6 ms·

> how to turn them off Switch to Linux. Windows 10 Home is now $119 and tracks you. Microsoft is trying to sell you a product and monetize your behavior. They

> how to turn them off Switch to Linux. Windows 10 Home is now $119 and tracks you. Microsoft is trying to sell you a product and monetize your behavior. They are pursuing a way to maintain their cash cow and have an avenue to push Google out.

nobodyshere 10y ago
I tried that quite a few times on a rarer pc setup (intel nuc 6i7kyk, 6i5syk). Doesn't usually end that well. What windows has that works great is the driver support, graphics drivers in particular. On ubuntu and mint especially. I'll try building a Ryzen pc this summer to see how well that works though.
elcct 10y ago
This is not that easy - some software is Windows only and it doesn't work under WINE etc.
chc 10y ago
This works well if your hobbies include manually editing obscure config files and replacing perfectly good hardware, and if your hobbies do not include playing games. I frequently explore the possibility of switching to Linux, and while it's not the garbage fire it was 15 years ago, it's still just not a peer to Windows for the way I use my computer.
- idobai 10y ago
  Interesting, gaming is one of my hobbies and I've switched to linux years ago. Most games I play are native and a few which aren't run on wine. The more people moving to linux = more games will be available on linux.
- booleandilemma 10y ago
  Completely agree. I tried Ubuntu a few years ago because I heard that distro was comparably easier to use and my experience was frustrating. It took me 3 hours just to get the speakers to work, and the wifi connection would regularly drop off. Windows just works, and I'll happily pay money for a good product.
  - cyberpunk 10y ago
    I have a reasonably noob-unfriendly linux distro (arch) on my bleeding edge kaby lane xps 13 laptop (month or two old) and even the touchscreen worked without any messing around with config files and so on. It came with ubuntu pre-loaded and I assumed they tweaked the arse out of the configs for it, and so expected pain when I replaced the OS. Turns out I was wrong. Vanilla with a minimal distro and even the touchscreen and suspend worked. Woah? I was impressed anyway.. As someone who's suffered OS pains you wouldn't believe (I mean.. I ran solaris 10 on a hp probook as my main workstation for a year one time...) and for well over a decade -- things are MUCH better these days then they were. Windows? Fair enough for you I guess. I'm not trying to convert you... I'll come off badly here, but I'll be honest: I kind of judge people who use MS tech by choice and while claiming to be technologists as being in the lower end of the skills spectrum. I'm not an elitist or at least; I'm really not trying to be.. Please don't take me wrong. At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver. If you're a photo editor or a journalist or writer or something, sure -- I get why that stack works.. Programmer? Sysadmin? I can't get my head around it. I'd like to understand, though.. What do you do? What tools do you use? Are you just living inside some IDE all the time and not interacting with lots of different tools? Thinking out loud as I type, maybe that's the difference here then? We *nix folks tend to use lots of small tools and if you're just sat in one big IDE perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter so much to you as it does to us??
    - criddell 10y ago
      > perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter Of course it doesn't matter. Windows, macOS, and Linux are all good enough. More than ever, you pick the operating system and hardware to support the applications you want to run.
      - cyberpunk 10y ago
        Well, okay. The tools I use will work on all these operating systems, but I wouldn't consider windows or OSX 'good enough' for me. I suspect most developers could get their stacks to work on everything from freebsd to windows (well, unless you're a .net dev) -- so that's not really the reason to pick one or the other? I don't run linux becuase 'vim' works better than it does on opensolaris... right?
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago
  I really can't underline how stupid you make yourself sound by writing that utter toss, so I simply conclude that I very much doubt you have any idea what Linux was like 15 years ago – considering that you have no idea what it's like now – so why refer to that at all?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    In general, you haven't made any arguments.
  - alistproducer2 10y ago
    This is a terrible comment. The OP makes valid points. I run Linux on several boxes and have been a user for years and I still have trouble dealing with it sometimes. For all its faults, Windows just works.
  - dang 10y ago
    We ban accounts that comment like this. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
- cm2187 10y ago
  I agree. Linux is a world full of obscure acronyms and undiscoverable CLI commands. RTFM or nothing. I would like to switch to Linux (particularly when I read these things) but I just don't have the time to learn all the basic things the hard way and deal with all the compatibility issues.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    At this point all the available desktop OS choices suck. They suck in different ways for different reasons, and they suck by different amounts. But they do - all - suck. It's truly tragic. As a species, we're hoping to build a self-enhancing mega-AI, but we can't even keep relatively basic OS technology stable without breaking it. I absolutely understand that some of the reasons for breakage are economic and political. But even so.
    - tictacttoe 10y ago
      I have to say that I'm absolutely in love with Arch linux. It's some work to set up, and it's not exactly novice friendly, but once it's set up, you barely have to muck with it—it just works. Truly a wonderful OS for the tech savvy.
      - tth 10y ago
        Use Antergos and skip the convoluted Arch install.
    - stinos 10y ago
      At this point all the available desktop OS choices suck. They suck in different ways for different reasons, and they suck by different amounts. But they do - all - suck. Thank you. As someone who uses all common OSes on a regular basis I am always surprised, almost intrigued, when seeing the huge confirmation bias causing some users who mainly use 1 OS to bash on the others with reasons which usually come down to 'I actually don't know how to use your OS but once I did and it sucked so yeah my OS is definitely better than yours'.
  - 10y ago
- boondaburrah 10y ago
  I have to replace perfectly good hardware more often under windows than linux, with osx being the worst offender (though to be fair, hackintosh isn't what they had in mind). With windows's new mandatory driver signing, some of my hardware will never work with newer windows. I have to either dig up a copy of 7 or XP, or throw it out. Even on 7 it's a pain. The same hardware works fine under linux. Also, your "manually editing obscure config files" is my registry hell. I'm pretty sure every operating system sucks (I'd say OSX's equivalent is defaults.write)
- csdreamer7 10y ago
  15 years ago is a long time to base a tech argument. I just played Tropico 5 on Ubuntu with Steam. All the hardware was detected. I installed a PPA to download the latest driver; that will keep me updated. > This works well if your hobbies include manually editing obscure config files I had to edit obscure entries the registry to block Microsoft's spying on my Windows 7 system. I have had to edit entries to fix obscure issues in Windows XP. I have yet to edit 'obscure config files' for my Ubuntu desktop in years.
djsumdog 10y ago
I have a primary Linux box, but my Windows box is still used for games. For the PC gamer, the indie game market on Linux is growing, but it's still not the same as the Windows market. Microsoft had one of the last minimal-bloat systems up until Windows 10. I don't want to enter a world where we need to start ad-blocking the entire OS via custom DNS servers. Microsoft is still making money of the initial OS license with every new machine. People will still pay for Windows. Why do they keep fucking it up?
- kefka 10y ago
  And I seem to remember when Microsoft squeezed out the market of accelerated sound cards, like SoundBlaster Live. It effectively killed their audio market overnight, with the fact that everything had to go over their DRM stack. We could have had machines with DSPs for sound, GPUs for accelerated array math, and general purpose CPUs for everything else. But MS decided that for us... Even though us Linux people can use advanced DSPs and the like.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I wonder how much of that had to do with the MAFIAA...
    - speeder 10y ago
      A lot. The switch from XP to Vista and the concurrent death of CRTs were a lot about holywood. Sound Cards, analog screens and advanced video programming (ie: changing how the screen acts directly instead of sending pixels on an standard defined manner) all allowed people to skip DRM and also all prevented new formats from getting popular. This is still that way, note 4k video cards and screens showed up at the same time a new bluray variation is coming out, despite tech for that being ancient. (in 1995 Silicon Graphics was selling workstation that could push in the monitor 48bit colour images at resolutions around 1080p, if you had deep pockets 4k 48bit was possible...)
  - boondaburrah 10y ago
    Perhaps that's why I use Linux or OSX for any serious work. Windows really fucked up the sound subsystem. I can't get anything outside of "7.1 output, maybe 1 or 2 channels in" to work without horrible hops and skips. Like Microsoft never thought I'd be trying to record 24 channels at once.
AndrewHMoore 10y ago
I agree. To be honest I'm not even angry at Microsoft, just very disappointed and surprised. Windows 7 is a technological marvel in my eyes - it's stable and dependable with amazing backwards comparability. How many millions* of man-hours of productivity has it enabled I wonder? How can Microsoft be so quick to burn decades of credibility and trust? I switched my very very non-technically savvy parents to Ubuntu several years ago and I don't regret it for a second. Once I got their wifi, browser and printer set up and reminded them about the UI once in a while, the tech support burden was minimal. They use their PCs even less now that they have large Android phones for email and messaging. I'm still hoping Microsoft will come up with something to challenge Android. They have the resources and brains. Unfortunately they're copying Googles business model of dark patterns to swallow as much of their customers data as possible (whether you choose to call it smart business practice or privacy destroying unethical behaviour), but additionally charging them for the privilege.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  MS used to treat home and soho users as a smaller cousin of their enterprise ones, but in recent years they seem to have developed a hard mental split between home/soho and enterprise.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  I second this. I avoided W7 for so long because after the ME and Vista debacles, I just wanted a stable system and figured W7 was just more of the same. I was so wrong. W7 is an awesome OS.
- greenhatman 10y ago
  I'm really hoping for a proper GUN/Linux phone operating system. I hope Ubuntu Touch works out well eventually.
- csdreamer7 10y ago
  My mother loves Ubuntu. She has actually taken to it quite nicely once she found out she didn't have to install printer drivers.
jzwinck 10y ago
I use Ubuntu, one of the most popular desktop Linuxes. The one that has this: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-desktop-removes-the-amazon-search-spyware.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-deskt...
danmaz74 10y ago
Related: just yesterday I saw a system pop-up on my only windows 10 box (connected to my TV) suggesting to switch from Chrome to Edge which would be faster... pretty anticompetitive behavior IMHO.

nobodyshere 10y ago

I tried that quite a few times on a rarer pc setup (intel nuc 6i7kyk, 6i5syk). Doesn't usually end that well. What windows has that works great is the driver support, graphics drivers in particular. On ubuntu and mint especially. I'll try building a Ryzen pc this summer to see how well that works though.

elcct 10y ago

This is not that easy - some software is Windows only and it doesn't work under WINE etc.

chc 10y ago

This works well if your hobbies include manually editing obscure config files and replacing perfectly good hardware, and if your hobbies do not include playing games. I frequently explore the possibility of switching to Linux, and while it's not the garbage fire it was 15 years ago, it's still just not a peer to Windows for the way I use my computer.

idobai 10y ago
Interesting, gaming is one of my hobbies and I've switched to linux years ago. Most games I play are native and a few which aren't run on wine. The more people moving to linux = more games will be available on linux.
booleandilemma 10y ago
Completely agree. I tried Ubuntu a few years ago because I heard that distro was comparably easier to use and my experience was frustrating. It took me 3 hours just to get the speakers to work, and the wifi connection would regularly drop off. Windows just works, and I'll happily pay money for a good product.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  I have a reasonably noob-unfriendly linux distro (arch) on my bleeding edge kaby lane xps 13 laptop (month or two old) and even the touchscreen worked without any messing around with config files and so on. It came with ubuntu pre-loaded and I assumed they tweaked the arse out of the configs for it, and so expected pain when I replaced the OS. Turns out I was wrong. Vanilla with a minimal distro and even the touchscreen and suspend worked. Woah? I was impressed anyway.. As someone who's suffered OS pains you wouldn't believe (I mean.. I ran solaris 10 on a hp probook as my main workstation for a year one time...) and for well over a decade -- things are MUCH better these days then they were. Windows? Fair enough for you I guess. I'm not trying to convert you... I'll come off badly here, but I'll be honest: I kind of judge people who use MS tech by choice and while claiming to be technologists as being in the lower end of the skills spectrum. I'm not an elitist or at least; I'm really not trying to be.. Please don't take me wrong. At the same time I'm don't understand how anyone with who works in tech and is thus capable of really understanding these things would voluntarily pick this stack as their daily driver. If you're a photo editor or a journalist or writer or something, sure -- I get why that stack works.. Programmer? Sysadmin? I can't get my head around it. I'd like to understand, though.. What do you do? What tools do you use? Are you just living inside some IDE all the time and not interacting with lots of different tools? Thinking out loud as I type, maybe that's the difference here then? We *nix folks tend to use lots of small tools and if you're just sat in one big IDE perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter so much to you as it does to us??
  - criddell 10y ago
    > perhaps the OS around it doesn't matter Of course it doesn't matter. Windows, macOS, and Linux are all good enough. More than ever, you pick the operating system and hardware to support the applications you want to run.
    - cyberpunk 10y ago
      Well, okay. The tools I use will work on all these operating systems, but I wouldn't consider windows or OSX 'good enough' for me. I suspect most developers could get their stacks to work on everything from freebsd to windows (well, unless you're a .net dev) -- so that's not really the reason to pick one or the other? I don't run linux becuase 'vim' works better than it does on opensolaris... right?
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago
I really can't underline how stupid you make yourself sound by writing that utter toss, so I simply conclude that I very much doubt you have any idea what Linux was like 15 years ago – considering that you have no idea what it's like now – so why refer to that at all?
- coldtea 10y ago
  In general, you haven't made any arguments.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  This is a terrible comment. The OP makes valid points. I run Linux on several boxes and have been a user for years and I still have trouble dealing with it sometimes. For all its faults, Windows just works.
- dang 10y ago
  We ban accounts that comment like this. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
cm2187 10y ago
I agree. Linux is a world full of obscure acronyms and undiscoverable CLI commands. RTFM or nothing. I would like to switch to Linux (particularly when I read these things) but I just don't have the time to learn all the basic things the hard way and deal with all the compatibility issues.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  At this point all the available desktop OS choices suck. They suck in different ways for different reasons, and they suck by different amounts. But they do - all - suck. It's truly tragic. As a species, we're hoping to build a self-enhancing mega-AI, but we can't even keep relatively basic OS technology stable without breaking it. I absolutely understand that some of the reasons for breakage are economic and political. But even so.
  - tictacttoe 10y ago
    I have to say that I'm absolutely in love with Arch linux. It's some work to set up, and it's not exactly novice friendly, but once it's set up, you barely have to muck with it—it just works. Truly a wonderful OS for the tech savvy.
    - tth 10y ago
      Use Antergos and skip the convoluted Arch install.
  - stinos 10y ago
    At this point all the available desktop OS choices suck. They suck in different ways for different reasons, and they suck by different amounts. But they do - all - suck. Thank you. As someone who uses all common OSes on a regular basis I am always surprised, almost intrigued, when seeing the huge confirmation bias causing some users who mainly use 1 OS to bash on the others with reasons which usually come down to 'I actually don't know how to use your OS but once I did and it sucked so yeah my OS is definitely better than yours'.
- 10y ago
boondaburrah 10y ago
I have to replace perfectly good hardware more often under windows than linux, with osx being the worst offender (though to be fair, hackintosh isn't what they had in mind). With windows's new mandatory driver signing, some of my hardware will never work with newer windows. I have to either dig up a copy of 7 or XP, or throw it out. Even on 7 it's a pain. The same hardware works fine under linux. Also, your "manually editing obscure config files" is my registry hell. I'm pretty sure every operating system sucks (I'd say OSX's equivalent is defaults.write)
csdreamer7 10y ago
15 years ago is a long time to base a tech argument. I just played Tropico 5 on Ubuntu with Steam. All the hardware was detected. I installed a PPA to download the latest driver; that will keep me updated. > This works well if your hobbies include manually editing obscure config files I had to edit obscure entries the registry to block Microsoft's spying on my Windows 7 system. I have had to edit entries to fix obscure issues in Windows XP. I have yet to edit 'obscure config files' for my Ubuntu desktop in years.

djsumdog 10y ago

I have a primary Linux box, but my Windows box is still used for games. For the PC gamer, the indie game market on Linux is growing, but it's still not the same as the Windows market. Microsoft had one of the last minimal-bloat systems up until Windows 10. I don't want to enter a world where we need to start ad-blocking the entire OS via custom DNS servers. Microsoft is still making money of the initial OS license with every new machine. People will still pay for Windows. Why do they keep fucking it up?

kefka 10y ago
And I seem to remember when Microsoft squeezed out the market of accelerated sound cards, like SoundBlaster Live. It effectively killed their audio market overnight, with the fact that everything had to go over their DRM stack. We could have had machines with DSPs for sound, GPUs for accelerated array math, and general purpose CPUs for everything else. But MS decided that for us... Even though us Linux people can use advanced DSPs and the like.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I wonder how much of that had to do with the MAFIAA...
  - speeder 10y ago
    A lot. The switch from XP to Vista and the concurrent death of CRTs were a lot about holywood. Sound Cards, analog screens and advanced video programming (ie: changing how the screen acts directly instead of sending pixels on an standard defined manner) all allowed people to skip DRM and also all prevented new formats from getting popular. This is still that way, note 4k video cards and screens showed up at the same time a new bluray variation is coming out, despite tech for that being ancient. (in 1995 Silicon Graphics was selling workstation that could push in the monitor 48bit colour images at resolutions around 1080p, if you had deep pockets 4k 48bit was possible...)
- boondaburrah 10y ago
  Perhaps that's why I use Linux or OSX for any serious work. Windows really fucked up the sound subsystem. I can't get anything outside of "7.1 output, maybe 1 or 2 channels in" to work without horrible hops and skips. Like Microsoft never thought I'd be trying to record 24 channels at once.

AndrewHMoore 10y ago

I agree. To be honest I'm not even angry at Microsoft, just very disappointed and surprised. Windows 7 is a technological marvel in my eyes - it's stable and dependable with amazing backwards comparability. How many millions* of man-hours of productivity has it enabled I wonder? How can Microsoft be so quick to burn decades of credibility and trust? I switched my very very non-technically savvy parents to Ubuntu several years ago and I don't regret it for a second. Once I got their wifi, browser and printer set up and reminded them about the UI once in a while, the tech support burden was minimal. They use their PCs even less now that they have large Android phones for email and messaging. I'm still hoping Microsoft will come up with something to challenge Android. They have the resources and brains. Unfortunately they're copying Googles business model of dark patterns to swallow as much of their customers data as possible (whether you choose to call it smart business practice or privacy destroying unethical behaviour), but additionally charging them for the privilege.

digi_owl 10y ago
MS used to treat home and soho users as a smaller cousin of their enterprise ones, but in recent years they seem to have developed a hard mental split between home/soho and enterprise.
alistproducer2 10y ago
I second this. I avoided W7 for so long because after the ME and Vista debacles, I just wanted a stable system and figured W7 was just more of the same. I was so wrong. W7 is an awesome OS.
greenhatman 10y ago
I'm really hoping for a proper GUN/Linux phone operating system. I hope Ubuntu Touch works out well eventually.
csdreamer7 10y ago
My mother loves Ubuntu. She has actually taken to it quite nicely once she found out she didn't have to install printer drivers.

jzwinck 10y ago

I use Ubuntu, one of the most popular desktop Linuxes. The one that has this: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-desktop-removes-the-amazon-search-spyware.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-deskt...

danmaz74 10y ago

Related: just yesterday I saw a system pop-up on my only windows 10 box (connected to my TV) suggesting to switch from Chrome to Edge which would be faster... pretty anticompetitive behavior IMHO.