Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

technical.ly

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 156 posts

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#111

Post by osigurdson »

anonymars wrote: post #98
osigurdson wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be thrown out, just keep using Windows 10. Oh, but you still want security patches for your old hardware and insist that it must be free - got it. I suspect if you were willing to cough up a few $B you could get companies to support any old hardware that you want, indefinitely.

Is Microsoft advertising their paid extended support as an option, or are they saying "buy a new machine"?

They likely ran the numbers and decide that it would be sub economic due to the small number of takers. Offering support for a very high that actually covers the costs + ROI would be laughable and just create negative PR.

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#112

Post by kbolino »

account42 wrote: post #102
kbolino wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own the computer, you can enroll your own keys and sign any operating system you want. The UEFI vendors don't necessarily make this easy to do, nor do they support it in a consistent way, but it's there. Of course, Microsoft has no incentive to make this any easier, since their keys come preloaded on every computer. The primary function of Secure Boot is to protect against bootkits. In a way, you're right, bec…

> If you own the computer, you can enroll your own keys and sign any operating system you want. The UEFI vendors don't necessarily make this easy to do, nor do they support it in a consistent way, but it's there This is not unilaterally true and there is no reason they won't try to push more locked down computers now that the base technology is accepted. > The primary function of Secure Boot is to protect against boo…

Not all malware is ransomware.

"They" will absolutely push more locked down computers, indeed this has become the norm in many areas of computing already, like smartphones, tablets, and video game consoles. For that same regular user, though, this is irrelevant: they're never going to install a different operating system.

A computer once compromised by a bootkit is also e-waste. It can never be trusted again. Now, I think an argument can be made that Secure Boot as implemented on most PCs isn't enough to truly protect against bootkits, but that just leads us to even more aggressive ways of locking people out of fully controlling their own computers.

Ultimately, Microsoft (and any PC O/S vendor that might supplant them in the future) will be expected by enterprises, judges, legislators, average home users, etc. to take responsibility for exploitation of "their" systems. Computers connected to the Internet 24/7 cannot rely on end-user discretion alone, and the effectiveness of such discretion varies widely anyway.

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#113

Post by kgwxd »

neepi wrote: post #11
kgwxd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and argues the migration from Windows 10 to Linux Mint is easier than Windows 10 to Windows 11. This message needs to stop. I use both heavily, because 1. I need to work and 2. I believe it's my duty to attempt to escape the prison MS/Apple/et al have built around us. But running Linux is fucking hard, unless all you need is available in a browser, and even then... If someone is going in expecting an easy replaceme…

I don’t give a crap any more. What I have learned is that in the last 30 years of being told that I should switch to Linux on the desktop is that I should stop listening to these people’s ideological perspective and just get on with creating and doing shit. Because that’s far more important. I’ll take Excel and Adobe over any of the alternatives. I am not even sure I’m happy with it on the server these days. FreeBSD…

I'm kind of there too, but I haven't entirely given up. 5 years ago, I wouldn't have installed Windows on any of my personal machines, but Windows 10 is on my primary PC right now.

I guess my point was that we're going to lose more potential users by over promising instead of just being honest.

It's built on an ideology.

It's pretty good but, when you struggle, we're here to help.

Things will be different, sometimes in very stupid ways, but there are multiple choices, with tradeoffs, YOU get to decided on.

The big corporations aren't really interested in you as a target demographic, but do you really want them to be?

All that sounds way more inspiring than "It'S tHe SaME thING, bUTT FReEEEEEdOm" which gets proven factually incorrect within the first 5 minutes of attempted productive use.

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#114

Post by bfmalky »

deltarholamda wrote: post #70
bfmalky wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't run Ableton or Lightroom on Linux, and Macs are almost 3x the cost of a similar spec'ed windows laptop. The apps are quite specific to me, but I imagine there are similar killer apps for other windows users.

>3x the cost of a similar spec'ed windows laptop Man, I'm not so sure about that. The M-series Macbooks are just crazy good for speed and battery life. The basic bottom-tier Macbook is $1000 and will do for a vast majority of people. A $330 Windows laptop is going to be a phenomenal heap of junk. People were running Ableton on 16GB M1 Macbooks a couple of years ago.

Yes, the bottom tier MacBook Air is about £1k, but only comes with a 256gb SSD. You can get a decent windows laptop for about that price with 1tb of storage and 32gb of memory. A similar spec Mac is close to £3k. CPU wise they are all fine for real-time audio, but the extra storage really matters.

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#115

Post by TremendousJudge »

JohnFen wrote: post #73
imzadi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not, Linux is still not really user friendly compared to a windows computer. Users still have to do command line stuff, and the software you are used to is not available. The equivalents are not as shiny as the windows versions. Macs might be too expensive for some people who are still running on old hardware.

> Users still have to do command line stuff Not really, unless they're doing something special. But if they're doing something special, they're not average users.

> unless they're doing something special

In my experience with Linux desktop, this could be "have the touchpad work the same as it did on Windows", "plug in an extra monitor and have it behave somewhat normally", or "play this game". But yeah, I guess that as long as we only expect "average users" to only use a web browser to look at Youtube, it's fine.

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#116

Post by anonymars »

osigurdson wrote: post #111
anonymars wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Microsoft advertising their paid extended support as an option, or are they saying "buy a new machine"?

They likely ran the numbers and decide that it would be sub economic due to the small number of takers. Offering support for a very high that actually covers the costs + ROI would be laughable and just create negative PR.

You seem to misunderstand. I'm not asking "does this program exist". The program does exist. But it is de-emphasized in favor of "lolz just buy a new computer".

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#117

Post by nottorp »

kbolino wrote: post #112
account42 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you own the computer, you can enroll your own keys and sign any operating system you want. The UEFI vendors don't necessarily make this easy to do, nor do they support it in a consistent way, but it's there This is not unilaterally true and there is no reason they won't try to push more locked down computers now that the base technology is accepted. > The primary function of Secure Boot is to protect against boo…

Not all malware is ransomware. "They" will absolutely push more locked down computers, indeed this has become the norm in many areas of computing already, like smartphones, tablets, and video game consoles. For that same regular user, though, this is irrelevant: they're never going to install a different operating system. A computer once compromised by a bootkit is also e-waste. It can never be trusted again. Now, I…

Responsability would mean no services open to the internet by default and not running arbitrary code from any random web site though.

What you're describing is more like security theater.

Does the TPM protect grandma from malicious javascript? :)

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#118

Post by burnt-resistor »

imzadi wrote: post #33
ryao wrote: post #22

Every time this happens, I wonder why people do not just drop Windows entirely.

Like it or not, Linux is still not really user friendly compared to a windows computer. Users still have to do command line stuff, and the software you are used to is not available. The equivalents are not as shiny as the windows versions. Macs might be too expensive for some people who are still running on old hardware.

Not Ubuntu, but we need a Linux that's pretty, standardized, simple, fail-safe, developed as an immutable whole, consistent, and integrated as macOS and long-term compatible similar to Windows without the M+MAANG corporate bullshit of either, perhaps through a non-profit, employee-owned co-op social venture.

Perhaps a far more polished and documented version of Qubes with various btrfs trees selectively presented cleanly to appropriate VM containers. Focus on the user UX meets the dev/ops UX but without gimmicks, not-invented-here, or fragility. All of the various desktop-laptop things need to work without surprises and be easily configurable with a UI. For fleet management, a desktop OS really needs simple, programmatic/declarative/imperative MDM- and/or chef-like configuration agent or hooks.

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#119

Post by joseda-hg »

joshstrange wrote: post #59

> System resources ... the requirements are much higher than they need to be They don't mention the requirements directly because people would laugh them out of the room. For hardware (aside from the TPM): 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with 2 or more cores on a compatible 64-bit processor, 4 gigabytes (GB), 64 GB or larger storage device. That is "higher than they need to be"? I don't think so. That's the absolute _flo…

At work we have some old computers which entire existence is running a legacy program from back when software didn't have gigs to spare

Those computers efectively have fixed requirements measured in a few megabytes + Whatever Windows needs

This eventually will mean that either those apps get rewriten for no good reason and moved to other platforms, or they get stuck on 'unsupported OS, AirGapped from as much as possible' limbo

Effectively nothing about them changed, they didn't need anything new, the API's didn't change, Microsoft just decided to do the thing

Re: Microsoft's big lie: Your computer is fine, and you don't need to buy a new one

#120

Post by bfmalky »

account42 wrote: post #93
bfmalky wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't run Ableton or Lightroom on Linux, and Macs are almost 3x the cost of a similar spec'ed windows laptop. The apps are quite specific to me, but I imagine there are similar killer apps for other windows users.

Ableton or Lightroom both have some level of support under Wine but it depends on the version you need. But both also have alternatives and IME killer-apps tend to become a lot less important once users have sufficient other motivations. Nothing is really irreplaceable.

I would love to replace Lightroom, but unfortunately the alternatives just aren't as good.

There are good alternatives to Ableton, but once you get to know a DAW it is hard to switch. And running a DAW with an ecosystem of 3rd party VST plugins and low level access to audio hardware on Wine sounds like a recipe for a bad time, but I confess I haven't tried it.

So, yes, these things are possible, but it is still easier to just use Windows.

Post reply on HN