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The Windows 11 Trash Party

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Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#211

Post by try_the_bass »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #88
try_the_bass wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I must have missed where that was the point. Can you point it out to me in this thread? There was an earlier mention of the weather widget, but that seems pretty different than "news headlines"?

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#212

Post by 7speter »

Kwpolska wrote: post #208
7speter wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m wrong but Windows is “free” (as in beer) unless you want to change your desktop, and then you have to fork over 100 dollars (if you don’t just buy a license from one of these grey market sellers who advertise on youtube). It seems pretty clear to me that Microsoft serves ads and collects people’s data to subsidize, at least to some degree the losses of not selling license codes for 150-200 dollars. This is…

Microsoft doesn't really care about pirate home users, their primary source of income is business users, and these tend to buy many more Microsoft products than just client Windows. Moreover, the vast majority of home users just buys a laptop with a fully licensed copy of Windows preinstalled.

Even then, google proved most people are okay with having their data collected and if they can get away with it, might as well profit off of it too. Also, maybe this is an old thing, but doesn’t ms get some money for having windows installed on prebuilds. And yes, I know microsoft makes most of its profit off of enterprise and government contracts, but thats not gonna stop them from collecting data for immediate (and potentially long term, if they find some new thing to do with said data) profit.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#213

Post by emodendroket »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #144
emodendroket wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, ignoring our personal preferences, which of those two halves of the business sounds like it's sustaining the other? I see a bunch of (cool) tools in one column, some of which admittedly might encourage people to use Windows or other paid MS products, albeit less so than in the past; in the other I see a lot of solid recurring revenue streams.

Azure is Microsoft's biggest money-maker, not the inclusion of ads in Windows. Windows itself drives 12% of Microsoft sales[1]. [1]: https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/

I think Azure is a bit of an awkward fit in the group, but just sticking with it, it's still eclipsed if we combine Windows, search advertising, "enterprise services," and Office, which would all seem to fit in the originally-provided "bad" group.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#214

Post by wastewastewaste »

speed_spread wrote: post #93
fortran77 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's awful because ordinary users don't bother to turn it off. But it wasn't _that_ hard to turn it off. I didn't have to hack anything, just look for the settings.

Except that it's not turned off, it's just hidden. But it's still running.

and came back for me after an update...

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#215

Post by toast0 »

LeFantome wrote: post #195
toast0 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

512mb should be plenty for win2k, I'd think. My college had a laptop program with Compaq Armada E500s that had maybe 64mb of ram. It shipped with win98se, but ran fine on 2k and xp. (With XP or 98se, but not 2k, you could use the internal display and the vga port independently). That was a nice laptop, but still, if you had 8x the ram, your machine was probably nicer in most ways. The key for 2k and XP is going to sy…

I loved Windows 2000 and liked XP but 64 MB is not a lot. 2000 probably ran on that but did XP really? I seem to remember XP using about 120 MB on start-up. That is nothing these days but I cannot imagine trying to run it in 64 MB. Google tells me that the minimum spec for XP is indeed 64 MB though with 128 MB “recommended”. Back then, recommended was really a lot closer to the minimum in practice ( if you wanted to…

Archive.org on my school website indicates it may have been 192 MB ram (I see a posting showing 192 MB as the new laptop config, but I'm not sure if that was when they first switched to the e500, or the slightly bumped version the next year students got, and it was 20 years ago, so my memory is getting hazy anyway), but I don't actually remember how much ram we had; that model shows up on internet spec sites with 64 MB, but it was an engineering school, so maybe they got a better than standard spec. Some students ran Autocad, and something called Mechanical Desktop, which I think was a 3d modelling program, others ran Visual Studio, etc. But I do know XP ran fine with what we had. I was in the Windows beta program when I started, and ran betas and RCs of XP on that machine, and remember XP supporting multimonitor that 2k didn't (it didn't show up until after the release date for XP though; I couldn't get an ATI or Compaq beta driver or anything, sadly).

Either way, a 512 mb machine should have been a beast compared to a laptop with < 256 mb and an ATI Rage Mobility.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#216

Post by MiddleEndian »

dustedcodes wrote: post #199
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…

They are not that different. Look at Azure and tell me with a straight face that it’s not the biggest clusterfuck of all time. Look at it. Azure is the single biggest reason why .NET developers have high blood pressure around the world. Azure is so bad people actively filter out jobs where the company uses Azure. The only other software which triggers this much aversion in people is MS Teams.

Let's be fair, I would also avoid any company that uses Microsoft Sharepoint!

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#217

Post by jwagenet »

smaudet wrote: post #167
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…

It is somewhat strange then that enterprise linux is not more common, you get stability and configurability. I mostly put this down to bad salesmanship/C*s tending to be effectively technological cavemen...perhaps there are backroom deals we are not privy to, though.

And, you know, a ton of critical software that doesn’t run on Linux.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#218

Post by lozenge »

7speter wrote: post #201
nstart wrote: post #31

Windows is my daily driver. I actually like the OS but Microsoft would do well to listen to these concerns being raised consistently. They need to ask some deep questions of themselves of what they want Windows to be. This reminds me of the days where Ballmers goal seemed to be to lock everyone into Windows and MS products when the real upside turned out to be “make MS products fully available where people already ar…

Maybe I’m wrong but Windows is “free” (as in beer) unless you want to change your desktop, and then you have to fork over 100 dollars (if you don’t just buy a license from one of these grey market sellers who advertise on youtube). It seems pretty clear to me that Microsoft serves ads and collects people’s data to subsidize, at least to some degree the losses of not selling license codes for 150-200 dollars. This is…

There are no losses. Firstly they charge the manufacturer to bundle a license, secondly their Office revenue depends entirely on users being able to run the software. And their Windows Server and Azure AD revenue depends on connectivity with Windows clients. And they need people to be familiar with Windows UI more than could be achieved just using it in an office.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#219

Post by MiddleEndian »

mastercheif wrote: post #166
quyleanh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with you except the prefer reason. I like to using Window because of its advantages about UX, which I cannot find in Linux or macOS. For example: the consistent keyboard shortcuts, the explorer's UX and UI when accessing by mouse and keyboard, the window management including tiling flow, the muti-monitor management... I feel that there is power at Microsoft forcing Windows including terrible adware as now, just…

How are Windows keyboard shortcuts more consistent than macOS? My experience is that the opposite is true. What’s the standard Windows shortcut for opening an applications preferences (cmd + ,”? What about switching tabs (cmd + shift + [ or ]).

Windows has (for programs that follow it of course) good tab management shortcuts. Ctrl pgup/pgdown to go left/right (equivalent to MacOS's shortcut mentioned above), and ctrl+tab to cycle through historical tab order (which many Mac programs have as well IIRC).

But for me the nicest shortcuts in windows are Win+# for applications. Win 1, 2, 3, etc. to select a program in that slot on your taskbar regardless of whether it's already open, and holding Windows and cycling through that number's windows, along with your standard alt tab for all windows in historical order. That, combined with the non-centered taskbar icons means you get great muscle memory on both keyboard and mouse, better than Mac OS's dock IMO.

Of course, MS is doing its best to kill this for some reason by insisting on limiting how you position the taskbar, trying to center everything, and randomly sticking "Search" into the taskbar periodically. Also for whatever reason sometimes the keyboard shortcuts are not reliable in Windows 11 lol.

I can't say I like all of Microsoft's plans, but the fundamentals are there, and they were solidly designed at some point.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#220

Post by jasfi »

I nearly switched to Windows 11 (from 10), but then I thought, do I have to? Instead I'm now running Fedora instead and my only concern is a printer driver, which I haven't needed to look at just yet.
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