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Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

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Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#111
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of research did you do? I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll w…

> Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy p…

The pain points have gotten less painful in the last few years. As someone who has run a hackintosh at one point, Linux is a walk in the park in comparison.

Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#112
post #103

Linux is rising from the ground up. Many users are fed up with Redmond's nefarious schemes to pump up their share price like using its user base as A.I. guinea pigs. Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough an…

I'm surprised recent MS Office isn't fully supported under Wine yet, given the advantages that LLMs give in reverse engineering stuff. EDIT: Well, should have searched first before posting: https://itsfoss.com/news/bottles-microsoft-365-early-look/

I generally assume Wine cannot use LLMs considering developers that have been in contact with Windows code cannot contribute and LLMs almost certainly were.

Edit: for reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ

No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#113
post #93
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

> I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS. I am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.

Not until the anti-cheat situation is figured out. But I play most single player games on Linux these days.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#114
post #49
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option. Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.

It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that. Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "ver…

> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.

Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.

(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble…

Try linux mint. Gnome 3.x is cancer. Also, linux mint still uses xserver and for some reason suspend works properly on nvidia

> Gnome 3.x is cancer.

No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#116
post #112
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised recent MS Office isn't fully supported under Wine yet, given the advantages that LLMs give in reverse engineering stuff. EDIT: Well, should have searched first before posting: https://itsfoss.com/news/bottles-microsoft-365-early-look/

I generally assume Wine cannot use LLMs considering developers that have been in contact with Windows code cannot contribute and LLMs almost certainly were. Edit: for reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.

That would be a stupid application of the rule, it would mean no developer could use an LLM for anything that already has a proprietary alternative with heavily documented internals or leaked source code.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#117
post #3

Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble…

> "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...

Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#118

Do they even have automated testing? This should have been detected not only in one layer of the release process, but in serveral ones.

So there’s an argument to be made that when the same person designs, implements and tests the change, any purported defense in depth is largely illusory.

Once upon a time I disagreed with this argument, insofar as I believed it wasn’t necessarily true as long as you had good peer review every step of the way.

But the shift to AI coding has made good peer review a heck of a lot harder to pull off.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy p…

The pain points have gotten less painful in the last few years. As someone who has run a hackintosh at one point, Linux is a walk in the park in comparison. Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners the…

> Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.

The last emerge conflict I had was handled 100% by an agent.

I'm not wasting my weekend on stupid sysadmin tasks anymore.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#120
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.

I’m saying that compiling Wi-Fi drivers from source is still representative of trying to run Linux on consumer hardware. Desktop Linux is like a kit plane. You can pay to have someone assemble it for you, but you still need to know how to get in there and fix it.

I can honestly say that I've never had to compile wifi drivers from source in more than a decade of using Linux as my main OS, even through my distrohopping phase. And I'm not researching my hardware ahead of time, either. I don't even know what you'd need to be running in order to have to do that? Maybe void or something similar? I don't think that my experience is particularly unique.

The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.

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