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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

#151

Post by viraptor »

ricardobeat wrote: post #125
viraptor wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you never needed quicktime on windows? Their download page asks you for the email to "Keep me up to date with Apple news, software updates, and the latest information on products and services." Their privacy policy starts with: "You may be asked to provide your personal information anytime you are in contact with Apple or an Apple affiliated company. Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information…

Little secret: if you click the download button below without entering your e-mail, it just works. Apple is very discreet in their e-mail marketing. They send maybe half a dozen emails per year, mostly after product launches or before christmas/school term/black friday/etc.

Sure, you can workaround those problems in many ways. The point was the same as in the article - this is the default behaviour you get. This is also the behaviour a typical user will accept and have to live with.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#152

Post by MiguelHudnandez »

derleth wrote: post #61
egypturnash wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO you also need a Jobs who wanders around (a) selling the thing to normal humans and (b) being a relentless advocate for the user experience, with the power to delay releases if something is broken.

> being a relentless advocate for the user experience The dark side of this is why I hate MacOS: There are things in MacOS I consider broken that I cannot fix, because Apple is dedicated to One Apple Way. Great for the Mac Fan, lousy for someone who has their own workflow. Apple only has room for one Jobs, one person to dictate how the experience is. Anyone else has to bow to Jobs or GTFO. The solution is good defaul…

> ... lousy for someone who has their own workflow.

"You're holding it wrong," indeed.

Your comment makes me want to try Ubuntu again on my MacBook. What I liked about it last time was that everything worked--just like on OS X. I guess the hardware premium and hardware monoculture are helpful even in the open source community.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#154

Post by eps »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #77
beloch wrote: post #67

First of all, this guy's biggest mistake was failing to format his drive and start with a clean Windows install. Installing windows requires far less effort than cleansing a vendor's install of crapware. Users should not have to do this. I must fully agree that MS needs to start restricting what Vendors like HP can install on the PC's they sell. Second, I'm very curious to see how the Windows App store plays out. The…

As I mentioned elsewhere, doing a clean Windows install is difficult if the only means of reinstallation you have is the bundled "recovery DVD" which puts all of the shit right back on there. With regards an APT for Windows, I don't see how that wouldn't be possible to add to Windows as a third party thing. With a nice GUI and search and a default catalog of quality mainly OSS software with no toolbars or BS and have…

Microsoft provides official (clean) ISO of W7 flavours -

http://www.mydigitallife.info/download-windows-7-iso-officia...

So, basically, burn respective .iso to a USB key, boot from it, install, enter the key from the sticker on the bottom of the laptop - done. Caveats are (a) limited choice of languages (b) lack of some brand-specific drivers, but if you run English version on a common laptop, it's very straight forward.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#155

Post by mistercow »

pi18n wrote: post #144
biturd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a company that does what you suggest. I will probably get down voted for saying it, but Apple. They put in the time to make a pretty darned good user experience for first impressions. There's no junk, no spyware, nothing to remove. Occasionally you might get a software bundle, like Office, or Quicken, but literally just drop it in the trash and you are done with it. Rarely would you have to find an u…

I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers. What you are talking about is the casual experience for people that don't know how to use a computer. If you don't know how to use a computer at all, Apple is really awesome. If you are trying to make your own software or sell software (particularly for phones) Apple is awful.

>I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers.

I was an Apple user and small OS X developer, and I agree completely. Three years ago, I made a living developing shareware. Then Apple decided they wanted total control over the app ecosystem and turned the "put out a good product and wait" business model into an impossibility. VersionTracker's sale to CNET and subsequent mediocritization didn't help, of course.

Now I use Ubuntu and do web development. And maybe some day WebGL and related technologies will get to the point that I can go back to the tightly optimized graphics programming I really crave.

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#156

Post by cubicle67 »

kstenerud wrote: post #124
biturd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a company that does what you suggest. I will probably get down voted for saying it, but Apple. They put in the time to make a pretty darned good user experience for first impressions. There's no junk, no spyware, nothing to remove. Occasionally you might get a software bundle, like Office, or Quicken, but literally just drop it in the trash and you are done with it. Rarely would you have to find an u…

Definitely NOT Apple. Despite their open source site, the most important bits of the OS are closed, and so developers can't dig into the OS to figure out if the bizarre behavior they're seeing is a bug in the OS or not. Worse, they can't submit patches for things they do find. Instead, they have to go submit a radar report, which can't be seen by anyone but themselves. It's so bad that it has become common behavior t…

all this is true if we add "for XCode based development" as a qualifier to "Definitely NOT Apple"

I use an ageing (4yo) 13" macbook as my primary development machine and it works fine. I'm no where near geeky (or whatever term you use) to be even thinking about fiddling with OS internals and I've never hit an OSX bug that bothered me much

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#157

Post by TeMPOraL »

uniclaude wrote: post #96
revelation wrote: post #81

I had a good laugh at people recommending Ubuntu. I recently installed the very latest Ubuntu on a VM, started the launcher, typed "terminal" ... and looked in utter disbelief as it started showing me random movies and crap from Amazon. If that is your idea of a better operating system, try again.

I'm not an ubuntu defender but honestly, aren't a couple Amazon ads better (or let's call it less bad) than all the crapware OP talks about? We are talking 1 command against hours of fight against a whole system.

I think I'd rather stay with crapware.

Companies, I don't care about your offers. When I will want to buy something, I'll Google myself a better deal.

Damn, it's just so wrong...

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#158

Post by dobro »

zanny wrote: post #134
ricardobeat wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bringing tablet computing, multi-touch, voice control, quality screens (IPS etc), video-calling on phones, small utility software, ubiquitous (real) web access, to mainstream (before someone attacks: yes, all these existed for a long time, but only became common place after Apple pushed them)? Pushing hardware design way past what anyone else was doing in the past half dozen years? Cornering the music industry with a…

The singular man acting as CEO did all this, and more! He is smarter than everyone else ever . Or he just used smart and predatory business practices, and somehow was the only major player to realize eyecandy will win over configuration for everyone that wants just a "tv" into the internet.

>The singular man acting as CEO did all this, and more! He is smarter than everyone else ever.

Doesn't matter is he was the smartest or not, all those happened under HIS watch. The same holds true for every other CEO.

And, as a CEO, he did "success" 4 times at 3 different companies: at Apple 1977, at NeXT (which he sold to Apple for a nice sum and their OS is still going strong), at Pixar and at Apple 1997-2010.

>Or he just used smart and predatory business practices

Predatory? As if Apple was MS in the nineties with 98% PC share and a de-facto monopoly?

You don't get to use "predatory" when you're at 2% of the PC market, near bankrupt and with competitors asking you to close the company and give back the stock money.

Not even when you are at 10% of the market for that matter. With 2-3 established competitors in each segment you compete, only the quality of your offerings can be your leverage.

As for "smart", yes, "he just used smart", as you condescendingly put it. If only the competitors "just used smart" themselves...

>and somehow was the only major player to realize eyecandy will win over configuration for everyone that wants just a "tv" into the internet

What won for OS X, iOS was "eye candy"? You don't get this UX thing at all, do you?

If it was mere "eye candy" that mattered, we would be rocking Enlightenment 16 themes designed by Kai Krause on our Alienware laptops...

Re: The amount of crap Windows users have to put up with is incredible

#160

Post by pi18n »

mistercow wrote: post #155
pi18n wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers. What you are talking about is the casual experience for people that don't know how to use a computer. If you don't know how to use a computer at all, Apple is really awesome. If you are trying to make your own software or sell software (particularly for phones) Apple is awful.

>I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers. I was an Apple user and small OS X developer, and I agree completely. Three years ago, I made a living developing shareware. Then Apple decided they wanted total control over the app ecosystem and turned the "put out a good product and wait" business model into an impossibility. VersionTracker's sale to CNET and subsequent mediocriti…

Yes, this restrictive control over the App Store is the most unfortunate thing they've developed. I would not be surprised if they tried to lock it down entirely by first changing the default security to "App Store only", and then removing the other options.

I guess great minds think alike, because I'll be jumping ship for web development on Linux in short order.

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