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Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

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Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#91
post #87
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into…

I remember a Windows update pushed through SBS that bricked all machines in company overnight. Boot up to bsod. Was that Windows 7?

I just looked it up. Yes, it was Windows 7. You have a better memory than me.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#92
post #11

A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.

joke's on you, it has never worked for me.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#93
post #51
post #43

My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

> I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

I am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#94
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion? My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.

They broke: * at "random", during regular use * when installing something, sometimes * when removing something, sometimes * slowly, over time They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit. What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran. This has never been true for windows although the reas…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#95
Linux is rising from the ground up. Many users are fed up with Redmond's nefarious schemes to pump up their share price like using its user base as A.I. guinea pigs.

Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough and are jumping ship towards Linux.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#96
post #53
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

I switched to Linux in 1993. Never looked back

ah, those were the days, when compiling the kernel took about 12 hours, or the switch from COFF to elf - fun times indeed

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#97
post #49
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option. Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.

It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that. Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "ver…

> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.

No it isn't. That was true maybe 20 years ago. Most distros now just work. If something isn't working, the internet solves most of the problems.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#98
post #49
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option. Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.

It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that. Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "ver…

To be honest, I feel that the ceiling is higher in Windows. I just today dealt with a faulty HP Printer driver that caused wuauserv (Windows Update) to report that I had to reboot every day. Finding which files were corrupted in `C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\` was not an easy task.

I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.

Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.

In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#99
post #11

A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.

joke's on you, it has never worked for me.

It has always worked for me when I needed it.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#100
post #55
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that. Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "ver…

I have had these problems on Windows too. Computers are complex and there are always trade offs

In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable" compared to a home desktop Linux (among all sorts of distro plus DE combinations). And I was using Win 98 ME, early Vista builds and so on too. It is really hard to bork Windows install to become fully inoperable. It will be screeching and throttling under fifty different viruses and malware installed by a naive aunty in the accounting but it will just somehow work. And GPU driver crashes in my case were self recovering. Linux on the other hand allows way more manual intervention, but it also kinda expects way more manual intervention too. In my experience.
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