of all is how little I can trust the operating system. My issues with linux and macos aren't issues of trust really, they're just annoyances or things I don't like. My biggest issue with Windows is that I fundamentally don't trust it.

Its a shame as well, because to me Windows used to be a middle ground between the "do it yourself" nature of Linux and the "do it our way" nature of MacOS. I don't even know what it is now, but I don't like it.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#85

Post by tcmart14 »

sho_hn wrote: post #8
userbinator wrote: post #5

Windows is definitely adware now. Microsoft saw how much the average user would install, and thought "we can do that too"; of course, by being "official", their own adware is much harder to remove. Windows can show the weather in the bottom left of the task bar, which is nice I've never wanted that feature nor found it appealing. I can just look outside if I want to know the weather where I am, or visit a site otherw…

> Windows is definitely adware now. It's sad, isn't it? In many a Hacker News thread about the Year of the Linux Desktop, someone will inevitably deadpan how there's just no money to be made; there's no business model. It seems to me that the same is true for Apple and Microsoft. There's "no" money in the desktop itself, only as a value-add, via platform effects or via dark pattern monetization like this.

To be honest, Windows really should just rebase on to Linux. They can make their programs work on linux. But the OS isn't the future for Microsoft when it comes to profits. Their future is software and tooling. I don't follow MS's financials, but I bet their growth with Azure and Linux is far outpacing Windows license keys. I believe they have already indicated that Ubuntu is far more popular than their own server OS. The current and future cash cow is Microsoft making money off developer tooling/infrastructure and their apps.

And honestly, Microsoft isn't doing too bad at tooling. Had you told me 3 years ago I would be developing .NET applications, mostly ASP.Core, on linux, I woulda said you were stoned. But here I am today, cranking out .NET code that runs servers on Linux. And the tooling is pretty good and is just getting better.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#86

Post by donohoe »

I took a shirt-term job a few years back and tried giving Windows a go after many many years absence.

Never again. Wow. It’s stagnated in many respects and its leading innovations are, sadly, hostile to users. I was very surprised.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#87

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

ronjouch wrote: post #74
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones do you recommend?

Not OP, but here are a couple I like: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 (Win10/11, well-maintained. Closed source but coming from trusted devs with commercial interest in shipping a quality freebie that publicizes their other software) https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla and https://wpd.app/ (both not super maintained)

I don’t see any of those mentioning disabling of MSN content in the Start menu. In fact, at least one of them mentions only Windows 10 and not 11.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#88

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

try_the_bass wrote: post #55
giantrobot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it's not data for you , it's data for Microsoft they turn around and sell. Every ping to their servers is more and more tracking data on you. If you sign into the OS with a Microsoft account, which is virtually required with Windows 11, they've got all of that data correlated with you personally rather than some ID string.

> The problem is it's not data for you, it's data for Microsoft they turn around and sell. Why can't it be both? Being data for Microsoft doesn't preclude it from also being data for you. Being able to just put in a query without having to fire up a browser might be a marginal improvement for a lot of people. And Microsoft doesn't sell you data. No advertising platform does. They sell access to you, by using your dat…

This misses the point that I don’t want to see news headlines unless I choose to see news headlines.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#89

Post by draw_down »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #47

There are two Microsofts, as I see it. The one with DevDiv and stuff, which has amazing and mostly free development tools like VS Code, VS 2022, Windows Terminal, WSL, Azure, the .NET ecosystem, the MSVC C++ STL, PowerShell, TypeScript, and so on. And then there's the bean-counting, irritating part of Microsoft that has stuck around since the 90s and doesn't seem to go away. This part justifies adding advertisements…

[dead]

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#90

Post by matrix_overload »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #47

There are two Microsofts, as I see it. The one with DevDiv and stuff, which has amazing and mostly free development tools like VS Code, VS 2022, Windows Terminal, WSL, Azure, the .NET ecosystem, the MSVC C++ STL, PowerShell, TypeScript, and so on. And then there's the bean-counting, irritating part of Microsoft that has stuck around since the 90s and doesn't seem to go away. This part justifies adding advertisements…

Well, guess which part pays the bills for the other one.
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