81–90 of 166 posts
Windows? Oh I'd forgotten about that giggles behind Linux desktop
You've forgotten about the most popular OS on this planet? I wouldn't take an OS recommendation from a person who happened to forget about that.
Android? That's Linux-based.
This is a deal breaker for me too. I updated to Windows 11 only once I found ExplorerPatcher. Were it not for sizeable investments in Windows-specific apps, I would have moved away. I am currently using: * ExplorerPatcher (replace taskbar) * OpenShell (replace start menu) * ProcessExplorer (replace task manager) * XYPlorer (replace file manager) * Utilities like Notepad++, Paint.net * Winsplit Revolution (Window mana…
There is no deal, you’re effectively modding an os in unintended ways
If doing that little is now considered "modding" a desktop OS, we've fucked up somewhere. Even phone OSes like Android let you download replacements of built-ins (such as another launcher, file manager, photo app) right from their app store.
Extract from Adventures in application compatibility: The case of the jump into the middle of an instruction from nowhere by Raymond Chen. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230324-00/?p=10... > What happened is that we recently made changes to this internal function, and apparently those changes were enough to cause the patcher to go haywire. This is unfortunately a regular occurrence: Whenever a new build…
And some windows machines from the windows 7 era can freeze program by program after some days just being on. On windows 10 you can replicate it by just pulling outages until you see this effect, or someing worse.
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What is Apple doing? macOS doesn’t seem to have changed much in the last few versions, which is great, because it’s a mature OS. macOS had been completely uneventful for me the last few years and recovered well from the terrible Mojave/Catalina days with the slow overheating Intel MacBooks.
I suppose I'm talking about how they continue to lock-down the os, in combination with their App-store. For example, hooking into the kernel is now very difficult - apps like Little Snitch running on Sonoma have a much harder job. Apple has wholesale telemetry going on that nobody seems to talk about. Apple have very little commitment to backwards compatibility, which is something that Microsoft took very seriously.…
You still can? The binary has to be notarized, but Apple doesn’t take a cut, you can run your own store and sell a game.
For example, hooking into the kernel is now very difficult - apps like Little Snitch running on Sonoma have a much harder job.
For most people that’s a good thing. I had many family members that had all kinds of crap installed, including dubious kexts. If you are a more knowledgeable user, you can still disable most protections. Also, about little snitch specifically, obdev now sells are more user-friendly version in the App Store that uses the new user space filtering API. Every kext is a possible compromise with access to kernel space. It’s good that they are deprecating them in favor of user space drivers.
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What kept you on their platform this long if you don’t mind my asking?
Not OP, but in my case it's Visual Studio. It's just the best IDE for me, and I have literally decades of muscle memory using it. I first tried Linux sometime in the late 90s, and this might finally be the year I switch over. I do everything else in a Linux VM now, may as well run Linux as host and Windows as a VM.
I wonder how long it'll be before someone comes out with a "distro" that combines the Windows 11 kernel with the Windows 2000/XP userland. WinPE 11 exists, and it actually has some bits of UI that still look like Win7.
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What kept you on their platform this long if you don’t mind my asking?
Judging by replies here should really be a "why are you still on windows" askHN. Besides other reasons here, when you have decades of experience on how things work, hundreds of little utils and tools... and you want to finally concentrate more on productive work in your life and not start the whole hurdle anew. Maybe if a perfect, seamless VM environment would exist, but that still leaves the HW problems.
Microsoft still haven't implemented a native vertical taskbar after all the years of it being in the top voted[1] request (part of the request to move to any side of the screen) and the fact it's been part of Windows for like 15 years. It's a dealbreaker tbh. Third-party tools that restored the W10 taskbar in W11 allowed users to continue having a taskbar that's usable for them yet the latest W11 betas show they're r…
It's because the Windows 11 UI was designed by people who've never used anything other that an Apple Mac. Yes, Microsoft hires employees with zero Windows experience to design their operating system. That's why the Windows 11 taskbar has the icons centred -- because Apple OSX does too. That's why there's no way to drag the taskbar around -- because Apple OSX doesn't allow this either. Etc...
What really made me worry about the future of the Windows ecosystem is the increasing amount of telemetry and Microsoft's endless attempts at trying to monetise every part of the system at the expense of my user experience, even if I paid for a license.
Making the base OS usable by disabling telemetry (and Cortana) hidden away in the settings has become a hassle. The UX dark patterns trying to make me switch from Firefox to Edge has become tiring for me. Them experimenting with ads in the file system, even if it was an experimental feature that was "never meant" for public release, made me wonder how far they were willing to push it in future Windows iterations, so I made the switch.
Edit: Worth mentioning that I switched to Fedora XFCE and I stuck with it because it doesn't get in the way of my workflow. I also noticed that it doesn't use as much background resources as W10 which is great.