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Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#291
You’ve managed to brick w11 VMs completely running in your native cloud. Kill laptops in the April update and trigger bitlocker on consumer machines which users having zero experience recovering their devices because the GUI is crap.

You’ve been busy.

Stop shipping features, ship stability and quality.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#292

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…

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Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#293

What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is. Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user bas…

> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.

The truth is - it's more complicated than that. People want three contradictory things:

1. To not be nagged for things like setting up cloud backups.

2. To not have data sent to the cloud without consent.

3. To be able to get their data back, if their hard drive dies.

Microsoft picks 2 and 3.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perpendicularly misaligned Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point. Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy. Of course, for most people things that are “parallel” would seem to be in close agreement.

> Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point. Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here

Right - sorry, my pattern suggests 2-dimensional thinking.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#295
post #166
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directory Opus has been doing that for decades.

I'm sure it did, but that app looks like a Win XP-era app (not even Win7). FilePilot is fast, looks good & feels modern (support a command palette, fuzzy search, etc). The only downside is that it runs on the GPU and so running it inside a VM is a bit of a hassle.

Why the hell would I want a file manager to be run on the GPU. it's supposed to be light on requirements and run on a potato, it's a file manager ffs not a 3rd person shooter.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#296

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…

> 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 just architecturally better for the end user.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how you can tell that they just don't get it. Microsoft, your users include developers and power users. We are not all someone's tech illiterate relative who needs constant reminding to check that backups are on, nor do we want to use OneDrive. If we turn it off, it means off. Updates off = they stay off until turned back on, don't worry, we'll remember. Backup off = it stays off. Edge off = it stays off. Ads…

It's wild to me that they don't have an Android-esque "Developer mode" that requires an obscure thing that you need to look up to see the options that can harm you (Click X times on the "Build info", etc).

Historically, Microsoft never had to consider that, because Windows was always in developer mode.

The Windows pedigree assumed that everything would at most have an ini or registry setting or group policy to override 99.9% of Windows' behavior or at least an undocumented but accessible internal API to set it.

The Windows 11 transition was the first time Microsoft shipped a sufficiently bullshit OS that it actually needed a developer mode.

But most scathingly... and the original sin... was that some shit-for-brains Microsoft leader made the decision to disable configurability for purpose of boosting platform revenue.

Fuck that person, because they knew exactly what and why they were doing it, and still made that decision.

Tolerate or hate them for all their sharp business elbows, but Microsoft of yore (Gates and Ballmer eras) intentionally made the decision that if they built and owned a platform that most people used (because it worked for them) then there would be more than enough money for everyone. And that it was healthy to leave money on the table for their developers, because developers and the apps they built drove people to the platform (see "Developers, developers, developers!").

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#298

I 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…

there are (will be) lots of calls on the muscle memory slacking off. I can't think of anything that is not reproducible on Mint.

I have tons of Windows experience (starting off by manually installing windows w/o installation floppies and manually editing win/system.ini, through win32 to current day nonsense), yet I find the command line interface of linux a lot more powerful.

I am not aware of the exact use of directX, it should be possible to run Windows through virtualization just for this task. (unless wine is sufficient)

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#299

I literraly can’t name one feature since Windows 7 what was worth it, even on the contrary: every update made the system worse. I had to restore Notepad, Calculator and Paint from Windows 7. What the hell Microsoft?

Did you restore Internet Explorer from Windows 7?

It seems uncontroversial that the state of web browsers is improved since Win 7

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know wtf their design team is doing. They're doing what management/business-strategy is asking them to do.

Not even the MBA types would mess things up this bad, it feels like Microslop is now full of programmers that make something and just ship it, no thought or any brain cells involved.

> it feels like Microslop is now full of programmers that make something and just ship it

I just don't see that happening in an Agile (the tech software dev term) workplace - it's got to be clueless Product Managers driving this. And even those folks have to answer to their management.

Tying it back to what's happening at the broader business level over the past few months - see this comment of mine [1] - there's got to be some degree of chaos at the business strategy level, and that's showing up at our consumer level.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996910

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