111–120 of 422 posts
What’s happening in somewhat poorer (BRICS, say) countries? Surely they’d be price sensitive enough not to pay for a Windows license if suddenly it has a (widespread) reputation for being less user friendly than Linux? (And this cohort would eventually become the majority of computer users over time… where would that leave Microsoft?)
It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me. Honestly MacOS isn't much better. Linux is still crap software, but we've reached the point where most things can be done on Linux, so good riddance. I hope that more people switch and Linux continues to improve. There's ac…
It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being free of a walled garden and adware platform.
>To Access the old devices and printer use the run prompt and type the following: shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A} This is the finest advertisement for every OS not named Windows that I have ever seen.
It's just a GUID. They're a good thing and very useful. Spoiler alert, your Linux systems probably use them too: [lammy@emi] blkid /dev/mapper/nvme0n1p5_crypt: UUID="RjKq3i-w2ov-ZXcp-Uc60-Ylzp-Gc56-xtjpkg" TYPE="LVM2_member" /dev/mapper/mint--vg-root: UUID="4d5373f4-d9e2-4787-98d8-24c33a1574b7" TYPE="ext4" /dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="d6b28757-9cd9-44a5-b68a-25515537e540" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="bc0382eb-01" /dev/nvme0n1p5: U…
Yes, your devices and various other underpinnings have GUIDs, but very few of them _only_ surface the GUID as a referent to the thing in a place a user would have to access it.
Similar to how, if you could only get at this by doing "rundll32 shellex.dll LoadOldPrinterSettings", the issue wouldn't be a function named LoadOldPrinterSettings, the issue would be that it's making you reach into a DLL to invoke a function by hand to get at it at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I managed to convince my mother-in-law to use Linux and drop Windows. But it seems that convincing the network guys at work is harder than convincing a retiree. Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.
There is no good replacement for Active Directory, by a large margin. It’s the single biggest factor that keeps Windows alive in the enterprise.
This is basically an article by a guy angry that the UI for printers changed and predicting the end of the Windows empire based on that.
Accurate as every other week's predicting of Microsoft's impeding doom from users who don't like Windows in the past 30 years. - 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft. - 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft. .... - 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's…
- There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux.
- Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned.
But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though.
Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system.
[0]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3695172/statcounter-da...
edit: It was 53% when the article was written. The statistics they link say it's now 64%.
This is basically an article by a guy angry that the UI for printers changed and predicting the end of the Windows empire based on that.
A long time ago there was a video (or was it audio) of a really angry dude ranting about this and that and in the end he exclaims: I can’t print. And that is the punch line, his life was miserable and the root of the problem was printing.
These days, I print so little I either stop at my local library, where printing is free, or I pay a pittance to print at a shop. It would take me a decade or more to pay off a printer when pages cost $.10.
I knew Windows was fucked when pressing WIN and searching for something brought up random crap from the internet instead of what I actually wanted. Do people at Microsoft use Windows or mac?
Paraphrased, but this actually happened on my work machine a few months ago. This kind of bullshit and bald faced disrespect is why I haven't used windows at home in years.
I really hate the way they're forcing their products I don't want on me. Stop opening things in Edge, I'm never ever going to use it. And stop asking me to backup folders on OneDrive, I already have Dropbox, I don't want it. And jesus, stop breaking the taskbar. Every major windows version they just make it worse. Now you can't even dock it to different parts of the screen. Why?!? The Windows 2000 taskbar was infinit…
A number of people really want widgets of some kinds - little things showing information like the time, or CPU clock, or battery left, or music playing. The problem becomes that A) people really want different presentations of information, B) something tiny and satisfying in the corner isn't as easy to justify as a big improvement, even if it is, as a big flashy thing, and C) some people get very upset at anything do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, you're saying that losing 21% of their OS market share by actively pissing off their customers shouldn't be seen as a problem? OS stagnation would be an improvement compared to what they're currently doing.
Why is having even bigger market share so important? Android has bigger market share than iOS too yet iOS is the more profitable one. Microsoft cares about profit first, not unprofitable market share. Not saying they're right or wrong, just saying it seems to be working for their bottom line as Windows is less relevante towards that as the PC market has been in a continuous decline anyway in the last decade. Fighting…
Because of revenue? a large seller of windows is genuinely just it’s market cap, it doesn’t really have a lot of killer utility compared to contemporaries. If it loses market cap then it’s a precipitous issue for them as there’s no point choosing the OS for other reasons, it simply lacks the value.
It’s market cap comes from people thinking it has a huge audience and so tailoring software for that audience and putting significant resources into that. Without that third-party effort: windows is toast.