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The day Windows died

thomasbandt.com

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Re: The day Windows died

#801

Post by mrguyorama »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #668
contravariant wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to Microsoft this was a Lenovo laptop. Though why Microsoft continues to do business with a company that thought it was a good idea to install a root certificate (with a publicly known private key) onto every single laptop they sold so they could MITM some ads into websites is beyond me.

I have a Microsoft computer (a Surface Laptop) and it's not that bad. There are dumb news stories in the search menu and it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox, but then the interface is pretty clean.

>it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox

I actually have never experienced this. What I HAVE seen is that if you accidentally open a not-firefox browser, it asks whether you want to make it the default.

Re: The day Windows died

#802

Post by torh »

lawgimenez wrote: post #639
elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

Also bought a ThinkPad a few months ago, right away installed Linux (Fedora). I didn't even second guess, just straight up formatted away the yucky pre-installed Windows 11.

Any experience with USB-C dock and DisplayLink drivers?

I tried openSUSE, but the only distro that seems to play with DisplayLink (or, actually it's the other way around) is Ubuntu. And I like Ubuntu as a server, but not as a desktop...

Re: The day Windows died

#803

Post by iamleppert »

You do not own the OS. You didn't create it, and you don't even own a copy of it. You have a very limited license to it, as in permission to use it in a very specific manner, and no other rights other than those that you were granted. If you look closely even those rights may be subject to change, and change without your approval. Microsoft, under their current license, is free to do whatever they want to their OS, and as a for-profit corporation, their goal is to maximize shareholder value and return, not to create a pleasing product for you or your offspring. If you don't like the product, you should be asking yourself what type of incentive structures created it. And if you don't like that answer, your only real option is to do what you've done and use something else.

Once a company grows to a certain size, the wants and needs and opinions of individual users are no longer relevant. Users are more akin to cattle and only ever viewed as larger collections who exhibit certain traits and behaviors that can be channeled into profit directions (normally at the expense of other groups of users). Microsoft has decided that the experiences of those users is more valuable (as in generates more profit per unit economic) than the experiences of whatever group you fall into.

Re: The day Windows died

#804

Post by bombolo »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #420
bombolo wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that people who haven't tried the thing they're commenting about in the last 10 years should start with a disclaimer like "=== ATTENTION, I'M JUST PARROTING HERE ===".

Interesting, and what should people do if they are unable to understand that others experiences can and do differ from their own? As of an hour ago, plugging a trrs headset into the jack on my laptop breaks audio until I go kick the daemon. Linux is a pain in the neck.

Format your distribution. You probably messed some config file up, while trying to fix something.

They work completely fine. I use them all the time and have been using them for about a decade.

Re: The day Windows died

#805

Post by jodrellblank »

LorenDB wrote: post #757
jodrellblank wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where was the chat app of fifteen years ago which could open Microsoft Word documents inside it, such that multiple people could have them open and be shared-editing the same file at the same time? Where was the chat app which could record the video call, add automated transcriptions, and upload it to a SharePoint-alike document store with permissions for the people on the call to watch it? Where was the chat app of…

I would imagine that fifteen years ago, nobody needed a document editor embedded in a chat app. In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app. As far as "automated transcriptions", they weren't necessarily practical fifteen years ago. And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever. And Matrix clients. And many other clients. In short: Teams is not all t…

> "And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever."

Where's the fifteen year old IRC client which does hardware accelerated video chat from a web browser?

> "In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app."

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Except we have evidence: given a choice of Teams or IRC, businesses choose Teams.

Re: The day Windows died

#806

Post by myself248 »

cesarb wrote: post #702
irthomasthomas wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been a Linux user for almost a decade. Built a PC for someone recently and they wanted 11 Pro. Whatever, I shrugged, and downloaded the iso from Microsoft. I dd'd it to a usb, like every other iso, and boot to the installer menu. I'm greeted by an error that there are missing drivers. I'm familiar with this error, still, but I'm surprised to see it on the latest O/S. It looks exactly like I remember from 98. So, I sp…

> Been a Linux user for almost a decade. [...] No, it's because I was dumb enough to think I could just DD a Windows ISO, like every other ISO I've ever encountered. Microsoft are special, I need to use special tools. You haven't been a Linux user for long enough. The Linux ISO you can "just DD to a USB key" is a hybrid ISO, which is actually a hack which has both a HDD-style partition table and CD-style headers, car…

Right, the point is, Linux has figured this out, why hasn't Microsoft?

Re: The day Windows died

#807

Post by znpy »

Aeolun wrote: post #572
elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

> I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future. I’d been using Windows for so long, dealing with all the issues, random installs, shutdowns and all the crap. Then one fateful day 3 years ago I installed linux, and I haven’t had to think about my computer ever since. It’s absurd.

Indeed.

Years ago maintaining a linux installation was a part time job.

Did you update the kernel? Have fun recompiling the nvidia driver.

Usb modem? Roll 19 or higher for some random package off sourceforge to support your device and roll a 20 for some kind soul to have written an howto.

Bluetooth audio? Who knows!

Printing? Sure, let’s dive into lpd’s legacy on this earth.

Attaching an external display? You’ll love reading xrandr’s manoage EVERY TIME.

A package outside the official repository? Well if you’re okay trading your version upgrade in the future, why not…

Nowadays most things work.

Now if only gnome could stop the war against its own users…

Re: The day Windows died

#808

Post by crimsontech »

abraxas wrote: post #725
javajosh wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how does one get an account banned?

If my experience is anything to go by it's enough to refuse to give them 2FA credentials and attempt to stick to only using a password (since I don't give a shit about a Microsoft account and didn't store any personal info there).

If you have a MS account for Windows doesn’t it store your bitlocker key and activity in the account online?

Re: The day Windows died

#809

Post by znpy »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #729
mrjin wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one the verge. I switched all my secondary devices to Linux and all of a sudden, I hardly heard fans running any more. I literally had enough with Russian roulette like Windows Update, all kinds of spyware for a long time but it's really really hard to find substitution for some of the stuffs I use also the drives were not that good on Linux.

Switched over ~10 years ago. Was rough then -- pretty dang easy now. Fedora 36 is pretty smooth. Only issue was a nvidia driver update a couple of years ago, but was easy enough to unwind. Otherwise no issues. It's like that Neil Stephenson passage where he compares BeOS to the Batmobile, MacOS to a Lexus, Windows to a station wagon, and Linux to a tank, with the problem being that people are scared to learn how to d…

I switched from ubuntu to debian and from debian to fedora (37).

Fedora is just great.

And being a red hat certified sysadmin, I'm liking it even more.

Re: The day Windows died

#810

Post by myself248 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #633
elihu wrote: post #485

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far: I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course. Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concaten…

Been a Linux user for almost a decade. Built a PC for someone recently and they wanted 11 Pro. Whatever, I shrugged, and downloaded the iso from Microsoft. I dd'd it to a usb, like every other iso, and boot to the installer menu. I'm greeted by an error that there are missing drivers. I'm familiar with this error, still, but I'm surprised to see it on the latest O/S. It looks exactly like I remember from 98. So, I sp…

Couple years ago I bought a Thinkpad, back when everything came with Win10 but you could still do the Win7 downgrade. I tried to do just that, but everything went sideways in roughly the same ways as your post, just with different details.

After two weeks and getting Lenovo to physically FedEx me some Win7 recovery media and I STILL couldn't get the license key to take, I threw up my hands and decided to see if 2017 might truly be the year of the Linux desktop.

I threw Ubuntu on it and everything was just flawless. From the first boot. Set up full-disk encryption with no hassles at all, pointed a backup target at my NAS, found a few Gnome tweaks to correct little UI misfeatures like the alt-tab delay, and went on about my day.

As a lifelong DOS/Windows user up to that point, but now a 6-year Linux convert, I wonder why I waited so long. At some point Ubuntu hosed itself in a dist-upgrade so I switched to Pop!OS, which took less than an hour and I restored my last backup and everything just works again. It's bizarre that anything could be so trouble-free. Case-sensitive filesystems still annoy me but I'm slowly memorizing all the weird capitalized directories and stuff, a small price to pay.

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