41–50 of 104 posts
You can buy signature edition Windows machines directly from Microsoft that are crapware free, which is what I did a few months ago.
I got a brand-new laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed from a local manufacturer in Turkey (Actually it says "Grundig" but it's assembled by Arçelik[1]), as a present. It had an i5 and an SSD so I decided to give it a go as a mobile workstation (I'm the kind of developer who likes his large monitors a bit too much). The installation was single-language and I wanted it to be English, so I re-installed from the dedicate…
Just remember that it's only the web stack. No part of the Windows widget/form libraries (to make GUI apps) is being opened. I see this confusion a lot.
(Ubuntu is very good on this front. Debian not so much but that's down to politics not technology. Windows is still a hot mess)
I recently switched from a 15" macbook to a lenovo windows 8.1 laptop after 10 years of mac/linux for my daily driver. I live with Windows as the base install and virtualbox linux (arch + ubuntu). I am so glad to be free of the Mac... My hardware is upgradeable again, the touchscreen is a real innovation, Excel opens instantaneously and when I want Unix, I use the linux vm, I am not tempted to use the strange halfway…
It's just utterly confusing to figure out how to do nearly anything on the OS. There are all sorts of noisy visual cues that look like they communicate state or flow but don't, as well as many seemingly ill-conceived UX "modes" that bewilder me and that just doesn't happen for me with tech stuff.
Want to get to the control panel? There appear to be several different ones and you have to hover your mouse in just the right place on the screen in order to coax a bar to slide in and show you a few options. There are several such bars, each triggered by some kind of mouse hover.
Since I'm ranting, even the usability on the modern IE site is horrid.
It seems that the idea is to have one environment for tablets and for 'normal' users and another for "pro" users who care about advanced control panels. Even if you accept two entirely different UX metaphors coexisting as reasonable, it still boggles the mind how anyone could expect normal users to figure out those strange mouse hovers.
It's just such a bewilderingly odd user experience. 8.1 cleans up a few of the biggest warts but is still (IMHO) a UX disaster and I would actively discourage anyone from deciding to use it.
Maybe the best business decision for MS would be to just copy OSX as much as possible and then let the legal department deal with any infringement claims.
I'm actually fascinated with the lastest comment on that page from klkvsk: "Anyways, blame Intel and N-7265 wifi adapter you have in your laptop, not Microsoft. Windows does have a generic driver that works well most of their adapters, but seems like not all of them. That's a question for Intel, why is it not compatible." This is just Linux guys' (me) scripted answer for people trying linux for the first time who has…
I made the move in the same direction some years ago and, yes, there are always problems, but IME a missing or broken driver is common with a fresh install of Linux OR Windows. I've often had to download a network driver (both WiFi and wired Ethernet) separately and get it onto the machine via physical media, bluetooth or IRDA. As for software updates: Yes there's a load of Lenovo crapware and yes it's best to just d…
But Ubuntu comes with drivers for all the network devices it supports, and when it does updates, it does them all in one go with a single reboot required. You install, get online, update, and you're done. A base Windows install often will require external media to get online to get updates, and the process is a painstaking series of rebooting and re-launching/re-starting windows update.
> Installing Sublime text, npm (and npm packages) on Windows is just as easy as on Linux.
I think the point is that he tried doing it The Microsoft Way, and that it was full of barriers and frustration. Of course you can use other tools, but Microsoft tools on a Microsoft system ought to be easy, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is not about the WiFi driver, i can live with that but when my wp8 phone is getting in my way of downloading the driver, its just wrong, really wrong. Its like it is saying to me "You don't know what you are doing, let me fix this for you".
But this guy (you, whoever) didn't actually know what they were doing...otherwise he wouldn't have blown away the restore partition without saving the stuff that they needed to do a vanilla install.
As a linux user, I expect the leading commercial products to be at least on par with what a relatively standard linux distribution gives you. But no, apparently a vanilla ISO of the OS is not enough, you need more.
I got a brand-new laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed from a local manufacturer in Turkey (Actually it says "Grundig" but it's assembled by Arçelik[1]), as a present. It had an i5 and an SSD so I decided to give it a go as a mobile workstation (I'm the kind of developer who likes his large monitors a bit too much). The installation was single-language and I wanted it to be English, so I re-installed from the dedicate…
As a Windows developer and somebody who actually likes using Windows, I'm still shocked by how pathetic Windows Update is. I'm often reinstalling because as a developer I want to try out the newer platforms. I gave Windows 8.1 a try recently. Fresh install and Windows Update says there's nothing to update. Knowing that's BS, I force it to refresh -- after a significant wait suddenly there's 1GB of updates. Really? Wh…
Heh. My workstation in my cubicle at the office is getting a hard drive replacement right now because some update left it stuck at startup, saying "Windows is configuring things. Please do not turn off your computer." (Or something to that effect.) I get it; if it takes longer than 15 minutes to fix, core IT is going to re-image the drive, but now I have to reinstall Visual Studio and SQL Server, and patch, and patch, and patch. And always be afraid that it will just happen again some day.