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Microsoft is driving users away

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Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#201

Post by nickelpro »

hackerlight wrote: post #193
nickelpro wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a power user unable to understand the needs of non-power users. We all go through that stage, it's natural. I once installed Linux on all my siblings' desktops because I had convinced my parents it would lead to "less viruses" (Fedora 13, I think, GNOME 2, those were the days). The nightmare of providing support for that over the rest of my high school years provided me with a powerful and important lesson. Yo…

How was the old school control panel not better for non power users? Everything in one compact and intuitive display with understandable icons and a description of the icon in the English language. I'm confused when I try to change or navigate settings in Windows 10 or in modern apps in general where there's an array of icons with no description. I can memorize what the hamburger means but beyond that is too much!

You haven't worked in IT with "truly" non-technical people if you're asking this question (yes, No True Scotsman fallacy, I know).

They never opened such panels, they don't read error messages, they just say "the printer doesn't work". If the "Add Printer" button doesn't work it's all over for them. The only thing you can do is make the "Add Printer" button as good as possible.

The least common denominator is so much lower than you think it is. It's why Jobs and Timmy Apple worked so hard to eliminate the concept of the "file system" and make everything built around the concept of the "app". These abstractions that seem intuitive to power users and technical people are nonsense to the much larger market of push-button users, and that's where all the money is outside B2B enterprise.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#202

Post by slooonz »

earlone wrote: post #106
firesteelrain wrote: post #4

As much as I like Linux, tides won’t be shifting for desktop to Linux. It will be Microsoft Windows for years to come

Yes agree. I started using Linux (Gentoo) as student 20 years ago to learn LKMs programming, and with my main Desktop being Windows currently, I give a new try to linux distros every year. I see Linux distros improve year after year, but they are still light years away from providing a good user experience. And even if I don't agree with many Windows 11 updates (like the cumulating number of services required to run…

> they are still light years away from providing a good user experience

I really don’t get this. All modern desktop environment (OSX, Windows, KDE, Gnome) looks like very similar in terms of user experience quality to me. All are different, true, which is why I can understand will exists. But I will very hard pressed to justify "actually, x is better than y" (yet alone "light years away"), for any pair (x, y).

Can you name just three deal-breakers, things so huge that they deserve that "light years away" judgement ?

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#203

Post by js4ever »

datagrimx wrote: post #124

For full Disclosure, I once upon was a software engineer at Microsoft. I witnessed first hand the evil decisions around Windows. I left Microsoft in 2006 but I am still part of the Alumni Network. IMO Microsoft can gain users back by: * Not requiring a Microsoft Account * Ending all data/telemetry collection * Not forcing Edge on its users * Stop releasing improved UI updates every week * Make bash, zsh, ... native f…

I agree with everything you said!

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#204

Post by makeitdouble »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #43

With the latest m2 macbook air's you actually get a significantly better laptop, for a lot less money, then a windows version I've found. Let alone the fact it just damn sexy. I got a DELL laptop from a client to be able to access their windows applications. I used it for coding for a bit, it was so painfully slow, so I switched back to my macbook air m2. I thought the Dell was just a cheap laptop, found out the reta…

DELL's market is not cheap consumer machines, it's laptops and desktops that can run windows (macbooks could until 2 years ago...) and can be corporate ordered and customized at scale.

If you're price shopping Lenovo or Asus would probably be better choices with better designs (but TBH if you're in love with macs you're probably in the right spot for them, I don't see why you'd go choose different tradeoffs)

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#205

Post by nickelpro »

overgard wrote: post #198
nickelpro wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As explained above this is irrelevant to enterprise users, corpo installs don't play with per-station configuration like this or care about consumer-facing UIs, the needs of that market revolve around things like image management, deployment, and active directory administration. You're right that the home market is shrinking though, the OEM install market is down billions in revenue and has been dropping by double di…

I think you're overestimating the importance of the revenue generated and underestimating the importance of mindshare and people caring about their system. If the next generation of creators (IE, coders, designers, etc.) grow up on macOS and linux then Microsoft has a real problem down the line. The Windows monopoly has been VERY good to them, they would be foolish to lose it by angering their most passionate users e…

> I think you're overestimating the importance of the revenue generated

It is literally impossible to do this. Revenue is the only thing that matters when measuring markets. If it doesn't affect the bottom line, it does not matter.

Passion does not sell OEM installs or license keys. Creators and hackers didn't buy MS products in appreciable numbers to begin with (compared to consumer and enterprise markets), so to the degree MS can be said to be losing them, MS does not care. If moms and humanities majors stopped buying laptops entirely and that $750M/Q dropped to the ~$1M/Q the power users drive, MS would probably pull out of the OEM license market.

This is a very different mindset about how businesses operate than you seem to share, which is fine, I'm explaining it not trying to convert you to it.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#206

Post by sillywalk »

layer8 wrote: post #92
forinti wrote: post #57

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.

Out of curiosity does Linux, or rather directory/desktop software running on Linux, have something similar to Windows Group Policy?

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#207

Post by makeitdouble »

asd88 wrote: post #110
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #43

With the latest m2 macbook air's you actually get a significantly better laptop, for a lot less money, then a windows version I've found. Let alone the fact it just damn sexy. I got a DELL laptop from a client to be able to access their windows applications. I used it for coding for a bit, it was so painfully slow, so I switched back to my macbook air m2. I thought the Dell was just a cheap laptop, found out the reta…

I suspect Apple Silicon is still in a league of its own and worth every penny compared to Windows laptops.

It's really the whole package. The new Qualcomm chip is probably not that far, but having a whole machine designed from top to bottom with a closed system helps taking advantage of every bit.

The closest to that would have been the Surface line, but with Panos out I wouldn't bet on it.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#208

Post by Lammy »

hawski wrote: post #134
Lammy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the OP meant to piss on GUIDs. I think they are laughing at a very cryptic command line recommended to access "old devices and printer". That was always a classic jab at Linux and this looks extra cryptic as it is a literal random string. Also UUIDs in the classic sense do suck in my opinion and Linux and FreeBDS use them, because they have to, to support standards that were made with Windows in mind. U…

I think it's kinda nice that my random identifiers have a little flag bit to indicate they were random v(._. )v

> their mixed endianess

Pardon my pedantry here but this is a misinterpretation of GUIDs through the lens of the UUID structure. The actual difference between GUID and UUID isn't the endianness-on-the-wire within the chunks but the number and sizes of the chunks themselves.

GUIDs are [32 bits, 16 bits, 16 bits, [8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8] bits].

UUIDs are [32 bits, 16 bits, 16 bits, 8 bits, 56 bits].

Endianness only matters with multi-byte data, so the "mixed-endianness" thing comes from the fact that the two specs mostly line up, but then people interpret GUID's array of octets as if ⅞ of it were a single multi-byte field as it is in UUID.

> or how version bits are placed in them

Indeed this is mostly lost to time and seems like odd placement these days. For anyone who's curious, the reason why those bits are where they are is because the Apollo Network Computing Architecture "version 0" UUIDs had a different third layout where the ninth octet indicated socket address family. IP's dominance led to the ossification of AF numbers which did not keep growing as anticipated, leaving several bits of effectively wasted space that were then reused to indicate the version since those bits could always be assumed to be 0 on NCA/NCS due to lack of any network standard on which they could be anything else.

Source: wrote a GUID/UUID library that implements all the old weird shit just for the fun of it:

  irb> GlobeGlitter::from_gregorian_time.inspect => "#"
  irb> GlobeGlitter::from_ncs_time.inspect => "#"

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#209

Post by [deleted] »

zeroCalories wrote: post #34

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…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#210

Post by zeroCalories »

tux1968 wrote: post #112
zeroCalories wrote: post #34

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…

> I hope that more people switch 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…

Linux is good enough, but in terms of stability and performance for user applications, it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS. There really isn't a company or organization that focuses on that, besides maybe Valve. We need more attention on it, for our own sanity, but most of the money is in enterprise servers.
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