15 ms·

This, and every other screw-up in the same vein, is why those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. W

by alxlaz 7y ago

This, and every other screw-up in the same vein, is why those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools? Cynically, it's amazing that Microsoft collects so much personal data about each user -- and yet its "target" ads are hopelessly generic and tasteless. Also, leaving the matter of whether or not I should even be seeing ads after I paid for the damn thing aside, the company that brought us Internet Explorer is the last one that should crack jokes about other browsers, even if they're good (which this one isn't).

iso1631 7y ago
Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least. Doesn't take much to put the shields back upto full. I just don't understand why people run windows. Maybe I just use computers wrong, having been on linux for the last 20 years, but my family (who I refuse to help with IT needs) are all far happier on chromebooks than on windows
- alxlaz 7y ago
  > I just don't understand why people run windows. I've used Linux for about the same time and honestly, I understand it completely. I would switch, were it not for muscle memory and for the fact that at least 50% of my work involves systems-level development for Linux (mainly embedded stuff, so a lot of cross-compiling). In the last five or six years I've come to dread the Linux desktop and its constant churn of rewrites and UX "improvements". I have a Windows machine that I use for work the other half of the time and honestly... it's great. Yeah, the occasional update breaks some fringe feature. But the chances of something like waking up to the announcement that Microsoft is removing desktop icons in the next update and you can just install this third-party application for it (which will break with every update) are practically zero. Microsoft puts out a lot of broken stuff (some of which slowly morphs into non-broken, useful stuff over time, e.g. Powershell), but you can mostly be assured that, if something works today, it'll work ten years from now, modulo some registry hacks. That's incredibly valuable. I really don't care about things like UI consistency and whatnot -- what I do care about is stability and functionality. Edit: tbh, the main reason why I'm not switching today is that I don't really trust this whole OS-as-a-service model. If it were Windows 2000 instead of Windows 10, I wouldn't think twice before switching, but these are different times. (More edit: please realize that I'm the same person who posted this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288917 , yeah?)
  - smabie 7y ago
    Or you could just use a window manager that doesn’t change? I’ve had the same desktop env for over a decade and nothing has changed at all. In contrast with windows and osx where we literally cannot opt out.
    - alxlaz 7y ago
      I do, but that doesn't help much. I don't really have a choice about GTK applications, for example -- I'm going to get the GTK 3 open file dialog and the colour picker with every GTK 3 application.
    - sergiosgc 7y ago
      I entirely understand alxlaz's position, buy my solution was exactly sticking to better window managers (in terms of long term support). My workstation is Linux since '98 or '99, and since then I've used GNUstep for about a decade, then i3 and now sway (basically i3 for Wayland). I'm free from the breaking changes alxlaz describes. I just checked, and GNUstep is pretty much alive. Even that change was caused by me wanting to try tiling window managers, not support failure.
      - alxlaz 7y ago
        Ah, I'm in a similar-ish boat, I use WindowMaker :). This isolates me from most, but definitely not all dubious changes. I've been down the tiling WM rabbit hole a while ago but it's just not for me, I like the mouse, I like icons... It's a little unsettling that there are two ways to get a stable experience: using window manager from 1998 (OK, ok, WindowMaker is still maintained-ish, in fact a very tiny portion of the code written after 1998 is mine :-) ), or getting used to a workflow akin to that of Windows 1.01 (i.e. a tiling WM). On the bright side, though, yeah, at least we have a choice!
        sergiosgc 7y ago
        > (...) getting used to a workflow akin to that of Windows 1.01 (i.e. a tiling WM) Not really, unless it's a tong-in-cheek remark. Tiling window managers use virtual desktops and programmable positioning of windows to produce a predictable layout. Windows 1.01 had neither of those. Add muscle memory to it and, if you can endure the learning/customization curve, you get a very efficient window manager. Whenever I'm alt-tabbing in search of windows in Windows or OSX I feel I'm using old software.
- wgerard 7y ago
  > I just don't understand why people run windows. There are many, many products that either run significantly better on windows (Office) or are completely unavailable on other OSs (many video games). That's changing, for sure. But there's still a long tail of products that semi-necessitate windows.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    How is office better than Google Docs?
    - njsubedi 7y ago
      Works completely offline?
    - t-writescode 7y ago
      For real document creation, Word and Latex are the best out there, bar none. For detailed and powerful spreadsheet use there is nothing that compares to Excel. This coming from someone forced to use Google Sheets at a former company, after having Excel.
    - zaat 7y ago
      Try using bi-directional text, or including equations in Docs. It is practically unusable. Excel is so powerful that people are doing with it stupid things and than their businesses rely on them. That stuff will never work in Docs. Office is a killer product, with extremely rich feature set that works very well. Sadly, there is nothing in the market that even close. It is the main (perhaps only) reason I still have to use a Windows VM.
    - wgerard 7y ago
      FWIW, I don't think it is necessarily. But, a lot of people are forced to use office for various reasons - trying to edit a docx in Docs/Pages/LibreOffice, for example, can be really frustrating for any number of reasons (fonts, margins, etc. all sometimes break spectacularly). So if you're using office quite frequently, windows can be very appealing.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  support is an obvious reason. with the exception of some dev tools and mac-only creative software, pretty much everything supports windows. I can go out and buy any high end laptop and be confident it will work well with windows. similarly, if I want to throw some random hardware in my desktop, I don't have to worry about whether drivers exist for my os. all this stuff requires an additional research step with linux. in short, if you're a power user (and especially if you like choosing your own hardware) and you want your os to "just work", windows is the best of few options.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  It really depends on your needs. For example, my in-laws got a Chromebook a few years ago. My father-in-law definitely liked it better. For my mother-in-law, it was an unmitigated disaster. He really only uses the computer for watching Netflix and reading the New York Times. She, a teacher, also uses it for work, and she found that most of the programs she used for classroom prep simply weren't available for ChromeOS, and didn't have any equivalent. So I ended up helping her give her old Windows desktop a nice deep scrubbing, put some more RAM in it, all that good stuff, and that's now what she uses when her iPad won't do. My own parents prefer Windows, too, though that's a more fuzzy situation. Basically, it's just that it's what they've always used. They've tried other platforms a couple times, and quickly found that it just wasn't even remotely worth the hassle of learning all the differences. That's down to differences in file sharing, printer set up, all that good stuff. Me, for a while I was thinking of switching back to Windows at home for a while, simply because I used Windows at work, and I was getting sick of having to remember two different sets of keyboard commands and suchlike. (Then I went to a shop where all the devs were given Macs, so I ended up there instead.) For my purposes, running some other OS as the host and Linux in a VM is plenty good enough.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Because everyone has their own priorities. My main priority is to give my family technical solutions they could manage if I were to kick the bucket, and to ultimately own their data they need. Between my wife and I we have 1tb of photos and videos. We could store it all in the cloud, but then if they shut her account down for whatever reason we would lose them all. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't find this acceptable. I do seem to be in the minority here, everyone I know just hosts all their files at a single cloud provide. It seems nuts to me. And I haven't found an off-site backup solution that works with Linux. CrashPlan used to offer family plans but they got rid of them. Backblaze only has B2 for Linux - not really acceptable given my requirements. So my family runs Windows. I run Linux.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- Vrondi 7y ago
  Chromebooks are far worse, if you have any privacy concerns.
- Nursie 7y ago
  > I just don't understand why people run windows. I like gaming. That's pretyty much all I do on Windows. I have a macbook for work because MacOS gets out of your way and just works. I have a linux server and a linux workstation for other stuff - the workstation for coding, experimenting etc, the server for VPN endpoint, gitlab, time-machine and various other servery things. But for games, if you're wanting to game on PC, windows is King. And that's why my workstation has windows installed too. (My mother and my brother still use it because I can't be bothered to try to teach them anything else)
- NilsIRL 7y ago
  > I just don't understand why people run windows I've seen so many good answers but to me, the main one is that people don't know there are alternatives. I know virtually no one in "real" life that knows what Linux is. Windows is pre-installed and people just roll with it. Some are aware there's this thing called "Mac" that it is more expensive and that's it.
- apazzolini 7y ago
  Video games.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  My windows computer is for goofing off and gaming. That is the only reason I keep it. If I want to get real work done I boot back into linux or use a macbook.
- stiray 7y ago
  > I just don't understand why people run windows I do. And just a disclaimer, I am using linux 100% on desktop (and prefer freebsd on servers). Where I run firefox, i3, terminal, evolution (as I am forced to use it due to Exchange support, while I actually prefer mutt) and this is it. I rarely run anything else that is windowed. The reason is simple. Linux desktop really sucks. Instead of whole community stepping together and make ONE well made, bugless desktop, where most of people wouldnt need to install 3rd party hacks, edit config files and do everything using mouse, you need to fight which one is better and you end up with 20+ desktop enviroments that all sucks one way or another. Linux would have edge over windows desktop if there wouldnt be higlanders fractions fighting which half finished desktop is better. And I am observing this for 20 years. Same goes with binary compatibility. Personally I dont care but for ordinary "dumb" user it is revolting. And immidiately when freebsd will give me working hw support, I will move away from linux too. As it is a mess since systemd came, where more and more non existant problems are beeing solved while you still cant clean dhclient mess from the system without killing it (-r? -x? Only in man pages.) It is a sad story of egoism and vanity where something that could be great, never was.
  - AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
    As someone who uses one of the minority desktops within a minority distro (Fedora w/ Cinnamon spin), I agree that all of the trash-talking within a community is to the detriment to its spread. I almost wish we could get all Linux users to verbally agree to something like the following: "I will not trash popular Linux desktop environments to outsiders. Ubuntu is fine. GNOME is fine. I understand that for the sake of the Linux Desktop's survival, it is more important that I be helpful and supportive of people's choice to use Default Ubuntu, rather than telling them that my Arch/Xfce/i3 setup is The One True Path." Use whatever you want in private. Just shut the f--- up about trashing Ubuntu/Mint/Manjaro at every opportunity because you disagree with some decision of theirs. It makes us all look bad.
    - jmnicolas 7y ago
      I think you misunderstood : the problem is not the trash-talking, the problem is that all Linux DE are trashes and if people were only putting their effort on one it wouldn't be trash.
- MadWombat 7y ago
  > I just don't understand why people run windows. My use of my home computer mostly consists of making/learning music and playing games. Both of these activities pretty much require Windows. There are some ways around it, like I could be running games under Wine and use a Linux DAW and use something like LinVST to get my plugins working, but it requires a lot of effort and the results are not guaranteed (people seem to have mixed experience running Kontakt 6 under Wine and not all games run equally well). Or I could go the money route and buy a console for games and a Mac for music, but it seems like an overkill and I would be exchanging a nasty proprietary system that is Windows for two separate nasty proprietary systems of Mac and PS4/Xbox.
- grawprog 7y ago
  >Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least. Yet, a large majority of computers are running an operating system that spies on you and serves ads to you. Not just personal computers, but most businesses too. Buying a computer that doesn't come with windows on it is difficult for the average person who isn't trying, I don't mean Chromebooks or those system76 type computers, I mean walking through best buy or something the way a lot of non tech people end up buying computers. I mean i've had windows restore itself on my hardrive after a boot issue despite formatting it away years ago. Or at least try to, I was really confused when the windows recovery prompt popped up. As far as I.knew it had been gone since the day I got my laptop. Not to mention, thanks to Microsoft, I now essentially need their permission to install anything other than windows on modern hardware(I know it's not quite that simple and kernel modules can be self signed etc.), but effectively, at least from the issues i've dealt with...and continue to deal with, the most recent being with virtual box and having to self sign kernel.modules to make it work, uefi really feels like Microsoft trying to keep whatever bit of control they can over every computer whatever you decide to do with it. I'm not trying to start a uefi debate, I know there's work arounds and other things ways to deal with it, but since it's existed, it's been nothing but hassles for me and it's something I never asked for or wanted in my computer.
- zentiggr 7y ago
  Because I work in a Windows-only facility, at least where my level of dev work is done. And I live in a house where the only other person has only ever user Windows, and hates change. Like even desktop icons shouldn't relocate unless she does it herself. She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason, then there better not be any more differences than the ones indicated.
  - starik36 7y ago
    > She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason Unless you are in the IT industry or at least an enthusiast, this is a rational approach.
    - iso1631 7y ago
      I'm in the IT industry, and it's my approach. I changed my desktop from fluxbox to xfce about 10 years ago, but have much the same keyboard shortcuts as I did 20 years ago, and the occasional icon has appeared in the dock as time progressed (namely volume, battery, wifi). I still use xplanet as my desktop for the rare times I see it, and I certainly don't have any icons on the desktop.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      Actually the opposite. Unless you work in IT, you likely don't understand changelogs or release notes very well. Unless you can assess the risk of not updating, the safe approach is to auto update everything. Yes, it may be annoying and you may run into new bugs. On the other hand: Your USB ports stopped working? You should've been updating the bios. You got breached via the browser or email app? Should've been updating them.
      - overgard 7y ago
        Kind of sad that our industry standard is: you need to put up with us changing shit on you all the time so that things can keep working. If I were a marketer, which clearly I am not, I would think it would be bad marketing to have your computer constantly be telling you "HEY, you need to drop what you're doing to apply this fix for me at random, because if you don't someone is going to install ransomware. Oh and by the way, we're going to install Candy Crush Saga with this, because fuck you." Maybe the person not updating isn't rational, but if every update is fucking candy crush I couldn't blame them for saying "maybe microsoft is worse than the hackers"
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >I just don't understand why people run windows. For me the main reason is games. Dual booting is really annoying and jumping through the 15 hoops it takes to run games on Linux doesn't seem worth it considering how poorly games seem to run natively on Windows already. It's not a question of "there are no games for Linux" but rather "the game I want to play is not on Linux". This one point is basically the anchor that all the other usage is centered around for me. Linux simply doesn't offer something amazing enough over what Windows does to warrant all this trouble for games. If the games I wanted to play ran decently on Linux with few problems then I'd probably switch over. But considering that MS is now doing that Xbox game pass subscription even on Windows, I think the chance of switching is becoming less and less likely.
  - sslayer 7y ago
    Steam with Proton and ProtonDb was a game changer. What runs native in Linux vs using Proton is like night and day
    - xnyan 7y ago
      Proton is fantastic, but you’re still saying I am going have to accept less compatibility and more work than on windows windows. Not worth it for me, especially with an nvidia GPU. I understand that’s mostly to blame on Nvidia but it’s still the reality of the situation.
  - jjdredd 7y ago
    Same reason for me. If not for games, I would have switched a long time ago. My favourite game runs only on windows and requires an anti-cheat that runs only on windows. So I just dual-boot.
- overgard 7y ago
  I switched over to running desktop linux a couple months ago because I was so fed up with these things, but the truth is... it's just pretty bad. Like if I let my laptop go to sleep my touchpad will never work again. I had to do a bunch of weird kernel hacks to keep my wifi working when the device goes to sleep, and even then it's a hack (I had to enable the airplane mode button, and then make sure to hit it twice any time I open the screen. Come on!). And the lock screen breaks if I'm plugged into a monitor, it shows this weird low resolution version and a high resolution one on top of it. Everything is just incredibly sloppy and either outright broken, or kind of broken. This is Kubuntu btw! I tried Fedora and it crashed every two minutes if I booted X windows so, that didn't work out. Also the main thing with Fedora was it couldn't recognize my sound card, which is like the main intel thing built into every laptop. Maybe it's a winmodem thing again or something, but overall it just does not work at all. So the reason people are still using Microsoft: You HAVE to unless you explicitly buy hardware for Linux. It's just unusable otherwise and the trajectory is getting WORSE, not better.
  - WanderPanda 7y ago
    Exactly my experience! In addition to that, it kills your battery in no time
  - slgeorge 7y ago
    Yes, you MUST buy certified hardware [0], preferably with it pre-loaded with Linux [1]. Ultimately, Linux didn't make enough of a dent in the desktop hardware space in the 90's/00's. The level of interest from hardware vendors (ODM/OEM/component manufacturers) has gone down - that's why things are worse. If you don't use non-preloaded hardware you are NOT signalling to anyone that desktop Linux is important. This reduces overall interest - vendors think that no-one uses Linux - over the long run this reduces the amount of work done. The take-away is please buy a DELL Sputnik with support - you are signalling to the market you want desktop Linux - and if it breaks you can complain! I confess I only partially practise what I preach - I'm on a thinkpad =-) [0] https://certification.ubuntu.com/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/ and there are other sites [1] https://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln310507/ubuntu-based-developer-and-engineering-systems-project-sputnik?lang=en https://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln310507...
- neycoda 7y ago
  "I just don't understand why people run windows." Because not everyone wants to get things to work through command-line especially Broadcom drivers.
- drngdds 7y ago
  I use Windows because: - Chromebooks don't meet my needs and Macs are incredibly expensive. - There's a lot of software I care about which is Windows-only and doesn't have a good Linux alternative, especially games. - I have not had great experiences using Linux. I still run into lots of dumb little issues that make me feel like I'm back in the Windows XP days, except this time I have to enter mysterious terminal commands I found on Stack Exchange to make things work right. - You can easily avoid this kind of nonsense in Windows 10 with like half an hour of setup after your initial install.
- mycall 7y ago
  > I just don't understand why people run windows. Software that doesn't exist elsewhere (maybe OSX).
aurbano 7y ago
Exactly this. Show me facts, what percentage of battery life will it save my _specific_ laptop compared to FF, how much faster will _my_ experience be. Is there anything that the dev tools will allow me to do that I can't with FF Developer Edition? In any case I'm mainly a MacOS user, but still.
dralley 7y ago
The Windows division has never really been part of the "New Microsoft", it seems from the outside.
- alharith 7y ago
  Microsoft didn't buy Github out of the goodness of their heart. They also didn't buy it because of it's significant revenue, a couple hundred million is probably a marketing budget to Microsoft, not something that drives the bottom line. Microsoft also didn't buy it to score appearance points with the socially conscious dev community that populated most of Github, although it was a nice PR story for a bit. You could say the ICE thing has driven all that goodwill away. Microsoft bought Github for the data set. To mine code to train models to write code to put developers out of business. Microsoft is coming for all of your jobs. They aren't investing billions in AI research and Open AI for philanthropy. The sooner people realize this the better. Sure it's tin-foil, but it's a hill I am willing to die on.
  - thestoicattack 7y ago
    I'm not scared of a "model" "trained" on the long tail of Github code any more than I'm scared of someone who can search stackoverflow faster than I can.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    I shudder to think of the kind of code that a machine-learning product trained on the full set of public GitHub repositories would produce. It might be better than what Frontpage used to spit out, or Word, when you used the save as HTML option, but I'm not sanguine about that sort of thing ever putting anyone out of work. Are they working on something like that? I'm sure that there are people doing so. Will it eventually trickle in some limited way as a productivity enhancement into Visual Studio or VS Code? Probably. Is it going to be some kind of magical no-code silver bullet that obviates the need for programmers? Not a snowball's chance in hell.
  - croon 7y ago
    I think the OP thing is bad. What you're suggesting (if they could pull it off) I would welcome. Either it turns into (an even worse than now) corporatist dystopia and there's turmoil before a reset, or it opens up for "everyone" and we're closer to post-scarcity. But most likely they'll automate some stuff, because this isn't real AI, and I can adapt faster than they can and do stuff their models can't.
spatz 7y ago
How about instead of a passive-aggressive ad try not showing me ads at all on my PC? It’s bad enough that it comes pre-installed and is the default.
will4274 7y ago
> Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools? Isn't this exactly what Microsoft is doing? Clicking on the ad leads to the product download page which also describes the features. In most cases, average users like to try software by feel, not by looking at a technical spec sheet.
latenightcoding 7y ago
Some friends think I'm overreacting for refusing to use Microsoft products to this day, yes they have open sourced a lot of cool tech but they are still Microsoft. I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it!
- Permit 7y ago
  >I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it! I don't have the same laptop so I can't comment on your exact situation. That said, I have a Windows machine and I am not using a Microsoft account to log in so your experience is not universal.
  - jack_codes 7y ago
    A colleague just bought a new desktop and set it up last weekend. He ran into Microsoft wanting him to login to a MS account _on initial install_. He ended up having to go into the BIOS to disable networking so he could force the installer to let him initially setup a local account. I don't know if this is for every install and is just my anecdotal perspective.
    - therealx 7y ago
      It's a dark pattern. You can get around it, but it's not easy for normal people to do.
  - latenightcoding 7y ago
    it is a recent change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103683
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
magduf 7y ago
>those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. >Cynically, it's amazing that Microsoft collects so much personal data about each user -- and yet its "target" ads are hopelessly generic and tasteless. This doesn't surprise me. As someone else old enough to remember the Halloween documents, MS has long suffered from serious organizational incompetence. Just look at that whole debacle they went through with music players: "PlaysForSure", Zune, etc., where each one obsoleted the last one and screwed over any users who had bought into it. Exact same with their phone OSes. Maybe it has to do with that funny org-chart picture with the different MS business groups pointing guns at each other. They collect a bunch of personal data, but can't look at things from a big picture and think "we collect all this data from our users, so maybe we could use a little of that to target our ads better". Of course, if you look at MS's marketing over the past 20 years, it should be readily apparent that they have some of the worst and most clueless marketing talent in the entire corporate world.
- dhx 7y ago
  Organisation chart comic referred to: https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonkersworld.net/2011/06/27/organizational-charts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...
  - eitland 7y ago
    And for those who wonder like me, the original is still there: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts I guess linking to the web archive is just carefulness at this point.
    - magduf 7y ago
      >I guess linking to the web archive is just carefulness at this point. It's a good idea IMO. Now that the web has been around for literally decades, I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something, found blog/forum posts to read, and then tried following links in those posts only to find they're dead, because they're so many years out-of-date.
harikb 7y ago
Just a few days, people were celebrating new Microsoft Edge being a viable competitor to Google Chrome and how it is all good for privacy. Let the thing take some hold, then complain about monopoly. If people want to "ban" something, they should ban "browser detection / user agent" and targeted ads based on that. If some state in "middle america" ran an ad targeted at users in SF stating "move to xyz, your life will be better", is that intrusive too? Well, then ban all targeted ads.
thejokerxi 7y ago
Win XP and Win7 was my all time fav microsoft OS. Screw 10. So much data collection and noise.
juststeve 7y ago
Not strong enough. Remember: Microsoft hearts linux.

by alxlaz 7y ago

iso1631 7y ago

Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least. Doesn't take much to put the shields back upto full. I just don't understand why people run windows. Maybe I just use computers wrong, having been on linux for the last 20 years, but my family (who I refuse to help with IT needs) are all far happier on chromebooks than on windows

alxlaz 7y ago
> I just don't understand why people run windows. I've used Linux for about the same time and honestly, I understand it completely. I would switch, were it not for muscle memory and for the fact that at least 50% of my work involves systems-level development for Linux (mainly embedded stuff, so a lot of cross-compiling). In the last five or six years I've come to dread the Linux desktop and its constant churn of rewrites and UX "improvements". I have a Windows machine that I use for work the other half of the time and honestly... it's great. Yeah, the occasional update breaks some fringe feature. But the chances of something like waking up to the announcement that Microsoft is removing desktop icons in the next update and you can just install this third-party application for it (which will break with every update) are practically zero. Microsoft puts out a lot of broken stuff (some of which slowly morphs into non-broken, useful stuff over time, e.g. Powershell), but you can mostly be assured that, if something works today, it'll work ten years from now, modulo some registry hacks. That's incredibly valuable. I really don't care about things like UI consistency and whatnot -- what I do care about is stability and functionality. Edit: tbh, the main reason why I'm not switching today is that I don't really trust this whole OS-as-a-service model. If it were Windows 2000 instead of Windows 10, I wouldn't think twice before switching, but these are different times. (More edit: please realize that I'm the same person who posted this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288917 , yeah?)
- smabie 7y ago
  Or you could just use a window manager that doesn’t change? I’ve had the same desktop env for over a decade and nothing has changed at all. In contrast with windows and osx where we literally cannot opt out.
  - alxlaz 7y ago
    I do, but that doesn't help much. I don't really have a choice about GTK applications, for example -- I'm going to get the GTK 3 open file dialog and the colour picker with every GTK 3 application.
  - sergiosgc 7y ago
    I entirely understand alxlaz's position, buy my solution was exactly sticking to better window managers (in terms of long term support). My workstation is Linux since '98 or '99, and since then I've used GNUstep for about a decade, then i3 and now sway (basically i3 for Wayland). I'm free from the breaking changes alxlaz describes. I just checked, and GNUstep is pretty much alive. Even that change was caused by me wanting to try tiling window managers, not support failure.
    - alxlaz 7y ago
      Ah, I'm in a similar-ish boat, I use WindowMaker :). This isolates me from most, but definitely not all dubious changes. I've been down the tiling WM rabbit hole a while ago but it's just not for me, I like the mouse, I like icons... It's a little unsettling that there are two ways to get a stable experience: using window manager from 1998 (OK, ok, WindowMaker is still maintained-ish, in fact a very tiny portion of the code written after 1998 is mine :-) ), or getting used to a workflow akin to that of Windows 1.01 (i.e. a tiling WM). On the bright side, though, yeah, at least we have a choice!
      - sergiosgc 7y ago
        > (...) getting used to a workflow akin to that of Windows 1.01 (i.e. a tiling WM) Not really, unless it's a tong-in-cheek remark. Tiling window managers use virtual desktops and programmable positioning of windows to produce a predictable layout. Windows 1.01 had neither of those. Add muscle memory to it and, if you can endure the learning/customization curve, you get a very efficient window manager. Whenever I'm alt-tabbing in search of windows in Windows or OSX I feel I'm using old software.
wgerard 7y ago
> I just don't understand why people run windows. There are many, many products that either run significantly better on windows (Office) or are completely unavailable on other OSs (many video games). That's changing, for sure. But there's still a long tail of products that semi-necessitate windows.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  How is office better than Google Docs?
  - njsubedi 7y ago
    Works completely offline?
  - t-writescode 7y ago
    For real document creation, Word and Latex are the best out there, bar none. For detailed and powerful spreadsheet use there is nothing that compares to Excel. This coming from someone forced to use Google Sheets at a former company, after having Excel.
  - zaat 7y ago
    Try using bi-directional text, or including equations in Docs. It is practically unusable. Excel is so powerful that people are doing with it stupid things and than their businesses rely on them. That stuff will never work in Docs. Office is a killer product, with extremely rich feature set that works very well. Sadly, there is nothing in the market that even close. It is the main (perhaps only) reason I still have to use a Windows VM.
  - wgerard 7y ago
    FWIW, I don't think it is necessarily. But, a lot of people are forced to use office for various reasons - trying to edit a docx in Docs/Pages/LibreOffice, for example, can be really frustrating for any number of reasons (fonts, margins, etc. all sometimes break spectacularly). So if you're using office quite frequently, windows can be very appealing.
leetcrew 7y ago
support is an obvious reason. with the exception of some dev tools and mac-only creative software, pretty much everything supports windows. I can go out and buy any high end laptop and be confident it will work well with windows. similarly, if I want to throw some random hardware in my desktop, I don't have to worry about whether drivers exist for my os. all this stuff requires an additional research step with linux. in short, if you're a power user (and especially if you like choosing your own hardware) and you want your os to "just work", windows is the best of few options.
mumblemumble 7y ago
It really depends on your needs. For example, my in-laws got a Chromebook a few years ago. My father-in-law definitely liked it better. For my mother-in-law, it was an unmitigated disaster. He really only uses the computer for watching Netflix and reading the New York Times. She, a teacher, also uses it for work, and she found that most of the programs she used for classroom prep simply weren't available for ChromeOS, and didn't have any equivalent. So I ended up helping her give her old Windows desktop a nice deep scrubbing, put some more RAM in it, all that good stuff, and that's now what she uses when her iPad won't do. My own parents prefer Windows, too, though that's a more fuzzy situation. Basically, it's just that it's what they've always used. They've tried other platforms a couple times, and quickly found that it just wasn't even remotely worth the hassle of learning all the differences. That's down to differences in file sharing, printer set up, all that good stuff. Me, for a while I was thinking of switching back to Windows at home for a while, simply because I used Windows at work, and I was getting sick of having to remember two different sets of keyboard commands and suchlike. (Then I went to a shop where all the devs were given Macs, so I ended up there instead.) For my purposes, running some other OS as the host and Linux in a VM is plenty good enough.
bcrosby95 7y ago
Because everyone has their own priorities. My main priority is to give my family technical solutions they could manage if I were to kick the bucket, and to ultimately own their data they need. Between my wife and I we have 1tb of photos and videos. We could store it all in the cloud, but then if they shut her account down for whatever reason we would lose them all. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't find this acceptable. I do seem to be in the minority here, everyone I know just hosts all their files at a single cloud provide. It seems nuts to me. And I haven't found an off-site backup solution that works with Linux. CrashPlan used to offer family plans but they got rid of them. Backblaze only has B2 for Linux - not really acceptable given my requirements. So my family runs Windows. I run Linux.
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Vrondi 7y ago
Chromebooks are far worse, if you have any privacy concerns.
Nursie 7y ago
> I just don't understand why people run windows. I like gaming. That's pretyty much all I do on Windows. I have a macbook for work because MacOS gets out of your way and just works. I have a linux server and a linux workstation for other stuff - the workstation for coding, experimenting etc, the server for VPN endpoint, gitlab, time-machine and various other servery things. But for games, if you're wanting to game on PC, windows is King. And that's why my workstation has windows installed too. (My mother and my brother still use it because I can't be bothered to try to teach them anything else)
NilsIRL 7y ago
> I just don't understand why people run windows I've seen so many good answers but to me, the main one is that people don't know there are alternatives. I know virtually no one in "real" life that knows what Linux is. Windows is pre-installed and people just roll with it. Some are aware there's this thing called "Mac" that it is more expensive and that's it.
apazzolini 7y ago
Video games.
ilikehurdles 7y ago
My windows computer is for goofing off and gaming. That is the only reason I keep it. If I want to get real work done I boot back into linux or use a macbook.
stiray 7y ago
> I just don't understand why people run windows I do. And just a disclaimer, I am using linux 100% on desktop (and prefer freebsd on servers). Where I run firefox, i3, terminal, evolution (as I am forced to use it due to Exchange support, while I actually prefer mutt) and this is it. I rarely run anything else that is windowed. The reason is simple. Linux desktop really sucks. Instead of whole community stepping together and make ONE well made, bugless desktop, where most of people wouldnt need to install 3rd party hacks, edit config files and do everything using mouse, you need to fight which one is better and you end up with 20+ desktop enviroments that all sucks one way or another. Linux would have edge over windows desktop if there wouldnt be higlanders fractions fighting which half finished desktop is better. And I am observing this for 20 years. Same goes with binary compatibility. Personally I dont care but for ordinary "dumb" user it is revolting. And immidiately when freebsd will give me working hw support, I will move away from linux too. As it is a mess since systemd came, where more and more non existant problems are beeing solved while you still cant clean dhclient mess from the system without killing it (-r? -x? Only in man pages.) It is a sad story of egoism and vanity where something that could be great, never was.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  As someone who uses one of the minority desktops within a minority distro (Fedora w/ Cinnamon spin), I agree that all of the trash-talking within a community is to the detriment to its spread. I almost wish we could get all Linux users to verbally agree to something like the following: "I will not trash popular Linux desktop environments to outsiders. Ubuntu is fine. GNOME is fine. I understand that for the sake of the Linux Desktop's survival, it is more important that I be helpful and supportive of people's choice to use Default Ubuntu, rather than telling them that my Arch/Xfce/i3 setup is The One True Path." Use whatever you want in private. Just shut the f--- up about trashing Ubuntu/Mint/Manjaro at every opportunity because you disagree with some decision of theirs. It makes us all look bad.
  - jmnicolas 7y ago
    I think you misunderstood : the problem is not the trash-talking, the problem is that all Linux DE are trashes and if people were only putting their effort on one it wouldn't be trash.
MadWombat 7y ago
> I just don't understand why people run windows. My use of my home computer mostly consists of making/learning music and playing games. Both of these activities pretty much require Windows. There are some ways around it, like I could be running games under Wine and use a Linux DAW and use something like LinVST to get my plugins working, but it requires a lot of effort and the results are not guaranteed (people seem to have mixed experience running Kontakt 6 under Wine and not all games run equally well). Or I could go the money route and buy a console for games and a Mac for music, but it seems like an overkill and I would be exchanging a nasty proprietary system that is Windows for two separate nasty proprietary systems of Mac and PS4/Xbox.
grawprog 7y ago
>Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least. Yet, a large majority of computers are running an operating system that spies on you and serves ads to you. Not just personal computers, but most businesses too. Buying a computer that doesn't come with windows on it is difficult for the average person who isn't trying, I don't mean Chromebooks or those system76 type computers, I mean walking through best buy or something the way a lot of non tech people end up buying computers. I mean i've had windows restore itself on my hardrive after a boot issue despite formatting it away years ago. Or at least try to, I was really confused when the windows recovery prompt popped up. As far as I.knew it had been gone since the day I got my laptop. Not to mention, thanks to Microsoft, I now essentially need their permission to install anything other than windows on modern hardware(I know it's not quite that simple and kernel modules can be self signed etc.), but effectively, at least from the issues i've dealt with...and continue to deal with, the most recent being with virtual box and having to self sign kernel.modules to make it work, uefi really feels like Microsoft trying to keep whatever bit of control they can over every computer whatever you decide to do with it. I'm not trying to start a uefi debate, I know there's work arounds and other things ways to deal with it, but since it's existed, it's been nothing but hassles for me and it's something I never asked for or wanted in my computer.
zentiggr 7y ago
Because I work in a Windows-only facility, at least where my level of dev work is done. And I live in a house where the only other person has only ever user Windows, and hates change. Like even desktop icons shouldn't relocate unless she does it herself. She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason, then there better not be any more differences than the ones indicated.
- starik36 7y ago
  > She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason Unless you are in the IT industry or at least an enthusiast, this is a rational approach.
  - iso1631 7y ago
    I'm in the IT industry, and it's my approach. I changed my desktop from fluxbox to xfce about 10 years ago, but have much the same keyboard shortcuts as I did 20 years ago, and the occasional icon has appeared in the dock as time progressed (namely volume, battery, wifi). I still use xplanet as my desktop for the rare times I see it, and I certainly don't have any icons on the desktop.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Actually the opposite. Unless you work in IT, you likely don't understand changelogs or release notes very well. Unless you can assess the risk of not updating, the safe approach is to auto update everything. Yes, it may be annoying and you may run into new bugs. On the other hand: Your USB ports stopped working? You should've been updating the bios. You got breached via the browser or email app? Should've been updating them.
    - overgard 7y ago
      Kind of sad that our industry standard is: you need to put up with us changing shit on you all the time so that things can keep working. If I were a marketer, which clearly I am not, I would think it would be bad marketing to have your computer constantly be telling you "HEY, you need to drop what you're doing to apply this fix for me at random, because if you don't someone is going to install ransomware. Oh and by the way, we're going to install Candy Crush Saga with this, because fuck you." Maybe the person not updating isn't rational, but if every update is fucking candy crush I couldn't blame them for saying "maybe microsoft is worse than the hackers"
Mirioron 7y ago
>I just don't understand why people run windows. For me the main reason is games. Dual booting is really annoying and jumping through the 15 hoops it takes to run games on Linux doesn't seem worth it considering how poorly games seem to run natively on Windows already. It's not a question of "there are no games for Linux" but rather "the game I want to play is not on Linux". This one point is basically the anchor that all the other usage is centered around for me. Linux simply doesn't offer something amazing enough over what Windows does to warrant all this trouble for games. If the games I wanted to play ran decently on Linux with few problems then I'd probably switch over. But considering that MS is now doing that Xbox game pass subscription even on Windows, I think the chance of switching is becoming less and less likely.
- sslayer 7y ago
  Steam with Proton and ProtonDb was a game changer. What runs native in Linux vs using Proton is like night and day
  - xnyan 7y ago
    Proton is fantastic, but you’re still saying I am going have to accept less compatibility and more work than on windows windows. Not worth it for me, especially with an nvidia GPU. I understand that’s mostly to blame on Nvidia but it’s still the reality of the situation.
- jjdredd 7y ago
  Same reason for me. If not for games, I would have switched a long time ago. My favourite game runs only on windows and requires an anti-cheat that runs only on windows. So I just dual-boot.
overgard 7y ago
I switched over to running desktop linux a couple months ago because I was so fed up with these things, but the truth is... it's just pretty bad. Like if I let my laptop go to sleep my touchpad will never work again. I had to do a bunch of weird kernel hacks to keep my wifi working when the device goes to sleep, and even then it's a hack (I had to enable the airplane mode button, and then make sure to hit it twice any time I open the screen. Come on!). And the lock screen breaks if I'm plugged into a monitor, it shows this weird low resolution version and a high resolution one on top of it. Everything is just incredibly sloppy and either outright broken, or kind of broken. This is Kubuntu btw! I tried Fedora and it crashed every two minutes if I booted X windows so, that didn't work out. Also the main thing with Fedora was it couldn't recognize my sound card, which is like the main intel thing built into every laptop. Maybe it's a winmodem thing again or something, but overall it just does not work at all. So the reason people are still using Microsoft: You HAVE to unless you explicitly buy hardware for Linux. It's just unusable otherwise and the trajectory is getting WORSE, not better.
- WanderPanda 7y ago
  Exactly my experience! In addition to that, it kills your battery in no time
- slgeorge 7y ago
  Yes, you MUST buy certified hardware [0], preferably with it pre-loaded with Linux [1]. Ultimately, Linux didn't make enough of a dent in the desktop hardware space in the 90's/00's. The level of interest from hardware vendors (ODM/OEM/component manufacturers) has gone down - that's why things are worse. If you don't use non-preloaded hardware you are NOT signalling to anyone that desktop Linux is important. This reduces overall interest - vendors think that no-one uses Linux - over the long run this reduces the amount of work done. The take-away is please buy a DELL Sputnik with support - you are signalling to the market you want desktop Linux - and if it breaks you can complain! I confess I only partially practise what I preach - I'm on a thinkpad =-) [0] https://certification.ubuntu.com/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/ and there are other sites [1] https://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln310507/ubuntu-based-developer-and-engineering-systems-project-sputnik?lang=en https://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln310507...
neycoda 7y ago
"I just don't understand why people run windows." Because not everyone wants to get things to work through command-line especially Broadcom drivers.
drngdds 7y ago
I use Windows because: - Chromebooks don't meet my needs and Macs are incredibly expensive. - There's a lot of software I care about which is Windows-only and doesn't have a good Linux alternative, especially games. - I have not had great experiences using Linux. I still run into lots of dumb little issues that make me feel like I'm back in the Windows XP days, except this time I have to enter mysterious terminal commands I found on Stack Exchange to make things work right. - You can easily avoid this kind of nonsense in Windows 10 with like half an hour of setup after your initial install.
mycall 7y ago
> I just don't understand why people run windows. Software that doesn't exist elsewhere (maybe OSX).

aurbano 7y ago

Exactly this. Show me facts, what percentage of battery life will it save my _specific_ laptop compared to FF, how much faster will _my_ experience be. Is there anything that the dev tools will allow me to do that I can't with FF Developer Edition? In any case I'm mainly a MacOS user, but still.

dralley 7y ago

The Windows division has never really been part of the "New Microsoft", it seems from the outside.

alharith 7y ago
Microsoft didn't buy Github out of the goodness of their heart. They also didn't buy it because of it's significant revenue, a couple hundred million is probably a marketing budget to Microsoft, not something that drives the bottom line. Microsoft also didn't buy it to score appearance points with the socially conscious dev community that populated most of Github, although it was a nice PR story for a bit. You could say the ICE thing has driven all that goodwill away. Microsoft bought Github for the data set. To mine code to train models to write code to put developers out of business. Microsoft is coming for all of your jobs. They aren't investing billions in AI research and Open AI for philanthropy. The sooner people realize this the better. Sure it's tin-foil, but it's a hill I am willing to die on.
- thestoicattack 7y ago
  I'm not scared of a "model" "trained" on the long tail of Github code any more than I'm scared of someone who can search stackoverflow faster than I can.
- thrower123 7y ago
  I shudder to think of the kind of code that a machine-learning product trained on the full set of public GitHub repositories would produce. It might be better than what Frontpage used to spit out, or Word, when you used the save as HTML option, but I'm not sanguine about that sort of thing ever putting anyone out of work. Are they working on something like that? I'm sure that there are people doing so. Will it eventually trickle in some limited way as a productivity enhancement into Visual Studio or VS Code? Probably. Is it going to be some kind of magical no-code silver bullet that obviates the need for programmers? Not a snowball's chance in hell.
- croon 7y ago
  I think the OP thing is bad. What you're suggesting (if they could pull it off) I would welcome. Either it turns into (an even worse than now) corporatist dystopia and there's turmoil before a reset, or it opens up for "everyone" and we're closer to post-scarcity. But most likely they'll automate some stuff, because this isn't real AI, and I can adapt faster than they can and do stuff their models can't.

spatz 7y ago

How about instead of a passive-aggressive ad try not showing me ads at all on my PC? It’s bad enough that it comes pre-installed and is the default.

will4274 7y ago

> Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools? Isn't this exactly what Microsoft is doing? Clicking on the ad leads to the product download page which also describes the features. In most cases, average users like to try software by feel, not by looking at a technical spec sheet.

latenightcoding 7y ago

Some friends think I'm overreacting for refusing to use Microsoft products to this day, yes they have open sourced a lot of cool tech but they are still Microsoft. I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it!

Permit 7y ago
>I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it! I don't have the same laptop so I can't comment on your exact situation. That said, I have a Windows machine and I am not using a Microsoft account to log in so your experience is not universal.
- jack_codes 7y ago
  A colleague just bought a new desktop and set it up last weekend. He ran into Microsoft wanting him to login to a MS account _on initial install_. He ended up having to go into the BIOS to disable networking so he could force the installer to let him initially setup a local account. I don't know if this is for every install and is just my anecdotal perspective.
  - therealx 7y ago
    It's a dark pattern. You can get around it, but it's not easy for normal people to do.
- latenightcoding 7y ago
  it is a recent change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103683
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magduf 7y ago

>those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. >Cynically, it's amazing that Microsoft collects so much personal data about each user -- and yet its "target" ads are hopelessly generic and tasteless. This doesn't surprise me. As someone else old enough to remember the Halloween documents, MS has long suffered from serious organizational incompetence. Just look at that whole debacle they went through with music players: "PlaysForSure", Zune, etc., where each one obsoleted the last one and screwed over any users who had bought into it. Exact same with their phone OSes. Maybe it has to do with that funny org-chart picture with the different MS business groups pointing guns at each other. They collect a bunch of personal data, but can't look at things from a big picture and think "we collect all this data from our users, so maybe we could use a little of that to target our ads better". Of course, if you look at MS's marketing over the past 20 years, it should be readily apparent that they have some of the worst and most clueless marketing talent in the entire corporate world.

dhx 7y ago
Organisation chart comic referred to: https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonkersworld.net/2011/06/27/organizational-charts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...
- eitland 7y ago
  And for those who wonder like me, the original is still there: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts I guess linking to the web archive is just carefulness at this point.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >I guess linking to the web archive is just carefulness at this point. It's a good idea IMO. Now that the web has been around for literally decades, I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something, found blog/forum posts to read, and then tried following links in those posts only to find they're dead, because they're so many years out-of-date.

harikb 7y ago

Just a few days, people were celebrating new Microsoft Edge being a viable competitor to Google Chrome and how it is all good for privacy. Let the thing take some hold, then complain about monopoly. If people want to "ban" something, they should ban "browser detection / user agent" and targeted ads based on that. If some state in "middle america" ran an ad targeted at users in SF stating "move to xyz, your life will be better", is that intrusive too? Well, then ban all targeted ads.

thejokerxi 7y ago

Win XP and Win7 was my all time fav microsoft OS. Screw 10. So much data collection and noise.

juststeve 7y ago

Not strong enough. Remember: Microsoft hearts linux.