[HN Gopher] Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11
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Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11
Author : h0ek
Score : 899 points
Date : 2026-03-24 09:36 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sambent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sambent.com)
| no_shadowban_3 wrote:
| These flowers smell like shit.
|
| If you don't use Linux or MacOS yet, why?
| jacooper wrote:
| Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram, and Linux
| still can't run proper creative software.
| troupo wrote:
| > Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram
|
| This hasn't been true for at least a decade. And it's
| _especially_ not true for the M* series Macs.
|
| Even Macbook Neo can handle editing several layers of 4k
| video files in several apps while running everything else
| https://youtu.be/Mo6o8RKn7jE?is=opeCYMDbt7bUAdvS Try that on
| "the same performance/ram" Windows Machine
| maxnoe wrote:
| "Most companies still do not publish Linux builds for
| creative software"
|
| There, fixed it for you.
|
| It's not like Linux is the blocker here.
| jacooper wrote:
| Doesn't matter, the end result is the same.
| nunodonato wrote:
| are you a creative professional? because I see that argument
| quite often as if people use Adobe CS daily, and then its
| mostly people who do basic stuff (that photopea or gimp can
| handle fine), but they like to feel "pro" by launching their
| pirated version of photoshop.
| spookie wrote:
| I use krita, adobe substance 2024, blender and whatever
| other software. Professionally.
|
| When I hear these arguments I just think these people are
| simply chained.
| jacooper wrote:
| Gimp is ass, what takes me 5 minutes in Photoshop needs an
| hour in GIMP. Also I edit photos occasionally in lightroom.
| I actually daily Linux, but I still have to dual boot for
| gaming and Adobe.
|
| Also Linux isn't flawless either, Fedora broke sleep on my
| full AMD PC since like a month now and no agent could
| successfully debug it.
| yourusername wrote:
| This used to be the case but looking at Macbooks now they are
| not much more expensive than a Windows laptop you would
| actually want to buy. And since they will still have some
| residual value 5 years from now i think it's about even.
| mschild wrote:
| > And since they will still have some residual value 5
| years from now.
|
| I dont know any private person in my circle that actually
| sold their laptop until it wasnt broken or so painfully old
| that the used value was mostly for spare parts. That may
| change a bit with the skyrocketing pc part prices but
| still.
| someonenice wrote:
| This used to be case before the M series. Now each year a
| new M processor gets released that are "cheaper" than the
| previous generation MAC - better processor, more RAM and
| more storage for similar price than last year model. This
| impacted their price in used market.
| someguyiguess wrote:
| My main computer is a 2020 m1 Mac. It handles everything I
| throw at it. I predict I'll upgrade in maybe 4-5 years.
| dirasieb wrote:
| feel free to link a windows computer (pre-built or parts,
| whatever you want) that outperforms the m4 mac mini while
| costing either the same or less
| troupo wrote:
| Macs are circling down the same drain.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| In what way?
| troupo wrote:
| - They are rapidly iOS-ifying the desktop experience
|
| - All core services and apps experience significant
| performance degradation (to thenpoint that Spotlight
| regularly fails to find installed apps) which are currently
| only offset by the insane performance of the M* series
| chips
|
| - Services become more and more pervasive, with ads
| throughout the system
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I don't know what that first one means. You mean the
| glass design?
|
| Yeah, spotlight has been rough for years, I grant you
| that.
|
| I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see
| them?
| 9dev wrote:
| You're probably an iCloud services user. Try a Mac
| without an iCloud account - it's nagging you pretty
| heavily to set it up, get an iCloud+ subscription, use TV
| and Music and Game Center subscriptions, and so on.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I am not. I don't even have Apple ID.
| baal80spam wrote:
| > You're probably an iCloud services user.
|
| I don't even know what iCloud is, and I have seen zero
| ads. I don't understand such comments.
| 9dev wrote:
| Oh please. Unless you've never opened system settings and
| got the device with a user account pre-configured for
| you, you have been exposed to iCloud several times.
|
| Does it make one especially edgy to pretend to use an
| Apple device while never having heard the name of their
| single cloud offering? Whatever floats your boat, mate.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Correct. My device is issued to me by my employer. I
| never owned a Mac in my life.
|
| I admit that my comment was a bit over the top. But all I
| know about iCloud is that it's similar to OneDrive. Never
| used it.
| troupo wrote:
| > I don't know what that first one means. You mean the
| glass design?
|
| Not just glass. It started with Big Sur at least. It's
| forcing narrow and/or devoid of controls interfaces into
| every app, breaking decades-old system behaviours
| (misbehaving controls, wrong or non-functioning keyboard
| shortcuts, mobile-like interfaces in desktop apps etc.).
| It's eschewing MacOS-native development for shoddy half-
| assed ports of iPhone software even for first-party apps.
| Etc.
|
| > I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you
| see them?
|
| I've seen notifications for Apple Music, and I've seen
| ads in the System Settings
| 9dev wrote:
| > offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
|
| I'm really afraid of that one. MacOS engineers don't have
| to worry about performance optimizations anymore, because
| the chips gobble it up anyway. Ever more powerful
| hardware is how we ended up with the awful performance of
| modern-day computing.
| conceptme wrote:
| Games
| mschild wrote:
| Fair. Depends on the game to be honest.
|
| I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the
| games I play work without issue but I know there are some
| which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific
| anti-cheating software reasons).
| no_shadowban_3 wrote:
| Do you play fortnite? Steam's linux support is really good
| but I kept a Windows install for a couple of years so I could
| keep playing fortnite.
| eknkc wrote:
| I have a desktop computer that I use for gaming so it had
| windows forever. Lately it started running laggy. Occasional
| frame drops and stuff. Reinstall, bios update etc nothing
| helped.
|
| For debugging I installed Bazzite (Linux gaming distro)
| assuming compatibility would be shit but I can at least test
| native linux builds of some games to see if there is a
| hardware issue. The thing runs perfectly. I've been playing
| propert windows games on Proton with higher / more consistent
| FPS. It is kind of funny at this point. Granted I do not play
| any competitive / multiplayer games.
|
| I guess Valve did a great job on the Steam Deck sw.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I've been running Fedora (or a flavor) on my gaming PC for
| two years. All my games work. I understand some competitive
| games with intrusive anti cheat are incompatible, but with
| the success of the steam deck I don't think the gaming
| argument is holding much water these days.
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| I was playing RE9 at 4K on my Debian 13 last weekend. The
| vast majority of games work, even some live service games. 5
| years ago you would face significant issues, today that
| simply isn't the case.
| dude250711 wrote:
| Because they suck.
| scrollop wrote:
| I moved to ultramarine linux and it's great - fast, has a
| nifty desktop management system, a few bugs but more than
| happy compared to using microsoft.
|
| "It sucks"
|
| Ha!
| bob1029 wrote:
| I use a blend of Windows, MacOS, iOS and Linux.
|
| Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of
| picking exactly one hill to die on.
|
| I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and
| 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective,
| but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally
| with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office
| on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
| red369 wrote:
| I agree completely about each being good for its own thing. I
| quite like iOS as a phone OS. The limitations often bother
| me, but since it's tiny screen that needs to fit in my
| pocket, I'm creating my own limitations anyway so I'll use it
| less (1).
|
| I switch around enough that I try not to do crazy amounts of
| personalisation in my desktop OS. Probably this evens out the
| OSs and there are aspects I like and dislike about each. I
| guess I prefer KDE Plasma to Windows or MacOS. I choose that
| for my own computer, but I spend far more time in Windows.
| I'm not sure I agree it it much worse from a UX perspective.
| It allows keyboard only usage very easily, which is something
| I struggled with in MacOS.
|
| 1) I'm only focusing on the UI - there are some things I
| struggle to forgive, like not being able to set add my own
| ringtone or alarm tone, or not being able to have the volume
| of a ringtone increase as the phone rings like on every
| ancient feature phone.
| red369 wrote:
| I've given this a little more thought, and I agree more
| with "Windows really does suck from a UX perspective" then
| I was thinking when I wrote my comment.
|
| I really should have included the recent escalation in
| hostility towards users in my thoughts - built in ads,
| pushing unwanted products, trash news in new tab pages etc.
| hu3 wrote:
| macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and
| customizations to make it sane for basic things like window
| management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount
| of tweaking needed for power users.
|
| And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash
| to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this.
| There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let
| me guess, disabling SIP...
|
| And it sucks at gaming.
|
| Linux on the other hand is great for power users!
| alex_duf wrote:
| I've installed linux (debian LTS with XFCE) on my mom's
| computer and she recently called me to thank me. She says her
| computer is much quieter now (meaning fewer notifications).
| She only needs a web browser and a text editor.
|
| So you're right, it's great for power users, it's also great
| for other users.
| hu3 wrote:
| I fucking love XFCE! And have more than a decade of mileage
| with it.
| alex_duf wrote:
| right? windows 98 ergonomics (that's NOT sarcasm) with
| more customisation and not trying to re-invent the wheel
| every month.
|
| I'm a gnome user myself, I do enjoy the year on year
| refinement they have going there, but I completely
| understand and respect the XFCE crowd.
| dahcryn wrote:
| you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave like
| Windows, that's what you mean.
|
| I'm perfectly happy with my "vanilla" macbook. Runs Baldurs
| Gate 3 and my final fantasy ps2 emulator just fine, and even
| trackmania was quite easy to get installed and runs well.
|
| Can't comment on that hash thing, but I don't see why that
| would be a problem? It's not linked to your name or
| something. Windows does a ton of things too that I find
| inexcusable, such as changing settings or permissions after
| updates, those have an actual impact on my daily experience
| with these things
| baal80spam wrote:
| > you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave
| like Windows, that's what you mean.
|
| 100% this.
| g947o wrote:
| Window management: only if you are the kind of power user who
| needs complex layout. I have used Windows for decades and
| have used Mac on and off, and have even bought one of those
| window management app on MacOS, but never needed to use them.
| In rare occasions where I need several windows open, side-by-
| side on each of dual screens is usually good enough, if not I
| probably am working in a terminal where I use tmux.
|
| Gaming: that's a fact but again doesn't matter to most
| people. Most people play video games on
| phones/tablets/consoles if they play games at all. PC gaming
| is a relative minority, and (regular) Windows laptops can
| only do lightweight gaming anyway. The amount of people who
| decides what "everyday computer" they should buy based on
| whether they are going to play games on it is very small.
| Plus, you get much better ROI by buying a PS5+Macbook Air
| than spending the same amount of money on a gaming laptop.
| skc wrote:
| Because Windows works just fine for me.
|
| I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.
|
| Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be
| honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your
| own.
| matltc wrote:
| Do you use powershell or run WSL
| nirava wrote:
| Depends on whether using someone else's windows machine
| leaves you crazy annoyed.
|
| My windows machine is also "fine" for the most part because i
| turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could
| not. Even so, every once in a while, typing "code" and being
| taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to
| shreds.
|
| And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled
| with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.
|
| It isn't that fine now that I think about it.
| Mashimo wrote:
| I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while
| every few years. But there was always something. Often video
| driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game
| that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software
| does not run on it.
|
| Still use it on my server though.
|
| I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite
| expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for
| now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more
| battery or power. No fan could be cool.
| alexb_ wrote:
| The last time I tried to use Linux, I said "fuck this" when I
| had to open up a text editor for something so basic as making
| a shortcut with command line arguments. This is the easiest
| menu in the world on Windows, but it took me looking up a
| bunch of things to get it to not work on Linux.
|
| The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize
| how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux
| and it didn't work anymore.
| nirava wrote:
| So you switched something as fundamental as the OS, and
| were pissed that it was ... different?
|
| You can fault Linux as the primary desktop environment for
| a few things, but that it's different to MS is not one of
| those.
|
| Do you also rant about having no windows key on a MacBook?
| alexb_ wrote:
| Yeah, it's kind of annoying. But middle click scroll is
| something I use literally every single second of every
| single day on my web browser. It's a deal-breaker.
| nirava wrote:
| Ok that's fair ig. I used to be a fairly heavy user of
| the middle click scroll feature on windows like a decade
| ago. Made the switch to Debian w/ Awesome, and that habit
| just casually fell away. The switch is probably a 3 day
| annoyance at most. IMO arrow keys and scroll are fine. On
| laptop trackpads two finger scrolling and momentum
| scrolling are far more accurate IMO. Also if you have the
| mx master mouse, it has a crazy good scroll wheel that
| you can "throw".
|
| Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll
| feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may
| have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short,
| in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid
| notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi
| decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the
| most.
| whobre wrote:
| I do use Linux at work and for programming at home, but for
| general office work Windows is just better, sorry.
|
| As for MacOS, I just hate it.
| krige wrote:
| Linux doesn't run the software I want to use, or runs it badly.
| MacOS... lmao.
| stndef wrote:
| I think we need to be a bit more careful and considerate around
| the use of language around physical abuse, or abuse in general,
| and using software.
|
| Saying that here as someone that isn't fond of the Windows
| experience these days, but the two are not relatable.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with
| anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually
| suffering from use of the word.
| stndef wrote:
| I'm willing to be wrong, but it's specifically mentioned as
| an analogy for abuse in the article itself.
|
| Not trying to turn everything "woke", but phrasing of
| scenarios around this just takes away from the severity of
| what actual abuse is.
| arowthway wrote:
| How does it take away from the severity of actual abuse? By
| not mentioning it when it's not relevant to the analogy?
| someguyiguess wrote:
| It's actually more triggering / offensive that you brought
| up abuse when no one was talking about abuse. This site is
| for adults who understand the concept of analogies. You
| just wanted to bring up the topic of abuse for whatever
| reason. Why?
| dontwannahearit wrote:
| Oh please, TFA has a title of "Flowers after the beating"
| - its a direct reference to domestic abuse which attempts
| to equate Microsofts behaviour and that of a domestic
| abuser.
|
| Username checks out, but you might want to check with
| your mother about how she feels about this comparison.
|
| TFA brings up abuse not stndef.
|
| An analogy is "a thing which is comparable to something
| else in significant respects" and stndef is right to
| point out that microsoft behavior, while abusive, is not
| comparable to domestic abuse "in significant respects".
| Not even close.
|
| The TFA title is sensational for effect and in very poor
| taste.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The article comes back to the abuse analogy multiple
| times. If you want to defend that as fine, go for it, but
| in no way is it a new topic that the poster here brought
| up.
| afandian wrote:
| I agree with stndef. "Flowers after beating" is a very direct
| evocation of physical abuse in an intimate relationship.
| Whether or not you think it's appropriate.
| arowthway wrote:
| If you don't claim it's inapropriate then what's left to
| agree about?
| afandian wrote:
| There are all kinds of language registers for
| communication. From formal business speak to 'locker room
| banter'. What is appropriate or otherwise depends
| entirely on the participants of the conversation. So, it
| depends on what kind of conversation we're trying to
| have.
|
| I think this post's usage is meant deliberately to be a
| bit edgy, to illustrate how badly Microsoft has behaved.
|
| An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore
| discuss what shared context we're trying to build,
| shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed
| 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
|
| Personally, data point of 1, I think it's a bit
| distasteful, and would prefer to participate in a
| community that doesn't routinely use that kind of
| langauge.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| blenderob wrote:
| > An encouragement to be mindful of language, and
| therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to
| build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed
| 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
|
| I don't understand how HN's news guidelines apply to a
| blogger writing an article on their own blog. The
| controversial language was found in the article. It
| wasn't found in the thread you're replying to.
| arowthway wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to expect people to autocensor
| based on ill-defined, circular notions of taste and
| appropriateness, at least not in edge cases where these
| notions clearly vary from person to person. If the
| reasoning is something like "an abuse victim might read
| this and feel bad" or "a stupid person might confuse
| social license for edginess with license for being a bad
| person", then that's a discussion we can have.
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| > An encouragement to be mindful of language, and
| therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to
| build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed
| 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
|
| I think you guys complaining about provocative title and
| not not the substance of what is said, is what people are
| taking issue with.
|
| If I didn't know better, I would honestly think it is
| concern trolling.
|
| > I think it's a bit distasteful, and would prefer to
| participate in a community that doesn't routinely use
| that kind of langauge.
|
| The entire point is that it is provocative and hyperbolic
| to make a statement. Often to make a statement you have
| to act _outside_ what is considered polite norms and
| ruffle the feathers.
|
| If Sam had given this a nice polite title (as per your
| preference), not as many people would have taken notice
| of it.
| afandian wrote:
| I hope you can take on trust that this is a genuine,
| exploration of the original point about language. And FTR
| I have a very low opinion of MS and have had since the
| late 90s.
|
| There are usually all kinds of twists and turns in a HN
| discussion. And it's not like we're discussing the
| background colour or something far off-topic, the title
| is a pretty noticeable part of the article. I don't think
| it should be verboten to discuss these things.
|
| I agree that transgressive speech is an important tool,
| and tone policing is generally bad news.
|
| To each their own.
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| > I hope you can take on trust that this is a genuine,
| exploration of the original point about language.
|
| I find it hard believe that any discussion like this is
| genuine and I am deeply suspicious of people that
| complain about hyperbolic and provocative language.
|
| Moreover, I think complaining about it like people have
| is here is verging on being ridiculous tbh.
|
| Again if I didn't know better (i.e. I don't think this is
| happen) I would actually think it deliberate to run
| interference.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I their point was: the comment they were replying to
| ("Beating is a normal English idiom") was being
| disingenuous.
|
| Saying something like "the benchmarks took a beating in
| the new version" would be inoffensive but "flowers after
| the beating" is much more specifically about abuse in a
| relationship.
|
| I don't think "Whether or not you think it's appropriate"
| was meant to say, don't worry it's fine. I think it just
| meant, let's not justify by pretending that it's about
| something different than it obviously is.
| arowthway wrote:
| Thanks, I get it now. I'm not sure if the comment was
| necessarily disingenuous but it's clearly not used as an
| idiom.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Heartbreaking: The Worst Company You Know Just Made A Great Point
| halflife wrote:
| Enough with the memes.
| mdrzn wrote:
| Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They
| don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained
| text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
| alberto-m wrote:
| Reading the article without Firefox's reader mode is a pain.
| Maybe it's a secret plan of Mozilla to promote their browser.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Don't all browsers have it nowadays? I feel like it's been in
| my Brave forever.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Whenever I see stuff like that I ask myself "who is this _for_
| ", like who _wants_ to see those elements animated for no good
| reason?
| Macha wrote:
| It's quite common for companies to work their way up to the line
| of the most user hostile version of their product that users will
| tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a
| switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep
| everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to
| inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
|
| I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if
| customer response more often insisted further roll backs than
| just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of
| losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage
| companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
|
| Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were
| the reactions to Unity's install pricing and wizards new OGL.
| Mostly companies get away with "oh my bad, this final step was
| just an experiment, we've rolled it back for now" to try again
| later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping
| their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no
| choice
| mschild wrote:
| The other thing is availability of alternatives.
|
| Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought
| Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device.
| Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good
| luck getting the average person through the setup process.
| chii wrote:
| > good luck getting the average person through the setup
| process.
|
| an enterprising hardware manufacturer can take on the mantle,
| and be the trail blazer with a no-setup machine that works.
|
| Personally, i would imagine something like framework laptop,
| and steam machine, are the best candidates.
| Ekaros wrote:
| How long would it take for some MBA to come there and say
| hey if we install this full of crap we could make multiple
| euros per unit... And then fill it with crap, spying and
| other things?
| bmn__ wrote:
| Purely hypothetical, hasn't happened yet. The reason is
| that Linux system vendors are lead and staffed by people
| who are idealistic like the average Linux system
| customer. They know their clientele, they know it would
| be bad for business.
| Gigachad wrote:
| This is what the Steamdeck is. But it took an absolutely
| massive amount of work over a decade from valve just to get
| gaming working. No laptop manufacturer could afford to do
| the same for fixing wine for desktop software since they
| aren't getting a cut of the software sales like valve does.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's mostly because they didn't care before. It _also_
| took a massive amount of work to get gaming to work on
| windows.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Good luck getting the average person through the setup
| process_
|
| AI is part of the problem with what MS has shoved in to
| things but it may be part of what can help with the
| underlying issue of this behavior by corporations.
|
| The average user increasingly will not need to be walked
| through in certain ways, they'll only have to be aware
| something, some way, is possible. Because we are most of
| usthe average, meaning outsider to knowledge and
| understanding of things their functioning on a computer. I
| can strip out tired windows behavior to some extent and
| certainly stand up a Linux desktop. But I didn't know how to
| easily manage retrieval of data from an old disc image that
| refused to mount. But I knew it was there and not impossible
| so I asked Claude. A one shot prompt that a few minutes later
| had Claude reading raw bytes in someway and finding the
| location of a few files I needed.
|
| So there is potential for AI to fill some gaps in this way
| and make some things easier and more in reach of average
| users. It's potential only though, so continuing to work and
| ensure open models remain a thing, it's important. Just like
| the Internet enabled a lot of things previously out of reach
| of people. And yeah, that was not an un mixed blessing with
| the rest, so all the more reason to move forward
| thoughtfully.
| dude250711 wrote:
| I think managers were promoted for infecting their features
| with Copilot, and developers for infecting them with React, and
| here we are.
|
| OneDrive managers on the other hand are one step away from
| inventing some way of adding a gacha mechanic.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| Blaming React is absurd. Its like blaming the screwdriver
| instead of the person using it.
| etiennebausson wrote:
| He isn't blaming React (or Copilot), but those who used
| them in context they had no place in.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| "developers with infecting then with React" is 100%
| blaming React
| edgyquant wrote:
| No it's directly putting the blame on developers
| anthonylevine wrote:
| "I'm on HN and whenever I see React mentioned I'm
| constitutionally incapable of not saying something dumb"
| shmeeed wrote:
| Seen in the context of the thread, with the both of you
| never addressing the actual problem at hand but instead
| reflexively and vigorously defending React against an
| alleged attack, I'm sorry to say this reads like an
| admission.
| tremon wrote:
| I too would absolutely blame a plumber for trying to fix my
| leaking pipes with a screwdriver instead of e.g. a solder
| patch. Not everything is a screw, not even in the
| developing world.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| lol Blame the plumber then.
|
| "Infecting with screwdrivers" now see how dumb that
| sounds?
| Draiken wrote:
| Nobody's blaming React. The blame lies on the bad
| developers that chose it to write a freaking start menu.
|
| React is the symptom here, not the cause.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| What does "infecting them with React" mean?
| shmeeed wrote:
| Introducing bloat.
| someguyiguess wrote:
| Umm sir, it's Windows. Bloat is part of its core
| architecture.
| shmeeed wrote:
| Fair point...
| general1465 wrote:
| Blaming React is correct. It is like asking for a picture
| on a wall and instead getting noisy, power hungry plasma TV
| on a wall.
| anthonylevine wrote:
| This metaphor is so stupidly bad it's hard to believe you
| guys even know what React is.
| tremon wrote:
| Thank you, your comment sure helps to improve our
| understanding of React a lot.
| anthonylevine wrote:
| My bad. I didn't realize it was my job to educate people
| who talk about things they don't know anything about.
|
| lol what a weird response.
| jamesnorden wrote:
| Thanks for adding nothing at all to the conversation.
| shmeeed wrote:
| I'm not a dev and actually don't know what React is. I
| don't care for this metaphor.
|
| As a user, however, I find that the Start menu has become
| more sluggish than it used to be, and that's pretty
| annoying. What about that?
| someguyiguess wrote:
| I recently began developing an app for Xbox Series X/S.
| The only framework that will work is UWP. When you look
| at the UWP docs, this is at the top of the page
| highlighted "If you are starting to develop Windows apps,
| we recommend you consider using the Windows App SDK, and
| WinUI rather than UWP. Although still supported, UWP is
| not under active development. Please see Start developing
| Windows apps for more information."
|
| So no, React is a (poor) solution, not the problem. The
| problem is Windows can't nail down a solid SDK for it's
| platforms.
| Geof25 wrote:
| Or instead of React you can use native WinUI. So using
| React is just lazy bloatware introduction
| account42 wrote:
| We can blame both. If my repair bill was higher because the
| mechanic chose to use a ridiculous electric screwdriver
| that used tons of power to achieve what a normal
| screwdriver can and stripped the screws in the process then
| I'd also be upset with both the mechanic and the
| ridiculously inefficient tool.
| anthonylevine wrote:
| > a ridiculous electric screwdriver
|
| So React, the most popular front-end library and used my
| hundreds of thousands of successful apps, is the
| ridiculous electric screwdriver? See how weird that
| sounds and makes it obvious you guys can't give an honest
| assessment?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| React is a javascript library. Javascript needs its own
| runtime. Why not just write stuff in native windows
| controls and save having to run an entire javascript
| runtime for no reason?
| anthonylevine wrote:
| > Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and
| save having to run an entire JavaScript runtime for no
| reason?
|
| Idk, and I'm not saying it's not a good question, but
| it's irrelevant to the comparison in OP's comment.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Using an entire javascript runtime and framework to make
| your OS start menu is using a ridiculous overpowered
| electric screwdriver that strips heads. Using native
| windows controls is using a proper manual screwdriver
| that just works
| serf wrote:
| it's also just a numbers thing. react and more broadly JS
| developers are a dime-a-dozen as far as availability goes
| compared to winapi folks.
|
| which on one hand, good -- fuck microsoft and the
| monolith; on the other hand we get react start menus when
| we have to use microsoft.
| p_ing wrote:
| .NET Framework needs its own runtime. Java needs its own
| runtime.
|
| What's the issue?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I have no issue with user-facing applications doing
| whatever they want, electron apps bundle an entire
| chromium to do their thing, but there's a win32 and win64
| api in C for a reason, to make OS level stuff fast
| jamesnorden wrote:
| I wouldn't want my start menu to load the entire Java
| runtime before opening, that's the issue at hand.
| someguyiguess wrote:
| Only someone who has not tried to write stuff in "native
| windows" would ask this question. If you want a real
| answer, go try and develop a Windows native application
| real quick. I'll wait...
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I would hope that the windows developers who are working
| on the windows shell would know how to write a windows
| native application in C. If it's that bad, they should
| improve the API, not just write it all in react instead
| hannahoppla wrote:
| Windows 7 was not written in react, it looked great and
| worked great. Get those guys to write the UI for Windows
| 11.
| kergonath wrote:
| This is such a ridiculous argument. Applications were
| developed long before JavaScript was a thing.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I learned Win32 programming from the Petzold book circa
| 1993.
|
| Pretty much everything in there still works, if I type it
| in and compile it with the current Visual C/C++
| toolchain. I might need to get rid of a few MOVEABLE and
| DISCARDABLE tags here and there, I suppose.
| foltik wrote:
| Its popularity or success in other apps has nothing to
| with the windows situation.
|
| Other apps are successful despite being slow and bloated,
| since performance isn't a primary concern of users. In
| contrast it's critical for OS internals like the start
| menu, so a javascript runtime and framework is just the
| wrong tool for the job.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| "Shit tastes great! Millions of flies can't be wrong!" ;)
|
| React only makes sense as a layer on top of the browser
| DOM, because the DOM itself cannot be fixed without
| rewriting it from scratch, so making it usable for non-
| trivial UI needs to happen in the 'framework layer'.
|
| But without the DOM as the thing that needs fixing and
| the restrictions of the single-threaded browser-event-
| loop, the React programming model simply doesn't make a
| lot of sense. Using the "React-paradigm" outside the
| browser (e.g. SwiftUI, React Native) is pure cargo-
| culting, it only makes sense for onboarding web-devs who
| are already familar with React - but makes it harder to
| create UIs for anybody else.
|
| The actual problem in the context of Win11 is of course
| that Microsoft doesn't have any sort of longterm strategy
| for Windows system APIs (not just UI frameworks). The
| only long-term-stable API is Win32.
| goalieca wrote:
| So you're saying that the people (HR) team is responsible and
| that their retention and growth policies are to blame.
| severak_cz wrote:
| Infecting with React can be easily explained by pathetic
| state of desktop application development environment.
|
| See https://domenic.me/windows-native-dev/
| zerkten wrote:
| This is an interesting point when the question is "how do I
| build a Windows app?" and a decision needs to be made.
| React is definitely one of the options that some consider
| when this question arises.
|
| I think you miss the more common reasoning though. This
| starts with "can we build a Windows app?" The answer to
| that was "no" for many more people until relatively
| recently. The .NET Framework wasn't as available by default
| until the second half of the 2000s which caused some
| Windows app devs to hold off beyond the performance reasons
| and WinForms vs WPF. Electron and React go hand-in-hand
| here as they made a (crappy) Windows app easy.
|
| What I feel popularized this was the webview approach on
| mobile. In 2010, there were a ton of frameworks popping up
| for hybrid mobile development. This was carried forward to
| desktop although some of us had been embedding IE webviews
| much earlier. This let people say "yes" and it went from
| one thing to the next with diversions into React Native.
| esafak wrote:
| It is worth pointing out that it is the _Recommended_ section
| in the menu that uses React _Native_. See also
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/react-native/rnw-settings-
| win...
|
| I ditched Windows long ago so I'm mentioning this only in the
| interest of accuracy.
| baq wrote:
| > It's quite common for companies to work their way up to the
| line of the most user hostile version of their product that
| users will tolerate.
|
| this is in general how the market for pretty much everything
| works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but
| it doesn't matter too much).
|
| lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much
| as you think', usually.
| Draiken wrote:
| I don't think "care" is the right word here at all. We simply
| don't have options.
|
| This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the
| assumption that there will be competition, but competition
| eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their
| positions and we end up with no real choices.
|
| You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they
| don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe
| that for a second.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the
| assumption that there will be competition
|
| The fact that governments allow Microsoft to abuse its
| position to force OEMs to install Windows is the biggest
| problem. This would never happen in a market where
| regulation ensures healthy competition.
| piva00 wrote:
| That version of capitalism sailed 40 years ago in the
| USA, antitrust enforcement has slowly disappeared which
| creates a race to the bottom for other countries who
| would like their companies to compete against USA's
| companies. If they enforce antitrust then the behemoths
| created in the USA by absorbing competitors without
| antitrust enforcement can eat their lunch, even though
| it's better for consumers.
|
| Unfortunately this also allowed the USA to have companies
| so large that they basically control the government,
| changing this now will require massive political will and
| a political body untethered from corporate interests. I
| really don't see that happening in the USA, it's been
| thoroughly captured after so many years driving on that
| path.
| PxldLtd wrote:
| I totally agree. There seems to be absolutely zero focus
| on Glass Steagall or Citizens United so I can't see how
| this actually happens without political revolt at this
| point.
| PxldLtd wrote:
| Yes, the neo-liberal economy we've ended up with has
| drifted quite far from well-regulated Capitalism. I'd
| still argue that we owe a lot of our rights to hard-
| fought socialist policy though.
| account42 wrote:
| Right, and even when there are options that doesn't mean
| you actually get to choose what you want for all things you
| care about, e.g. there might be option A with feature a
| (e.g. no ads) and option B with feature b (e.g. no vendor
| lock in) but none with both a and b - so you only really
| get a choice for the things you care most about. Which is
| effectively why gradual enshittification is effective: Most
| users will put up with minor anti-features rather than jump
| to a different platform that will require new programs
| and/or relearning.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| We see this same phenomenon play out in other industries
| too, like cars.
| charcircuit wrote:
| If people truly cared then there would be a high enough
| expected value to invest into building competitor to be
| financially worth it.
| Silhouette wrote:
| That argument doesn't really hold when the barriers of
| entry are so high. Believing that one of the biggest tech
| firms in the world is doing something undesirable and
| having a better idea that many people would in fact pay
| for is not the same as having the resources to become a
| unicorn with a huge global customer base that can
| practically implement that idea.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Plus, specifically for Microsoft, competing doesn't mean
| an alternative to Windows. It means an alternative to the
| entire enterprise stack, especially Office & M365.
|
| Google hasn't enticed the big entrenched MS orgs to move
| over to Workspace, so if Google can't how can a smaller
| startup ever hope to accomplish that in the face of these
| behemoths that can just outlast them in a race to the
| bottom until they are insolvent or get bought by said
| behemoths?
|
| Microsoft doesn't just sell an OS, or some services, they
| sell "IT in a box"
| autoexec wrote:
| Sometimes companies will make more money by refusing to
| give consumers what they want. Collusion is also
| extremely profitable. A competitor that isn't interested
| in playing along can be bought out, but once shareholders
| get involved they're going to insist on screwing over
| their customers just like everyone else does anyway
| because they'd be leaving a huge pile of cash on the
| table otherwise and short term profits are all
| shareholders care about.
| charcircuit wrote:
| "by refusing to give consumers what they want." in
| practice consumers don't really want that, that much. The
| companies do similar things due to the similar ways
| consumers react to them. That's the point of this rely
| chain.
| autoexec wrote:
| There are lots of things consumers want. They'd love a
| cell phone that didn't spy on them, they want a smart TV
| that isn't full of ads, they want an ink jet printer that
| doesn't refuse to print when there's still ink available.
| These aren't huge asks but because subjecting customers
| to them make companies money it's difficult, if not
| impossible to avoid.
| nicoburns wrote:
| What makes you think a competitor that "plays fair" can
| compete with a competitor that takes advantage of the
| system and extracts as much value as they can?
| tsss wrote:
| This is about markets. It has nothing to do with
| capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy
| competition that this type of enshittification happens
| everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the
| buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.
| Draiken wrote:
| How the hell can healthy competition breed
| enshittification? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
|
| Take an industry with healthy competition like
| restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format,
| service and probably a lot more.
|
| Now tell me how that competition enshittified eating at
| restaurants?
|
| For me, nothing stands out. If a restaurant charges
| nonsense fees, under-staffs to increase profits, reduce
| portions with the same value, etc. I can simply go to
| another one. Restaurants that enshittify will almost
| inevitably close.
|
| But if we look at a closely related industry like the
| food delivery apps, we see the same exact signs of
| enshittification we see on the tech world due to
| monopolies (or oligopolies to be more exact) like: -
| Increased/hidden fees
|
| - Increased delivery times
|
| - Crappy apps with ads everywhere
|
| - Ineffective review systems
|
| - Pay-to-win search
|
| - Dynamic pricing
|
| They can get away with it because realistically, you
| don't have any other options. The cost to entry might not
| be that high but the network effect all but prohibits
| competition.
| tsss wrote:
| > Take an industry with healthy competition like
| restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format,
| service and probably a lot more.
|
| Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average
| restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant
| only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible
| service to be almost indistinguishable from all others.
| Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and
| compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational
| consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the
| same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more
| profitable, thus expand more easily).
|
| The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places:
| When it is difficult to compare quality, price always
| wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well
| defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice
| as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive
| and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for
| my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare.
| All the product descriptions and pictures are
| exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if
| the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as
| good (and from personal experience: they never are), so
| I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the
| products to be equally crappy no matter the price.
|
| It's not Amazon's fault. This happens everywhere.
| Vegemeister wrote:
| Stop trying to blame capitalism for your failure to jump
| out of the pot when they put ads in Windows 8.
|
| We very much do have options. I haven't had Windows on a
| personal machine since 2011.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| If a regulator is effective at protecting the users, that
| regulator becomes a target for the industry
| mihaaly wrote:
| Things forced on you is not market. You are not talking about
| market rules at all. This is not it!
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| It's an option issue, I use an extremely modified version of
| windows, and same one for the last 5 years I think with the
| updates, local accounts, no ads, no telemetry, tweaks etc. I
| still don't like tons of things about windows but compared to
| Linux desktops it's heaven (for me). Don't even get me
| started on macOS desktop experience it's a fucking miserable
| (again for my personal taste).
|
| A lot of windows UI design decisions are pretty good. They
| mess it up now and then like windows 8 (tablet design mess)
| disaster, especially now with WSL 2.0, it delivers everything
| I need.
|
| Do I still hate it , yes for the reasons explained in this
| article and other stupid designed features like search index,
| windows defender , mix of legacy and new dialogs, for the
| shitty design of powershell and then the mess of mixed
| shells, terminal etc.
|
| List goes on, but comparatively I'll pick windows desktop
| over anything out there at the moment. It's a personal choice
| but I assume majority of windows user feel this way (or
| cannot afford macOS :))
| surajrmal wrote:
| A single product meant for all the users will inevitably be a
| poor fit for most of them. We need more variety of products
| for the different segments of the market. Alternatively we
| need more knobs to tune things to user needs. One promise of
| AI is enabling folks to personalize product experiences, but
| so far it's all been surface level.
|
| I think the desktop Linux ecosystem is an example of
| something healthier, but it goes too far in the other
| direction. There are too many options to choose from that
| it's hard to find the one for your needs.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| > lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as
| much as you think', usually.
|
| How can this be your takeaway when there is no channel for
| communication with the users? There is no signal at all so
| you assume what is convenient _for you_. But this has no
| bearing on actual user sentiment, its _just convenience for
| you_.
|
| Part and parcel of the "problem" with tech people is they
| assume they can just fill in the gaps with their preferences
| and pretend they're actually user preferences. In the rest of
| life this is called "bullshit".
| jeppester wrote:
| The only way this get better is if the user gets to choose
| between an OS with ads, lock-in, telemetry etc. and then one
| with none of that.
|
| As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your
| poison" situation.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What bugged me for years is that I ended up paying the
| microsoft or apple tax that way. In the end I figured out a
| more efficient way around that than any of the
| rebates/refunds: just buy second hand hardware. Someone else
| paid for and used the windows license, I just need the box.
| raddan wrote:
| If you don't need a laptop, you can also build a machine
| from parts. This is probably the best way to run a desktop
| computer.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Anybody on HN that didn't know that you can build a
| machine from parts or isn't capable do doing so is
| probably on the wrong website ;)
| tmtvl wrote:
| I have two left hands (and one of them is backwards) and
| components spontaneously disintegrate when I touch them.
| I know I'm not capable of building a computer so I bought
| mine from Tuxedo computers, who sell computers running
| GNU/Linux. I might be the GNU/Linux whisperer who manages
| to not have any major issues, but that doesn't correlate
| with the type of technical aptitude which would let me
| turn a heap of components into a working machine. I even
| managed to break a laptop by trying to replace the CMOS
| battery.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hah! You're like one of my family members. We keep her
| away from anything electronic because the failure rate in
| her presence can not be accounted for by accident alone.
|
| Oh, and laptops are nasty. They are put together in ways
| that can easily confound you when you have plenty of
| experience. Lots of it revolves around little pieces of
| plastic that are marginal when new and that just want to
| break by the time the device needs service. It's a
| conspiracy!
|
| Anyway, at least you know it can be done. The conditional
| still holds.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Making any hardware changes whatsoever to a laptop is
| dramatically more complicated than building a desktop. It
| very much is just a matter of 1) buying compatible parts
| (there are websites for this, or if you shop in person
| they'll be more than happy to help), then 2) matching
| plug labeled A to socket labeled A.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Nah. They're all apple users.
| gosub100 wrote:
| This is another way they rip off consumers. In a perfect
| world, the license would be resalable for someone else,
| just like you can sell a used Blu-ray. During piracy cases,
| they clamor about their "intellectual property". Ok so that
| means it's not physical, and once one person is done, they
| can sell it to someone else who needs it.
| prox wrote:
| This.. give me the - option - to not be an ad infested
| hellhole of an OS and sell me a product.
| Ranxer wrote:
| Better yet: don't pick any poison at all -- both System76 and
| Tuxedo Computers (as examples, sometimes you can buy a latop
| without an OS and save the money, same goes for PCs) offer
| laptops with Linux installed: no Microslop tax, and hardware
| that's guaranteed to work with OSS.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Most people want a computer that works with their software.
| No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution. Especially
| because nearly everyone has _some_ niche thing they like,
| some 5% that isn 't covered by the FOSS solutions, that
| only a niche Windows program can actually do correctly.
|
| And that doesn't even get into gaming.
| randoadmin wrote:
| Well, considering that you can run almost anything
| (excluding games and specialized graphics software) with
| 99.99999% guaranteed result via WinApps, I don't see what
| the issue is for a hypothetical member of the majority
| population.
|
| It's not 2016 anymore, you don't have to switch to
| LibreOffice if you need an office suite of apps.
|
| That obviously would be preferable, but if you're an avid
| Microsoft ecosystem user, just use WinApps. It's simple
| enough to the point that a child could use it.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| What percentage of MS Office user can, in your
| estimation, complete the steps as described in this
| readme?
|
| https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
| alexb_ wrote:
| Even skipping the first step (which requires _a second
| readme_ ) the next step involves opening a terminal.
| Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is
| to make computers usable without knowing how they work,
| what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up
| anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
|
| Linux is an important operating system, but anyone under
| the delusion that it is desktop ready right now needs to
| actually watch someone use it. I say this not because I
| hate linux, but because I love it. I want someone to make
| it usable for a desktop, and people claiming that it is
| usable right now are not helping that.
| hootz wrote:
| I agree that most users won't be able to follow Winapps'
| guide, but "The entire point of an operating system is to
| make computers usable without knowing how they work" is
| just false. That is the point of an OS for computer
| illiterates, not the "entire point of an operating
| system".
| lynx97 wrote:
| Arguably, the vast majority of users are "computer
| illiterates", and an OS should cater to the majority. So
| in a sense, OP has a point.
| fwip wrote:
| I may be showing my grey hair here, but that's
| emphatically not the point of an operating system.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would
| argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage
| their applications and work processes rather than their
| computer.
|
| It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper
| level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly
| resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the
| argument that many people don't need to "know" what a
| file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long
| as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app
| to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity
| that they are looking for.
| harvey9 wrote:
| It should be possible to get creative and business work
| done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an
| os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the
| file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine
| how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of
| what a file is.
| falcor84 wrote:
| This is actually an interesting example. To me it sounds
| like it actually should be less confusing to a person who
| has no preconceived notion of what a file should be, and
| only wants to save their work and reopen it later, not
| worried about what shape the saved object takes.
|
| On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was
| when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that
| unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it
| essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple
| saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never
| accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never
| actually had any interest in figuring out where and how
| these tabs get persisted - it just works.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken
| from paper based office work. You have container folders
| and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into
| different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually
| hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can
| contain folders can contain folders. The real world has
| some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but
| it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be
| the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps
| remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically
| collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you
| understand nesting, files and folders are quite
| intuitive.
|
| Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all
| we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or
| sectors of the hardware.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders,
| all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or
| sectors of the hardware.
|
| I agree with most everything else you said, but would
| slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the
| idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via
| arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of
| content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links).
| While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel
| that we shouldn't be beholden to it.
| hdb2 wrote:
| I had commented this above, but the OS should be flexible
| enough to do whatever the user needs it to do. "What it
| needs to do" is pretty broad, but I think that's the
| point.
| mattkevan wrote:
| There's a big difference between working on a computer
| and working with a computer.
|
| The people doing the former use computers for 'real
| work'. They are using a computer as an end in itself,
| care about operating systems and have strong opinions
| about systemd. The people doing the latter couldn't give
| two shits about any of that and just want to get their
| presentation finished on time.
|
| Problem is, both sets of people have to use the same
| machines. It's also why software like GIMP will never
| become widely adopted in professional environments
| because it's designed for a completely different
| userbase.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I agree on the facts but I think the gatekeeping effect
| is probably helpful for the current users.
|
| If we had a giant influx of computing illiterate people,
| the platform would enshittify. They would move towards
| android-type lock downs and user hostile stuff. More and
| more binary-only proprietary software, they might fork
| systemd etc and make sure that the proprietary binaries
| only run under certain unmodified setups etc. Of course
| there would be escape routes to various other, nonpopular
| distros, so the skilled people would be fine again, but
| there would be a barrier again.
|
| I think this is fundamental. Once the general public
| starts entering an arena, it won't stay the same. Eternal
| September etc.
| hdb2 wrote:
| > Even skipping the first step (which requires a second
| readme) the next step involves opening a terminal.
| Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is
| to make computers usable without knowing how they work,
| what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up
| anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
|
| I strongly disagree with this; I believe that an OS
| should be whatever the user needs it to be. In my case, I
| am a power user that loves the command line, and while I
| agree that I may not represent the majority of users, I
| do not care for your assertion that my way of doing
| things is somehow invalid.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I know it's a bit ironic given TFA's focus on shoving
| Copilot and Recall down users' throats, but I really do
| believe that an OS-level AI agent could solve these
| usability issues. We need to solve a lot of trust issues,
| but the capabilities are essentially already there for a
| non-technical user to tell a Samantha-like OS AI "please
| get this working", and it will.
| pixelmelt wrote:
| I've already been doing this haha, got Claude to install
| VR mods into a game that most certainly should not have
| been working with VR mods on linux
| bmn__ wrote:
| That's barking up the wrong tree. Github shows
| instructions for software developers. A normal user would
| just install Winapps from package manager, like with all
| the other Linux software.
|
| Your critique should be channelled into a productive
| direction and point the finger at the maintainers why
| this is not packaged yet.
| https://repology.org/projects/?search=winapps
| https://pkgs.org/search/?q=winapps
| cardanome wrote:
| For better or worse, well mostly worse, most of the
| software people use these days is either directly running
| in the browser or is electron based so running perfectly
| fine on Linux.
|
| Gaming on Linux is a mostly solved issue for anyone that
| doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming. If a game
| isn't using some root kit level anti-cheat or copyright
| protection, it is going to run just fine. Same with
| running most other software.
|
| The only part where Linux is sucks is for certain
| creatives fields. If you need Adobe products you are out
| of luck. Video editing well you use Da Vinci or free
| software. There are some good DAWS but no Ableton.
|
| Yes, you have to compromise but Linux is definitely
| getting there. Not everything runs on Mac either and
| people cope just fine.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer
| gaming
|
| Turns out, a lot of people do exactly that. Hundreds of
| millions of people play CoD, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex
| and many many other games which won't work on Linux at
| all.
|
| I think the state of gaming on Linux is absolutely
| incredible - what used to be a very esotheric and "roll
| of the dice" process 20 years ago now is extremely simple
| and it mostly just works. But when I play games with
| friends every week it's almost never a game that would
| work on Linux.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| is Bitwig not as good as Ableton? ive never used Ableton
| so i wouldnt know, but Bitwig seems crazy good to me,
| especially compared to other DAWs on linux like Ardour or
| Reaper
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| If you already have an ableton license the thought of
| paying the same amount again sucks. Reaper is nice for
| all things recording though
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| -Affinity instead of adobe is just fine imho. Gimp is
| not. -Rhino3D/Grasshopper
|
| Especially Affinity imho. A lot of the people studying
| graphics design in the last 3 years or so, that I know
| of, saw the benefit of not paying for an Adobe
| subscription.
| fainpul wrote:
| Then at least let the company that makes your niche
| software know that you want a Linux version of it, even
| if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this
| chicken / egg problem. Nobody wants to use Windows, they
| want to use some specific application. If most software
| is available on Linux too, then consumers can actually
| choose their OS.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Most software is already available on Linux. I've
| successfully run Linux in corporate jobs where everything
| runs on the MS/AD/Azure stack. The issue is not that you
| can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra
| work at every corner to get things running, because
| unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all
| the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a
| million cases in the background. Windows is really great
| at that - until it breaks. Then you're usually screwed.
| Like, if the problem is close to the kernel, you can't
| even fix it theoretically. Best you can do is wait for an
| official MS patch. On Linux things break more often, but
| you can usually fix them without having to resort to
| extreme measures. It's a fundamentally different usage
| philosophy that plays very hard into the strengths of
| techies. So non-technical users will always shy away from
| Linux.
| sombragris wrote:
| > the issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is
| that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get
| things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take
| your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it
| tries to juggle a million cases in the background.
|
| You _may_ have to spend extra work to get things running;
| but once it 's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
|
| I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very
| technical distribution and some manual configuration is
| expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs
| from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.
| lstodd wrote:
| I don't know what are these nasty bits windows is
| supposedly hiding, or what exactly breaks more often on
| Linux. For me it's exact opposite: my linux just never
| breaks. I don't do anything special, just plug in the hdd
| into new box bought when old gets too slow for new tasks,
| continue as nothing happened.
|
| Uptimes of half a year are not uncommon, the record so
| far is 400+ days. I just don't shut it down unless
| there's a serious kernel or hardware upgrade.
|
| It just works, non-kernel updates, stuff being
| plugged/unplugged, couple times I swapped sata hdds
| without turning off power (which is simple, they are
| hotplug by design, just don't drop the screws onto
| motherboard and don't forget to unmount+detach first).
|
| Now, when I used to and test some cross-builds for
| windows (win7-win10 era), I had another dedicated windows
| machine for that. And even though I tried to make it as
| stable as possible, it was a brittle piece of junk, in
| comparison.
|
| So in my experience, yes, linux is fundamentally
| different usage philosophy: you don't need to think about
| what crap Microsoft will break your workflow with next
| Tuesday.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Company? Most of the time this stuff is years (sometimes
| DECADES) old. That's why it doesn't work on Linux in the
| first place.
| krater23 wrote:
| I don't want windows or linux, I want a OS where I don't
| notice that it's there. When I have to think about my OS,
| then the OS has a flaw. And currently nor Windows or
| Linux can deliver that anymore. Windows 7 after some
| customizations and Windows XP had this, but M$ destroyed
| it. Linux never had this and I don't expect that this
| will come in the future.
| tasuki wrote:
| > I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there.
|
| I guess you want a Mac. That's fine.
|
| I value freedom and things not mysteriously breaking and
| functionality not disappearing, and am quite happy
| investing a the time and knowledge upfront, so I use
| Linux.
|
| And then there are people who want to have a system which
| works out of the box initially and who don't want to
| learn anything and don't mind it breaking later, and they
| choose Windows.
|
| To each their own.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Then at least let the company that makes your niche
| software know that you want a Linux version of it, even
| if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this
| chicken / egg problem.
|
| To solve the chicken/egg problem, the GNU/Linux
| distributions should generate some very (in particular
| binary) stable interface for writing applications
| (including GUI applications) on GNU/Linux - like WinAPI
| on Windows. With "stable" I mean "stable for at least
| 20-25 years". This interface must, of course, work on all
| widespread GNU/Linux distributions.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It's an old joke, but it's also accurate in this case -
| isn't what you are asking for just WINE?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > isn't what you are asking for just WINE
|
| An operating system is a style of thinking about your
| work. WINE is a way to get Windows applications to run
| (by now run decently) under GNU/Linux. These Windows
| applications are nevertheless foreign bodies in the whole
| kind of thinking which GNU/Linux is built around.
| bombcar wrote:
| The joke is that the most stable Linux API for
| applications is ... WIN32 via WINE.
|
| It's sad because it's true.
| sznio wrote:
| I think that eventually, Win32/WoW64 will be the stable
| common API for Linux programs - or at least games. I
| won't be surprised if it outlasts Windows.
| nananana9 wrote:
| Even if we don't agree on a userspace ABI, this is still
| fine-ish, as long as you can statically link everything
| you need. Unfortunately the nerds maintaining the core
| libraries REALLY don't want you to do that, and the
| answer to "how do I build a portable Linux GUI program"
| goes more or less like:
|
| "Build musl libc statically, set up a toolchain to use
| it, build libc++ for that toolchain, get libwayland, link
| that statically (which their build scripts don't support,
| roll your own), get xcb,libxau,libxwhatever and build
| those statically as well, and implement TWO platform
| layers, dynamically checking for wayland support. There's
| like 5 different ways to set your window icon. Yes, you
| need to implement all of them. Now for loading the
| graphics API......."
|
| On Windows it's a call to RegisterClassW followed by
| CreateWindowW.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Most games nowadays run perfectly fine on Linux.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Windows games you mean.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Some of which run better on Linux than Windows.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They might for whatever reason, however without Windows
| they would not have existed in first place.
| happymellon wrote:
| > No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution
|
| Hard disagree. Not that it _has_ to be FOSS, but you have
| a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to
| change your ways.
|
| Leaving an abusive relationship is hard, but sometimes
| you have to do it.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _you have a product that is predatory towards you and
| you refuse to change your ways._
|
| And honestly it seems like you refuse to learn even the
| smallest bit about human nature.
|
| Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their
| computer. Walk into a room of 100 graphic designers who
| have spend the last 20 years using Photoshop exclusively
| and put GIMP in front of them and and at least 98 of them
| are going to say what the hell is wrong with you, they
| have work to do, take this uncanny valley garbage and get
| out of here.
|
| I'm typing this on a System76 laptop right now but I
| understand expecting people to use Linux writ large is
| ridiculous.
| prathamtharwani wrote:
| Everybody "learns" how to use a computer. It's just a
| question of what they learn first.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I would propose a new law of interaction design: Whenever
| something is promoted as a tool that you wouldn't need to
| learn, then it's actually designed to use you, and you
| are the tool.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I mean I kinda agree on what you are saying but then it
| logically follows that if you don't want to try out
| alternatives, don't want to push your government to enact
| better laws, don't want to spend time taking them to
| small claims court - basically don't want to do anything
| but suffer - then just suffer.
| butlike wrote:
| I don't know how to better explain this, but as I get
| older I find I just have less energy to address all the
| things. My worldview gets larger and my energy levels
| become less and eventually I need to just 'stop'
| progressing in a certain activity. It could be re-
| learning the TV's remote control like my grandparents, or
| it could be re-learning how to drive with an EV
| touchscreen on modern cars, or it could be re-learning an
| operating system that just presents a mountain where you
| just say: "I can't do it this time."
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Sure, if you ignore all the time you're wasting on the
| status quo. You _are_ still using energy on all the
| problems of the existing system.
|
| For a remote or a car there is no benefit to changing.
| For Windows there is.
| pc86 wrote:
| The _vast_ majority of people do not test out
| alternatives to things they just need to use for work,
| they don 't lobby their government even informally for
| different laws, have never gone to small claims court (or
| even been in a court room when it's in session). These
| are all minority "activist" activities for lack of a
| better word.
|
| The tin foil hat interpretation of this is that it is all
| by design, by whatever cabal runs everything, to
| subjugate the masses and control them directly or
| indirectly. The generous interpretation is closer to an
| extreme version of Sturgeon's Law[0] where this is just a
| natural, even inevitable, byproduct of most things being
| garbage. Like most things the truth is almost certainly
| somewhere in the middle.
|
| [0] "90% of everything is [crud/crap/shit]"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their
| computer.
|
| I see this point being missed over and over again in this
| thread. To people like you and I the computer is often
| the entire point. To normal people it's a tool. It exists
| to get the job done so they can move onto something else.
|
| The solution that requires the least effort is
| objectively the best solution. Most of the time that
| still means Windows, and it won't change until the
| required level of effort changes.
| happymellon wrote:
| If all the crap that people suffer through, and make
| YouTube channels dedicated to about how much Windows is
| hell, is not enough to get them to look elsewhere then
| "fixing" other operating systems won't get them to look.
|
| They aren't looking and they aren't interested in
| looking. At this point they have no one else to blame.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Good news re: gaming is with SteamOS/Bazzite gaming on
| Linux is finally near-turnkey. Only thing I had to adjust
| on my bazzite computer was zram, otherwise I've never had
| to open the terminal (unless I wanted to). Expedition 33
| ran perfectly day 1.
|
| I do agree with your larger point though. It's the same
| reason everybody doesn't change the oil in their car on
| their own or cook their food every night over ordering
| out. Only it goes even further because by this point most
| people expect a computer to just do what it's supposed to
| do (or they think it's supposed to do) the first time
| they try. I can't imagine asking my parents to start
| inputting terminal commands. Even just the process of
| something like running etcher and prepping a usb drive to
| install linux is a whole thing.
| Ragnarork wrote:
| > nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5%
| that isn't covered by the FOSS
|
| I'm interested in where that estimate + number are coming
| from. And I'd like to point out that I don't nearly see
| as many people pushing back against say MacOS for "not
| being Windows", despite the fact that the same issue
| would be there. I wonder why Linux gets special treatment
| in that regards, when modern distros make usage very
| accessible.
|
| > And that doesn't even get into gaming.
|
| Gaming on Linux works very well. And if something
| doesn't, it's usually by choice (e.g. BattleEye customers
| not enabling it on Linux) or by sheer incompetence /
| malevolence (e.g. EA Games and their shitty EA App that
| breaks often even on Windows, and even worse on Linux in
| a Wine environment).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| MacOS has the software people need, hence why there's not
| that same push back.
|
| Just as nobody is pushing back against Linux when it
| comes to server software, or pushing back against
| PlayStation when it comes to games.
| chocochunks wrote:
| Linux unfortunately needs to be a Windows that's better
| than Windows to a lot of people unfortunately. It must
| support all their hardware and software perfectly and can
| never have any issues, only then will it be an accepted
| alternative. Probably because it's free and they want it
| to work on their existing setup.
|
| Mac users paid money for their choice, so ironically they
| are more forgiven for the inability to run some Office
| VBA macros, work with that random MST dual display dongle
| or whatever. They rationalize their expensive purchase as
| a good decision and that it's good enough and possible to
| solve issues encountered like spending 5 times as much on
| Thunderbolt dock to do what the $30 MST dongle did or
| learn some entirely new $10 app to do what they did on
| Windows with something else.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Most people want a computer that works with their
| software.
|
| I suspect that most people don't run much software at all
| outside of their web browser and wouldn't notice any
| difference between using chrome in windows and using
| chrome in linux. Gaming is not the barrier it used to be
| either.
| jl6 wrote:
| Agreed. Default Ubuntu is pretty much feature complete
| for mainstream users, as long as they don't have to
| install it themselves.
| exceptione wrote:
| Cool. Windows can't do 99% of the things I and anyone not
| grasping at straws can do with Linux.
|
| It is getting tiring, I don't say Linux is perfect, but
| KDE has been better than Windows for years, Linux doesn't
| bit rot like an average Windows install and Linux is in
| practice surprisingly more stable, but no-no-no, Linux
| can't be this time again. Quick... ehm "there is a piece
| of software that only works on Windows". Have you ever
| thought the reverse holds too, but times 1000?
|
| If you call yourself an IT-professional, you only run
| spyware.exe in a vm or in a box with all networking gear
| ripped out and you don't making stupid excuses.
| twilo wrote:
| Linux is pretty awful at a lot of things ...
| nobleach wrote:
| As a VERY long-time Linux user, I agree. Multi-monitor
| setups, where you can unplug the monitor and have your
| windows gather back onto your laptop screen requires WAY
| too much configuration. Having your audio switch back to
| internal laptop speakers requires homebrewing a script.
| On my 2020 Dell XPS, I still haven't figured out how to
| enable the subwoofers - so I'm stuck with ThinkPad
| quality audio. I have 3 ThinkPads (one with straight
| ArchLinux, 2 with CachyOS) and there's always some little
| piece I'm annoyed with. The X1C has good battery life,
| the T480 and P14s are meh. I JUST bought my first HiDPI
| Lenovo laptop this weekend. Getting that to be a decent
| tradeoff between readable text and mongo-duplo-massive UI
| has been "fun". (Yoga 15.3" Aura edition - I really like
| it) But running apps in Wine is darn near impossible -
| the text is for ants!
|
| All of these issues go away with Mac and Windows. I'm not
| giving up on Linux, I'm just a realist.
| kakacik wrote:
| No need for such childish reaction, dismissing other's
| viewpoints achieves nothing for your side of arguments,
| at least nothing good and one of the reasons some skilled
| folks won't migrate, we have enough toxic communities
| elsewhere.
|
| Also quite a few inaccuracies - what the heck is 'bit
| rot' on windows? I had 1 same Windows 10 install running
| on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC and
| installed tons of software and games, both official
| and... some other types. 0 issues.
|
| On laptop whole lifetime with original install is the
| default for everybody I know, for me 6-7 years (simply
| the length of ownership). We don't talk about Windows 95
| or ME era here where frequent installs were basically
| mandatory and a well-practiced chore.
| vel0city wrote:
| > I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for
| 8 years as primary personal PC
|
| I actually have a desktop still running that got a launch
| party host Windows 7 Steve Ballmer edition install that's
| just been upgraded as time has gone on. Very much a Ship
| of Theseus machine but technically only ever migrated the
| OS image around, never reinstalled. That's 17 years of a
| Windows install so far, and its perfectly fine. That one
| install has made it through multiple motherboards and OS
| upgrades. It'll end up dying and being replaced once I
| get too uncomfortable with 10 EoL, this board is still
| useful to me but it doesn't have a TPM so Windows is dead
| to this machine.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Historically I wouldn't refer to it as "bit rot", but
| generally "registry bloat" with a combination older, no
| longer used .DLL's hanging around, rather than being
| removed on software uninstallation or upgrade.
|
| In the past a good "registry cleaner" would help - but
| those are no longer reliable with newer versions of
| Windows - there are many virtual entries that get
| cleaned-up by overly aggressive utilities.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
|
| It actually is. It may not be the best solution, but it
| absolutely is one of available solutions. = Not being
| able to ( or wiling to ) learn ( and adjust ) as needed
| is part of the reason we are here.
|
| I am not being nitpicky here. Reasonable people don't
| hope things will change; instead, they change things they
| can.
| lynx97 wrote:
| > And that doesn't even get into gaming.
|
| Or Accessibility, which the Linux desktop is notoriously
| bad with, since, what, 20 years. The constant push to
| rewrite things typically forgets making Accessibility a
| priority, for the sake of "progress".
| microtonal wrote:
| _Well acktshually_ , gaming is a really good example.
| Valve did a lot of good with Proton to the point that a
| lot of games work and work well.
|
| Perhaps ironically, Wine may be the best stable API on
| Linux. I'd like to see a concerted and well-funded effort
| to make Wine run certain Windows applications well. We
| might not be able to replace the Adobe Suite short-term
| by a FOSS alternative for most of its users, but we might
| be able to get Wine to run the Adobe Suite, Affinity
| Suite, and whatnot well enough to make it possible to
| switch and keep running these applications.
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| Yes. please. All that Ai Coding Power that's presumably
| around.. it should get easier, no?
| sznio wrote:
| >No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
|
| It is a solution. Once you do it, your problem is solved,
| that makes it the solution. If you aren't willing to go
| with that, you can stay with Windows and just accept the
| constant abuse.
|
| As for gaming, I've been on Linux for two years now and I
| haven't had a single game not work.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| And as for a better solution, Teach kids. Once I'm an
| ornery PTA parent I'm going to push for programming and
| *nix of some sort to be taught to the school, even if I
| have to volunteer to do it myself.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Most people want a computer that works with their
| software. No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
|
| Why is that argument always applied against Linux, and
| never against for instance macOS, which also can't run
| Windows software?
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Why is that argument always applied against Linux, and
| never against for instance macOS, which also can't run
| Windows software?
|
| There's a certain type of technical user that gets joy
| from coming up with arguments, good, bad, or just pulled
| out of their butt, explaining why people can't use Linux.
| I'm not going to spend my day trying to understand
| people's unusual preferences.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Not even that! Most people want a computer that lets them
| get the tasks they want to do done, in the way that uses
| the lowest effort.
|
| If they want to edit a photo, and they're used to
| Photoshop, then Photoshop will be lower effort than a
| competitor just as Photoshop is lower effort than
| darkroom editing film. Competitors have to be _lower
| effort_ or offer significantly better features than
| incumbents. Product cost is a part of the effort needed
| to use that product, but far from the entire thing.
| 7bit wrote:
| Linux is one of the poisons bro
| 7777332215 wrote:
| Which kind of poisons? Can you list more?
| krater23 wrote:
| Linux is just no good option. Linux has it's own issues
| that make them unusable for people that don't want to put
| time and effort in their OS itself. Current example: Slidly
| incompatible unix tools, still not 100% complete, but
| rewritten in rust.
| Macha wrote:
| First of all that's only Ubuntu, but also at this stage
| uutils is way more compatible with the GNU tools than
| Apple's tools are.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| No general user that is now using Windows would come in
| contact with the edge cases were the rewrites differ from
| the standard utilities.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Windows has only one major advantage over Linux, it comes
| preinstalled with all required hardware support.
|
| Both installing Windows and installing Linux can be
| difficult for most people. I have done both
| professionally and when installing Windows I have
| encountered frequently more serious problems, which
| required much more time to solve than the problems
| encountered when installing Linux.
|
| For those who have someone else to install and configure
| Linux, it is at least as easy to use as Windows.
|
| My parents, more than 80-years old, have used for many
| years Linux without any problems and they have no idea
| what Linux is, they just know the applications that they
| are using for viewing and editing documents, e-mail,
| Internet browsing, music or movies listening or watching,
| TV watching or recording (with TV tuner) and so on.
| pjmlp wrote:
| With your support.
|
| Would have they bought such a configuration on a random
| computer store?
| wtetzner wrote:
| If it came pre-installed I don't see what the difference
| would be. Many people don't know how to do anything other
| than launch certain applications on Windows either.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Except that it is a reality that is yet to happen in most
| countries.
|
| Most people also don't buy laptops from some online store
| that only HN readers know about.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Personally I'm a huge Linux supporter and user. I try my
| best to not to use any non-free software, and while I
| prefer macOS laptops, I always have an exit strategy if I
| decide to ditch the platform.
|
| Recently, I decided to start making music again after a
| decade of hiatus. I got a nice audio interface and some
| hardware which can do nifty things. The catch?
|
| _None_ of the supporting software for my hardware runs on
| Linux. I either need to run a VM to configure these things,
| or use the macOS versions of the software. I chose the
| latter because it 's not meaningful to passthrough all the
| devices to change some parameters and give device back to
| Linux. I also don't use Wine. I don't want to install
| something that big into my daily driver.
|
| While Linux is great for many, many things, there are some
| things still sorely lacking in the ecosystem. Why can't I
| adjust monitoring/routing in a _class-compliant_ audio
| device? Why my effect processors ' USB protocol is not open
| so I can't play with it parameters from Linux?
|
| We still have a long way to go in some areas.
| II2II wrote:
| And I think it is fair to acknowledge that Linux doesn't
| fit the needs of all people. The thing is, the flip side
| is also true. While I can pick up my (admittedly
| technical) hobbies under Windows, it is more convenient
| under Linux. Without the FLOSS ecosystem, I could not
| afford to do so at all.
| bayindirh wrote:
| That's true. I run _almost_ everything under Linux. All
| my daily driver and work-related desktop systems are
| Linux for more than two decades now. Heck, we don 't have
| any Windows machines used for work in the datacenter.
| However, I wanted to highlight that Linux is not "there"
| yet, and telling "just use Linux, duh" doesn't solve all
| the problems a user has.
|
| For photography and graphic arts, Linux can handle many
| if not most of the work (I use Digikam and Darktable with
| great success, for example), yet when it comes to audio
| for example, it falls short due to a thousand papercuts.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| And if you are a professional photographer, Darktable
| falls short by a thousand cuts. It is not even close to
| Lightroom, let alone Photoshop.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm not a professional photographer though. I'm also not
| a professional musician, either.
|
| Yet, Darktable allows me to process my RAWs to a point
| which I like. Similarly, my audio equipment allows me to
| create some music which I like, too.
|
| I didn't push Darktable to professional levels, but I
| believe it can match bigger tools for what I want to do
| with it. I don't do photo manipulation, for example. Just
| process RAWs. I expect the same from my audio equipment
| for my music endeavors.
| II2II wrote:
| That's the thing, not everyone is a professional
| photographer. Open source tools are fine for many of us.
| They are also great to get a taste of a field, to learn
| the basics, without a massive investment.
|
| You don't have to be everything to everyone. You just
| have to satisfy a need.
| Kye wrote:
| Not to address/counter your comment, but because it might
| be helpful: if that's a Focusrite interface, the company
| itself points to an open source project in its support
| documentation.
|
| https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-
| gb/articles/208530735-Is...
|
| I haven't actually tested it, but it seems like it works
| for people, and it's solid enough to have the kernel
| component _in_ the kernel. I found it while researching a
| possible move with my Vocaster One.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I have Scarlett 2i2G4. I may look into it. On the other
| hand, I have way more advanced stuff from ESI and
| Audient, which allows much more customization when
| compared to Scarlett, and they have no Linux support
| AFAIK.
| Kye wrote:
| Some hope for ESI, maybe: https://kb.esi-
| audio.com/?goto=KB00337EN
|
| If it's one of those and class compliant, you might be
| able to access all of it through alsamixer or one of the
| many frontends (maybe too many, maybe one for you):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsamixer
|
| The Audient situation appears to be a proper nightmare
| realm with non-class compliant stuff, but there is a tool
| with a list of caveats longer than you might want to deal
| with: https://github.com/TheOnlyJoey/MixiD
|
| It's more best case scenario as an escape hatch and less
| problem solved, but it's _something_.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Well I'll test it when I have some time. ESI has a lot of
| routing flexibility on board, and I don't know how ALSA
| will present it to me, but I may report it here.
|
| I didn't expect Audient to work, actually.
| vovavili wrote:
| That's kind of my experience dabbling into Linux as well.
| You're effectively turning your laptop into a fancy
| tablet, which is okay only if you're not doing some
| professional work in specific niches that are mostly
| seamless with macOS/Windows. Niche hardware usually is
| out of the question.
| delecti wrote:
| Programming works fine on linux, better even than Windows
| unless you're developing _for_ Windows. Most gaming
| (other than some online games with uncooperative anti-
| cheat) is as easy as on Windows, where games are also
| likely to need a bit of tinkering. Web browsing is
| obviously fine, and that 's most of what most people do
| (and so most people would be fine with "effectively a
| fancy tablet"). 3d modeling is fine. The foss equivalents
| to most Adobe software suck, but that's not really
| specific to linux.
| 1bpp wrote:
| Recently someone did the incredible work of getting
| Photoshop to run perfectly in Wine, but it looks like the
| original reddit post detailing it got removed for legal
| reasons (which is nonsense, it doesn't make piracy any
| easier). Adobe seems to actively work against any efforts
| to run their software on Linux.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_
| mad...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Normies will never get computers from them without help
| from fellow nerds, that then need to support them, they
| want their genius, the easiness to walk into a shopping
| mall store.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| 2nd hand "Windows" computers are way way cheaper and are
| pretty easy to put some distro on. You can pretty much
| cleanse them from any Microsoft taint and use them for lots
| of purposes.
| jeppester wrote:
| I have a tuxedo machine myself for that reason.
|
| The problem is that I can't get one in a store. It's a
| product that is only available to those in the know.
|
| In the ideal situation a lay-person would be in a store,
| and there would be two versions of the same machine, one
| with ads on the lock screen, one without.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I recently made a decision between a Macbook and a Linux
| laptop. I went around and around on this, I really wanted
| the Linux laptop. I even considered Omarchy on one of the
| Panther Lake machines DHH says he's gotten it working on.
|
| I made a decision I didn't want to make: I bought the
| Macbook Pro. If I was retired or completely cashflow
| positive in my endeavors, I'd pick the machine I want.
|
| That being said, there were so many ecosystem, hardware,
| power management, GPU throughput and compatibility
| advantages with the Macbook Pro at the moment, and given
| that I'm firmly in founder/launch mode, I went with the
| safety option. My biggest risk is Apple making another
| anti-consumer choice.. I don't see the ads they've started
| pumping into their product, but I do miss GNOME.
|
| I made a work decision, not a technology decision. That
| said, Windows never entered the equation.
| badthingfactory wrote:
| You probably made the right decision. In my opinion, DHH
| is underselling how terrible the keyboard on the Dell XPS
| is. I bought the lunar lake XPS and I hate the keyboard
| so much, I turned it into an expensive Jellyfin server
| and bought a $275 thinkpad T14 on ebay to use instead.
| Maybe the keyboard on the panther lake version is better,
| but my fingers just get lost with the flat keys. In
| addition, they are super low-travel and mushy. I gave it
| a few months and just couldn't handle typing on it
| anymore.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Thanks. I appreciate the report. The keyboard is
| important to me.. I do a lot of work on the road and
| don't want a lot of peripherals. Apple keyboard and
| trackpad are great.
|
| My "nice" mechanical keyboard is sitting on my old
| desktop, which is now a container store. It's easier to
| not go back and forth.
| jorvi wrote:
| I mean, this goes way beyond OSes.
|
| Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar
| has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it,
| larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube
| content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile
| YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with
| no way to disable it.
|
| In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-
| default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing /
| consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire
| separate app for 'partners', or toggle.
|
| I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real
| customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The
| real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no
| competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that
| synthetically increases KPIs.
|
| I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right
| the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a
| _lot_ of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the
| dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization
| being split out into normalization and compression (
| 'volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a
| toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle
| to completely disable shorts.
|
| Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.
| numpad0 wrote:
| That's a terrible idea. The greatest thing about the
| Internet is that there's no _segregation_ between creators
| and consumers.
|
| TV has it. Only TV program production companies can create
| shows. That literally undermine ... a lot of things. We
| don't need that.
| mort96 wrote:
| There seems to be a pretty wide gulf between "segregate
| consumers and content creators" and "please let me make
| it so that I can remove/disable the huge central button I
| never use that takes up a lot of space and is super easy
| to accidentally hit"
| mort96 wrote:
| YouTube in general is such a good example.
|
| A while ago, they introduced the Home page with algorithmic
| recommendations; okay, it sucks that you can't choose
| whether Home or Subscriptions is the default, but at least
| you can choose between the algorithmic recommendations and
| the chronological subscriptions feed.
|
| Then they introduced Shorts. These are algorithmic ally
| recommended TikToks which you can't disable, they always
| litter _both_ the Subscriptions page _and_ the Home page.
| This sucks.
|
| Then, recently, they added algorithmic recommendations to
| Subscriptions. So if you're on Home you see only
| algorithmic recommendations, and if you're on
| Subscriptions, a lot of your screen is still taken up by
| algorithmically recommended videos from channels you
| subscribe to.
|
| Every one of these steps is in the direction of making sure
| you watch what YouTube wants you to watch instead of what
| _you_ want to watch.
| randusername wrote:
| I keep mental tabs on the number of videos you can see
| from the home page on desktop.
|
| We crossed an all-time record recently.
|
| We get a 2 rows x 3 column grid now. The upper left is an
| ad, the lower row are clipped in half to coach scrolling,
| bringing the total to 2 thumbnails.
|
| I feel like a junkie whose dealer tripled their prices
| and cut the drugs with 80% filler; sobriety by cartoonish
| consumer exploitation
| mihaaly wrote:
| > I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the
| real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners.
| The real customers are the shareholders.
|
| Exactly.
|
| I am in an engineering design software developer
| organization bought by an investor from the founders
| approaching retirement (they worked 3 decades on this
| software helping construction engineers designing better
| homes). Ever since the lead up to the sell - changes were
| tuned to lure in investors, for the liking of investors -
| our organization is focusing on maximising revenue. Fast.
| That is THE focus. New marketing strategy, sales strategy,
| licensing strategy changes, reshape organization to have
| more informed decision making in sales (i.e. collecting and
| processing much more data on increasing number of
| contacts). Company meetings are about EBITDA, sales goals
| vs. actual, streamlining organization. Luncbreak
| discussions evolve around how to license existing features
| differently so it would trigger/force up/cross sales.
|
| What is not on the agenda for maximising revenue: features
| and engineering. We are a "sales oriented organization",
| says our new CEO prodly - brought in during the sale.
| Addressing user needs and becoming more popular for the
| eventual income boost takes longer than the sales cycle of
| less than 5 years (the investor wants to sell the company
| in 5 years time). Engineering is in the way, accounting
| books need to look much much better much sooner for the
| eventual profit. Only sales tactics work here.
|
| I see ralted pattern elsewhere, in tools I have the
| misfortune to use (SaaS and other subscription based
| products). Shameless self-promotions (cross-sale) distact
| your focus all the time, 'features' good for the assumed
| 'cutting-edge' image of the organization, privacy offensive
| practices (data for running sales campaigns), 'offerings'
| that help you with the ideas they force on you for some
| sizeable extra cost.
|
| It will not end well. Takes long time to fail, but without
| valuable features and engineering there will be no value
| left for the users to buy eventually. No user wants top
| notch marketing, licensing, and sales strategy for the
| benefit of the organization.
| geophile wrote:
| On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase
| in two kinds of posts: 1) That's it, I've had it, windows is
| dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a
| distro. 2) I'd love to get off window and move to Linux but I
| can't because it doesn't have an app that works identically
| to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.
| njovin wrote:
| I hate to sound like an apologist but it seems unfair to me
| to lump MS and Apple into the same bucket here.
|
| Yes, Apple has a 'walled garden' to an extent, but I've never
| once worried about MacOS serving me an ad from a third party,
| and their privacy controls are top notch and seem to get
| better as advertisers attack methods get more sophisticated.
|
| I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to jump
| through a few hoops to get an unsigned app installed, and
| each time it's been relatively painless.
| yfw wrote:
| Like that windows recall feature which they keep pushing
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because Microsoft makes far more money on enterprise and ai
| products than they do selling windows licenses to consumers.
| h1fra wrote:
| That's how the world works for everything: software, politics,
| social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging
| gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have
| already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and
| move on
| HexPhantom wrote:
| The rollback only ever applies to the thing people noticed.
| Everything else quietly becomes the new normal.
| kiicia wrote:
| Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when
| choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer
| advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in
| general.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I think private interests should not run what is effectively
| public infrastructure, like Windows. Or, put another way,
| infrastructure of national importance should be publicly
| controlled and governed with transparency and public interests
| in mind. Either that, or true capitalist competition has to be
| reenabled aggressively: forbid walled gardens, split up the
| Googles, etc. This centralization of public utility and power
| in the hands of private individuals, coupled with an
| uncompetitive market, is nonsensical. Competition or
| nationalization.
| apetresc wrote:
| Windows is not public infrastructure. If the government's
| reliance on it has reached the level of "national
| importance", then that's the problem that needs to be
| addressed, not Windows' ownership.
|
| Public infrastructure should be built on open-source, period.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Why is Windows not public infrastructure? Because it's
| privately owned, or because it's not relevant to enough of
| the public? I argue that it is public in function. My
| thinking matches yours as regards OSS.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| The government haven't yet mandated you use windows. Yet.
| It will be soon, like with androids and iphones, for user
| identification so the government knows who sends every
| network packet.
| fsflover wrote:
| > It's quite common for companies to work their way up to the
| line of the most user hostile version of their product that
| users will tolerate.
|
| It's called "enshittification":
| https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
| ruszki wrote:
| > It's quite common for companies
|
| This is not general. This is true only on markets which are
| full regarding available customers, and there is no foreseeable
| growth.
|
| What we can see in IT in the past 10-15 years (especially after
| around 2015) is the slow progress towards this state from a
| rich and competitive (and personally I think a way more fun)
| one.
|
| I worked for dying companies (e.g. Ericsson), for slowly moving
| ones (e.g. Santander), and for several now dead startups, and
| what happened with Google, Microsoft, etc is that they slowly
| moving from the "startup" market - there is still available non
| conquered market segments - to the dying, slowly moving one -
| where there are a few large players, and it's not possible to
| grow in any meaningful way with your own skills. The only
| difference now compared to the decades until the 90s is that
| antitrust checks and balances are dead, and they can
| artificially inflate their own power, which haven't happened in
| this scale for at least 100 years. And it caused world
| shattering problems back then, and it will now too.
|
| I would leave this field happily, even when I'm exceptionally
| good in it, because it's more and more disgusting. Only if
| there would be any good alternatives, which wouldn't require me
| to loose at least a decade of my life. But unfortunately, the
| balance is way more fucked up to easily change my lifestyle at
| this point. And it will be just worse than this.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if
| customer response more often insisted further roll backs than
| just the last straw if a company crosses the line.
|
| I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system
| fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour. Until we change
| that, the power will always be with these kind of companies.
|
| Perhaps governments could levy punative fines in such
| situations. But that seems like a bandaid (and ripe for
| corruption). Ideally we'd have structural change that prevents
| this behaviour in the first place. Perhaps worker
| representation on company boards. Or progressive corporation
| taxation that more strongly encourages smaller companies and
| more competition.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > I think consumers have little power here. Our economic
| system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour.
|
| Consumers have the final say, our economic system
| fundamentally is consumer spending. (Ok, save for most recent
| year(s) of mag7 AI buildout. But generally that's the case
| for USA economy).
|
| We have to stop taking out our wallet and just accepting
| things like sheep. (nearly) Every one of the "scrapped"
| computers could have run a *nix OS and been a middle finger
| to microsoft.
| thunderfork wrote:
| You can do that, but the companies and institutions built
| on Windows will still keep paying whatever it costs for
| Active Directory, and thus all the bundled software that
| comes with it.
|
| Individual consumer action does not a monopoly break.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their
| wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause
| Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.
|
| Nearly 1 billion PCs have stayed on Windows 10, 42% of the
| global desktop marketshare is still on 10 despite EOL.
| Linux has been showing consistent growth on the steam
| hardware survey as well, and time will tell but I have a
| feeling the MacBook Neo is going to put another nail in
| Microsoft's consumer coffin.
|
| The problem for us is that's such a tiny margin of
| Microsoft's customer base. They aren't a consumer company
| anymore. For Microsoft to feel the pain, we need the big
| legacy enterprises to start ripping out Windows (and by
| extension, rip out Windows Server, Azure, M365).
|
| Us here on HN are in a unique position to help, with many
| of us having influence on or even the authority to make
| technical decisions for the companies we work for. Its not
| enough to stop buying Microsoft at home, we all need to
| stop buying Microsoft at work.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Windows OS is just an onramp for their cloud services.
| That's their focus, now.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their
| wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause
| Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.
|
| Microsoft has largely stopped asking consumers for money.
| The last paid upgrade was Windows 8, IIRC. Since then,
| Microsoft wants consumers to upgrade, so it's free, with
| full screen prompts at login, and sometimes the 'no
| thanks' button just does it anyway.
|
| Microsoft sells consumer OSes to OEMs. I haven't been
| looking, but I assume they don't allow OEMs to install
| Windows 10 Home anymore; and maybe not even Windows 10
| Pro. So when consumers buy a new PC, they're getting
| Windows 11. The only Linux option at most stores is
| Chrome OS, which Google is shutting down, and is just a
| browser for most users (it's a useful product! a lot of
| users just need a browser; but it's not a platform of
| empowerment)
| tosti wrote:
| The past: Nobody got fired for buying IBM.
|
| The present: Nobody got fired for buying Microslop.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| It seems like another tragedy of the commons. Consumers
| ultimately have the final say in climate impacts by above
| companies. That isn't to say consumers are guilt free, but
| the power of an individual is pretty small
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Consumers have the final say, our economic system
| fundamentally is consumer spending.
|
| Only if consumers have viable alternatives to choose from.
| If they don't then what are they supposed to do?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| *nix is not a viable option? That's news to me.
|
| I agree it's not as easy as pre-installed, but it
| definitely is viable.
| xp84 wrote:
| Sort of related, I think this is why big tech loves "free,
| ad-supported" so much. Using Google search or YouTube or
| ChatGPT or Fortnite doesn't seem like an action that is
| "supporting a company." When none of the money comes from
| your pocket, you don't really feel like you're making an
| important choice to patronize one business or another.
| generic92034 wrote:
| But the money is coming out of our pockets. The costs of
| the ads are added to product prices, which everyone is
| paying.
| tantalor wrote:
| > consumers have little power here
|
| Don't buy their products, and tell your friends
| sayYayToLife wrote:
| I am only 1 person. FAAMG have reputation management
| teams/marketing teams that are paid to lie all day.
| AdamN wrote:
| By friends we mean IT leadership in organizations which
| really needs to be making the case for MacOS, Linux,
| ChromeOS, or whatever instead of (but more likely in
| addition to) Windows.
| abustamam wrote:
| Yeah exactly. But I don't think my local state
| university, my wife's accounting firm, or my clients are
| going to ever switch from Windows, no matter how user
| hostile it becomes. One could dream.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| When I went to university 17 years ago, all of the
| computers (except the Macs) had dual-boot Windows 7 and
| Ubuntu 9.04.
|
| I'll give you five guesses which OS I never booted into.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| That's a bit of a trick question, because if you'd booted
| into Windows, it would have eventually broken the dual-
| boot.
| xp84 wrote:
| It's absolutely adorable to include macOS in that list,
| as though good ol' Tim Apple is the White Knight standing
| up for consumers and always doing the right thing. MacOS
| and Windows are working from the same playbook. The
| specifics vary, but leaving one for the other is like
| running from an abusive boyfriend to his slightly-richer
| and slightly-better-looking best friend who acts just
| like him.
| epistasis wrote:
| You can even keep that Office365 subscription going on
| Linux via the web apps these days. They are buggy as
| hell, but no more buggy than the Mac versions in my
| experience (haven't used the Windows versions enough to
| compare...)
| bonesss wrote:
| Even on windows it's a struggle.
|
| I used to do a lot of document and Office work. If you
| had told me that 20 years in the future MS would still be
| around, automagic piracy enabled coding bots were a
| thing, and people were having problems because the
| buttons in Office don't work, I would've flagged the
| third as unbelievable.
| acheron wrote:
| > ChromeOS
|
| "Boy, I hate operating systems from evil gigantic
| corporations that constantly spy on us. I know the
| solution, let's use a Google product!"
| deaux wrote:
| None of those. All we need is enforcing laws that are already
| on the books. Antitrust laws. Break up big tech.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Which requires voting in politicians that would do that. Of
| course we're much more likely to elect politicians that get
| the support of billionaires in general so this shit ain't
| never happ'ning
| xp84 wrote:
| Idk. Our antitrust laws present a high burden of proof and
| so much subjectivity. The question "Are customers _really_
| being hurt?" has to be argued in court (and then argued on
| appeal at like 3 levels). I think it harms our whole market
| system, and arguably even harms the capitalist system, to
| have players with so much power, and the antitrust laws are
| focused narrowly on proving specific harm mainly in the
| area of pricing, which isn't the whole picture.
|
| Too many markets are utterly dominated by one or two big
| players. I know it's a tricky problem because market share
| is hard to define (Does Amazon have 80% share of
| e-commerce? Or 30% share of all retail?) but I think we
| would be better off if there were a more aggressive set of
| rules about anti-competitive behavior that automatically
| applied to these huge firms, which didn't rely so much on
| subjective judgment.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Anti trust laws do not generally apply to these situations.
| The government has had an appetite for antitrust, but the
| cases are far from a slam dunk. We need modern laws for
| modern problems.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Those laws _used_ to apply, until the courts adopted
| Robert Bork 's "consumer welfare standard" in the 80s,
| under Reaganism.
|
| Analyzed well here: https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.
| Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
| ferongr wrote:
| Breaking up Apple would be glorious. Great hardware without
| an Orwellian OS on top.
| com2kid wrote:
| Apple only holds on monopoly position on the smartphone
| market for people with lots of money.
|
| They aren't a majority in any other market segment.
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| The reason we are in such a position is because government
| contracts and government involvement with companies like
| Microsoft Amazon. They don't have to care about consumers
| when they have multi billion dollar Gov contracts.
| rmah wrote:
| "Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such
| behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to
| grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product.
| If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's
| really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The
| alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not
| buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Sure, but there's a power disparity here. I think the
| clearest example is smart TVs where there have been
| examples of consumers buying a TV, and then having ads
| retroactively added to the product a year later. There's
| not much a consumer could to avoid that. It's our
| regulatory environment allowing that.
| j_w wrote:
| You don't need a TV. If there are only smart TVs then
| simply don't purchase one.
|
| Most consumers are unwilling to take an option that they
| perceive as inconveniencing them more than getting
| screwed by the company inconveniences them.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Go to a shop and try to find a non smart tv.
| kortilla wrote:
| "You don't need a TV"
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more
| than a "perceived" inconvenience.
|
| The reality is that companies know they can get away with
| crap because they all get away with crap. And because
| they all do it, consumers are powerless.
|
| This is why regulation isn't a bad the thing that many
| HNers seem to recoil at. The real problem with regulation
| is when it's defined by lobbyists rather than consumer
| groups. But even then, it's really no different to the
| status quo where businesses are never held accountable.
| j_w wrote:
| If somebody "needs" a TV then they might "need" some
| hobbies.
|
| A disturbing proportion of my family spend more than half
| of their free time watching television (typically while
| doom scrolling tiktok). They don't "need" TVs - they need
| to find interests.
| Cpoll wrote:
| Sure, but you're just choosing hobbies for people. TVs
| are just one example here. If your hobby is 3D printing,
| you might've gotten screwed by Autodesk's subscription
| changes.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yeah, and it's not just non-essentials. You could easily
| get screwed by your food production supply chain, or your
| housing provider.
| acheron wrote:
| Evergreen
|
| https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-
| doesn...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| What people don't need is someone dictating to them how
| they should relax after work.
|
| Besides, it's not like TVs are the only industry where
| consumer choice is an illusion. You see the same problem
| in a lot of sports (I used to fence and there was a great
| deal of pressure to buy equipment from one specific
| manufacturer which charged literally 4x the price for
| their gear).
|
| And it's not just hobbies either. I need a car for family
| duties and there are plenty of parts on it that can only
| be replaced by an authorised dealer.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > What people don't need is someone dictating to them how
| they should relax after work.
|
| Nobody dictates that. What we do is to suggest there
| might be more rewarding things to do with their time off
| than watching TV between the dopamine hits from TikTok
| claysmithr wrote:
| Sounds like they need God
| zahlman wrote:
| > Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more
| than a "perceived" inconvenience.
|
| From personal experience, it really really is barely even
| an inconvenience. Especially in a world where YouTube
| exists and is accessible for free from a desktop
| computer. There's barely been anything good on TV for
| decades, and the older stuff probably only seemed good
| because of the difficulty of publishing any competition.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It really depends on the individual. I barely watch any
| TV and have been like this for the 30+ years that I've
| been old enough to own a display. For a while, I did go
| fully in with media centres. Even running XBMC on an
| original Xbox. But I honestly just don't really care for
| video content all that much regardless of how it's
| delivered.
|
| But I also know a hell of a lot of people who still
| massively prefer watching content the traditional way. As
| in, not just TV shows, but on a TV too. And I have no
| more right to tell them how to consume video content as
| they do to tell me how I should consume the stuff I want
| to read.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > And I have no more right to tell them how to consume
| video content as they do to tell me how I should consume
| the stuff I want to read.
|
| I sometimes suggest they'd do themselves a favor if they
| stopped watching Fox News and reality TV, that life is
| much better without that.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more
| than a "perceived" inconvenience.
|
| The TV I have has never had an antenna cable plugged, or
| an internet connection. It's, from day one, been a large
| HDMI monitor to an Apple TV, a Nintendo Switch and a C64
| Maxi with some other devices plugged in from time to
| time.
|
| It IS possible to ignore the TV's software most of the
| time (mine, luckily, isn't intrusive at all) and use it
| as a conduit for a much cheaper and easily replaced (or
| hacked) device.
|
| I remember how surprised the engineers at [manufacturer
| redacted] were when I told them they had everything
| needed to turn their TVs into thin clients and meeting
| room monitors right into the Linux firmware just a
| compile away. I'd totally love a 35" X terminal in 2008
| with Ethernet and a couple USB ports.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Please make a list of things you don't need so that in
| case of any issues with the company or system that allows
| access to them you will know to just stop using them.
| j_w wrote:
| I've dropped many things in the past because of issues
| with the company/service. Amazon Prime, every single
| streaming service, I've been car free for over 3 years,
| and there are more.
|
| Are there some things I would struggle with if suddenly
| there were issues? Sure. I had to significantly increase
| my internet spend because of the (much) cheaper option
| going to complete shit. I require the internet for my
| career but unless the entire world collapses I doubt I'll
| run into any true blocker that would prevent me from
| using it for work.
|
| Most people are just afraid to change their lives
| substantively. I am too, but I'm also willing to do it
| for causes I believe in.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I think you underestimate the meaning of the word
| 'inconvenience'. Hot water is a convenience.
|
| My point is that your list is one list which you are
| making, but someone else could look at your life and make
| a different list. Your argument only goes so far you can
| extend into your own life. If you really cared about
| something's place in your life, you wouldn't classify it
| as a convenience, so you are conveniently applying your
| own classifications to other people's lives, which you
| don't have a right to do.
|
| This is why we have democratic institutions and authority
| -- to make these limits about what is tolerable and
| intolerable -- not what people's conveniences are.
| fluoridation wrote:
| The list is longer than you'd probably think. Keeping a
| principled stance might involve taking on some
| inconvenience, which could be a problem for some people.
| drnick1 wrote:
| The trick is to use the TV as a monitor and not connect
| it to the Internet.
| j_w wrote:
| This is what I do with the smart TV that I was given
| after a relative was tired of it freezing up/apps
| crashing. Haven't had any issues.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I remember some brand was caught connecting to nearby TVs
| of the same brand to send telemetry to their corporate
| masters through the neighbour's internet connected TV.
| Not sure how far they went with downloading new firmware.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah that is definitely the kind of thing we need
| regulation to address. In the market, the only power you
| have is to purchase or not. It ruins the free market's
| ability to function if the company you buy something from
| can remotely vandalize it after your purchase.
| rbanffy wrote:
| And this is even worse than with computers where you can,
| with some training, remove Windows and install a less
| user-hostile operating system. With a TV, while sometimes
| possible, most people are not sufficiently proficient in
| tge dark arts required to get rid of the native OS or to
| subvert it to your will against the wishes of its
| corporate master.
| gathered wrote:
| On top of that, the TV manufacturers subsidize the cost
| of their own TVs by shoving as much adware as possible
| and having it pay for the cost of the hardware. "Smart"
| TVs will almost always be cheaper than equivalent dumb
| TVs because of this reason, which forces many consumers'
| hands. I don't think there's any way to avoid this other
| than regulation, which likely won't happen because the
| system moves too slow to keep up.
| aylmao wrote:
| Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't
| choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can
| pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less
| productive is often hard to afford.
|
| Another instance where companies can have more leverage
| than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing
| because they work; not giving consumers the option to play
| Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch
| sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming
| companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than
| building an OS to gamer's preferences.
|
| I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't
| always good regulators for the market. The market is best
| regulated by organized entities.
| megaman821 wrote:
| iPhone adoption in the enterprise wasn't because of IT.
| When consumer preference is strong things tend to happen.
| something765478 wrote:
| > Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and
| even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is
| one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
|
| Sure, but I also think that a lot of the issues with
| Windows 11 don't really matter much if its just used as a
| work OS. For example, I refuse to upgrade my home PC to
| 11, because I don't want Microsoft to spy on me; however,
| when I am using my work computer, I _know_ that I am
| already being spied upon, so that 's not a concern for
| me.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Not even companies have a choice, for the most part.
| Their choice of operating system is dictated by the
| applications they need to run, and only the smallest and
| most unsophisticated businesses can generally get away
| with nothing but a web browser.
|
| There is a whole ecosystem that needs to move before they
| can move.
| pinewurst wrote:
| So does North Korea's. This is Goodhart's law in action -
| the metastasis of PM culture rewarding "engagement".
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| If people stopped buying cigarettes there would be no
| tobacco industry. But the true cost of smoking is not
| something that the smoker realizes until it's already too
| late. That's why we had to have huge public health
| campaigns to deter people from smoking, because the long-
| term effects aren't obvious when you're just stopping in at
| the corner store. We all live in our own little bubbles and
| it's often difficult to see how our actions, individual and
| collective, shape the world around us.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Consumers can make choices only if it is clear what the
| options are. In many cases, Microsoft hides behind weasel
| or made up words. And it takes a security researcher to
| peel back the layers of their bullshit.
| observationist wrote:
| I'd love if everyone switched to Linux and the walled gardens
| just died, but the most realistic outcome would be Microsoft
| and Apple having to up their game and improve their
| respective products. Right now they're driving hellbent for
| leather into OSaaS monthly computer subscriptions,
| eliminating use agency to the greatest degree possible, and
| exploiting every possible intrusion and usurpation of
| consumer privacy, vacuuming up every last bit of data and
| monetizing it to the greatest degree possible, without any
| concurrent return in value to the consumer.
|
| The only way that stops is by having enough people leave that
| they change their behavior, and it's not sufficient to switch
| to the competition that is operating under the same perverted
| incentives under the same system with the same failure modes.
| No Windows, no Mac, no Chromebooks, no enshittified corporate
| quagmire of awfulness and despair.
|
| The solution is simple - use Linux. Set your family up with
| Linux.
|
| It's the year of the Linux desktop; it's never been easier or
| better, and it's never been more important to make the leap.
| linkregister wrote:
| Mac OS comes with the purchase of the hardware. For mobile
| and tablets, yes, there is a strict walled garden. But I've
| been programming on Mac OS for longer than the age of this
| HN account, and even longer on Linux. In practice there's
| not much beyond the window manager and containerization
| that are impractical on Mac for every day programming
| compared to mainstream Linux distros.
|
| The family computer is set up to boot into Ubuntu; booting
| into Windows 11 is the exception (games, iTunes).
| observationist wrote:
| Not giving Apple money means no Apple hardware. I've gone
| decades doing it and haven't regretted it once. I've
| turned down work because it involved having to work with
| Apple devices and software. It's really, really easy to
| not give them money.
|
| Pirate everything if you have to, but stop feeding the
| companies that are making everything awful.
| mlsu wrote:
| The best solution would be competition. But go ahead try to
| compete, you will be crushed.
| halJordan wrote:
| Your are suffering from a fundamental misidentification.
| There are only people. There is no system doing anything.
| There are people doing things. Consumers have as much control
| as they want.
|
| When you insist that the people comprising the system have no
| agency, you're the one perpetuating it
| deaux wrote:
| >It's quite common for companies
|
| It's quite common for megacorps, FAANG and friends, NASDAQ
| bigwigs.
|
| It's rare for small companies, and extremely rare for
| independent developers.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Speaking only for myself, this sort of behavior is a great way
| to break the Trust Thermocline [1]. The point where I am so
| frustrated, so fed up, so expectant that said company will
| abuse me again, that I refuse to do business with them at all,
| under any circumstances, no matter if it is inconvenient to
| avoid them or not.
|
| 1. https://x.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904
| willis936 wrote:
| Exactly. This behavior is blindly driving to "line go up"
| without realizing they just dug their own grave. 2025 was a
| series of existential missteps for Microsoft. This is a
| historic moment. These suits would rather die than try to
| build trust.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| > It's quite common for companies to work their way up to the
| line of the most user hostile version of their product that
| users will tolerate.
|
| Yes, when there isn't real competition. And that's in part due
| to a long history of anti competitive practices but also simply
| because Microsoft is too big and should be broken up.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > It's quite common for companies to work their way up to the
| line of the most user hostile version of their product that
| users will tolerate
|
| I get the impression that many companies are working through
| this with AI-assisted coding. How bad can the product get
| before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing
| programmers and deploying AI slop? For products like Windows
| and Office, the subscription model and enterprise account
| revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before
| they even have to apologize and roll back.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| >"It's quite common for companies to work their way up to the
| line of the most user hostile version of their product that
| users will tolerate."
|
| developer delusion. devs who barely use their own apps. who
| dont understand the day-to-day user experience.
| m463 wrote:
| The answer to all of this has traditionally been robust
| competition.
|
| A framework of just and fair laws and regulations should
| support this, backed up by open enforcement.
|
| but, yeah.
| omoikane wrote:
| The underlying philosophy for these companies seem to be "ask
| for forgiveness, not permission". Some of us are done
| forgiving, but I am not sure there are enough of us to reverse
| this cultural trend.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You'll note that those are both B2B fumbles. The savvy end user
| usually doesn't have the needed weight.
| kivle wrote:
| I've noticed recently that my Windows 11 start menu isn't a 50%
| gray empty blob anymore. I always disable "recommended apps"
| (eg. ad supported app suggestions), so 50% of the space in my
| start menu was unused, yet it was still there of course. Kind
| of refreshing to have a somewhat normal looking start menu
| again with something as revolutionary as a _list of apps_ right
| when you open it. Let 's see how long it takes before they mess
| it up again.
| coffeemug wrote:
| A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely
| not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not
| selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a
| little of it nobody cares, if you demonstrate too much of it
| you clash with everyone else's priorities which quickly becomes
| career limiting. So people willing to fight for taste never
| advance.
|
| This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is
| not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize
| it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is
| orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely
| good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs
| you've ever seen, as one example.
|
| A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is
| that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's
| a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in
| Microsoft's DNA.
| justonceokay wrote:
| I think about how a successful and robust ecosystem is one in
| which there are many parasites at every level of the food
| chain. If your ecosystem doesn't have parasites then it's not
| operating with nearly the amount of interconnectedness or
| efficiency that it could be otherwise.
|
| It's similar to that idea that floats around where $0 lost to
| fraud is not the optimal amount. If you over index on removing
| fraud from your system eventually you will spend more on
| monitoring and removing it than you save on the fraud itself.
| That is time you could have spent building more things that
| make money.
|
| The ecosystem is a beast of its own and the optimal state of
| the ecosystem is /not/the optimal state for any actor within it
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I call this odious practice "profit maximization titration" and
| almost all companies do it now. They continually enshittify the
| product a little at a time until they notice a dip in profits
| and then they dial back the shittiness a bit. Or if they're
| really sophisticated they will enshittify the product by a
| large amount and then do a binary search to restore product
| functionality in logarithmically smaller steps until the
| balance between profits and customer dissatisfaction re-
| stabilizes. They 'git bisect' the product's shittiness, as it
| were.
| ptero wrote:
| Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused
| users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer
| down people's throats.
|
| But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and
| for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to
| shake off government use.
|
| Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only
| way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get
| govvies off it. My 2c.
| mschild wrote:
| I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons.
|
| A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes
| bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays
| is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365
| subscription is net positive for the bean counters.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Chat software is absurdly expensive. I'm not saying teams
| is good, but being nickel and dimed is a real risk for
| businesses too.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 18EUR a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I
| really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is
| making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic
| cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat
| application seems absolutely insane.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> Chat software is absurdly expensive._
|
| Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee
| that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or
| Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self
| hosting it yourself.
|
| My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their
| Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative
| peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say
| 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain
| an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent
| bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even
| then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites
| for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway.
|
| Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for
| Teams so you can focus on your product instead?
| 9dev wrote:
| That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a
| passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat
| app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend
| that decision.
| iso1631 wrote:
| We used to have anti trust regulators. We don't now.
| 9dev wrote:
| We've got a lot of billionaires with a higher balance on
| their bank accounts though, so you can't say it was all
| for nothing
| iso1631 wrote:
| It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the
| "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who
| don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a
| winner takes all Ferengi style system.
| hnthrow0287345 wrote:
| You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it
| and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our
| jobs'
| 9dev wrote:
| yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant
| to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put
| up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.
| craftkiller wrote:
| How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12,
| you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month.
| Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a
| $42/month raise.
| kstrauser wrote:
| And if you put it to a vote, "would you rather upgrade
| from Teams to Slack for $9 per month, or get $9 of
| taxable income more per month?", I think there's a very
| good chance you'd be switching that week.
|
| (I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo
| out of my own pocket not to use Teams.)
| dahcryn wrote:
| 6k would be a no-brainer.
|
| In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version
| for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's
| about 14/user/month.
|
| At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly
| cost for something that is comparable to something you can
| get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at
| that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask
| your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat
| app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and
| intuitive it is.
| 9dev wrote:
| I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial
| constraints under which European startups are operating
| :) The median series A is something like 1-6 million
| Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you
| spend money for on these scales.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the
| financial constraints under which European startups are
| operating :) The median series A is something like 1-6
| million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider
| what you spend money for on these scales.
|
| I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often
| why US-American tech startups don't act much more
| frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway
| to make their startups succeed.
| matsemann wrote:
| Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in
| a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force"
| your companies to use tools made by your other companies.
| So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the
| VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc.
| So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the
| apps get to claim good sales and user numbers.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Quicker and bigger is better than slower and smaller.
| Especially in a competitive sector.
|
| Better to go bust quick, than to eke out a tiny profit by
| being super frugal. The latter is a waste of everybody's
| time.
| kstrauser wrote:
| A big part of it is that if you're in a very competitive
| realm, where most of the startups you hear about are
| working, then every day counts. If you can spend $1M to
| develop a product in a year or $2M to develop it in 6
| months, that extra million gives you a 6 month head start
| in sales, revenue growth, and publicitity. Depending on
| the numbers involved, that frugality could cost huge
| amounts of money overall.
|
| Note that you don't hear so much about the many, many
| startups doing slow growth things in less glamorous
| fields. I know a few companies making agricultural
| products for small farmers. Yes, frugality makes perfect
| sense for them. They're not going to have a hockey stick
| growth curve where they go from $0 to $10M to $1B over
| the course of 2 years. Their revenue graph will look more
| like a traditional manufacturer. They're doing things the
| way you describe, but they're not all over tech and non-
| tech news sites.
| jasonkester wrote:
| The reasoning makes more sense when you factor in that
| your startup's VC is also Slack's VC.
|
| You're actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m
| of their own money back, in a way that makes their
| investment more valuable.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That would be 420k/yr. To get to 4 million you need 25000
| users. That's quite a big company.
| kakacik wrote:
| So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody
| is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There
| must be massive discounts above certain threshold.
| dpark wrote:
| Your corp has 95 thousand employees but bats an eye at 16
| million dollars?
|
| Also yes, volume licensees generally get massive
| discounts.
| bluegatty wrote:
| That's a very upside down way to think about it.
|
| The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive
| with it, than the free version?"
|
| The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support
| calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as
| well.
|
| Not 'But it costs $X million!'.
|
| Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right
| monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're
| smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?
|
| Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their
| monitors.
| kstrauser wrote:
| This is exactly right. You're going to pay a dev on the
| order of $10,000 per month, then make it harder to do
| their job to save $14? That's idiocy.
|
| The person responsible for picking our work laptops asked
| me for advice selecting our new Macs since our old model
| was being replaced:
|
| "Do we really need to spend an extra $1000 for 64GB of
| RAM instead of 24GB?"
|
| "That'd save us $300 per year, or about a dollar a day,
| over the deprecation schedule, and it'd make our devs
| slower. We spend more than this to have lunch catered."
|
| "You know... good point. 64GB it is, then."
|
| And that's how we opted for beefy machines on this
| hardware cycle. The guy I talked to is extremely smart
| and competent, but just hadn't looked at it from that
| angle. Once he saw it, he instantly bought in. There are
| dumb ways to save money with massive negative ROI, and
| cheaping out on basic equipment and resources is one of
| them.
| mulmen wrote:
| Careful, at some companies that kind of talk leads to
| discontinuing catered lunch.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I would not be working at one of those companies in the
| first place.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| My company doesn't OK basically any software requests,
| even cheap stuff :( We also don't make anywhere near
| $10k/mo (not USA). REcently got a new dev machine and it
| had 512GB m2 SSD and 16GB of RAM. I had to order 32GB but
| I had to explain why: to run docker images (and i'm
| hitting limits with 32GB constantly). I had to wait 2
| weeks for the RAM upgrade. I wanted a bigger SSD but it
| would have taken longer and I needed to upgrade ASAP. It
| doesn't even have a USB-C plug (but a SD card slot, good
| grief).
| mulmen wrote:
| Monitors are a personal choice. My monitor doesn't force
| anyone else to install yet another a chat app to talk to
| me. The choice of chat app has to be made centrally, or
| at least at an organizational level.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| > 6k would be a no-brainer.
|
| "It's one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10
| dollars?"
| mulmen wrote:
| You get teams for free with office but how do you justify
| that logic when free office suites are available? You can't
| justify your decision on functionality because that could
| also be used to justify the cost of Slack. If you're
| actually considering cost vs functionality then it's no
| longer a no-brainer.
| dahcryn wrote:
| yeah I don't understand how this isn't blatant market abuse
| through their monopoly position
|
| Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but
| unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the
| mitigation.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Regulators are either sleeping on billions of lobby money
| or asleep at the wheel
| account42 wrote:
| Don't forget network effects. If other companies you are
| working with use Teams then there is less friction if you
| also use Teams yourself.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?
|
| The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a
| meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life
| function that all others are lacking.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| No but it's hard to get excited about two different flavours
| of shit sandwich. Teams is terrible piece of software no
| doubt but slack is worse, marginally
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Yes, and you are wrong.
|
| Objectively.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I haven't had that many issues on Windows "native" client. So
| I really don't get what the critical issue is... To me it has
| long looked like good enough.
| jwrallie wrote:
| Teams is not that bad if you are using Office and OneDrive
| anyway, as it integrates well with those.
|
| Most of my team members are using different named chats for
| discussion instead of channels, which are used for more
| important notices. Somehow it works, and our channels on
| slack were also basically chats anyway.
|
| My only gripe is that Linux does not have a "native" client
| anymore and the web client is full of bugs on Firefox. But
| it's Microsoft, what can you expect. It's not that bad except
| for memory consumption on other platforms.
| hedora wrote:
| I use Firefox on Mac when I'm stuck in a Teams meeting. The
| native client attendees invariably have more problems than
| I do with connections, authentication, forced updates mid-
| meeting, etc.
|
| I'm guessing the native client has been going downhill,
| based on frequency of issues people report. I hope they
| kind of forgot about the web client, and won't enshittify
| it as quickly.
| delecti wrote:
| Teams if you only use it for meetings is great, truly. It's
| easy and simple. Messages in the attached chat rooms of
| recurring meetings is really convenient. DMs work seamlessly
| and sort in between those meeting chats.
|
| The problem is that the "teams" in teams are a cobbled mess
| that works like a combination of forums posts and chat rooms.
| If you have coworkers who really like that functionality,
| you're forced to interact with the garbage underbelly of the
| app. My opinion of Teams shifted drastically when we got a
| new PM (former MS employee) who started putting things there,
| making them hard to keep track of.
| projektfu wrote:
| I don't like either very much. Both Teams and Zoom try to
| stay resident after you're done. I use both from the browser
| now because they are both abusive.
| rishav_sharan wrote:
| Well I genuinely like Teams. Being forced to work on a mix of
| Zoom & teams in my new work, I have found an appreciation of
| using M365 connected tools - Outlook,claendar, teams,
| sharepoint, copilot etc just work very well together for me.
| a_victorp wrote:
| Zoom has this feature as well
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts
| with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals
| and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to
| connect to some networks.
|
| We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop
| with Windows and Office anyway.
|
| Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story.
| I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to
| get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my
| savior.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard,
| it has always been predatory.
|
| Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about
| Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was
| terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I
| particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is
| far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also
| quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was
| unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came
| close.
|
| Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the
| ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They
| still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a
| feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable
| because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned,
| but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is
| still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with
| web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually
| simplifying anything.
| yfw wrote:
| Its as steve jobs said, once you control market share theres
| no incentive to build a good product and you lose the ability
| to do it.
| olav wrote:
| > The traditional Office suite is still good
|
| I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with
| the Windows or Mac desktop versions.
|
| Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with
| alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google
| Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with
| arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font
| rendering and insane defaults.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > For me, the MS products are a complete mess with
| arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons
|
| In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength.
| Office has to take into account a large number of use
| cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is
| available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that
| "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature.
| The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't
| know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google
| Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs,
| but Office gives me the missing 1%.
|
| That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging,
| the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most
| points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem.
|
| As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it
| has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king
| of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work,
| Apple has always been on top.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The font rendering is a dealbreaker for me. I have to use
| Word periodically for exchanging files with customers where
| we have zero say in the mechanism. That is, when they say
| "here's our version of the contract for review before we
| give you $$$", and it's in Word that doesn't open cleanly
| in something better like Pages or Google Docs (yeah, I said
| it and I meant it), then Word it is.
|
| I can't stand using it a moment longer than I have to, and
| never, ever use it for anything other than this kind of
| legacy doc compatibility situation. The font rendering is
| _so, so bad_ that I just can 't look at it. If MS ever
| cared to fix it then I bet that could move their Mac
| adoption by at least a few percent, which would work out to
| a nice chunk of change at their scale. But alas, no. We get
| stuck with something that looks like they took a photo of
| an LCD calculator screen and downscaled it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Windows used to exist in a competitive environment where they
| had to fight to remain relevant. For a long time now they
| have become complacent, no matter how many ads, product
| placements, and user abusive features they push, people will
| tolerate it.
|
| The situation has only just changed now that Apple and Valve
| are getting close to threatening the Windows monopoly.
| makapuf wrote:
| Frankly I don't know why we still have laptops. Honestly I
| think my mobile with a usbc base for screen and usb would
| perfectly work in a hardware pov. I don't know if Android
| would work, and besides of that a small fixed pc for
| whatever needs power.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| because phones are not general computing devices, and
| really shouldn't be. They are too important to modern
| society to be unlocked for their full potential.
|
| That said, I doubt the average person on a laptop even
| needs a general computing device, so your point does make
| sense. Though, is carrying around a screen and a keyboard
| and cable any better than carrying a laptop?
|
| I could see an argument of it being cheaper, but that
| would take years, possibly decades, of multiple
| competitors in the space for the market to make that
| true.
|
| Now, if we could have a decent folding keyboard and
| monitor that fit into the same case as your phone, that
| would be a game changer, but I don't think anyone is
| risking the investment to develop that.
| philistine wrote:
| People want a full-size keyboard. Adding a couple of
| millimetres underneath that keyboard allows you to put a
| whole computer in there.
|
| We have laptops because it makes sense. Look at Apple's
| Macbook Neo. The tiny logic board on that computer is the
| least of Apple's worries. The most expensive components
| are the display and case. Why not charge 100 bucks more
| and not have to worry about this thing being a phone
| accessory?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Yeah, that's basically my point.
|
| The only way it would make sense to use your phone is if
| the keyboard and monitor can fold up so small that they
| can attach to the phone and still fit in your pocket.
| Otherwise, just using a laptop is going to be better
| every time.
| philistine wrote:
| What you're asking, a laptop that can fold so small,
| requires materials science breakthroughs that we cannot
| bet on. A cheap slab of pure aluminium will be king by
| the time we're both dead. Mark my words.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.
| foldr wrote:
| Isn't this backwards? Microsoft had way less competition on
| the desktop in the 90s than they do now.
| ptero wrote:
| I do not think so. The Windows - OS/2 war was a big fight
| that Microsoft won on merits. Windows 95 was
| revolutionary at the time, folks queued at the malls on
| the release day to get it, bugs and all.
|
| They fought the compiler wars with real engineering,
| giving Borland a run for the money. Different people have
| different opinions about Visual Studio. As a Linux user
| since 0.9 I did not like its architecture and focus on
| GUI at the expense of everything else, but I still saw it
| as a consistent framework done by excellent engineers.
| And so on.
| p_ing wrote:
| On the desktop, I don't believe Microsoft has had
| significant competition for quite some time, likely back
| to Windows 95. In the server space, NT fought really hard
| against the UNIX giants of the time.
| foldr wrote:
| Windows' share of the desktop market has dropped from
| about 95% in the late 90s to around 70% now.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| Yeah, it used to feel like "we'll crush competitors, but at
| least we ship solid software"
| blincoln wrote:
| > Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared
| about Windows
|
| I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring
| about most of their software. Windows is just the most
| egregious, high-impact example.
|
| SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to
| run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under
| the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some
| of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world
| because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in
| giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table
| schemas.
|
| That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for
| us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach
| was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows
| itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same
| reason.
|
| I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the
| mid-2000s.
| p_ing wrote:
| > giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table
| schemas.
|
| Prior to SharePoint 2013, Microsoft used sparse columns. It
| made for massive tables and was poor design.
|
| Moving to XML blobs for user-defined schemas was the
| correct choice. The table schema became significantly
| smaller and user-defined schemas (for Lists/Libraries)
| could become much more complex.
| tremon wrote:
| It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about
| Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated
| differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased
| next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from
| the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s,
| the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot --
| and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of
| things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform
| in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling
| via user license changes, constantly renaming products).
|
| Microsoft being _good_ to their customers is the anomaly, not
| the other way around.
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd read "Microsoft lost their way" as a description of how
| the speaker's worldview has changed, as they've gained
| experience and perspective.
|
| Microsoft _is_ often good to their customers. Generally in
| situations where badness has a poor RoI, or they 're trying
| to lure you deeper into their clutches.
| philistine wrote:
| Microsoft has indeed lost their way with Microsoft, but not
| in the sense that they became evil ghouls. They've always
| been evil ghouls. No, what's happened is that Windows became
| a minor part of Microsoft's profits. The whole company is not
| focused on Windows the way Apple is with the iPhone.
|
| The higher ups no longer care about Windows as a product
| itself. They only care about Windows as a storefront to their
| other efforts (OneDrive, Office, Copilot, etc.)
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, at least their software used to be pretty good. The
| Windows NT kernel is arguably a better design than Linux. I
| complain about NTFS _now_ , but thirty years ago it was
| better than most other filesystems. And Windows NT at least
| didn't jam a billion ads down your throat.
|
| Granted, MS has always been a pretty evil anti-competitive
| company, so I'm not trying to sanitize them much here.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| Even if gov adoption dropped, I suspect the incentives wouldn't
| change much unless there were genuinely viable, low-friction
| alternatives.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and
| pretty decent.
|
| XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster,
| Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle
| with Win11.
|
| Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm
| sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and
| the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design,
| where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a
| bait+switch.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a
| disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of
| the cycle with Win11.
|
| The cycle is more complicated:
|
| * 2000: exceptional
|
| * XP: bad (the original XP was indeed bad)
|
| * XP SP2 (from a technological perspective basically a new
| OS): decent
|
| * Vista: bad
|
| * 7: good
|
| * 8: awful (it was so bad that soon 8.1 was introduced)
|
| * 8.1: bad
|
| * 10: controversial (some say it's "decent"; some say it's
| "bad" because of the magnitude of telemetry (spying) that
| Windows 10 introduced)
|
| * 11: awful
|
| So, in my opinion it's rather a _general downward trend_ with
| some overlaid cycle.
| kawsper wrote:
| Even earlier than that:
|
| Win98: bad
|
| Win98 SE: good
| kakacik wrote:
| Completely agree with your timeline and rating, 2000 was
| the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with,
| before it was such a bad shitshow that MS-DOS 6.22 seemed
| like coming from another planet.
|
| Hated 10, was forced to it basically only due to gaming, a
| common assholish trick MS uses whenever it can. But when
| looking from 11 perspective, 10 was fine compared to that
| heap of disorganized badly designed crap.
|
| Yet again time to be ashamed to work for MS, this time its
| sticking around like tar spit on a white shirt.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 2000 was the first windows one could use the word
| 'stable' with
|
| Windows NT4 was also very stable (once you installed the
| Service Packs), but had a lot less convenience and modern
| features than Windows 2000.
| hedora wrote:
| Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky,
| but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.
|
| They had a "last release in the series was best pattern"
| with Win 3.11 / NT, Win 98 SE / 2K and XP SP2 (which merged
| the consumer and business tracks).
|
| After that, it's been strictly downhill. 7's additions vs
| XP are purely hostile to the end user, including escrowed
| disk encryption and DRM. 8 was the beginning of the pivot
| to mandatory cloud. 10 added mandatory telemetry and ads.
| 11 added nonsensical AI crapware, and turned the ads to 11.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been
| wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.
|
| Don't worship Windows 8/8.1.
|
| It also introduced WinRT, an API that gave the
| programmers a lot less freedom; the roadmap was clear:
| applications should from now on be developed for the
| WinRT API, and only be distributed via an app store
| (Windows Store). The old WinAPI shall be legacy, and will
| only be provided as long as Microsoft is willing to.
|
| Windows 8's ARM version (Windows RT) was incredibly
| locked-down; here applications could only be installed
| via an app store (Windows Store). It was clear that
| Microsoft had similar plans for the x86 version.
|
| Actually, because of programmers' and users outcry
| regarding this, Microsoft pedaled back in this regard
| with Windows 10 (but started introducing a lot more
| telemetry).
|
| Also, Windows 8 was the Windows version that started the
| tight integration of the local user account and the
| Microsoft account. Windows 8 and 8.1 were the first
| versions of Windows for which the "How can I avoid
| setting up a Microsoft account when installing Windows?"
| tutorials started.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > Windows 8 was better than 10.
|
| No, Win8 was all about the Metro/RT nonsense, the attempt
| to convert Windows into a touch-centric locked-down App
| Store platform.
|
| While a fair bit of that lived on in 10, it was far less
| obnoxious. Although they still managed to break things
| like Sticky Notes in the process of converting them to
| 'store apps'
| bluescrn wrote:
| The general downward trend is across the whole of tech, if
| not the whole of society, rather than just Microsoft
| products though.
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| No they haven't oscillated.
|
| Generally Windows NT line to Windows 2000-7 was pretty
| decent. Even Vista once Service Pack 1 came out was pretty
| decent. Vista Service Pack 2 is basically Windows 7. Win 8
| and everything after has been garbage.
| duped wrote:
| > Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams?
|
| People seem to forget Teams is the unloved child of a forced
| marriage between acquisitions, it was never going to turn out
| successful.
| dartharva wrote:
| What % of Microsoft's revenue comes from government contracts?
| I'd be very surprised if it's more than 2-3%
| i_cannot_hack wrote:
| Pulling the emergency break promising to improve a situation will
| in general not build any trust unless the mea culpa also
| includes:
|
| 1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of
| control to begin with
|
| 2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again
|
| Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3
| years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| I don't really see that happening here.
|
| Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be
| gaining any by this move.
|
| That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their
| public image is as bad as it can get.
| raddan wrote:
| > they won't be gaining any by this move.
|
| Then why even do it?
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Microslop is saying "I'm sorry that you're offended" and will
| continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to
| fix their image so that they can raise more money.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office
| products divisions need fired.
|
| They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard
| to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
|
| Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A
| prompt!!!!
|
| They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized
| company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of
| every single portal in that product.
|
| It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the
| business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm
| quite frankly embarrassed for them.
| M95D wrote:
| Yeah, but...
|
| Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the
| only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what
| you think about their products.
|
| Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations
| are.
| anthonylevine wrote:
| > Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about
| their products.
|
| I don't understand this point. Are you suggesting that less
| people being happy with their product and thus less people
| buying it is not related to the valuation of the company and
| their stock?
|
| > Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and
| corporations are.
|
| Huh?
|
| I get you're trying to make a point about the bottom line,
| but that doesn't mean the bottom line is impervious to bad
| product decisions or that the people who are paying for their
| products are not in fact their customers.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Parent is pointing at the fact that the relationship
| between our perception of MS products and their financial
| success is highly inelastic. The bottom line isn't
| impervious to bad product decisions, but there can be a
| large number of user hostile decisions that PMs push
| through that still increase revenue on the whole even at
| the cost of user satisfaction, before they move past the
| optimal point in the payoff curve.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| Windows 11 should run on ANY PC.
|
| I am customer and I absolutely hate it that they have restricted
| the machine that Windows can run on.
|
| If they don't fix this sort of anti customer garbage then all
| their words are pure horseshit.
| SloppyDrive wrote:
| This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp
| microsoft is with the requirements...
|
| Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume
| things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in
| particular), or fuck off entirely.
| alex_duf wrote:
| have you thought about switching to another OS?
| mkl wrote:
| Unfortunately Linux doesn't run well on my Microsoft Surface
| Pro 4 (which is perfectly functional other than the lack of
| Windows security updates). I'm very unlikely to buy or
| recommend a Microsoft computer again, even though I liked the
| hardware.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Looks like your device is supported & has been for a while
| ?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/nwr4kd/best_
| d...
| mkl wrote:
| I check out the status every so often. Not much is
| upstreamed yet, so it requires a patched kernel and some
| mucking about, likely on an ongoing basis. I'll probably
| try it at some point but not until I have moved my uses
| for that machine onto something else.
| hedora wrote:
| For what it's worth, I have a surface laying around
| somewhere. It doesn't run Windows any more. I have plenty
| of older Linux machines that are still supported.
|
| Moving forward, I'm sticking with hardware where
| everything works without setting the Linux 'taint' bit
| (i.e., zero proprietary code in the kernel). Most laptops
| made in the last few years with an AMD CPU + GPU meet
| that requirement.
|
| I'd require that even if I was running windows, given how
| badly I've been burned on short hardware support
| lifespans in the past. For instance, I also have an Intel
| OEM reference motherboard that never had Linux video
| drivers. It no longer boots windows.
| Havoc wrote:
| Their office subscriptions are also going up in price at. Crazy
| rates. Giving Stiff competition to food price inflation
|
| All because it has some AI stuff on it that I don't want.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Funny thing: I wanted to try out Copilot to help with creating
| a starting point for a diagram in Visio.
|
| Copilot isn't in Visio (at least in the subscription my work
| pays for).
|
| I used Copilot's chat interface instead, and it is unable to
| generate a diagram in the Visio .vsdx format; it tried, failed,
| tried to fix it, failed.
|
| Sigh.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Copilot's glaring limitations when interacting with Office
| are insane considering that's its main value prop
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| I opened a blank document and pasted a fairly large markdown
| text. Converting it to word (or html) formatting is easy,
| there are online tools and/or any other LLM can do it. This
| one time I opened the Copilot willingly and was excited about
| getting it done with a few keystrokes: "convert to word
| formatting".
|
| It generates a formatted response but cant edit the document.
| How stupid you have to be to integrate copilot and not allow
| it to update text in a text editor??!
| throwa356262 wrote:
| Yes the price hike is almost 2x
|
| If anyone knows how to revert to non-AI version of the
| subscription let me know
| Scoring6931 wrote:
| It's called 365 Classic and it's hidden in the Subscriptions
| section of your Microsoft account.
| xdkyx wrote:
| Did they really fix the taskbar? I still cannot change it to
| either side of the screen, am i missing something?
| mkl wrote:
| I don't think the fix is released yet, except for possibly
| Insider builds.
| dahcryn wrote:
| no, the big news is that finally they have the intention to do
| it
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| Replaced all our windows machines with mac silicon and linux 6
| months ago. No one is going back no matter what they do now.
| steveharing1 wrote:
| Finally they realizing the power of linux is cannot be taken for
| granted
| c0l0 wrote:
| Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to
| excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as
| vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's
| even more true today.
| sgbeal wrote:
| The reason, i opine, that so few people switch from Windows to
| any Unix flavor is that Windows users are waiting for the two
| productivity suites which make Windows at least marginally
| usable (cygwin and msys) to be ported to any of the Unix
| flavors.
|
| ;)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It's just office.
|
| Make office work and people will happily leave in droves.
| tim333 wrote:
| Apparently you can
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDbERjm0yA
|
| That one's using PlayOnLinux.
|
| Not tried it myself but that's been one of the blocks to me
| using linux as a day to day thing. Although I'm on mac and
| don't find it too bad.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| That is Office 2013, or a 13 year old software.
|
| Play on Lennox is just non-free wine. And no offense to
| the wine people, but it seems like perhaps they have hit
| a wall on what would be Windows 10 translation.
| greatgib wrote:
| I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well.
| It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
|
| But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement
| because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing
| nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win
| the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck
| them up again once they feel confident enough.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Love the quiz at the end
|
| It's remarkable that computer users are paying $139 to give data
| to Microsoft through an ad-supported "operating system"
|
| Back in the day (generally) only OEMs paid
|
| What is the $139 for
| zabzonk wrote:
| > injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's
| "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and
| pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody
| asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also
| placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking
| Game Pass subscriptions
|
| sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock
| screen does display icons for things like local events and
| weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at
| worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i
| have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
|
| am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink
| going on here?
|
| as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365
| subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't
| irritate me at all, because i never see it.
|
| mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is
| about as good as UIs get.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| >sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11
|
| It's a setting called "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on
| your lock screen", and it's checked by default.
| albert_e wrote:
| Not only is it enabled hy default ... it magically gets
| enabled by default after some days, desktop spotlight feature
| that pushes some lock screen wallpapers and trivia overriding
| my personal wallpaper, Edge trying to do the same thing to
| homepage, edge trying to steal browser favourites and
| extensions from other installed browsers once every few
| weeks, edge stealing default app linkage for PDF viewing,
| copilot in various flavours appearing on taskbar, start menu,
| edge, ...it's mayhem out there.
|
| Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that
| keeps reminding you who has the power.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I do get lockscreen wallpapers, but in general I find them
| quite pretty and interesting. I've never tried changing to
| a fixed lockscreen wallpaper, though I I do have a fixed,
| custom desktop one. I can't think that people are obsessing
| about the lockscreen???
|
| I don't see any of the other things you do. I use Edge as
| my default browser, with uBlock installed and it all seems
| to work. There is a Copilot icon, but I think I could
| remove it if it irritated me, which it doesn't. My Asus
| Zenbook has a Copilot key which irritates me much less than
| other aspects of the keyboard layout which have nothing to
| do with Microsoft.
|
| All in all, I like Windows 11. I don't see how it has made
| things worse than any of the other NT versions.
| krige wrote:
| Ah, it's available only if you pick a specific wallpaper
| image, that's why not everyone sees it.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > pick a specific wallpaper image
|
| you interest me strangely - which one?
| krige wrote:
| Oh I didn't mean a specific file. Lock screen wallpaper
| has three options, custom image, custom slideshow, and
| Spotlight. The former two have the "Get tips (...)"
| checkable, the latter doesn't.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I have the same experience. I'm on a Windows Surfuace 7 Arm
| laptop right now. There's no Copilot icon next to the start
| menu. I press the start icon and I don't see a single ad
| anywhere. There are no ads on my screen. I use Edge and I don't
| see anything odd while I shop. Granted, I run "Pro." Maybe the
| home edition has more of this?
|
| I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get
| the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent
| yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account
| and useful things sync.
|
| I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the
| icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs
| you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but
| somehow that's not evil?
| senfiaj wrote:
| > On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account
| too, but somehow that's not evil?
|
| Really? Isn't this only for App Store and other Apple
| services? You can still do your everyday basic things,
| including downloading and installing software from internet.
| crancher wrote:
| Macs don't need Apple accounts at all. I just set up three
| Macs with no Apple accounts, not needed for intended use.
| They all work fine. Apple accounts are only needed if access
| to Apple services is desired.
| timpera wrote:
| Same for me - I find Windows 11 pretty good and I've never seen
| an ad in the Start menu. It might be specific to some editions
| or regions?
| WarmWash wrote:
| For some people the threshold for "ad" is an uninterruptible
| segment that they are forced to watch, or a typical banner ad
| placed on screen. For others it's the visual presence of any
| set of pixels that can be connected to a business entity or
| revenue stream.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Oh I've definitely seen all those things... in the short
| minutes after a fresh install, before I wipe them out.
| tjungblut wrote:
| Sorry Pavan, I'm happier with Fedora Atomic and Bazzite now.
| pharrington wrote:
| Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business
| relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a
| Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better
| product. People who know they need Windows will always have the
| option to install it themselves.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| I actually belive that is what triggered this.
|
| There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting
| Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued
| to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be
| forced to find an alternative.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Now there's an idea I can get behind.
| hedora wrote:
| I've installed Win 11 in VMs and linux on bare metal quite a
| few times this years.
|
| If you count "time to unobstructed desktop + working hardware
| drivers", Debian beats windows by a large margin. (10 minutes
| vs. 1-2 hours). Also, with windows, you need to type weird crap
| like this into a terminal: &
| ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://debloat.raphi.re/")))
|
| Debian mostly lets you avoid such stuff.
| snozolli wrote:
| Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update
| fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days
| trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely
| unhelpful logs, but gave up.
|
| I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so
| much faster.
| seebeen wrote:
| When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and
| that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for
| 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I believe they are abusing their customers but I think it's in
| poor taste to compare this to domestic violence.
| abkolan wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. Some journos don't mind crossing the
| line for a click bait headline.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Yeah, fully agree. The idea domestic abusers care about flowers
| is ludicrous. They're violent and mostly remorseless about it.
| Anyone who dealt with it personally would chuck the flowers in
| the bin.
| sgt wrote:
| You'd be surprised how much that happens. They'll sweet talk
| their way back and that's how these relationships often
| survive.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Flowers are not because they care, it's damage control only.
| I actually liked original derisive title in this article,
| Microslop needs to be shamed into doing the right thing.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| The underlying point about power imbalance and gradual
| normalization of bad behavior is fair, but that analogy carries
| a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software
| decisions
| autoexec wrote:
| > but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that
| doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
|
| It's imperfect. We have way more choices in domestic partners
| than we do with operating systems but I think there are a lot
| of similarities though too. User-hostile software like
| Windows is intentionally designed to develop dependence and
| learned helplessness in users. Windows will gaslight you.
| Microsoft will victim blame. Many shared tactics. It's a fair
| comparison to make.
| rob74 wrote:
| One more similarity is how hard it seems to be to break up
| with an abusive partner: when I saw the "Windows anounces
| Recall - Linux increases its Steam market share by 25%"
| meme, I checked under https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-
| tracker/, and yes, in May 2024 it went up - from 1.9% to
| 2.32%. But in February 2025, it was back down to 1.45%. It
| has rebounded since, to 3.38% in January this year, but
| dropped to 2.23% in February. Not sure where these big
| fluctuations come from - maybe Linux gamers don't really
| play that often, so they only log on to Steam
| sporadically?!
| saidnooneever wrote:
| saying victims of domestic violence should chose better is
| also victim blaming ma dude.
| autoexec wrote:
| > saying victims of domestic violence should chose better
| is also victim blaming
|
| You're the only one saying that, not me.
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| > but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that
| doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
|
| Twitter literally runs CSAM-as-a-service.
|
| While Microsoft is not _quite_ that evil, building the North
| Korean computer surveillance system with "Recall" comes
| pretty close. Other examples include things like Facebook's
| regular doxxing of it's users with their real name policy.
|
| It's a crass comparison, but not unreasonable on both sides.
| Abuse goes beyond just physical violence, and the practices
| of these tech companies really do match those other kinds of
| abuse. The other half is that software has eaten the world,
| and these changes really do affect people's lives.
| cmicali wrote:
| I agree and appreciate you calling this out.
|
| It's easy to not understand the impact or meaning of referring
| to violence in a flip way when one has never had to have
| experienced it.
| mapotofu wrote:
| I also appreciate the callout but don't believe it's in bad
| taste. There are enough analogs, and it makes you question
| the type of people who run the companies and make the
| decisions. In MSFTs case, Bill Gates was an associate with a
| known pedophile and likely an abuser himself.
|
| I completely understand it being triggering but shying away
| from it because of that protects perpetrators. A lot of
| executive circles are filled with abusive freaks and their
| decision making reflects that.
| user_7832 wrote:
| I'm willing to bet _very_ good money that windows forcing
| an update somewhere has led to things that has killed
| someone.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Damn, really, _2_ downvotes? Do you guys think what I
| said is wrong (or irrelevant or something)?
|
| I'll be happy to correct myself if I said anything wrong,
| but downvotes without comments really don't tell me much.
| bee_rider wrote:
| A article mapping out those connections would be a good
| thing to do. That's not what this article is, though. This
| is about Microsoft having poor quality software and a
| business model that is adversarial to their customers.
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| The guy was a Darknet Vendor and has been to Jail/Prison in
| the US.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| So when he looks at Windows 11 and calls it something bad,
| you should probably pay attention.
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| He is someone that cares about operation and information
| security. Modern Consumer operating systems basically
| throw all of that out of the window. On top of that he
| hate Microsoft.
| zahlman wrote:
| >the impact or meaning of referring to violence in a
| flip[pant] way
|
| I don't think you actually mean "violence" in general, unless
| you think that word means something radically and
| fundamentally different from what I think it means (and my
| understanding is based on what dictionaries say; but I will
| happily acknowledge that I have encountered very, very many
| people whose apparent understanding of the term is utterly
| incomprehensible to me). I say this because I never, ever see
| people object to the use of idioms such as
| https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/you+killed+it . The
| objection is only ever raised with respect to very specific
| kinds of violence.
|
| Or will you also object when I kill a process, or when POSIX-
| standard systems (I'm _pretty_ sure this is part of the
| standard but I 'm not that kind of nerd) continue to use
| `kill` as the command name? How about when a new startup
| releases a "killer app"?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I felt the exact same way. Put a bad taste in my mouth and I
| just stopped reading.
| hedora wrote:
| I disagree. Microsoft's actions have real world consequences,
| increasingly including violence. They're building a
| surveillance machine that is already being used like
| organizations such as ICE, and that's not even the worst of it.
| Look at how they are trying to tip the balance of power from
| employees to employers with telemetry in Windows 11, Office
| 365, LinkedIn and GitHub.
|
| Like domestic abusers, things only expand and escalate from
| here.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Not too surprising in a society where we use the language of
| homicide and violence for trivial things like describing a good
| comedian.
| boca_honey wrote:
| For a moment there, I also thought it was in bad taste to
| compare shitty software to domestic violence. Then you came
| in with this and reminded me that maybe I was being too
| fragile and should get over my self-righteousness.
|
| Do you also have a problem with "killing" a process on a
| computer? A kill-fee on a contract? How about killing time?
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| The title is supposed to be provocative and hyperbolic. Much of
| what is provocative and hyperbolic could be considered to be in
| poor taste, that is the entire point.
|
| The guy is an ex-Darknet Vendor and regularly interacts still
| with people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell
| online drugs and he is quite pleasant compared to these people.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > The guy is an ex-Darknet Vendor and regularly interacts
| still with people that build ransomware, hack the US
| government, sell online drugs and he is quite pleasant
| compared to these people.
|
| It's _almost_ as if we don't use "people that build
| ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs" as a
| baseline for "pleasant".
| JollySharp0 wrote:
| The point I was making that the norms for many of us isn't
| this behaviour of everyone is walking on eggshells. I find
| it infuriating that people will get bent out shape if they
| hear the truth. I prefer it when people talk plainly and
| speak how they feel. He is unfront and honest, which I
| appreciate much more than a snake in the grass (which is
| how many people behave in spaces where language and
| behaviour is tightly controlled).
|
| I find it honestly ridiculous that people are complaining
| about provocative & hyperbolic title, to the point where I
| believe they are concern trolling.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| I strongly disagree, and not because of the "Microsoft is
| associated with bad things and that's a form of violence"
| points other people mentioned.
|
| The end result of treating domestic and sexual abuse like
| Serious Important Subjects that people should only talk about
| in a Serious Respectful Tone isn't that people become more
| mindful of abuse dynamics, it's that they avoid bringing up the
| subject at all.
|
| In practice, yes, abusive practices of corporations echo
| abusive practices of violent partners, and the parallel is
| worth highlighting. Bringing up the fact that both of them will
| use grand gestures to stop you from questioning their pattern
| of behavior isn't disrespectful, it's useful information.
|
| If anything, abuse victims should hear that message more often.
| zahlman wrote:
| Strongly agree with you (and disagree with GP).
|
| I'll also note that the same demand for Serious Respectful
| Tone never seems to be invoked for metaphors that refer to
| other kinds of serious crime (including violent crime, such
| as murder). You can say "great job, you killed it out there",
| or "oof, my sportsball team got destroyed", etc. etc., and
| nobody seriously proposes that this somehow devalues life
| (human or otherwise).
| g947o wrote:
| I had enough of Windows 11's ads that I bought a Mac mini for
| personal use and requested a Macbook to replace my Windows
| laptop.
|
| I will have to use Teams and Outlook at work because I don't have
| a choice. But that's it Microsoft.
| pedrohlc wrote:
| Thanks for the curated and well described list!
| codeulike wrote:
| I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because
| of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it
| seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere
| I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web
| results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have
| come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in
| Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things
| are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
|
| I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox
| and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of
| content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows
| taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty
| Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes
| away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is
| the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as
| everything else.
| jpfromlondon wrote:
| 'Microsoft was entering a mode called "swarming",'
|
| Swarming, as in locusts, or else flies on shit.
| lizknope wrote:
| I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a
| Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.
|
| I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it
| isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like
| they have Stockholm Syndrome.
|
| My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy
| a Mac.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Mac's are way more expensive than most people need. If anyone
| asked me today, I'd say buy a cheap laptop and I'll install
| Linux on it for you. Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs
| come up. Problem solved, hundreds of dollars saved over the
| Mac.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Other brands' USD 599 laptops are atrocious. Neo is
| guaranteed to be a reliable, pleasure, and long-term
| investment.
|
| >Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up.
|
| This is a dealbreaker compared to never (or even rarely)
| having any "bugs".
| drooopy wrote:
| Most PC laptops at Neo's price point (or cheaper) are
| essentially manufactured e-waste.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. It's got
| the price of entry down to where it's now the obvious
| recommendation for less-technical friends/family wanting an
| affordable-but-nice laptop for light home/office/student use.
|
| I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac
| running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
| torginus wrote:
| I don't think Ipads are selling well. I have an old style
| basic one (from 2019 I think?), and the only thing I use it
| for is to read articles and occasionally look at emails, for
| which it's perfectly adequate.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Tablets can do very little that you can't do on a phone.
|
| Phones got larger and more capable, tablets now seem
| somewhat redundant. But a laptop with a keyboard and 'real
| OS' can still do many things that aren't practical on a
| tablet or phone.
| lizknope wrote:
| > The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. I
|
| It already is.
|
| > MacBook Neo Just Broke an Apple Sales Record, Shipping
| Delays Continue
|
| > The laptop is a record-breaking release for sales to first-
| time Mac owners, according to Tim Cook.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/macbook-neo-just-broke-an-
| apple-s...
| zbentley wrote:
| > I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real
| Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
|
| Maybe, but I somewhat doubt it, for a few reasons:
|
| - Kids like iPads for gaming/video watching, and the overhead
| of computer interfaces for them might discourage laptopping
| (understandable for littler kids; regrettable loss of tech
| familiarity for older ones, but true regardless).
|
| - Parents/rough users like iPads 'cuz there aren't moving
| parts or gaps to get hammered and damaged, though the screen
| is a risk.
|
| - Cellular iPads/huge phone-alikes are pretty popular, and
| the vast majority of users are unfamiliar with the idea of
| hooking a computer-shaped device up to cellular internet.
|
| - iPads are easier to MDM-manage/lock down. You can do that
| on MacOS too, of course, but a lot of folks find it easier to
| regulate kid/employee/etc. use of an iPad because the
| management system is familiar and simpler.
|
| - iPads feel like a big phone. That's a pretty intuitive
| switch for a lot of folks who either don't have keyboarded
| computers at all, or associate them with non-fun
| (work/school) computing. Silly distinction to draw, to be
| sure, but very significant in the minds of many users. The
| single-brick/touch aspect of iPads is desirable enough that a
| fold-out laptop isn't going to overlap with a lot of those
| users.
| devilbunny wrote:
| > for normal people is to buy a Mac
|
| Thus, the MacBook Neo. For the average user who only
| occasionally needs a general-purpose computer, it's powerful
| enough. As the geek in my friends-and-family circle, it's what
| I will be recommending to most of them if they ask.
|
| Most of them only use phones or tablets anyway.
| hedora wrote:
| If they have a budget of ~ $1000, then I'd recommend an AMD
| Linux laptop. For folks here, I'd recommend similar, but pave
| it + put Devuan or similar on it.
|
| For low end laptops, if you can tolerate Apple's terrible
| window manager, rapidly declining stability, and creeping ads
| (they leaked expansion plans that are coming soon), then the
| Neo probably wins.
|
| Typed on a macbook pro.
| fullstop wrote:
| > but pave it + put Devuan or similar on it.
|
| The distribution which left the root account without a
| password if you selected "Use sudo as default and disable
| root account"?
| kakacik wrote:
| Is there a full equivalent of Total Commander there? I don't
| mean just something with 2 panes, I mean full equivalent. Those
| I have seen were clunky, slow and lacked features thus
| completely breaking the flow. When I see folks doing something
| more complex in File explorer or similar stuff I rather walk
| away, make a tea/coffee, have a chat or two, come back to watch
| them hopefully progress a bit, when it would take few quick
| operations in TC. Its like doing java development in Notepad vs
| Idea, both work but man I always thought engineers craved
| efficiency...
|
| That program is _so_ powerful when used in skilled hands, it
| saves me tons of time every day, easily 30-60 mins compared to
| other colleagues doing similar tasks. Editing files directly in
| archives (or archives in archives), quick file comparison,
| tabbed panes, dir sync, ftp client, etc.... and tons of
| customizations of behavior and visuals, plugins ecosystem, and
| its freakin ' fast and stable.
|
| Another one could be Notepad++, ie mass edit of lines as cells
| in spreadsheet is a powerful feature.
| whatsupdog wrote:
| Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over
| 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming
| Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app
| stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their
| store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my
| website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees
| through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay
| anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to
| do.
| willis936 wrote:
| I like Ubuntu. My only regret is having an nvidia GPU and not
| getting an AMD one before computing components became
| unaffordable. Nvidia on wayland is 100% busted and juggling DEs
| for gaming vs productivity work is inelegant.
| journal wrote:
| Microsoft is on track to be judged for digital genocide.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| The pattern is pretty familiar at this point:
|
| 1. Ship something user-hostile 2. Wait for backlash 3. Roll it
| back partially 4. Get credit for "listening"
| kalavan wrote:
| Also called the door-in-the-face method.
| Silhouette wrote:
| In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and
| choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust
| of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a
| viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever
| Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For
| those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them
| and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards
| using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on
| desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably
| finding they do have viable alternatives.
|
| Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never
| understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and
| regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality
| while using an operating system that is under the control of
| another company with a proven track record of forcing updates
| that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing
| saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of
| Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're
| working with any kind of sensitive data.
|
| For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We
| aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot
| of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions
| where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT
| departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else.
| So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are
| likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other
| platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there
| is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally
| new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision
| or based on the capabilities of the products.
| hedora wrote:
| ^--- this
|
| It is completely impossible to comply with European privacy law
| if you are using up-to-date Windows for your business.
|
| The US CLOUD Act compels companies to provide access to data on
| machines they have the technical ability to access.
|
| Starting in Windows 8, Microsoft granted itself the ability to
| pull locally-stored documents out of (non-onedrive) folders on
| all machines for "debugging" purposes.
|
| Since then, EU courts overturned the Privacy Shield deal with
| the US because our laws are in direct contradiction with their
| privacy protections, so no, there isn't some backstop that lets
| Microsoft be the good actor if they get a bogus warrant.
|
| If the EU could ban Windows, I'm sure they would have done so
| already.
|
| Source on "they can read your files":
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...
|
| Note that this policy began in the Windows 8 days, and didn't
| originally have the Microsoft 365 branding attached to it. Now
| that Windows 11 mandates login, they changed the wording.
| projektfu wrote:
| Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows
| installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the
| drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network
| access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the
| pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the
| things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to
| zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore
| profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more
| situations, but this has been really good for my use case.
|
| X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as
| well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I think nowadays the only safe and sane way is running Windows
| isolated as a VM (e.g. QEMU on proxmox). I did this with my
| gaming server. The VM sits on ZFS which I can snapshot before
| any Microsoft stuff happens, to revert any action. I can cut
| off the network card virtually and shutdown the guest whenever
| I get tired of it. I could even disguise the CPU/QEMU config,
| so that the anti-cheat from Star Citizen didn't recognize it
| was running in a virtualized environment. Pair this with
| Moonlight+Sunshine and you can game without issues on any
| remote client. Why I prefer Windows for gaming? It is just
| (still) the default and provides the least barrier and setup
| effort for most games.
| nicbou wrote:
| I used to dual boot Windows to play a single game too, and
| every few months something drastic would change with no input
| on my part.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| Until they talk about being able to remove Edge, they aren't
| serious.
| tantalor wrote:
| Thus begins the next phase of their neverending cycle. They do
| this same shit every 10 years or so. This has to be what, the
| third or fourth time?
| selectively wrote:
| Domestic violence analogies for computing....really gross. I
| wouldn't hire or work with 'Sam Bent'.
| xfz wrote:
| Completely agree, we can be edgy without being insensitive.
| selectively wrote:
| Or, even better: let's not be edgy, because we are not tweens
| circa 2002.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| There's nothing "gross" about it. You are making a mountain out
| of a molehill, and honestly the kind of behavior you're
| displaying here would be absolutely miserable to deal with at
| any job. Nobody likes someone who complains about trivial non-
| issues like this.
| bbstats wrote:
| I mean...this is a huge company. For them to do something even
| mildly consumer-focused I'll take as a win.
| Jackevansevo wrote:
| Don't worry, they'll just destroy any goodwill they tried to claw
| back with these 'fixes' in following releases.
|
| They absolutely can't help themselves but make their product more
| and more user hostile.
| twilo wrote:
| Am I the only one who's been using 11 on multiple machines for
| years without any issues?
| mkup wrote:
| Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit)
| can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your
| Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows
| Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your
| location and many more -- making Windows 10/11 completely quiet
| online -- something competitor's tools (e.g. various GitHub
| scripts) can't achieve. https://www.prime-expert.com/
| wackget wrote:
| I admire your effort to increase user privacy but it's very
| difficult to argue that allowing a piece of proprietary closed-
| source software to make fundamental changes to your operating
| system is a good idea.
|
| For starters, it doesn't explain what exactly it does. This is
| all I could see on the info page:
|
| > Privacy Enablement Center: Politely ask already installed
| Windows 10/11 to phone home less, or add Privacy Enhancing DNS
| Proxy to already installed Windows, in order to block
| Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements,
| tracking of your location and other types of potentially
| unwanted Windows network activity -- making Windows 10/11
| completely quiet online -- something competitor's tools can't
| achieve.
|
| That sounds an awful lot like using the hosts file or a
| firewall such as Portmaster[1] to block known tracking domains,
| no?
|
| [1] https://safing.io/
| mkup wrote:
| Pure hosts file solution won't cut it for several reasons:
|
| 1) certain domains (the most offensive privacy infringers)
| are whitelisted by Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL to always bypass
| hosts file lookup (DNSAPI.DLL is a place where hosts file
| parser lives on Windows, so this parser just ignores hosts
| file records which don't align well with data vaccuming
| purpose of modern Windows versions)
|
| 2) hosts file can't blacklist domain hierarchies (domain +
| all subdomains), it can blacklist only apex domains
|
| 3) some domains to block are not quite domains, rather domain
| names regexps (set of domain names to block is not finite)
|
| So, I would say it's rather list of regexps to block than
| list of domains to block (in our product it's compiled to
| highly efficient finite state machine in C, plus a user-
| friendly list of categories to choose blocking preferences
| from); but in principle you are right: all of it currently
| boils down to DNS packet interception.
| oldandboring wrote:
| Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally
| predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years.
| Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them,
| but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm
| probably leaving some stuff out.
|
| Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they
| scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.
|
| Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of
| all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and
| many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was
| monumentally bad.
|
| Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.
|
| Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad
| had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop
| some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced
| modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity
| Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is
| still like this.
|
| Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the
| good old Start Menu.
|
| Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like
| Windows. I get the annoyances though.
| neves wrote:
| For me the worst is Microsoft Start news. I've already turned it
| off multiple times and it always come back.
|
| To add insult to injury, it always displays terrible gossip,
| sports or far right news.
|
| If any developer that works in MS news service is reading this
| message, please know that I hate you.
| ndespres wrote:
| It's so mind-boggling that they have control over the default
| browser home page and the news feed on everyone's taskbar and
| they choose to show gossip and one weird trick that doctors
| hate. Don't they feel embarrassed that they pollute their brand
| like this? Is the revenue from the clicks really worth it, or
| do they just not care?
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| While crazy to us, I bet we're in the minority. Average
| computer user might actually like it or at worse (to MSFT)
| not even notice it. Their web experience is bombarded with "1
| weird trick" ads everywhere.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I don't think it's about revenue from clicks; they probably
| believe that it is what customers want, because those
| customers click on it. That surely means that they want it.
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| Use this https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 or something
| similar, unfortunately without this level of tweaking it will
| be a shit show, not deeply modified windows feels like browsing
| the internet without an ad blocker.
| garganzol wrote:
| No worries, this is just how manipulative relationships work:
| they always aim for unidirectional communication.
|
| You're obliged to consume the most important news from the most
| important entity on the planet Earth
| (Microsoft/Facebook/X/...), eat piles of informational crap
| that get dumped onto you, waste you emotional energy on
| processing the whole thing, participate in drama and show your
| admiration. Why? Because you're very convenient when in this
| state, you're mendable and coercible for whatever action the
| entity wants you to do without saying it directly.
|
| But when it's time to listen to you and your concerns -
| surprise-surprise, nobody's home. It's one way only, see you
| next time, maybe.
|
| P.S. Forcefully installing an attention-pollutve app like News
| in the Start Menu is nothing less than a way to control you.
| And for an insatiable ego, the sense of control is everything.
| This is why it keeps coming back, again and again, as if it's a
| lucky reoccurring coincidence. A Windows Update repairs the
| system? Yes, plus it repairs the system of control. Security
| patches are very convenient vehicle for that - once you eat it,
| you'll be served special dishes you never asked for.
| tencentshill wrote:
| It's slop in the traditional pre-AI sense, though the term
| was still vaguely related to 4chan then.
| doomroot13 wrote:
| I turned it off exactly once through the settings and it's
| never appeared again over years of updates. How did you "turn
| it off"?
| garganzol wrote:
| I presume that it's a difference between Windows OS editions.
| I turned it off too, but it wasn't as easy as one click, I
| had to use Group Policies to decrapify the adjacent aspects
| of the system. Group policies are not available in Windows
| Home edition, for example.
| doomroot13 wrote:
| I just went into the settings for the widgets, turned off
| the "Start" or "News" experience or whatever it is and it's
| never come back. Just using the toggle it offers in
| settings. While I was at it I went into the taskbar
| settings and just turned off the widgets altogether, never
| came back. I wonder if sometimes we just assume the worst
| and resort first to "hack" ways to disable some of these
| things and when a new update comes along from your company
| or whoever, it gets re-enabled. Instead of just using the
| built-in functionality for turning things off.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| do you really expect us to believe ms is pushing 'far right
| news'?
|
| perhaps youre just so far left that anything slightly in the
| center feels 'far right'?
|
| when bing / edge recommends me stories it's never ever 'far
| right'. it's almost always something pro-left or that makes the
| (R) look negative.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| You really have no clue how this works. Microsoft is just the
| intermediary. They take money from whoever pays to shove you
| ads, sometimes malicious ads that could infect your machine
| (if you're not heavily protecting yourself from that). And
| it's not only Microsoft that's the culprit, they all do it.
| Google does it, Meta does it, Microsoft does it.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| No no you don't understand. "Here's a picture of some gross
| toenails" is the sincere best most valuable advertisement that
| the fourth most valuable company in the united states is
| capable of delivering. If anything better existed, they would
| be using it.
| codeulike wrote:
| I've never seen any adverts in Windows. Just saying.
|
| How many of the people pearl-clutching in this thread actually
| use Windows?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I think it's more likely that what you consider ads and what we
| consider ads don't quite line up.
| codeulike wrote:
| No, I just havent seen anything in Windows that could be
| described as an advert. Where are all these adverts supposed
| to be showing up exactly?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| OneDrive pop-ups in the system tray, OneDrive buttons in
| explorer are two of the most egregious because they are
| presented as though they are not ads.
| codeulike wrote:
| I turn off OneDrive so I dont think I have seen those.
| But in what way are those ads? OneDrive is part of
| Windows, like iCloud is part of the Apple ecosystem
| luckys wrote:
| Maybe it would be a good idea for Microsoft to split Windows into
| a version for business that supports all the cruft that has
| accumulated and is needed, and another version where they start
| from scratch. Something that is lightweight and respects the
| user. A man can dream.
| zbentley wrote:
| I like your dream. I think financial incentives make it
| unlikely, though. The writing's been on the wall for user-
| friendly general computing OSes for awhile, I think. So
| Microsoft's incentive is to treat Windows like a loss leader
| (even if it's not) and use it as a funnel for
| services/subscription revenue from their other products.
|
| I hate that/wish it weren't so, but I think the last ~15y of M$
| decisionmaking makes a lot of sense in that context.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Another aspect to this is that I really doubt consumers would
| go to linux if there was any pay-wall or 'donate for more
| features' type aspect to it. Something that really isn't
| emphasized much is how lots of OSS/linux work is done by the
| various big corporations often for goals that are not aimed
| at the small scale users, and it's a happy byproduct that
| many aspects of their system may run better just by swapping
| OS, all free to them. Similarly Valve's efforts seem tightly
| focused on what matters to their products/services and being
| available to everyone is a byproduct.
|
| The windows cost gets hidden/de-emphasized when buying a PC,
| or other users just ignore it which is seems to be below MS's
| pain tolerance for lost revenue on those users. If there was
| a price of admittance to linux for any other company to
| devote resources to work on it where it couldn't be treated
| as a loss-leader for something else, it'd be an even tougher
| struggle to migrate users over. (and it's likely right now
| most people moving to linux are somewhat enthusiasts)
| bjacobel wrote:
| This already exists, but you have the markets backwards.
| Microsoft wants to force the cruft onto everyday users; it
| subsidizes the cost of the operating system license. Home users
| can be conned into paying for OneDrive or Copilot subscriptions
| much more easily than enterprises can. On the other side,
| Windows Server is their lightweight version, and it's made for
| the only customer that Microsoft respects: ones that paid in
| full upfront.
| lizknope wrote:
| I see people saying the opposite and saying MS should sell
| windows Enterprise or LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel)
| version to consumers. These have less of the bloatware and
| forced features that most people are complaining about.
|
| I have 10 Linux machines and 1 Mac at home. I never use windows
| for anything personal. At work we have windows laptops that I
| really only use for email /web and to connect to a remote Linux
| desktop where I do all my work. The windows enterprise version
| we have seems to have far less of the crap that people complain
| about.
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| Back in the day windows NT was serving this purpose and a lot
| of pro users would use it over windows 98. (At least in 3rd
| countries where all licenses are pirated).
|
| It actually used to work well, and I think there are still some
| windows editions like this they are more strictly separated and
| not that good for daily en user usage.
| drooopy wrote:
| Introducing Windows NNT (New New Technology).
| p_ing wrote:
| You don't want that dream.
|
| It's a whole new set of unknown bugs, security issues, lack of
| essential features, and app compat issues.
|
| And the internals of NT are quite good and still largely
| modern. There's not a lot worth replacing (my only thought
| would be to rip out the file system filter driver model though
| I don't know what would replace it).
| accrual wrote:
| There's "MinWin", I wish this could be used as the foundation
| for a consumer Windows OS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin
| zejn wrote:
| Don't you ever complain about that regulation which will require
| [x] on window corner to cancel-close.
| senfiaj wrote:
| If MS brings back normal local accounts, I'll switch back. This
| is insane, imagine I have bought a kitchen stove or a washing
| machine which requires to setup an account on some website.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I would just like to add forcing users to use bing online to
| search their local files to one of their cards. I think that's
| the main one they missed, but it's a good article.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Wait the local user account workarounds are totally gone now? I
| assume that means the only reason why it still works for me is
| because my iso is still on a previous version, good to
| remember...
| dirasieb wrote:
| the funniest thing in this whole "fixing windows" campaign is
| that you can download "fixed" (read: not enshittified) windows
| TODAY instead of waiting for microsoft to deliver on these
| promises
|
| reduces focus on AI, better performance, more stable updates, etc
| are all already here with windows 11 LTSC, why the hell would i
| move back to the GA release and deal with their crap?
| trynumber9 wrote:
| Unfortunately Apple is learning to be as annoying too. I don't
| want to upgrade to Tahoe which is inscrutable to me. Maybe remind
| me next year. But they pop up every week reminding me to
| "upgrade" even though most the problems are unfixed. They have
| pushed iCloud in the settings application as if it is an adboard.
|
| Hopefully they stop but I recognize these steps from Windows
| slippery slope.
| nicbou wrote:
| I haven't upgraded, and the notifications are fairly rare and
| unintrusive.
| pier25 wrote:
| I get it at least once a day. Sometimes as "Update to Tahoe"
| and sometimes as "Install pending updates tonight".
| pier25 wrote:
| This sucks. Sometimes they even disguise the update to Tahoe
| notification as "Pending updates to install later tonight".
| conartist6 wrote:
| Holy shit they crossed the line to "actually fucking evil"
| ape4 wrote:
| So will I be able to upgrade my old computer without a Trusted
| Platform Module 2?
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| I wish there was a better alternative for average users. It's
| easy to say, especially on HN, that using Linux or Windows LTSC
| is a way to avoid these issues (and I do.)
|
| Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?
| dryarzeg wrote:
| > Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?
|
| Buyers of PCs, laptops and other devices with Windows pre-
| installed. I guess that the cost of the Windows licence is
| included in the price of each device.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| That's true, I meant that as a reference to the article where
| they mentioned people paying $139 at retail for Windows.
| Which seems bonkers. Why would you do that.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Oh definitely not. You can buy it at key resellers for like
| $30.
| pier25 wrote:
| Microsoft should be scared about the Macbook Neo. They're going
| to lose a good chunk of the market because of it.
| smt88 wrote:
| No they're not. They're going to continue making enormous
| amounts of money from corporate IT lock-in, Azure, and AI.
|
| Windows' biggest competitor is iOS, and many people have
| stopped using Windows entirely and just rely on their phones.
| Microsoft has had record profits since that started happening.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Funny you mention iOS - my MegaCorp-issued iPhone has
| Microsoft entune for device management and Active Directory
| membership, Microsoft Authenticator for single sign-on, and
| really high quality versions of Microsoft office apps -
| Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel. Microsoft is all-in when comes
| to iOS.
|
| Over Peak I had to update a shared Excel file on SharePoint
| each night - because as we all know, Excel is the finest
| multi-user database in existence. I had no problems doing
| that from my iPhone.
| mock-possum wrote:
| But what PC user is going to be like "oh now that the NEO is
| out, I'm _finally_ willing to switch to a completely different
| operating system"
| pier25 wrote:
| What about new users that don't have a laptop yet?
|
| Or users that have a very crappy Windows laptop and would
| like to improve to something good hardware wise?
|
| Or what about Windows users that have other Apple devices and
| don't have strong hardware requirements?
|
| Let's not forget about RAM and SSD prices increasing PC
| prices through the roof.
| p_ing wrote:
| Apple isn't capable of manufacturing the amount of volume
| necessary to displace x86/Windows.
|
| Apple shipped 25.6 million Macs in 2025. Lenovo shipped 19.3
| million PCs in the _4th quarter alone_.
| johnnydoe9 wrote:
| Side note but is this page not optimised for mobile at all or is
| it just me?
|
| Either way, it's too little too late for me. I'll be trying to
| get into Linux again after Windows 8 times cause I've had it with
| Win11.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| This follows the standard windows pattern of every release
| alternating between bad/good.
|
| 98 good
|
| ME bad
|
| XP good
|
| Vista bad
|
| 7 good
|
| 8 bad
|
| 10 good
|
| 11 bad
|
| When 12 comes windows will be tolerable again.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Inshallah. This is the first 'bad' version I've caved on
| updating to, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the next
| 'good' one looks like.
| oybng wrote:
| Really highlights the plummet in quality and massive shift in
| user tolerance that w10 is considered "good" now
| admax88qqq wrote:
| The conspiracy version of this is each bad windows release is
| purposefully extra bad so the next "good" version is
| perceived as artifically well.
|
| It's a shame too, I feel like the underlying OS has some
| really good engineering in it, but the layers of cruft and
| anti-features on top make for a poor overall product.
| senfiaj wrote:
| Yes, I have also read / heard that Windows is actually very
| well engineered at the low level (despite the claims), and
| even surpasses Linux in some aspects. For example, Windows
| handles low RAM situations much better than Linux. During
| swapping Linux can become so unresponsive that even the OOM
| killer can fail and the only solution is hard reboot :(.
| But all I see people claim about Linux's superior memory
| management, which I think is believed largely because of
| the memory overcommitment. It can reduce the average RAM
| consumption because Linux, by default, maps the allocated
| pages to a read-only zero filled shared page, and allocates
| actual memory only when page faults occur during page
| writes. But this can make the worst case scenario much
| worse when no physical RAM or swap space is available.
| senfiaj wrote:
| Windows 10 was not as good as Windows 7 for its time (and even
| now). After 8/8.1 things started to go downhill. Windows 7 was
| a really good polished OS with beautiful and consistent UI.
| Windows 10 UI looks like a Frankenstein, and MS fired a lot of
| QA folks, now the testing is primarily done on the insiders and
| regular users. Also these privacy / telemetry / ad problems
| started from Windows 10.
| canticleforllm wrote:
| Would rather seed 9front torrents at this point than use Windows
| 11 after seeing how they shoved slopware into everything
| immediately. Just fuck off with that noise.
|
| And these apologies they've been rolling out - to whom? For what?
| Gabecube is going to eat their gaming market share, servers are
| already predominantly Linux. I'm sure they've got tons of
| enterprise customers. Fuck 'em, they can keep them.
| laylower wrote:
| Are we pushing sambent.com now?
| zymhan wrote:
| Yeah there is something suspicious about this site.
| hendersoon wrote:
| The forced telemetry and blocking local user accounts is
| particularly egregious. I've been running Shutup10 for over a
| decade now, disabling their telemetry after every update. It's
| outrageous that they force mt to do this.
|
| And local accounts, all the methods required following a guide,
| using a hidden hotkey like shift-F10 and typing in an obscure
| command. Nobody did this by accident, or was coerced into it.
| These were sophisticated users who did not want to login to a MS
| account. Microsoft not only didn't care about their users'
| preferences, they actively fought us. It's downright offensive.
|
| And like a battered spouse, we lived with it, we took the hits,
| because we wanted to play videogames. Well, now Windows is no
| longer required, thanks to Valve's work on WINE. And suddenly
| they're apologetic and conciliatory. No thanks, Microsoft.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| What an incredibly well-written article.
| shevy-java wrote:
| "By October 2025, Microsoft had systematically hunted down and
| killed every single workaround for creating a local account, the
| `oobe\bypassnro` command, the BypassNRO registry toggle, the `ms-
| cxh:localonly` trick, even the old fake email method."
|
| I don't know how it is for Windows 11, but for Win10, activating
| it is super-trivial, even without downloading some crack .exe.
| With that in mind, I never bought Microsoft's claim that it hates
| "pirates". In particular one work around that is even published
| on github - which is owned by Microsoft - so there is no way
| Microsoft does not know about it. Why does it not take that
| github site down?
|
| Clearly Microsoft does not have anywhere near as much as a
| problem with pepole using Windows as such. I switched to Linux
| more than 20 years ago so I don't care much about Microsoft
| anymore. I do have a secondary computer run Win10. I don't see
| why I would want to switch to Win11 ever though - it only has
| drawbacks. And Win10 was already really bad. Microsoft used to be
| objectively better; all that trend to AI or ads, lowered the
| quality. It seems that corporation past a certain size, become
| super-lazy.
| torcete wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what Operating Systems do nowadays that they
| didn't do 15 years ago that requires so many resources.
| cute_boi wrote:
| microslop isn't going to fix anything. Action matters more than
| talks.
| smukherjee19 wrote:
| Just a guess, with Macbook Neo releasing, M$ likely got scared of
| mass exodus to MacOS (the average PC user can now consider a
| Macbook and it likely wipes the floor with all Windows laptops
| out there) and decided to throw in a damage control piece.
| guestbest wrote:
| Hilariously, the MacBook neo has the same taskbar issues since
| it was what Microsoft copied. No one is getting replaced so
| I'll guess they'll just add some customizations to make it more
| Mac-like to win users back.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| I have to be honest. The idea that Microsoft is even admitting
| that their products are less than perfect is a step in the right
| direction.
|
| A step on a thousand-mile journey, perhaps, but it's a step.
| senfiaj wrote:
| One major thing is the mandatory MS account. And it's (or more
| precisely its laxing / removal) not listed in the improvement
| list. Optional online account is fine and I might even use it.
| But mandatory online account is a big NO. This is disrespectful
| and an invasion of my privacy and control over my computer. I
| bought a PC / laptop and I want to use it the way I want,
| without any permission from some fucking server.
| runjake wrote:
| One point that wasn't mentioned is that we've been through this
| cycle many times before with Microsoft, and we will again.
|
| It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows
| for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved,
| developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored
| the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows
| because they "got the best of both worlds".
|
| And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is,
| the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit
| phases.
|
| This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if
| Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll
| be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.
|
| And the whole process will repeat.
|
| PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you
| listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior
| leadership, they are _still_ spewing the same platitudes about
| agentic computing and software. So what 's really going to change
| long-term?
| elboru wrote:
| I remember being excited about Edge, I even started using it
| because it was fast and had a couple of built-in features I
| liked. It was a big improvement over the old IE, it felt like
| Microsoft was going the right direction, but then they kept
| using dark patterns to change my default search engine to Bing.
| buccal wrote:
| Now you have "rounded edges" in Edge that add a content area
| limiting margins to all sides. Also, they took an open source
| browser and do not provide the source for Edge. So much for
| love of open source.
| malfist wrote:
| Every third version, as the saying goes.
| dsign wrote:
| The solution for "Windows" is to use the current US derangement
| to convince the EU, China and even the Russians that, as a matter
| of national security, it's in their best interest to come to the
| negotiation table and create an international organization that
| "adopts" WineHQ[^1] and any other projects that focus on a Win32
| compatibility layer. It can be financed with increased sales
| taxes for any PC software distributor that doesn't natively
| support Linux.
|
| [^1]: https://www.winehq.org/
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| While I have _many_ grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly
| upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-
| height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget
| the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as
| their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items
| retained the same width.
|
| The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable
| way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by
| default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get
| past not being able to _at least_ make a double height taskbar.
| But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make
| ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a
| taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I
| have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will
| animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the
| title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this
| incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one
| visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10
| also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when
| opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would
| resize all existing items to the same dimension.
|
| This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given
| permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu
| replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of
| the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running
| Windows 10.
| mrmuagi wrote:
| I am particularly needy when it comes to the taskbar. I
| installed a few mods:
|
| * Windhawk - can tweak taskbar with extensions similiar to
| gnome tweaks imo (free)
|
| * DisplayFusion - qol for multi monitor setups (paid)
|
| I would give it a try if these two applications help you,
| honestly there's just so many settings to explore -- but afaik
| static width was something I needed and got done through
| Windhawk.
| buccal wrote:
| You should not have to hack Explorer to make it usable.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Yes, it seems like UI designers only solve the basic use case:
| beginner user with 3 apps open on a 14" laptop, each full
| screen, or tiled side-by-side.
|
| I imagine them presenting their design on a static PowerPoint
| slide, and upper-management says "beautiful", and they move on
| to CoPilot features, never looking back.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| The Teams... team... took several years to let us pop out
| chats to their own windows. The minimum size of the window
| was almost half my screen for a long time, which was annoying
| since it had a mobile app and my phone is way smaller.
|
| Someone would send you a document and it took over the entire
| Teams window. You had to exit it in order to chat with the
| person about the document. The concept of having more than
| one 'thing' on screen at the time was completely missing. My
| only explanation was that the developers had never used a
| computer before.
| robocat wrote:
| > the developers
|
| Try not to blame the people working at the coal face.
| Developers lack influence in most companies, they are told
| what to do by product managers and the rot often gets worse
| further up the hierarchy chain. Developers mostly know what
| is wrong and don't like the shit they are doing. Imagine
| the anger of working on Server 2012 (Windows Server 8) with
| the default Metro UI - that idiocy had to go right to the
| top.
|
| How independent are developers at Microsoft - are they in
| charge of product design decisions?
| major505 wrote:
| As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows
| platform today.
|
| - Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting
| better day by day;
|
| - Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high
| end business printers only work on windows.
|
| - Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully
| migrate to mac.
|
| - Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the
| package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already
| exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just
| the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a
| pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements.
| But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on
| Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it,
| with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff
| running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take
| a lot of time before one arrives.
|
| Its the curse of the power user.
| tombert wrote:
| Excel is the biggest blocker for my dad, and why I keep losing
| the argument to get my parents to move to Linux or Mac.
|
| Pretty much all their other stuff is stuff that either works
| fine on Linux or is just in the browser anyway, but the only
| thing that I don't really have a rebuttal to is when my dad
| points out that he uses the full-fat excel and a lot of the
| more modern features.
|
| I would so rather they move to Linux, and just put Excel inside
| Winboat or something, but they won't have it. Annoying since
| I'm still expected to play tech support for them and
| Microsoft's recovery tools do not work, and as far as I can
| tell have literally never worked for anyone in human history,
| and I'm not entirely convinced that the people at Microsoft
| have ever tested them.
| hiciu wrote:
| > just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't
| have it
|
| Just curious, is it about different tools / workflow / the
| new thing to learn (and those are valid reasons!) or are
| there some technical issues with for example Winboat?
| tombert wrote:
| They've never used Winboat (or anything Linuxey really), so
| it's definitely not a fault with Winboat itself.
|
| Honestly I think they really just don't want to change and
| they're trying to look for ways out because they know that
| "I don't want to!" isn't going to fly with me if I'm
| expected to be tech support.
| bombcar wrote:
| What do they do with Excel for Windows that they can't do
| with Excel for Mac?
| major505 wrote:
| This is exactly what I do with my personal computing. I
| would prefer to be on linux, but a lot of people still
| sends me data in excel spreadsheets for processing, and
| lets be honest: apple hardware is fucking awesome.
|
| The feeling of being able to work away from my desk and
| dont care about battery, is so goooooooood.
|
| And I have to admit. Even if I dont like macos, my macbook
| with m1 and 16gb ram is probably the fastest laptop I ever
| own.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure. I'm sure my dad Googled something to
| use it as an excuse to not change.
|
| As I said in a sibling comment, I think they really just
| don't want to change and they are looking for excuses; I
| suspect even if I could prove that there's absolute feature
| parity between the two versions they'd just find another
| reason.
| e12e wrote:
| Excel for Mac has gotten a lot better - but I'm not
| surprised if it is still its own thing - with edge cases in
| format, macros, visual basic, linking to databases and data
| sources etc. I imagine excel under wine is better than the
| port to Mac in some respects.
| tombert wrote:
| If you can even get Excel working under Wine. Older ones
| work fine, but AFAIK there's no way to get the modern
| Excel working on Wine.
| bombcar wrote:
| The edge cases are where it can break, but they're
| getting smaller and smaller as Excel slowly turns into a
| web-based app.
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| Don't forget general familiarity. I don't know about today, but
| Apple was once very big on giving large discounts to education
| specifically for the purpose of getting students familiar with
| their machines.
|
| https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html#kids
|
| My point is it's harder to switch from the system you know.
| inversepolymath wrote:
| This was the biggest blocker for me. I've only used a windows
| DE. I have managed various headless linux systems though. I
| decided to try cachyos (plasma) a few months ago by dual
| booting and a few weeks ago I backed up my W11 install and no
| longer run Windows. I've ran into various issues but overall
| it was less scary than I thought. The issues range from
| figuring out which package manager contains what software to
| flickering issues when using Citrix. Luckily LLMs make these
| issues fairly painless.
| coole-wurst wrote:
| You can run Photoshop and small Excel (fine for 90%) on Mac
| without an issue.
|
| The real problem is more specific industry software - Revit,
| Solidworks and probably a thousand smaller ones.
| major505 wrote:
| yeah, solidworks. forgot about it. A lot of people depend on
| that.
| fragmede wrote:
| It very depends on which part of the software is needed.
| SOLIDWORKS is usable on a windows VM via Parallels thanks to
| their GPU acceleration (it's totally unusable via Virtual
| Box/VMware on a Mac). Would love to hear the other thousand
| smaller ones. Davinci for professional video editing is a
| multi-platform. No idea about Mastercam.
| opan wrote:
| >Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's
| simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100%
| compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on
| obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of
| time before one arrives.
|
| I was thinking about this compatibility problem the other day.
| Usually someone moving between office suites (MSFT Office,
| Google Drive, LibreOffice) complains stuff broke, then they
| give up / drop it / work around it. I was imagining an ideal
| path would be to document these cases of incompatibility as
| bugs/issues in LibreOffice. Describe the difference and how it
| should work, then LibreOffice fixes their software to better
| match. I don't know if this already happens. Personally I avoid
| all office software like the plague and try to work with plain
| text files and vim. I just hear about these issues enough that
| I'm mildly invested in the situation by now.
|
| I tried to tell a friend about WYGIWYM stuff like LaTeX, groff,
| and Typst the other day. He seemed more interested in "figuring
| out" why stuff broke when changing between office software. I
| tried to tell him that MSFT doesn't follow their own spec and
| everyone else has to reverse engineer it, resulting in
| implementation differences. Plus MSFT's own implementation
| being proprietary so it can't be easily copied. I'm not sure
| the weight of the situation got across to him.
| major505 wrote:
| Another thing that I consider hard tonreplace from microsoft is
| Active directory. This thing is universal. And after tring
| alternatives its easy to see why. Is its probably the most
| complete tool I used for humans and device managers. But linix
| and mac had done a good job adapting to it in the last decade.
| gosukiwi wrote:
| Out of those I think Gaming might be the biggest, and some
| games like League of Legends (all Riot games) need Vanguard,
| their anti-cheat which only works on Windows. So it's not easy
| for Valve but hopefully it will get there sometime.
|
| The biggest reason I don't just migrate is because gaming. Most
| steam games could work on Linux but then if you want to play
| one that doesn't you have a problem. I'd rather just use
| Windows and never have a problem, because the game was designed
| for my platform.
|
| That being said, for work I use macOS.
| redml wrote:
| Even if they fix it, and that's a big if - It doesn't really mean
| anything when they have a ton of MBAs and product managers
| working internally to make it creep back in. It's going to take a
| decade to grow trust again and I don't think they're up to the
| task.
| adabyron wrote:
| Has it always been a case of incentives with Microsoft?
|
| Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.
|
| Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a
| few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.
|
| Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products
| better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick
| wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a
| few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.
|
| I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like
| this in companies.
| maevyn11 wrote:
| No idea why anyone would buy a Windows machine over a mac unless
| in this day and age unless they can't afford one, Microsoft's OS
| dev philosophy has been trash for years.
| tombert wrote:
| For that matter, Linux has been better than Windows for
| decades.
|
| Yes, Linux has some jankiness, I don't dispute that, but when
| people say that they're often smuggling in an assumption that
| Windows _doesn 't_ have jankiness, which is decidedly not true.
| People are _more used_ to Windows and its shittiness and they
| forget how much bullshit they actually put up with for it.
|
| Windows Update, for example, is awful software and if anyone
| who works on it is reading this, you should consider getting
| out of the software game because you are not good at your job
| and considering how consistently bad Windows Update has been
| for its entire existence I don't think you'd be good at other
| software jobs either.
|
| Windows Update bricked my mom's laptop doing an automatic
| update to Windows 11, I believe because they broke some boot
| keys, and since Microsoft's restore and repair tools don't
| actually work, my parents called me in a panic because there
| were of course tons of irreplaceable files that they couldn't
| access. I had to walk them through flashing a Linux USB, walk
| my dad through booting off that USB, walk my dad through
| setting up tmate, and then I had to mount the NTFS drive and
| rsync the files to my personal server. Just to reiterate: _I
| had to use Linux to save Windows because Windows ' tools do not
| work_.
|
| If Microsoft used a filesystem that didn't coexist with
| dinosaurs, I could have set them up with recurring filesystem
| snapshots and this could have been fixed at the filesystem
| level. You know, like what has been readily available on Linux
| since like 2010 with btrfs and other Copy on Write filesystems.
|
| To be clear, before I get a lecture, I'm aware that updates are
| a hard problem when you have a diverse set of hardware, but I
| should point out that it's not like my mom installed the OS on
| some arcane custom built rig, this was an OEM install on her
| laptop, so they don't have that excuse. Additionally, I update
| every Linux computer in my house literally every day, and I
| have never had it so thoroughly brick the boot process as I had
| with my mom's computer.
|
| My elaborate point here is that Windows has _lots_ of jank,
| more than Linux, but people just act like that 's part of the
| deal, but don't extend anywhere near that same level of
| courtesy to Linux.
| nurettin wrote:
| If it starts to get better after it absolutely cannot get any
| worse and users start to parade their experience switching to
| other platforms like badges of honor, is that really a win? After
| so many got their time and money wasted?
|
| I mean I guess there is no reason to care, since their main
| products work in a browser, powerbi users and gamers can endure
| anything and old people will just get their grandchildren to fix
| their windows.
| freediddy wrote:
| i am never switching off windows 10, even when it goes off
| completely support. if i have to i'll switch to mac instead.
| oopsiremembered wrote:
| Microsoft is effectively a malware company now.
| Vektorceraptor wrote:
| Still getting MSN widget displayed, even though I turned it off.
| The best was - the unremovable desktop icon for the desktop
| wallpapers! That's what people who love a clean desktop always
| wanted for.
| hkon wrote:
| I hear about people in my extended circle moving to linux every
| week now. Windows users of 10-25 years++ have had enough.
| seu wrote:
| I was dual booting Linux Mint (work) and Windows 11 (games). A
| month ago, Windows started trying to push an update, which I
| resisted. A week ago, they just force fed it to my computer. I
| deleted the partitions without a second thought, tried CachyOS,
| realized that the games I play worked perfectly out of the box,
| and now I'm using it as my main OS. I'm never again installing
| windows on a computer I own.
| haolez wrote:
| Kinda off-topic, but I wonder if a hypothetical OS that
| reimplements the Windows APIs (like ReactOS[0], but with perfect
| modern hardware support) would be better for end users than a
| Linux distro with a modern DE.
|
| In the past, this hypothetical OS would be a revolution. But I
| feel that, in recent years, this gap is not as big anymore and
| Linux supports way more apps than in the past. Such an OS might
| even not be relevant anymore, even if it exists.
|
| Do I have a blind spot on this? Is there value in having a
| "working ReactOS" as of 2026?
|
| [0] https://reactos.org/
| profsummergig wrote:
| We are not far away from an era where AI will code up a Windows
| clone.
|
| If MS doesn't protect the user-experience of Windows users, it's
| over for them.
| AnonyMD wrote:
| Simplicity is best. They should return to that fundamental
| principle. Current Windows has far too many unnecessary features.
| yungporko wrote:
| there is literally nothing microsoft could possibly do or change
| now or ever to make me even consider going back to using windows
| on a personal machine. i don't care if they turn windows into the
| greatest OS in the world and make it free, microsoft can fuck
| right off forever
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