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Microsoft is driving users away

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Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#361

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

Animats wrote: post #90
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…

> It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. It is. At Windows 7, they pretty much had desktops right. Everything mostly worked. They'd finally fixed the crashing problems. (How? The Static Driver Verifier validated that third-party kernel drivers would not crash the rest of the system, and a classifier applied to crash dumps routed similar crash dumps to the same maintainer.) The UI was reasonable for a de…

everyone who has tried to combine mobile and desktop UI's has always fucked it up. I'm absolutely convinced it can't be done while servicing both well.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#362

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

pierat wrote: post #225
whiplash451 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you could turn off auto-update I would not mess with that bit these days

There is a difference between: 1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha. 2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later. Windows is #1. Linux is #2. Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a ga…

> But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks.

I've legit had windows shutdown in the middle of an online p2p gaming session before.

absolutely ridiculous.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#363

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

vetinari wrote: post #311
cedilla wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. If the system doesn't eventually force them to update, they just won't. That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else. If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpo…

> If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool. Or they just know their users. At our company,the policy is set up to request reboot during the next 30 days (so basically till the next patch Tuesday). Who complains the most about updates all the time or every day? Those, who didn't bother to reboot during the last 30 days. So at some point, yo…

I'm one of those who will ignore it until forced to reboot because it's less reboots in total.

At home I have plenty of times where rebooting isn't disruptive, at work that's never true.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#364

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #270
cedilla wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. If the system doesn't eventually force them to update, they just won't. That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else. If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpo…

> The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. They will learn when they have been hacked often enough. We should stop treating everyone as children. Oh no, children are now treated like adults.

I don't even run antivirus on my personal windows machines.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#365

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

culopatin wrote: post #339
xinayder wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is still crap software I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2019 and I can tell you that the moments I got pissed off where due to companies being extremely hostile towards Linux (ahem, Microsoft) and making their shit with proprietary Windows libraries. Linux is not difficult, it's much easier to learn than to spend 5 hours on Windows trying to find out which UUID refers to the now-hidden old print…

When you say “Linux is much easier” we can’t pick this weird anecdote of troubleshooting a printer. Is the average printer setup in Linux much easier? What about getting wifi going out of the box? Or Bluetooth? Or even finding out if something is not right? I don’t want to sound like a Window defender (heh) but let’s be honest here. If I open device manager and I see a little triangle I know something is wrong. In Li…

I don't know what average means in this context but my experience is that linux printer setup is far easier than windows.

CUPS has come a long way over the years.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#366

Post by ChoGGi »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #273
Sayrus wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own experience doesn't reflect that. I've been using Linux for work for years and tried to switch from Windows to Linux for games. NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not…

Gaming and pro audio plugins are the reasons for me to keep Windows bootable. However, recently Windows started to take more than 15 minutes for booting (except for sometimes, when it takes only 3 seconds as if to mock me), and none of the 30 suggestions or so I've tried could fix this big. Since the advice in such cases is always to re-install everything (nevermind 100+ audio plugins with proprietary DRM I'd need to…

If you have any HDDs still in your system, they could be failing.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#367

Post by noobermin »

culopatin wrote: post #341
noobermin wrote: post #294

Linux is also removing tools people use. Just the other day I found out hcitool and rfcomm were removed from bluez, yet another thing I now have to handwrite myself even when I just want to tinker. Sure, you can still do things like I can write to a socket using python over using rfcomm, but isn't it the same as this article? It's gets in the way of gnome and friends wanting to "cater the experience" plus it's legacy…

You say “Linux” as if it was a single company. What prevents you from either re adding it yourself or being part of the group working on that and changing what you don’t like?

Gnome/freedesktop is essentially a single entity, and their choices affect the FOSS as a whole. If you're going to say well there are individual contributors, well there are individual employees and teams at microsoft too. I also addressed your point, I can always make my own script to play with bluetooth just like OP can run control panel with some hexstring incantation. Can is can I suppose.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#368

Post by ProllyInfamous »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #354
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…

* You can turn off the vast majority of the telemetry, and what little remains can be easily stopped via pihole * Edge is advertised when you first install Windows, but nothing forces you to use it. I use Firefox with Windows 11 and no mention of Edge appears anywhere now. * Updates aren't weekly, except maybe security updates. And most updates these days happen unobtrusively in the background. * They've made great p…

Yes, but why are these opt-out instead of OPT-IN? [answer: $$$, "ease of use"]

Why must you use command lines to disable features which should have been opt-in, in the first place?

Why must one use a 3rd party device (e.g. PiHoles, which ARE awesome) to disable stuff — particularly when you can't even turn all telemetry off in the first place?

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#369

Post by pierat »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #359
butlike wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux also doesn't have the use case of grandma/grandpa. Gunshy small brick and mortar owners, kiosks, banks, employee who doesn't have privileges (both on the system and in writing) to update...the list goes on. Forcefully rolling out the update is the only way it may ever get updated, in a lot of cases.

I'm not grandma. Let me choose.

Who cares if you ARE "grandma". That assumes that old women are technologically incompetent, and a pretty shit thing to assume.

My MiL (early 70's), happily runs Xubuntu on her machine. After getting the printer/scanner to work, it just fucking works. She agreed to schedule the updates in the early morning, so its just done.

She wanted a password manager, and showed her how to install software. That's done now, since we've had an app store longer than Apple.

The only thing she couldnt figure out was how to open an Access database made in 2003. That took me some time to figure out. Finally did and got them exported to LibreOffice spreadsheets.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#370

Post by Night_Thastus »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #368
Night_Thastus wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* You can turn off the vast majority of the telemetry, and what little remains can be easily stopped via pihole * Edge is advertised when you first install Windows, but nothing forces you to use it. I use Firefox with Windows 11 and no mention of Edge appears anywhere now. * Updates aren't weekly, except maybe security updates. And most updates these days happen unobtrusively in the background. * They've made great p…

Yes, but why are these opt-out instead of OPT-IN ? [answer: $$$, "ease of use"] Why must you use command lines to disable features which should have been opt-in, in the first place? Why must one use a 3rd party device (e.g. PiHoles, which ARE awesome ) to disable stuff — particularly when you can't even turn all telemetry off in the first place?

Because Window is, at its core, meant for average, everyday users. Not developers. Not power users.

And for the average user, all they care about is having a web browser and access to get the applications they need.

I really don't see the harm in the MS store being present. It offers them a user-friendly way to tell people to "just go here and install X" without having to walk them through anything more complicated.

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