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People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

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Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#271

Post by Junk_Collector »

john_strinlai wrote: post #159
jerf wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow. It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away. T…

> 20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few…

It's an interesting case to me. The company I work for has been shipping systems on windows since the 90's despite pretty consistent requests from customers to ship hardware on Linux. 2 years ago we started creating our own Linux distribution and this year started shipping products on it. We still ship a lot of stuff on Windows 11, but that market share is starting to shift now. 10 years from now I could see us completely moved to our Linux distro. Now, what's actually interesting is that it wasn't customer requests or efficient capital allocation that drove this. Microsoft effectively forced us to do this against our will by a combination discontinued products and handling of Windows 11 and now that we've spent the capital we won't be going back.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#272

Post by mikkupikku »

Arainach wrote: post #258
tapia wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience at least. You can go to the forum of archlinux and see the replies. They tend to be quite useful and in a good tone.

Within the last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463982 "But, a Raspberry Pi isn't supposed to be a replacement for your desktop; it is meant as a device for experimentation." "why couldn't you read the self-contradicting docs and pick the right option?" (paraphrased) "just because you don't know how to follow the instructions, doesn't make the OS bad." " By now, you should see that years of experience !=…

Half those aren't even remotely harsh. Saying the raspberry pi wasn't designed to be mained is totally reasonable, what possible objection do you have to somebody saying that?

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#273

Post by skipants »

WarmWash wrote: post #22
ooterness wrote: post #3

Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.

The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux. Until product people start getting involved, it's damned to it's eternal ~5% consumer market penetration.

I think that's a fair criticism for issues where Linux devs might be blind to the friction a lot of Linux distros come with, but I don't think it's universal for all devs and for all features, all the time.

Personally, although I'm not a Linux maintainer, I am a dev and I love doing work that makes UX better for everyone.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#274

Post by thrawa8387336 »

chocochunks wrote: post #84
kstrauser wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, by all means do post a link to a comparable new Windows laptop for $400, including a fast GPU, reasonable amount of fast storage (and not counting an SD card or such), a high-DPI monitor, and non-embarassing build quality. I'd love to see this.

The GPU in the Neo isn't particularly fast...nor is the storage. Neo makes loads of compromises to hit $600 with some of it's features. Even for $400 you can get Windows PCs with TWO whole USB 3.0 ports. $400 quickly hits diminishing returns territory. Like here's a $500 PC: https://www.amazon.com/Aspire-Copilot-WUXGA-Display-Processo... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-14-AI-review-Basic... Twice the storag…

Should be at least 4X the RAM and 4X CPU cores, just to run Windows at a comparable speed.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#275

Post by kuerbel »

john_strinlai wrote: post #133
kuerbel wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large parts of one german state switched to open source. First they laughed at them and now they are envious. The switch to Linux is happening this year. Until the end of the year they want all workers on Linux instead of Windows. It is possible, and fast if you want it.

kudos to them! out of curiosity, "large parts" of "one german state" is how many machines roughly? i am suspecting that it is probably nowhere near enough to put windows in "significant danger". however, i am rooting for their success and hope that they thoroughly document (and publish) the process. i have never seen a transition like that go smoothly, let alone when it is in government.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...

That was the situation at the end of December.

Note that projects like these often fail not for technical reasons, not even cost, but political pressure from other parties, pressure from people that worked for ages in the administration and, well, have some problems to adjust to new software.

There is also a push from the German state to switch to open source or at least European solutions. There is the Deutschland-Stack, for which the IT planning council made open source mandatory: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Deutschland-Stack-IT-Planning-C...

And so on. At my day job more and more customers are reconsidering cloud adoption, especially M365 and such.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#276

Post by mschuster91 »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #101
drewda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...

I've used macOS for years and still don't understand their windows minimize/restore logic. I'm always hunting for my minimized window. Yes, the fault probably lies with me. OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed and intuitive. But yeah... I'd rather fumble around in macOS: Windows is always trying to upsell a service that I don't need. If I say no it will helpfully keep reminding me (my answer is never going…

You want to look into HyperSwitch and SizeUp. These two solve pretty much all headaches relating to window management on macOS.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#277

Post by OliveMate »

I think the decreasing fondness of Windows can mostly be blamed on Microsoft forcing their internet services on users; with the need for Microsoft accounts being the most recent & damning of the bunch.

You had gadgets in Vista & 7, but they could easily be disabled. 8 had live tiles for things like the news (effortlessly removable) and introduced the Microsoft Store (which increasingly needs an account). 8.1 added Bing Search to the start menu (requires Regedit to remove nowadays), 10 added news & current events to the start menu, and in 11 they want us to register Microsoft accounts to use the OS.

It's ridiculous how much control we've lost over Windows so that Microsoft can tell shareholders more people are doing Bing searches and signing up for Microsoft accounts than ever before.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#279

Post by mikkupikku »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #249
WarmWash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux. Until product people start getting involved, it's damned to it's eternal ~5% consumer market penetration.

> The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux To specialize that statement a bit, Linux is made and maintained by people who showed up and contributed . These two facts create a vicious cycle. The people show up to add things they love to Linux, and Linux becomes something that only those exact people love. We're deep into this spiral where Linux has become specialized for ultra-…

The people who take that goal seriously get burned when, having persuaded a normie to install Linux, they realize they just volunteered to provide free tech support to that person until whenever time they give up and buy a Mac.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#280

Post by breve »

john_strinlai wrote: post #159
jerf wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow. It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away. T…

> 20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few…

> i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software

Up front they won't need to do a full rewrite. They'll only need to make it work well enough under Wine.

At a source level, tools like Avalonia's xpf make porting WPF apps to other platforms easier:

https://avaloniaui.net/xpf

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