Live data from Hacker News

Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

bbc.com

411–420 of 458 posts

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#411
post #313
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should look into an alternative then. Linux is quite beginner friendly these days and with Wine you can emulate pretty much any Windows application if that's what's holding you back from switching. If not then MacOS is the way to go. If you really want to go "back" then you should have a look at ReactOS which is a sort of an open-source Windows clone. I can't comment on recent Windows-related event as XP was the…

Even if Windows 10 has problems with scattered settings, old style programs vs new style apps, default apps and start menu annoyances, Linux Desktop annoyances are on a completely different level. The huge Gnome 3 schism, that lead to many different Gnome forks. And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps. And if you manage to pick a desktop,…

>And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps.

This is not really true, and has not affected anything that I've seen. Basically every GTK desktop (including GNOME) has another separate widget library on top of GTK, to include its own widgets specific to that desktop. Also GTK3 is currently release frozen and will not be adding any more features, GTK4 is the current version.

>hopefully by avoiding Gnome 3 because it constantly changes workflow and uses buggy JavaScript plugins,

I haven't seen any desktop system that doesn't change workflow over time, or doesn't have some bugs in the plugins. That's a sad fact of life when you have hundreds of plugins made by various people, with varying quality. FYI KDE is also using javascript as a plugin language for the desktop, and for a number of other QML things, so it makes no sense to single out GNOME for use of javascript: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

>And then of course the entire X vs Wayland situation.

The situation with compositing should improve over time with Wayland, the idea there is to not ever turn off compositing (though the Wayland implementations are still optimizing this for the various edge cases).

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#412
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they should make an OS that doesn't get pwned if you connect it to the internet when it's two weeks behind on updates. Linux and BSD machines manage it. Remote 0-days don't come by that often.

> Maybe they should make an OS that doesn't get pwned if you connect it to the internet when it's two weeks behind on updates. do you really believe that they AREN'T working on this? of course they are. the field of software development is extraordinarily young. we still don't know how to do things very well, and we're still discovering new ways to know we aren't doing things well. > Linux and BSD machines manage it.…

If we're talking target value, I rather think that servers are higher value than people's desktops - they have lots more juicy info, and richer owners.

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to ban.....the BBC?

BBC = British slanting , RT = Russian slanting , France 24 = French slanting, NYT = US slanting. They all have a slant but if you know you can still read their articles and get something out of it.

Slanting is moderately ambiguous, what do you mean? Obviously national news orgs are centric to their country where their readership is. The bbc is hardly a Nationalistic or propaganda or even aligned with the government

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#414
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By far, the most effective tactic I've found for controlling those update-triggered reboots is quite simple: Set your wifi as metered. That's it. It'll tell you about updates, but not auto-download them, until like 6 months or something have passed. It'll even actually fail to download them sometimes, even when you click the download button... but un-metering easily fixes that.

For Pro SKUs on up, group policy isn't exactly obvious but it is more effective. You can disable automatic downloading or installation of updates, and you can disable forced rebooting. You can also disable Cortana, most telemetry, and some other things. I've yet to see it messed with by an upgrade and it applies no matter what network you connect to.

I think you can disable Cortana (and many other annoyances) by just disabling the service. But yeah, group policy is generally more capable and fine grained.

And yeah, Cortana was one of the first things I killed off after getting a windows machine again, though I don't remember for sure how. It's so bad.

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#415
post #411
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Windows 10 has problems with scattered settings, old style programs vs new style apps, default apps and start menu annoyances, Linux Desktop annoyances are on a completely different level. The huge Gnome 3 schism, that lead to many different Gnome forks. And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps. And if you manage to pick a desktop,…

>And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps. This is not really true, and has not affected anything that I've seen. Basically every GTK desktop (including GNOME) has another separate widget library on top of GTK, to include its own widgets specific to that desktop. Also GTK3 is currently release frozen and will not be adding any more feature…

GTK, here are two forum threads that covers this.

GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/gtk3-regressions-from-a-gtk2...

Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/horrible-gtk3-gnome-ui-desig...

And then you have the terminal Termite

https://github.com/thestinger/termite

  This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility towards other 
  projects using VTE as a library. GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of 
  the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are 
  meant for others to use.
JavaScript can definitely work as scripting language for a desktop environment, but it doesn't work for Gnome in the current state.

I have written about this topic before, see thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195694,

quoting myself

  Personally I prefer building GUIs in a scripting language 
  like JavaScript over a compiled language like C and C++
and

  I think for Gnome and other desktops that uses this 
  technique, it is in the right direction
But the negatives in short are poor documentation, memory leaks, you end up only using the approved plugins (if you don't like to restart your desktop more than once a day) which of course negates the whole idea of a plugin system.

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#416
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe they should make an OS that doesn't get pwned if you connect it to the internet when it's two weeks behind on updates. do you really believe that they AREN'T working on this? of course they are. the field of software development is extraordinarily young. we still don't know how to do things very well, and we're still discovering new ways to know we aren't doing things well. > Linux and BSD machines manage it.…

If we're talking target value, I rather think that servers are higher value than people's desktops - they have lots more juicy info, and richer owners.

I think there is mismatch in publicly here. When private consumer's computers gets hijacked, those kind of stories can show up in normal non-technical newspapers, as a warning or a horror story for other consumers.

But does hijacking of servers create that kind of publicity? Sometimes companies have to admit that they have been hacked because of data leak. But do they publicly admit for every breach? Is it in private companies interest to go public with that kind of information? And if they do, does it reach non-technical newspapers?

There was a good thread about Linux kernel security today, a slideshow and video. TLDR; many unsafe practices because of C, bad project management to track bugs, triage bugs, correctly applying patches, correctly map patches with CVEs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27513149

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#417
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. I switched my work machine to windows after I couldn't get displayport chaining to work consistently under linux and had to plug in my monitors in a specific order after booting. Windows is by no means perfect. A bit overly provocative: With windows, if something is bad it is microsofts fault, with linux it's a user error. I don't like ads in the operating system (but I see it is hard to find a p…

> I couldn't get displayport chaining to work consistently under linux But did you try to use hardware designed for Linux?

Does Linux want to be as popular as Windows or as popular as Mac? Nobody has to check whether their hardware is designed for Windows.

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#418
post #415
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps. This is not really true, and has not affected anything that I've seen. Basically every GTK desktop (including GNOME) has another separate widget library on top of GTK, to include its own widgets specific to that desktop. Also GTK3 is currently release frozen and will not be adding any more feature…

GTK, here are two forum threads that covers this. GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/gtk3-regressions-from-a-gtk2... Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04 https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/horrible-gtk3-gnome-ui-desig... And then you have the terminal Termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite This is the tip of the iceberg when it com…

>GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective

It's a bit odd to read this sentence. GTK2 got its last minor release over 10 years ago, and was EOLed 6 months ago. It's a dead project. GTK3 is also feature frozen as of 6 months ago, and will not see any features brought back from GTK2. If you want to get some of these issues fixed, it would be best to start submitting patches to GTK4, or trying to find other solutions that will work there. Or, you could try to revive some of that GTK2 code yourself, although I wouldn't recommend it -- a lot of that code is very obsolete.

>Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04

This is a design decision made independently by the MATE developers to update their app to a different design, no? I don't see what GNOME has to do with this. Regardless of your feelings on it, at least one person seems to have thought it was the right decision.

>And then you have the terminal Termite

I remember this issue from last time it was discussed, I think the Termite maintainer overreacted as a result of a very normal technical disagreement. I don't really witness them rejecting patches any more than any other project. I also disagreed with that developer's decision to fork on a technical level, I thought that was unnecessary and could have been avoided.

>But the negatives in short are poor documentation, memory leaks, you end up only using the approved plugins (if you don't like to restart your desktop more than once a day) which of course negates the whole idea of a plugin system.

Some people are actually working on the docs, please contribute if you are able: https://gjs.guide/

There have been issues with memory leaks in the past, but those are bugs that can pop up with any garbage collected language. I'm not sure what you'd expect them to do, besides do the normal thing, and fix the individual bugs whenever possible.

I hate that I always have to say this, but there is no alternative to only using approved plugins, on any plugin system. I don't know what you mean it negates it. In Javascript the crashes and hangs are usually from unhandled exceptions and infinite loops -- This is even worse with a C or C++ plugin system, because those are memory unsafe and can cause bad segfaults. If the javascript is causing segfaults then that's probably a bug that should be reported.

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#419

I like Windows as an end-user OS. Works with all my equipment. The only horribly annoying feature is the lack of borders around windows which sometimes make it very, very difficult to distinguish two overlapping windows. I am a heavy user of Linux in the back (all my servers and containers run some kind of Linux since '93) and I desperately tried to use it on the desktop but is it a big pile of crap. SO I will live i…

LMGIFY: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

Re: Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils

#420
post #241

>> Windows 10 was released in July 2015 and dubbed "Windows as a service" Can we please have 7 back, with its complete lack of built in ads, dark patterns ramming the Microsoft browser down your throat, telemetry everywhere (the calculator, really?), changes for the sake of showing that some manager did something rather than functionality (Rename this PC -> Rename this PC (Advanced))? Windows 10 still regularly shows…

You should look into an alternative then. Linux is quite beginner friendly these days and with Wine you can emulate pretty much any Windows application if that's what's holding you back from switching. If not then MacOS is the way to go. If you really want to go "back" then you should have a look at ReactOS which is a sort of an open-source Windows clone. I can't comment on recent Windows-related event as XP was the…

It’s easier to complain about and keep using Windows than to retrain, support, and make all programs compatible for >500 people, unfortunately.
Post reply on HN