Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux has lot of bugs and issues, but they are not caused by intention to make users' life worse.
They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better. To quote CS Lewis: >Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torme…
Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
381–390 of 550 posts
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#382I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account. Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password becaus…
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I see a likely inversion of motives here: you earn your living coding or otherwise are deeply vested in Windows, so you are committed for survival to Windows and to fixing the absurd account problem that MSFT has inflicted on you. The expression "muscle memory" here just means the cognitive load of working with a te…
My Ubuntu servers have been in an undefined state since canonical botched a regular upgrade to 26.04 LTS due to the ongoing DDOS. Their status page says everything works. A simple ping tells me nothing works. Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world. All major Linux distros are hell bent on repeating the mistakes of Windows. Especially since the people in control of the stack (minus…
Entirely fair, but let's not pretend the situation is symmetrical. Canonical doesn't have monopoly on the linux or broader *nix world the same way that Microsoft has on the Windows world.
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been Microsoft’s playbook since the 90s. You talk about this as if it’s something new and people should have trusted them before.
90s microsoft was awesome for the user. what are you talking about? NT4, MSDN, DirectX. they weren't perfect, but the UX was amazing.
Internet Explorer did everything it could to fragment the market place with non-standard HTML tags, VBScript, ActiveX and so on and so forth.
Microsoft released their own JVM that was incompatible with Sun Java code and caused headaches for millions of people.
Win95 used shady tactics to break compatibility with Dr-DOS.
MS Chat (or whatever it was called) was the bane of public IRC servers.
Win98 locked people into IE4.
WinMe was a clusterfuck.
MS refused to allow retail stores to sell Windows if the store also sold PCs with competitors OSs. Killing any chance for BeOS and others to Compete.
Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as “communism”.
I could go on but you get the idea. Microsoft have always been a shitty company.
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet somehow PEAK Windows versions ( whether it was 2000, XP or 7 depending on person) all predates introduction of forced or opt-out telemetry.
Peak in what way? Windows 2000 had sequential service startup. It took /ages/ to boot. The boot screen was pretty, though. XP was a security nightmare and out the gate was BSOD city, much of that thanks to 3rd party drivers, but the OS had fundamental kernel bugs, too. 7 was okay, but it isn't something you'd want to go back to with modern hardware. It lacks many features we find essential. TRIM being a big one. I'd…
Nice try but you won't deceive any attentive readers. Everything you've told in that paragraph was applicable to Windows 7, it had all the stability and none of the user hostility of later versions.
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#386By changing two settings in Windows, you can fix the worst of it. Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update. By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them. start > run…
I don't know if you realize it but your post single-handedly demonstrates a lot of the reasons why Windows is bad ...
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland. These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software. I actually did leave Ubuntu because background Snap updates were randomly crashing running applications. Now, I'm fai…
> These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software. > I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft. I understand it's frustrating wh…
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wine -> Running Windows programs on Linux WSL -> Running Linux VM inside of Windows Wine is more like emulating Windows API behavior on Linux, while WSL is Microsoft throwing their hands in the air and saying "Lets just VM Linux wholesale". Both aim to avoid Windows, neither replace Linux but instead tries to move more to Linux.
>Both aim to avoid Windows, neither replace Linux but instead tries to move more to Linux. I don't agree: WSL is an attempt to use programs developed for Linux in Windows. It is clearly for people who want to use Linux programs but don't want the headache of setting up Linux or dual booting.
Then I'd think it be available as a "right-click > Launch Linux Program" or something like that, like WSL1, rather than the VM approach WSL2 takes which gives you entire environment. Even Microsoft themselves market WSL like that:
> Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/
I agree with your last part though, it's for people who want to use Linux without the headache of dual-booting or managing their own VMs, so they use predefined packaged VMs ala WSL instead.
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux is doing just fine without normies.
The normies are what makes Microslop money, though. We need to get the normies onboard in order to fight MS' stranglehold on computing. Gatekeeping isn't the right move here.
Not that I'm even involved with distro development anyway. Probably would've been better to let the real OS engineers have the discussion on that one.
Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are caused by moral busy bodies who think they know better. If you know better just hack it your way. Linux is an open platform. Nothing prevents you from gutting Ubuntu and making it your own. You can't say the same for Windows though. So I guess is not a matter of monopoly of idiocy, but whether you can do something about idiot decisions when they are made. This is why an open platform will always win. It's…
>If you know better just hack it your way. ... It's just architecturally better for the end user. As an end user I want the product/tool to serve me well out of the box, I don't have time to hack it to fix what I dislike about it on my own dime. That's what my job is for.
The same probably can be said about laptops. Linux is great but buggy, and proprietary OSes do not pass the requirements.