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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

#291

Post by likeclockwork »

coin wrote: post #265
jerhewet wrote: post #55

> The first step was getting rid of the usual pre-installed crap [...] It took me over an hour to go through all the uninstallers. I was at least three sentences into a long "Uninstallers? Seriously?" rant when I realized that this is exactly what the average poor bastard on the street would do if they wanted to get rid of the crapware that infests a new machine. [long thoughtful pause] Jesus. It really is that big o…

And why should one have to reinstall the OS on a brand new machine? I don't need mod or install new firmware on my new car. I don't need to swap parts on my new washer machine. No, a PC, car, washer machine should just work, as purchased. The idea that a new Windows PC can't be used out of the box just shows how broken the user experience is.

It's like when you buy a picture frame and it comes with a charming picture of someone else's family in it.

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

#292

Post by [deleted] »

mistercow wrote: post #245
sbuk wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> More recent abominations like Gatekeeper are just icing on the cake. I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this line of reasoning. How can security measures like this harm most users, especially given it's something that can easily be turned off.

Surely you can see that "easily turned off" is relative to a user's experience, and that ease of disabling is not the only issue. If you ask most users to turn off a security feature so that they can run your software, they're going to think you're doing something shady. And that's pretty shitty. Now a lot of people will say "it's only $99/year; what's the big deal?" Well, first off, that's $99/year, forever, or your…

[deleted]

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

#293

Post by plaguuuuuu »

flogic wrote: post #27
eli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem isn't the process of installing. It's the damned trip line installs along the way. If you install Adobe Reader, it shouldn't install McAfee for you. If I install your software, you don't have the right to install browser plugins. In terms of installers, Windows has developed a culture of malware that really needs to go.

Don't install insecure crapware like Adobe Reader. Chrome has an internal pdf reader. I've personally also got Evince installed.

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

#294

Post by npsimons »

enjoy-your-stay wrote: post #278
endemic wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Has Sergey Brin changed the way people use the internet?" Let me Google that for you.

You could just as easily alta-vista, or yahoo that because people used those search engines originally, and they existed way before Google did. Google however turned a better product and has therefore captured the lion's share of the market. But they Google search engine is pretty much a copy in functionality of previous ones that came before. Of course Google have brought other things to the internet (maps comes to…

The same exact accusations could be (and have been) leveled at Apple. The fact of the matter is that Apple is a very, very good marketing company; as for revolutionary technology and being innovators, not so much.

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

#295

Post by npsimons »

tsm wrote: post #274
npsimons wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have heard of rooting and using something like TitaniumBackup to force remove apps, right? And of course, there's always the option of going with the clean versions direct from Google.

With my particular phone (Droid2 Global) you can't root if you've upgraded to 2.3. Nor can you downgrade to 2.2 and then root. Basically I'm just stuck on castrated Gingerbread for the life of the phone.

I'm sorry. That's lame. I recently (finally) got my wife's phone rooted, and it was a pain. The whole experience has me considering writing a scathing critique of the the whole "just root it" culture of Android, which is, I have to admit, very similar to the responses here of "just wipe and do a clean install". It wouldn't be so bad, except that there is so much unintentional disinformation, broken links and general nastiness in trying to prevent people from messing with their own hardware. I've had easier times developing embedded software with sh!t BSPs! I blame not just the manufacturers (Samsung, I will never buy an Android device from you; between rooting my wife's Samsung phone and the Tab from work with it's non-standard port and refusing to charge off anything but the supplied charger, just no), or even the carriers, but the community really needs to get it's sh!t together.

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

#296

Post by npsimons »

ROFISH wrote: post #29

Note this is an aside on USEFUL background apps, not spyware/crapware, since it appears he disabled the update mechanisms in the last two paragraphs: Most of those background service apps (Google Update, Apple Push, Adobe Update) are because a tiny background app is necessary to preform certain functions, and check for updates in the background, which is a good thing! For example, 'iTunesAgent.exe' on Windows was to…

There's a difference between "background app that quietly does it's job and stays out of the way" and "holy fuck, what the hell is using all twelve cores and 8gigs of RAM and making Google take 30seconds to load!?" Running your software on my hardware is a privilege; don't abuse it, and I won't delete your oh-so-important-crapware. That includes not nagging me to update and/or register.

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

#297

Post by revelation »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #213
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 have a good laugh at people that dismiss an entire OS for a problem solved with 10 seconds and 20 characters of effort.

You didn't get the point of this comment and article at all. The question is not in the quantity of things, it's that a hardware vendor (or here, distribution maintaner) would think so lowly of his customers that hes ready to just shove advertisements and annoyances into their face by default.

And theres no magic switch to get them back to a point where they recognize that users matter.

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

#298

Post by Already__Taken »

Jach wrote: post #205
ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

I 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…

> Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on, 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…

> Some developers are angry about Windows 8 because they perceive that Microsoft is caring about them less, and that's probably true

C'mon, Microsoft just handed them an app store for the entire ecosystem. None of their technology stack was designed to do that before surely some stuff had to change.

assuming they survive, that's pretty cool.

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

#299

Post by chongli »

sbuk wrote: post #207
mistercow wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem was that at around the same time that VT became useless, Apple removed the OS X downloads section from their website (in preparation for the Mac App Store). So within a very short time span, most of the resources that small developers had for promoting their work disappeared. More recent abominations like Gatekeeper are just icing on the cake. >I'd think that it would improve discoverability in gener…

>> More recent abominations like Gatekeeper are just icing on the cake. I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this line of reasoning. How can security measures like this harm most users, especially given it's something that can easily be turned off.

Because measures such as these are security theatre (aka fearmongering). They are designed not to protect users but to force developers into their walled garden.

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

#300

Post by iRobot »

undergroundhero wrote: post #210
Jach wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on, 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…

I've had a soft spot for Microsoft ever since C# became my primary programming language. The .NET documentation is incredible, and Visual Studio works flawlessly with their languages. I'm loving their Kool-aid.

..glug ..glug ..glug ...choke!
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