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Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

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Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#431

Post by p_ing »

WorldMaker wrote: post #389
breakingcups wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason Microsoft is aggressively deprecating "older" CPU's that work perfectly fine. Heck, I have one laptop with Windows 11 that worked great, but won't update from 22h2 to 24h2 because CPU support was dropped between versions, leaving me with only the glib suggestion from the Windows Update UI to "Buy a new device". Ironically, installing Windows 10 and activating ESU would lead to longer hardware life. O…

TPM wasn't the only reason older CPUs were dropped. The biggest reasons where the line in the sand Microsoft chose would not be supported in Windows 11 was Spectre/Meltdown [0] mitigation. Windows 10 added a bunch of intentional slowdowns to mitigate that disaster and people incorrectly blamed Windows 10 for being slow and not the CPUs and their CVEs. Windows 11 seems to have wanted a clean slate without needing to h…

Yes, Microsoft is blocking CPUs which lack the ability for Virtualization Based Security. Given OS security is important to Microsoft (surprise, I know), enforcing VBS is a priority.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#433

Post by sys_64738 »

zrobotics wrote: post #37

IT & software dev for a small-midsize company. I wasn't able to finish migrating last month due to a pressing project, but we're migrating almost all of our systems at work to Linux. 90% of our user's work is done in a browser, and the other 10% is in an in-house application I wrote. That app works on Linux, since my work machine has been on Linux for years. We'll have a few macs and 2 win11 machines, but the rest ar…

Can you elaborate on the decision making? Was it purely a financial design (i.e. not to buy Win11 new systems and use the legacy PCs for Linux), or was it just a decision to break free from the Windows upgrade cycle? Thanks!

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#434

Post by xp84 »

fujigawa wrote: post #228
heavyset_go wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say that specifically with Secure Boot, Microsoft actually promoted user choice: A Windows Logo compliant PC needs to have Microsoft's root of trust installed by default. Microsoft could have stopped there, but they didn't. This was not the case with the initial rollout of Secure Boot, it was combined with locked BIOS to lock PCs so that they could only boot Windows 8 on some devices. This was the case on W…

> This was not the case with the initial rollout of Secure Boot, it was combined with locked BIOS to lock PCs so that they could only boot Windows 8 on some devices. This was the case on Windows RT ARM machines from that era. Okay, but, that was like 15 years ago, on some shitty first-run computers that no one bought. A failed first attempt. I've never met a single person that owned, or has ever used, a Windows RT de…

Don’t confuse the real point with the caricature. There’s a very real risk of only giant corporations being able to control software, because the general public does not even draw a distinction between “having control over what software is running on your computer,” and “being able to run a curated collection of software blessed by the manufacturer and subject to their exclusive discretion.” The full acceptance of the Apple iOS platform proves this. Apple must bless all binaries, and except for cases that are getting less and less common where jailbreaks are possible, the user has no authority and you could argue they do not own the device.

Some combination of the advertising industry and those with a vested interest in anti-fraud such as banks will eventually try to sneak remote attestation in there, which has the potential to put a complete end to ownership of devices as we have always understood it.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#435

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

array_key_first wrote: post #407
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right-click requiring two clicks to get to the options you most likely want to use (e.g. 7z unzip or opening in a specific program) This one you can still change. It is some hidden registry tweak, but there is the capacity to always "show more options".

Changing the registry is far too much of a hurdle.

Guess that depends on how much it angers you. Within minutes of seeing that, I jumped to the web to find a workaround, because that was way too annoying to accept.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#436

Post by spaghetti_king »

m463 wrote: post #153

I should mention that ubuntu phones home a lot. I like the fact that it has done a lot for the linux ecosystem, but there are a few things: - it has a privacy policy - it forces updates - their hardwired package ubuntu-advantage-tools cannot be uninstalled without breaking the os - motd has telemetry and nags - can't disable snaps - whoopsie uploads crashes to canonical now, this is different from windows because the…

I'm curious what you recommend? I've used Ubuntu mostly because of it's larger community and assumed it was less painful then others but am open to switching. I have to say the endless amount of distros and small differences between them has always been daunting and something I think holds some non-technical people back.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#437

Post by beeflet »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #416
beeflet wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. On linux, you have OpenSCAD (which is okay for some applications) and you have FreeCAD (which sucks imo). Right now, I just use OnShape which works in my web browser and is similar to SOLIDWORKS (and it's $0 for students). In the future I will try running windows CAD under linux using kvm and this: https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary

Just use Windows lol

I need to use both. It's easier for me to run windows in kvm than it is to run linux in WSL. (And more reliable in the long run, because I don't have to deal with changing windows update shenanigans)

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#438

Post by everdev »

p_ing wrote: post #431
WorldMaker wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TPM wasn't the only reason older CPUs were dropped. The biggest reasons where the line in the sand Microsoft chose would not be supported in Windows 11 was Spectre/Meltdown [0] mitigation. Windows 10 added a bunch of intentional slowdowns to mitigate that disaster and people incorrectly blamed Windows 10 for being slow and not the CPUs and their CVEs. Windows 11 seems to have wanted a clean slate without needing to h…

Yes, Microsoft is blocking CPUs which lack the ability for Virtualization Based Security. Given OS security is important to Microsoft (surprise, I know), enforcing VBS is a priority.

Security for Microsoft...

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#439

Post by beeflet »

fainpul wrote: post #315
grogenaut wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just run it in a windows vm for just that use, there's great ways to make this almost seamless in linux. works better than win/etc.

CAD applications usually require graphics acceleration. I've tried to make Fusion 360 work on linux using VMware, VirtualBox and GNOME Boxes – performance was unacceptably bad.

You could do KVM GPU passthrough

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#440

Post by underlipton »

Aurornis wrote: post #57
PostOnce wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make sure libreoffice is included, and ublock origin. Show them how much faster it is, with fewer ads, and no subscription to Microsoft required just to write a document. The business customers might want to know that databases are a lot cheaper on Linux, especially for small business. Literally spoke to an automation company the other week that told me "we have to delete a bunch of stuff every time the database gets…

> Make sure libreoffice is included Probably an unpopular thing to say here, but in my experience pushing non-tech people to use libreoffice as part of a Linux transition is a fast track to getting them to hate Linux. Using Google Docs has been much more welcoming in my experience. Something about libreoffice doesn’t resonate with a lot of non-tech people.

I usually take moments like this to relate my experience of OpenOffice (LibreOffice, prefork) blanking several of my documents, courtesy a bug that may or may not still be in LibreOffice. But this leads me to the reason I'm bringing it up now: the incre~dibly uncomfortable and unwelcoming experience of trying to pry 1) What happened, and 2) How to fix it out of the OO/LO volunteer support community.

My understanding is that the issue is the way OO/LO and the OS work together to handle file writes, which will not be changed because Linux distros do it right and Windows does it wrong and too bad that I was trying to use OO on a Windows PC. But I can't get a straight answer, and even if I were to, it wouldn't fix the bug - because the bug would be that I was using Windows. And now that I know that this is something that happens, I don't have any real guarantee that tomorrow the problem won't be the particular distro that I use, or whatever weird personal ax-to-grind led to the design decision that would now be giving me a headache. And that probably goes doubly for your average Windows user who doesn't really know what they're getting into.

Obviously, Google's support situation isn't any better. They've also had their share of catastrophic data loss fun-times. I genuinely don't know what the answer is.

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