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Microsoft is driving users away

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Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#411

Post by JohnFen »

whiplash451 wrote: post #376
pierat wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your comment is orthogonal to mine. Updating is always the right thing to do. How it is scheduled by the OS provider is another story. But refusing to update because you don’t like the scheduler is unreasonable. If you can’t stand the scheduler, change OS.

> Updating is always the right thing to do.

Except when the update makes the product worse.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#412

Post by pjmlp »

herbst wrote: post #409
pjmlp wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, that it the usual answer since I started with Slackware Linux in 1995, it always work for someone else.

We don't have to go into details but I really wonder what kind of bad experience you had. I use Linux for ~20 years now and literally wasted weeks getting graphics to work the way I want. I know all about these pains. However this was a long time ago. OS drivers were shit, official drivers horrible to install and maintain. Today all end customer facing Linux flavours feature a button do directly enable proprietary dr…

Now try that on a random laptop with dedicated GPU.

It isn't as if I never used any other distribution since 1995, in fact I probably have used more in numeric value than the average age of HNers, just to use a random metric.

Hence why my Linux based media devices nowadays are Android and WebOS powered instead, I leave GNU/Linux for servers.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#413

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

whiplash451 wrote: post #377
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed 3rd-party antiviruses are useless. Your best protection comes from the OS provider through updates (hence my original message).

worse than useless, they quite literally will use the same techniques to grab ahold of the kernel as the viruses they're trying to protect from.

I always found it hilarious how the spectre mitigations were breaking AV software.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#414

Post by datagrimx »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #340
datagrimx wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO PowerShell is horrible. It is it an object, or not an object. You don't know, unless you know. How about operators? They make ZERO sense (-eq). They went supreme extreme on namespaces. I could write a paper on how bad PowerShell is. You can keep it. I'll stick with zsh or bash.

Huh... Everything is a object. But that object might be a string. And you don't have to know, you can ask. I get that when everything is text, it becomes simpler to reason about. But you also have to do a lot of maneuvering to get information out of it. PS tries to give you more power. My main gripe with ps is command discoverability: I don't know who thought that the "verb-subject" would be a good idea, because if I…

Shells on Linux/Unix everything can be accessed as a file. Everything. In PowerShell it is a object, or maybe a file, or maybe a handle, or a resource, or a string. A complete catastrophe is Az PowerShell. Why isn't everything a object?

The answer is the origins of how Windows handles everything. It diverged every time a new hire took over a subsystem. "Not invented by me" ran strong in those days.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#415

Post by timetopay »

shiroiushi wrote: post #287
timetopay wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild how annoying Windows UX can be when it's something that microsoft wants you to use, to help improve their services revenue. TBH, I'm on board with some of the negatives you listed, but I feel like the entire enthusiast community has been screaming about edge, telemetry, and start menu search for years. Microsoft seems determined not to listen, it's astonishing.

Why should they listen? Will doing these things improve their profitability? I don't think so. Having this annoying stuff (telemetry, forcing Edge, etc.) is good for Microsoft's profitability, and that's all that's important. If users don't like it, they can pound sand. It's not like they're going to switch to Linux; if they were really going to do that, they would have done it already in the last 20 years. Microsoft…

The problem with this logic is that users _are_ pounding sand: to macos and ipados, which has been steadily ticking up.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#416

Post by Valakas_ »

mike_hearn wrote: post #297
disqard wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All personal computing happens on a phone This makes me sad, and is scary, etc. However, putting emotions aside, can we extrapolate from this? Could the next "killer app" actually be an even tinier device? A smartwatch? Or have we reached a local extremum (phones)? And what does that say about attempts to regress towards larger screens (AR/VR headsets)?

Phones dominate not because of screen size but because the operating systems they run are fundamentally more user friendly. iOS/Android were the first time experienced OS engineers were able to go back to the drawing board and rethink the whole stack from scratch. They learned a lot of lessons from what worked and what didn't on generalized desktop computers and were able to build something people prefer using. That'…

It's mostly screen size... Life happens, and of the two, the phone is the one with you. Wherever I go, i carry my phone, but not my laptop. I take pictures with it, so they're stored there. I take screenshots, and share stuff with friends, gets saved on my phone. I browse on the phone on the bus/subway wherever. Browser history gets saved there, opened tabs, etc.

Bringing photos, saved stuff to computer all takes an extra step. For most of the time I need a digital device, the phone is good enough, and most importantly - it's with me. Not just when i get home.

When high productivity is needed, then yes, laptop is king. But if somehow we could have the same productivity on a device, 10x smaller that I can carry with me, why wouldn't I start doing everything on that device? That's why smartphone is king.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#417

Post by shiroiushi »

timetopay wrote: post #415
shiroiushi wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they listen? Will doing these things improve their profitability? I don't think so. Having this annoying stuff (telemetry, forcing Edge, etc.) is good for Microsoft's profitability, and that's all that's important. If users don't like it, they can pound sand. It's not like they're going to switch to Linux; if they were really going to do that, they would have done it already in the last 20 years. Microsoft…

The problem with this logic is that users _are_ pounding sand: to macos and ipados, which has been steadily ticking up.

Those defections don't matter. The only thing that matters is MS's profits and stock price, and those are doing great. They can stand to lose a few malcontents and increase profits by squeezing the rest of the users.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#418

Post by rstuart4133 »

pjmlp wrote: post #399
rstuart4133 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about getting wifi going out of the box? It's 2024. WiFi even works out of the box on Debian now. > Or Bluetooth? Getting some random device to connect to Bluetooth is a lottery - on both Windows and Linux. It's a horrible standard. That said, it usually works on both. > In Linux… ???? Where do you even go? If we are talking about printers and one of bigger Linux desktop environments, a little red triangle in…

In any laptop I decide to try it on, or still stuck to desktops?

Unless the vendor ships the laptop with 'nix I guess there is a chance it won't work out of the box. But given it is is running on Apple's M series now, the odds of it not working after a while are very, very low.

As for me, I've only used laptops since 2000 or so (a variety of Dell's and Lenovo's), I've only run Debian on them, and at worst I've had to do is use a kernel from Debian testing.

I think it's safe to say the current version of Linux runs on more laptop and desktop hardware than the current version of Windows now. Windows may run on some bleeding edge hardware Linux doesn't because the laptop manufacturer "made it happen" with specialised drivers, but as a rule manufacturers don't give a rats about older hardware they shipped and Windows has been deliberately breaking compatibility with old hardware, so there is no comparison. Linux runs on everything older, Windows only the latest.

Every instance of a person throwing up their hands in disgust and moving to Windows has been because of that. They had some solid "well worn sock" of a laptop they adored as their daily driver, a Windows update broke it once too many times and they rage quit their Microsoft addiction.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#419

Post by Lawand »

overgard wrote: post #54

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…

I also prefer the Windows Taskbar rather than the dock as you mentioned, that's why I created Taskbar for macOS. Feel free to check it out: https://lawand.io/taskbar

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#420

Post by firesteelrain »

sillywalk wrote: post #206
layer8 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, however it is sub standard and hard to use. Look at IdP
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