My experience, as of late, is that HP is pretty bad when it comes to shipping machines with pre-loaded crap. Dell and Lenovo business-oriented computers ship fairly clean, but HP business-oriented machines ship with loads of crapware. All consumer-oriented machines ship with crap.
The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
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Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#32Not computer users, just the windows users. I never understood the install wizards for windows software, in 99% of the time you just click "next" until it stops asking for more "next". And now they all sneak garbage adware with the check boxes enabled by default because most people just click "next" anyway. Also the whole download and install drivers/utilities etc after installation is very time consuming because the…
This is nonsense fanboism. Modern versions of Windows are extremely similar to OS X from a usability perspective. OS X has plenty of counterintuitive warts. Computers of any flavor are pretty hard to use. > I never understood the install wizards for windows software... I never understood why half the time when I download Mac software and double click it, nothing seems to happen because it's a "disk image" (talk about…
One thing I noticed when I first bought a Mac was that the driver for my Lexmark printer was about 30MB and integrated properly with the system printing options. On Windows, it was more like 200MB, had its own custom print dialogue which could be themed and had an online gallery for themes which you could download. You could download a theme that turned your printer dialogue into a potato. Not even kidding. On Mac, the printing dialogue was just the standard OS X printer dialogue.
Why is this? I don't know. Maybe they put less, er, effort into the OS X driver because of marketshare. Perhaps it was a different set of developers and the Mac developers had some sense. Maybe it's not even possible to create custom-potato-themed printer dialogues for OS X. All I know is that since moving to OS X I've seen far less crapware and whilst you're right that OS X has some UI warts too, I find that it (and the 3rd party software you install) bugs you a hell of a lot less.
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#33I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there. The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they…
> The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold to To be honest, I didn't jump from Windows to Linux because of this. I jumped because Windows ME was just that bad. However, this makes me increasingly happy I jumped with each new version of both Windows and MacOS. > Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on,…
The pieces are all there already, but you can't pull it off with dis-associated independent groups. Canonical comes close, as does Redhat, either could do this is they started making their own hardware, or contracting out a HW 'spec.'
But you need a 'real' company to say to someone like an Atheros that you'll design in their wireless chip only if they will commit to driver support for it on your OS. That sort of thing doesn't happen between a company and an 'interested third party' sadly.
The other thing folks will have to come to realize that you won't be able to combine your "TV" and your "computer" much longer. The demands of content producers are reaching a point that 'general purpose computing' on devices that can show their content are made increasingly more difficult and eventually they won't legally exist. Secure boot, HDCP, all of these things are manifestations of externally exerted control over the platform.
The good news is that computers will go back to being computers. It is going to feel a bit weird for a while though.
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#34I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there. The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they…
> you have to not be able to get something 'good enough'
So true. so true. My applauses sir.
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#35I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there. The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they…
> The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold to To be honest, I didn't jump from Windows to Linux because of this. I jumped because Windows ME was just that bad. However, this makes me increasingly happy I jumped with each new version of both Windows and MacOS. > Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on,…
>Too bad that of The Two Steves, Jobs gets the accolades and Wozniak gets ignored.
Oh please, not this again. But OK, I'll bite:
Wozniak was given plenty of recognition for his work at Apple.
But he quit in 87, which was 25 years ago. What has he done since? Not that much, really.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, has brought tremendous contributions to a number of industries.
In the light of this, it makes complete sense that Steve Jobs is a household name, whereas Wozniak isn't (but Wozniak is definitely a "hacker household name", which is what he deserves to be).
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#36Unfortunately, the profit in those laptops comes from the shovel ware, so there's no incentive for OEMs to sell a pro-user experience.
Microsoft got the message and their retail stores only sell computers as "Microsoft Signature", i.e. no crapware. http://signature.microsoft.com/
I was unaware! thanks for the pointer.
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#37I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there. The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they…
> ...hardware designed from the ground up to be developed on, open systems so that folks can easily work with it, and a team dedicated to making sure integration and support is there so that folks like you and I can say "Hey this audio doesn't work when you set the sampling rate to 40Khz" and they can fix it and release that fix... Why would that not describe any major Linux distro?
"Why would that not describe any major Linux distro?"
Because Linux distros don't build or spec hardware. A hardware company can make a platform that is 100% supported by a software distribution, but it is currently impossible for a software distribution to be 100% compatible with a HW platform which won't release details of its implementation. One of the things I like about the OLPC XO-1 was that everything was documented. Very cool that.
Trendy example, look at the Raspberry Pi. Now look at the graphics blob, now back at the Raspberry Pi. Can't get there from here. So there is an opportunity.
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#38For users that want to just use the internet like the author of this article, I think that Chromebooks are quickly becoming a really great option. No crapware, comes with what you need to get online and nothing more, tons of battery life, tiny startup time. It fits the "I just want a dumb terminal for the web" model perfectly.
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#39A few added things:
- To those suggesting using Linux, I use Windows because I need to. I run programs that require Windows, and don't really want to start messing with Wine. Also, from seeing the recent Ubuntu stories here on HN, it really does seem like the people behind Ubuntu and Gnome in particular are guilty of the same thing with their "brand"
- While Apple probably doesn't do this on MacOS they sure do try to get your email to sign you up to "offers" when you download QuickTime.
Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible
#40Unfortunately, the profit in those laptops comes from the shovel ware, so there's no incentive for OEMs to sell a pro-user experience.
Microsoft got the message and their retail stores only sell computers as "Microsoft Signature", i.e. no crapware. http://signature.microsoft.com/
All PCs sold at Microsoft Store come with
Microsoft Signature – a great way to get the most out of Windows.