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The Windows 11 Trash Party

birchtree.me

401–410 of 523 posts

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#401
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Against fixing this behavior, and others: The year of the Linux desktop for anyone who regularly browses this site came a long, long time ago. If you're running Windows today and still telling yourself that you'll switch once it finally gets bad enough , the sad truth is that you'll put up with anything, as long as Microsoft introduces new bad behavior slowly enough to let you acclimate to their successive, increasin…

Look at these HN comments about Linux laptop battery life, for example: - " you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w " - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327618 - " have you looked into tlp? Have you tried tuning it for battery life? " - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327071 - " It's only a few ye…

There's a difference between dealing with shortcomings or taking up a DIY project and contending with malice, or buying from a vendor with fundamentally antagonistic incentives. Both may be struggles, but only one is an insult.

There's a practical difference as well, in terms of what is a regression vs. what is intended behavior come back to haunt you. This shapes what's likely to recur as well as what's the longterm trend over time.

What you're doing here is like pretending that a car with a smaller gas tank than you're used to presents the same kind of problem as one that reports every route you take in order to collect a fee on behalf of someone else— never mind the fact that half of those posts are explicitly about running Linux on hardware not intended for it, or that you are inevitably going to find advice about obsessive optimizations on a site called 'Hacker News'. None of the issues those posts raise are about user-hostile behavior from Linux OS vendors, or the exploitation of user data, or the subversion of the user's attention.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#402
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's insane how good Microsoft sales people are, if they manage to make Azure sell this well when GCP and AWS are objectively better at basically everything, including cost considerations.

Counterpoint on GCP: Way too risky to use as a small to medium business. Google has a known history of firing its customers without recourse.

From what I understand you do have the option to pay more for more assurances and higher touch support. It's just that the pricing will be the same, or even higher, than Azure.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#403

I've been daily driving Linux since March 2020 however recently purchased a Valve Index and decided to pop Win 10 on a completely empty secondary M.2. The setup kept failing because it just could not handle the fact that the primary M.2 had a Linux boot loader on it. It just refused to install. My work around was to setup a QEMU VM inside Linux where I provided the VM with the secondary M.2 as the main install drive.…

Excel is the big one. The web version is really, really good on its own terms, but desktop excel really is in a class of its own both in terms of capability and penetration.

Yes, it does give people regular reasons to point and laugh at it, and it's probably dangerous how much of the modern world depends on it, but you only have to use a competitor for a very short period of time to realise that displacing it would be a very, very tall order.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#404
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…

Deep questions like why didn't anyone like Metro UI on Windows 8? :) Even on touch devices it sucked. I would say that was an obvious sign of a a sick organization when it effects that kind of carnage on its users. Only reason they got away with it, was that there were no real alternatives to Windows. Windows 11 is something in the same league, but i would say there are more alternatives now than ever before, so Micr…

Cause everyone already had learned how to "touch"-gui, but microsoft in typical arrogance, redesigned it from the bottom up, throwing all the learnings away, you either had from android or macos. And like introducing a third language, to do the same tasks you already can perform fluent in two other languages, it was just this constant stepping into the void of expectations. It came out 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language) and was thus 9 years to late (1 iphone) and 5 years to late (1 android). It was moment were microsoft dediced to go uphill, that journey developers usually have to face, when dragging users away from windows (aka the universal gui). I mean, the normal user learns windows in school.

You only make that sort of learning effort on rare ocassions. And you dont make it just because your vendor locks you out of a previoulsy perfectly working for you ("You learned to know it blind") device.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#405
Ever since the "tile"ification of windows 8, they've been monetizing the OS like it's a TV and they're the only one allowed to run commercials on it.

I really feel like if you purchase money to use software, aside from security updates, you should be able to effortlessly have a clean experience with it, free of ads, mandatory metadata collection, and promoted trash from MSN's tabloid-headlines.

Every smart feature in Windows is an insidious plot for Microsoft to brand themselves further into our lives, and I've been using and recommending linux whenever possible because of it. I miss the simplicity of Windows 7.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all its faults, Windows is the only operating system that manages to balance practicality, versatility, customizability, and reliability all in one single operating system. Linux? The fucking thing breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong. No reliability, zilch, nada, /dev/null. I don't trust Linux with anything mission critical, unless I'm paying someone monies to make sure my time isn't wasted (eg: Red Ha…

I'm surprised at that on the reliability front - things are a fuss to get going, but if you're on a LTS version of whatever-distro, its usually pretty rock-solid (hence why its powering everything you look at...)

Tip: there's much, much less fuss if you not it preinstalled, with support.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they can control it? Lack of design in Windows is a direct consequence of MS's inability to steer its process and product strategies. Multiple competing GUI teams, user experience, core devs unable to roll out features because of the number of stake holders, etc.

Windows 11 arguably looks better than Monterey. Please don't tell me closing windows on top left is a good UX decision and also don't tell me that Mac's weird 2.5D icons look good. Apple's software design language is actually terrible. Of course that can't be said about the hardware - that's world class.

The UX things are mostly just conventions, you may not like it, but doesn't make it objectively terrible.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not ‘pirating’ to not pay for Windows for quite a while now. The license is optional and I don’t bother with it on VMs.

For anyone wondering some details here [0]. You can now easily download the installation ISO directly from Microsoft, and choose to run it either 'activated' or 'unactivated', but there's no piracy involved.

0: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-windows-10-free-or-...

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#409
post #389
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…

Wouldn’t the “advertising platform” part always suck, though? What I mean is that the problem is not an “identity crisis”. It’s that it’s becoming enshittified.

I agree. I don't think Microsoft is confused - Windows is becoming an advertising/"service" platform. This is entirely intentional. I also don't think that product managers or executives think of themselves as building an "OS" anymore. That's a very technical way of looking at the product vs. whatever business buzzwords at in vogue.

Re: The Windows 11 Trash Party

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And security issues. The downside of folks wanting to write software for your platform is that not all of it is good for the user.
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