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De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

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171–180 of 347 posts

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#171
post #53

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but how on earth did the EU pass a regulation[0] with such far-reaching implications? First Apple opening up to third-party app stores and RCS, now Microsoft giving users a bit more leeway. How come none of the big tech lobby against it in the EU? If it survives the waves of appeals, the DMA will probably change the entire technology landscape in the near future. Not that I'm complaining…

Because while corruption* is still rampant in the EU, it’s not at least directly protected by the constitution like in the USA, so occasionally some legislation that benefits normal folks over megacorporations manages to sneak through.

*also known as lobbying with so much money you can buy millions of times as much “free” speech as everyone else.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memory management on Linux is worse than in Windows and Mac. Mac has an efficient memory compression and dynamic swap system, Windows also has one, but a little bit less efficient in my personal experience, and on Linux you have to configure zRAM or zSwap and they don’t work as well. You can’t keep memory pages as compressed data in RAM what you can do in Mac and Windows. The out of memory behavior is also very b…

> The out of memory behavior is also very bad on Linux, where it will just lock your system. Don't modern distributions come with the OOM killer? On my Arch system I didn't have to do anything to have the one from systemd.

My anecdote is this:

I had a Ubuntu 20.04 VM from university with 64 GB memory and my process needed 70 GB and it did lock my system.

And the anecdote continues: I ran a 55 GB process on a 16 GB Mac and it finished without a problem and without me having to configure anything.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#173
post #53

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but how on earth did the EU pass a regulation[0] with such far-reaching implications? First Apple opening up to third-party app stores and RCS, now Microsoft giving users a bit more leeway. How come none of the big tech lobby against it in the EU? If it survives the waves of appeals, the DMA will probably change the entire technology landscape in the near future. Not that I'm complaining…

Perhaps they agreed to overlook some tax evasion or something

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#174
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on linux for the better part of the last 6 years. Legitimately the only times I can recall _not_ being able to do something on Linux were a handful of use cases: - Multiplayer games: Steam Proton largely solves compatibility for a lot of games now, but the included DRM and anti-cheat for some multiplayer games made them unplayable. - Certain specialist tools like Photoshop, some CAD software, etc. Open sour…

I tried multiple times to use Linux as primary desktop. I gave up. Windows hardware support for consumer devices is just better. And games, especially old games. Linux is amazing , but for a everyday machine. I've given up on Linux, I don't have time to configure it. Also every desktop ui Ive used on it isn't quite as polished as windows.

> Windows hardware support for consumer devices is just better.

YMMV. My run-of-the-mill corporate hp-recommends-windows laptop's webcam was unsupported under Windows for approx. a year after I bought it. Worked OOB on Linux since day one.

Ditto for my other run-of-the-mill corporate hp-recommends-windows laptop's intel iGPU: it had a tough time outputting 4k@60Hz over the hp dock. Had to do a weird dance of unplugging and replugging the monitor at just the right time to make it work. Fixed after some Windows update half a year in. 0 issues since day one on Linux. Also, on this particular machine, you better have an external mouse for installing Windows, since it doesn't recognize the touchpad. Ditto for the integrated intel wifi card. Bonus points for Windows insisting on connecting to the internet (the pc doesn't have any onboard wired network). Last I tried, it was win11 22h2. The computer is a 2020 model.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always deploy the DBAN when I get my hands on a new laptop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darik's_Boot_and_Nuke

> DBAN can be configured to automatically wipe every hard disk that it sees on a system or entire network of systems, making it very useful for unattended data destruction scenarios. Bored, belligerent 14 year old me would have loved to get his hands on this...

Bored 14 year old me basically had this, it was pretty booring. Destroying data mechanically with a sledge hammer was much more fun.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#176
post #85

Suppose you are buying a new laptop ... does anyone else feel sad that their operating system has effectively turned into some weird social media marketing tracking data harvesting hybrid of a thing? But in the name of progress and security, you can't stay on Windows 10. So for me it's this weird middle ground right now .. waiting for either Windows to U-turn, die out, or for more work apps to port to OS X.

Surprisingly, I'm not sad at all. I've been using Windows for a long time and recently purchased a new computer with Windows 11. It's such an abomination that it forced me to try Linux for the very first time on my production machine, and I'm very pleased with the results. A thank you to Microsoft for giving me a reason to look somewhere else, and a sincere thank you to the open source community for all the work they…

note that ubuntu is trending towards the bad behavior that windows and macos are trying to normalize.

it talks to the mothership behind the scenes, it forces updates, and although the package manager should be your friend, they have sort of weaponized it so you can't uninstall their packages easily.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1434512/how-to-get-rid-of-ub...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/135540/what-is-the-whoopsie-...

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The out of memory behavior is also very bad on Linux, where it will just lock your system. Don't modern distributions come with the OOM killer? On my Arch system I didn't have to do anything to have the one from systemd.

My anecdote is this: I had a Ubuntu 20.04 VM from university with 64 GB memory and my process needed 70 GB and it did lock my system. And the anecdote continues: I ran a 55 GB process on a 16 GB Mac and it finished without a problem and without me having to configure anything.

I don't think Ubuntu 20.04 is considered "modern" in this discussion, though macos did, at the time, already have ram compression.

Also, as a curiosity, do you know how much swap there was? Usually, distros only create a limited amount of it. But I agree, as a user, you shouldn't have to worry about that.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#178
Pro Hint: due to licensing issues and EU regulations, "Windows Pro Education N" is pretty much the most bloatware free version, as it's also compliant with HIPAA.

- No media codecs

- No AI recording/transcription features due to missing media codecs

- No cortana

- No Teams upselling, no Office upselling, no Skype

- No self installing games

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#179
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it strange to complain about randomly needing to grant applications access to apparently-unrelated permissions? This sounds exactly the same kind of weird handwaving Linux fanboys routinely get scolded for. And "It's better than Windows" doesn't make it good, but the fact is that you don't have to do this for any kind of keybinding in Windows, so it's neither here nor there.

It's strange because you have distorted the facts. iTerm doesn't "suddenly" ask for accessibility permissions. You , by your own description, have attempted to make global changes to the macOS GUI. That's a legitimate and expected situation for an accessibility permission dialog to show up.

Why does changing a keybind inside of iTerm 2 need global accessibility permissions? By my own words, it's not a global shortcut, because well, it wasn't.

> I'll try to set a keyboard shortcut (not a global one mind you)

(I will admit that the phrase "keyboard shortcut" instead of something like "key binding" likely lead to this confusion, but by the time this occurred to me, the edit window was already closed.)

This hit me just recently when trying to map Command+P to Control+P. I don't know if Command+P is somehow special, but if you want to try it for yourself, feel free.

Secondly, though, accessibility permission is a really large hammer. Typically that's a high level of privileges as it usually means being able to read and interact with just about everything on-screen. Granted, this is the reality of many desktop OSes today anyways, but that's the other thing. If I have to switch all of these permissions on for many apps anyways, is this really a good design? No, of course not.

I tried to keep my rant relatively contained, because the truth is I hate macOS a lot worse. A software I used to like a lot, SnagIt, has become progressively less usable as macOS has updated over time, presumably because apps that handle screenshots and video capture have had to get increasingly tricky to function. Just about every time SnagIt starts, it gives me a laundry list of permissions I need to grant it. I mean literally it has to be like 7 things. Most of them seem to stick, but apparently after the software updates some of them need to be done again.

This security model sucks in other ways too. Like for example, you have to give your terminal emulator full disk access. If you don't, really stupid things will happen. I accidentally ran brew update in a VS Code terminal. It worked! And promptly wiped out all of the granted permissions on all of the casks it updated, because VS Code (of course) doesn't have full disk access, and as part of the security model you can't just update an app without full disk access. I really wish that wasn't the default behavior, because it was genuinely just a mistake to use the VS Code terminal for that. But even worse, I really want to grant this permission to Brew and not literally everything I run in that terminal emulator, so this is pretty damn unideal.

I haven't even gotten into Gatekeeper, OCSP stapling, and all of the trouble I have gone through trying to sign apps for macOS and have it not need to phone home to check the signature. (I was also hit by that funny bug where programs were taking forever to execute because the exec syscall was hanging waiting for Apple's servers. Reminds me that I am on a "privacy friendly" OS.)

But seriously, I'm really only scratching the surface here. Don't get me wrong, I hate other OSes too. I have an ongoing rant right next to this one about how much I hate Windows 11, and I don't think I really need to express how bad desktop Linux is from a usability standpoint.

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