101–110 of 166 posts
Guess it's time to jump to macOS finally. I've always wanted to try that but due to prohibitive costs never did. But with more and more Windows shenanigans I guess it's time to bite the bullet and make the switch .
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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.…
The only reason Microsoft still have the old control panel is because they haven't gotten around to removing it entirely yet. The old UI has been slowly being killed off for years now. If you think that they're keeping it around to keep people happy then you're very much mistaken.
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Steam/Valve made a point of running Windows games under Linux as good or better as under.Windows. that is, Wine and Proton are really good these days. Running genuine MS Windows® in a VM is very possible but much less necessary than, say, 10 years ago, if you want to run some non-esoteric Windows software. It also technically requires a license.
They asked about Office, Adobe, and Autodesk. I’d say the situation is still the opposite there. In the early 00s, you could run Microsoft Office etc. pretty well with CrossOver Office and the likes. But these applications barely work anymore if at all, most likely because their complexity increased a lot over the years. Using a Windows VM is a pretty good solution. Though last time I tried only commercial solutions…
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What kept you on their platform this long if you don’t mind my asking?
For me it's the hardware support in windows. I've been using Linux on and off for 15 years, but every time I've tried to switch my home desktop I've always run in to issues. I used mint Linux for quite a while and it makes a very good stab at competing with windows. Recently I got a steam deck and I'm surprised how good it is in desktop mode, and also at running windows games in proton. I'm actually considering getti…
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There is no deal, you’re effectively modding an os in unintended ways
Maybe I'm too old, but since when is simply using another software as opposed to built-ins considered modding? Most of these seem like replacements to me. 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.
ExplorerPatcher /is/ modding. It's not killing explorer.exe and launching another UI that is independent from the os like, say, what blackbox for windows or litestep did. It's patching running executables in memory in a way that could break whenever any data structure gets changed in a Windows update, which is a big deal because Windows is a rolling release OS that constantly adds and remove features. Users of explorer patcher found themselves having to boot in windows safe mode to disable it in the past after windows update ran. It's literally breaking your machine in a way that computer users that aren't very savvy might not understand how to fix. It's very bad publicity for MS who might get blamed by some: "my computer isn't starting anymore after a windows update, I hate MS" so it makes perfect sense to prevent this program from launching in a new major update.
And it's relying on the assumption that the old code paths it depends on won't disappear in the future. EP doesn't have a replica of the old windows taskbar: it's merely disabling Windows 11's new one and forcing the old one to appear, and it can do that because the code for the Windows 10 task bar is still there. You surely don't expect this to survive all future refactorings and cleanups?
ExplorerPatcher is the kind of software that would have been neat in the old world of Windows where a release of Windows gets frozen and sees no major changes past security updates except for the release of a Service Pack which you have to manually install yourself. It is a terrible idea in the current world of a rolling release state OS.
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The only reason Microsoft still have the old control panel is because they haven't gotten around to removing it entirely yet. The old UI has been slowly being killed off for years now. If you think that they're keeping it around to keep people happy then you're very much mistaken.
It's a shame really. I find the big software world so strange now, back in the day companies were really concerned with keeping their user base happy - I wonder why things have gotten to the point where this no longer seems to hold true. Is it because of a lack of alternatives? Or people are being trained to just accept it rather than pushing back?
Now that the monopoly is established, users don't need to be kept happy.
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I don’t know what microsoft is thinking, there is no real reason to use windows 11, it is a downgrade in a lot of ways. At least windows 10 held directx12 hostage as an incentive to upgrade. Its funny, everytime I boot up one of my systems that still has windows 7 installed it feels so nice, even better than 10 much less 11. I think microsoft is playing a dangerous game with messing around with windows like this, it…
Yes, they are losing users over this. Although I have also heard of technologically capable people running into having their system auto-upgraded somehow and now using 11. Don't ask me how in the world they accept this. If that happened to me, I would reinstall the previous OS, even out of principle alone. And then MS seems to think they are doing any better with their online office suite. Well no, there are many peo…
Even VSCode is starting to turn to shit. They are adding all this voice bloat to VSCode, at no time ever while programming have I ever wanted to leave a voice comment, it's inefficient and stupid. I could understand if it was a plugin or extension but to add it to the core? Plus all the other garbage they are shoveling in it which could have just been extensions. They have lost the plot. Also I feel it getting a little sluggish to the point where I am planning on finding a good enough past version and locking on it and rejecting all future updates.
With the March update the only thing that seemed it could be useful was the "locked scrolling" feature.
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For me it's the hardware support in windows. I've been using Linux on and off for 15 years, but every time I've tried to switch my home desktop I've always run in to issues. I used mint Linux for quite a while and it makes a very good stab at competing with windows. Recently I got a steam deck and I'm surprised how good it is in desktop mode, and also at running windows games in proton. I'm actually considering getti…
Why doesn't someone make a paid distro that doesn't have these problems? The market is absolutely there. Oh wait, that's mac, sort of.
Not being able to customise my environment is a dealbreaker for me. I will be converting my day to day machine to Linux rather than being nagged into a user hostile OS upgrade. Clearly Microsoft has given up on powerusers, the people who notice and sometimes fix flaws in their monolith. Seems shortsighted.
What kept you on their platform this long if you don’t mind my asking?
If gaming anticheat and media DRM worked on Linux I’d be so gone
Widevine kind of works on Linux IIRC, but hardware accelerated VP9 decode is a huge issue still. It was fine for a while, then Google broke support in Chromium and made it work only in their ecosystem (ChromeOS).
Haven't looked at it in a while, but last I did it "worked". Resolution on netflix ends up being fine - 1080p - but I couldn't help shake the feeling that its worse.
...check bitrates and sure enough...less than half. Never worked out why, but that's a bit of a show stopper when combined with no online shooters.