7 ms·

I loved and lived Windows for a decade and felt so cozy and at home in it, but when the first force-upgrade happened, I knew it was time to move along. Just ca

I loved and lived Windows for a decade and felt so cozy and at home in it, but when the first force-upgrade happened, I knew it was time to move along. Just cannot accept things changing without my consent on my workstation.

jart 5y ago
Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsoft makes big changes to look, but at the end of the day its substance is the same. Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity.
- saghm 5y ago
  > Mac and Linux do the same thing The earlier responses in the thread were talking about forced upgrades. I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; you can continue to use old packages and even reboot the machine indefinitely. Sure, you might not get security fixes or keep unrelated packages up to date beyond a certain point, but that's not at all the same thing as updates being applied without actually being invoked by the user.
  - jart 5y ago
    Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades. It's also probably possible to opt-out of bug fixes too. If you want to put a rosy spin on things, you could think of it as a free system administration service. There's a lot of people out there who are working really hard, for you, to make sure it goes smoothly. It's also common for Linux distros to use the opt-out model these days too.
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      > Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades. I dunno, I've heard multiple reports of people leaving their machine alone and coming back to it having upgraded and rebooted into a new version, sometimes into an unrecoverable blue screen. How would they have opted out of that?
      - habeebtc 5y ago
        Went through that with Win7 a few times. Eventually found a way to disable. In this case, the forced W11 upgrade was forced on me by my company via push.
        forgotmypw17 5y ago
        Whenever there's a way to disable it, it's usually discovered after the fact, and then next month a new setting is introduced which must also be disabled. Fool me once, etc.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; Eh, not very accurate in my opinion. If you want to use the latest software you are very much forced to upgrade Linux because they have no concept of separating the platform from the applications that run on it. Either everything is bleeding edge or nothing is. Or you compile things from source like it is 1979. There are Windows programs released today that will run just fine on Windows 7. How many Linux programs released today will run on Karmic Koala without recompilation?
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      I just looked up what Karmic Koala is, and it is Ubuntu 9.x. I have not tried to use that recently, but I am quite happy running 14.x today, and it runs everything I need. I use IntelliJ 13.x for my Git stuff, Geany for most of my text editing, a dozen different browsers at whatever versions they are for my Web things, and whatever versions of mpv, mc, LibreOffice, etc. it came with for what those programs do. With only 1GB of RAM it's not always as snappy as I'd like, but I use the periods of swapping to meditate. I don't have to use programs released today, only ones which I need today.
    - saghm 5y ago
      My point is that there's a difference between "you need to update to use certain things" and "your computer literally is forcibly updated even if you don't want it to or aren't ready". I agree that Windows is probably ahead in terms of backwards compatibility, but the first few comments in the thread were talking about machines getting updated without them applying the updates, which is not a thing I'm aware of happening on most Linux distros.
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      I'm not sure who you mean by "they", but there's a lot of difference between distros, and many different ways to put the pieces together (or leave them out) Compiling from source is the most reliable way to run the latest and greatest version of a particular application that I've found to date, leaving out all the middlemen like package mantainers, whose competence I may or may not trust. And generally speaking, I'd trust a several-decades-old technique much more than something just released. As far as Windows software goes, I've found Wine to be a much more reliable platform for old Windows applications than Windows 7 or 10, although there's nothing better than emulated Windows 9x for running programs of that era. (I make "any browser" websites, so running 1995+ software is something I do on the regular.)
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Mac does it, which is why I also quit mac. Some GNU/Linux distributions do it, but not all of them. And I have way more control over it when it does happen. Apple was pretty solid until around Mountain Lion. Once I saw them messing with "Save As", I jumped. I've had good experiences with LXDE and Xfce so far on multiple distros. Anything Gnome are no longer in the running, however.
  - rewgs 5y ago
    macOS does not force updates or upgrades.
  - jart 5y ago
    Looking at Google Trends for GNOME,KDE,LXDE,XFCE from 2004 to present is interesting. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F037t6,lxde,xfce,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... Back then GNOME and KDE stood head and shoulders over all alternatives, whereas these last twelve months, all the Linux desktop choices appear more or less in the same league. Open source sort of behaves the opposite way as markets where instead of shakeout we get shakein.
    - pitay 5y ago
      Interestingly just removing the US location restriction it looks quite different, with KDE being far more frequently searched for than the others at the moment. Searches for Linux desktop environments look to have reduced a lot in total since 2004, on Google at least. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F037t6,lxde,xfce,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
- kouteiheika 5y ago
  > Linux do the same thing. [..] Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity. If you're using a "mainstream" desktop environment (e.g. GNOME), then yeah, but that's not universally true. I've been using exactly the same desktop environment for something like ~12 years; I love Linux because if you set it up right it's essentially zero maintenance (significantly less than Windows and macOS), and almost nothing changes without your consent. The only forced change during those 12 years that I've noticed was the migration to systemd, and Firefox reskinning their GUI for no good reason every other release.
  - jart 5y ago
    The forced changes to the init system and desktop gui are far more radical than anything Microsoft or Apple ever did. The init system change was also due to the GUI people. GNOME told everyone they must adopt SystemD or else you can't use GNOME anymore. It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides. If a system administrator woke up from a 15 year coma, they would have no clue how to use any of this stuff and would have to start over from scratch. How can we as open source developers, present a better alternative to big tech products if we keep dividing and conquering ourselves? To think about how unfair that is to the thousands of volunteers who worked hard to create these desktops and systems and treasure troves of stack overflow answers, that just get swept away two years later, it's a failure of leadership.
    - chousuke 5y ago
      Bah. If a sysadmin woke up from a coma, systemd would be the least of their worries, since it has a comprehensive manual, working backwards compatibility for most standard interfaces, and is in most cases much, much easier to deal with than what was before it. They might scream in horror at how containers often get (ab)used though.
      - jart 5y ago
        More like compound tragedy. The world's largest search engine used to run on a single computer. Now the world's smallest app has its own kubernetes cluster.
- Jach 5y ago
  People who still prefer GNOME2 GUIs are using MATE, what is the OSX 10.3 lover to do?
  - jart 5y ago
    I googled for some screenshots and MATE doesn't look like GNOME 2 to me. See https://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=CentOS_5&p=x&f=1 https://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=CentOS_5&p=x&f=1 and https://int3ractive.com/blog/2019/things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu-mate/ https://int3ractive.com/blog/2019/things-to-do-after-install... I found some screenshots of MATE desktops from ten years ago. Those did look like GNOME2. However it appears that since then MATE chosen to embrace a new identity too.
    - Jach 5y ago
      Look instead at MATE's homepage: https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/ Or their screenshots. For Ubuntu MATE, select "Traditional" in your link's step 1. You can also look at the final screenshot of https://learnubuntumate.weebly.com/traditional-menu.html https://learnubuntumate.weebly.com/traditional-menu.html Sure, MATE has evolved to give more options, and distros seem to like defaulting its look to something non-traditional, but the traditional look is still very GNOME2 and very much alive. I've got an old desktop from 2009 that's run Gentoo the whole time , I never upgraded to GNOME3, but I did switch to MATE when it came out, and haven't had to mess with it since apart from trying out different icon sets or other small theme changes. It looks basically the same as ever, even compared to my old laptop screenshots from 2007 -- I still have my wobbly windows from Compiz (fka Beryl) too.
      - forgotmypw17 5y ago
        TBH, both Ubuntu and Gnome have completely lost my trust as far as making stable and predictable environments. The Mac-like global menubar which they've grafted on without being able to adopt the applications is an atrocity IMO. I consider Windows 95 / NT4 / 2000 to be "peak desktop GUI" and use distros which allow me to emulate that look, feel, and behavior. I use it until it fails to deliver that experience and then keep trying other distros until I find another one who has not yet rotted out. So far, I have only had to switch distros a handful of times.
- bavell 5y ago
  > [...] Linux do the same thing. My Arch + AwesomeWM setup I've been running for the last 5+ years would disagree with you. Kinda one of the reasons I went with this setup, I have total control over all updates, installed software, etc.
romwell 5y ago
>I loved and lived Windows for a decade I know it's probably a typo, but I can't help but imagine the wonderful OS that Windows 6 never was :)
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Not sure where the supposed typo is, I started with 3.11, then used 95, NT4, 98, 2k, and around XP/Vista is where I realized it's time to move on because of the increasing upgrade nags and the UI being changed without my consent... I still stuck around until Windows 7 because I had just grown so into it, was very comfortable with keyboard controls, etc. Then a computer I knew upgraded itself to Windows 8 without being asked to, and started booting into a bsod...
  - RedShift1 5y ago
    There was never any free and forced upgrade to Windows 8, I assume you mean Windows 10?
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      You may be right, perhaps it was Windows 8 to Windows 10. But even in the days of XP, upgrade nags were already in effect, and one keypress or mouse click at the wrong time (when the popup appeared) could send you down that road. Unless you already anticipated it ahead of time (from past experiences) and went through the settings and disabled automatic update checking. The overall intent and attitude matters more to me than the details, and the general intent of Microsoft (and Apple, and Gnome, and Ubuntu, and many others) seems to be "we know how your desktop should look and operate better than you do." This is completely the opposite of what I want, which is to have a workstation which is configured to facilitate my work, where nothing changes without my explicit REQUEST.

jart 5y ago

Mac and Linux do the same thing. I know people who still prefer the OSX 10.3 and the GNOME2 GUIs, or for instance the way nytimes.com looked back in 2010. That's the problem with making GUIs the thing you love. Some goons stop by your home every few years and toss up the furniture. Apple is the gold standard since it pretty much looks the same as it did in the 80's and each major version tunes subtle things. Microsoft makes big changes to look, but at the end of the day its substance is the same. Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity.

saghm 5y ago
> Mac and Linux do the same thing The earlier responses in the thread were talking about forced upgrades. I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; you can continue to use old packages and even reboot the machine indefinitely. Sure, you might not get security fixes or keep unrelated packages up to date beyond a certain point, but that's not at all the same thing as updates being applied without actually being invoked by the user.
- jart 5y ago
  Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades. It's also probably possible to opt-out of bug fixes too. If you want to put a rosy spin on things, you could think of it as a free system administration service. There's a lot of people out there who are working really hard, for you, to make sure it goes smoothly. It's also common for Linux distros to use the opt-out model these days too.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    > Force is a strong word, since Windows provides ways to opt-out of feature upgrades. I dunno, I've heard multiple reports of people leaving their machine alone and coming back to it having upgraded and rebooted into a new version, sometimes into an unrecoverable blue screen. How would they have opted out of that?
    - habeebtc 5y ago
      Went through that with Win7 a few times. Eventually found a way to disable. In this case, the forced W11 upgrade was forced on me by my company via push.
      - forgotmypw17 5y ago
        Whenever there's a way to disable it, it's usually discovered after the fact, and then next month a new setting is introduced which must also be disabled. Fool me once, etc.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; Eh, not very accurate in my opinion. If you want to use the latest software you are very much forced to upgrade Linux because they have no concept of separating the platform from the applications that run on it. Either everything is bleeding edge or nothing is. Or you compile things from source like it is 1979. There are Windows programs released today that will run just fine on Windows 7. How many Linux programs released today will run on Karmic Koala without recompilation?
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    I just looked up what Karmic Koala is, and it is Ubuntu 9.x. I have not tried to use that recently, but I am quite happy running 14.x today, and it runs everything I need. I use IntelliJ 13.x for my Git stuff, Geany for most of my text editing, a dozen different browsers at whatever versions they are for my Web things, and whatever versions of mpv, mc, LibreOffice, etc. it came with for what those programs do. With only 1GB of RAM it's not always as snappy as I'd like, but I use the periods of swapping to meditate. I don't have to use programs released today, only ones which I need today.
  - saghm 5y ago
    My point is that there's a difference between "you need to update to use certain things" and "your computer literally is forcibly updated even if you don't want it to or aren't ready". I agree that Windows is probably ahead in terms of backwards compatibility, but the first few comments in the thread were talking about machines getting updated without them applying the updates, which is not a thing I'm aware of happening on most Linux distros.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    I'm not sure who you mean by "they", but there's a lot of difference between distros, and many different ways to put the pieces together (or leave them out) Compiling from source is the most reliable way to run the latest and greatest version of a particular application that I've found to date, leaving out all the middlemen like package mantainers, whose competence I may or may not trust. And generally speaking, I'd trust a several-decades-old technique much more than something just released. As far as Windows software goes, I've found Wine to be a much more reliable platform for old Windows applications than Windows 7 or 10, although there's nothing better than emulated Windows 9x for running programs of that era. (I make "any browser" websites, so running 1995+ software is something I do on the regular.)
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Mac does it, which is why I also quit mac. Some GNU/Linux distributions do it, but not all of them. And I have way more control over it when it does happen. Apple was pretty solid until around Mountain Lion. Once I saw them messing with "Save As", I jumped. I've had good experiences with LXDE and Xfce so far on multiple distros. Anything Gnome are no longer in the running, however.
- rewgs 5y ago
  macOS does not force updates or upgrades.
- jart 5y ago
  Looking at Google Trends for GNOME,KDE,LXDE,XFCE from 2004 to present is interesting. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F037t6,lxde,xfce,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... Back then GNOME and KDE stood head and shoulders over all alternatives, whereas these last twelve months, all the Linux desktop choices appear more or less in the same league. Open source sort of behaves the opposite way as markets where instead of shakeout we get shakein.
  - pitay 5y ago
    Interestingly just removing the US location restriction it looks quite different, with KDE being far more frequently searched for than the others at the moment. Searches for Linux desktop environments look to have reduced a lot in total since 2004, on Google at least. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F037t6,lxde,xfce,kde https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
kouteiheika 5y ago
> Linux do the same thing. [..] Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity. If you're using a "mainstream" desktop environment (e.g. GNOME), then yeah, but that's not universally true. I've been using exactly the same desktop environment for something like ~12 years; I love Linux because if you set it up right it's essentially zero maintenance (significantly less than Windows and macOS), and almost nothing changes without your consent. The only forced change during those 12 years that I've noticed was the migration to systemd, and Firefox reskinning their GUI for no good reason every other release.
- jart 5y ago
  The forced changes to the init system and desktop gui are far more radical than anything Microsoft or Apple ever did. The init system change was also due to the GUI people. GNOME told everyone they must adopt SystemD or else you can't use GNOME anymore. It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides. If a system administrator woke up from a 15 year coma, they would have no clue how to use any of this stuff and would have to start over from scratch. How can we as open source developers, present a better alternative to big tech products if we keep dividing and conquering ourselves? To think about how unfair that is to the thousands of volunteers who worked hard to create these desktops and systems and treasure troves of stack overflow answers, that just get swept away two years later, it's a failure of leadership.
  - chousuke 5y ago
    Bah. If a sysadmin woke up from a coma, systemd would be the least of their worries, since it has a comprehensive manual, working backwards compatibility for most standard interfaces, and is in most cases much, much easier to deal with than what was before it. They might scream in horror at how containers often get (ab)used though.
    - jart 5y ago
      More like compound tragedy. The world's largest search engine used to run on a single computer. Now the world's smallest app has its own kubernetes cluster.
Jach 5y ago
People who still prefer GNOME2 GUIs are using MATE, what is the OSX 10.3 lover to do?
- jart 5y ago
  I googled for some screenshots and MATE doesn't look like GNOME 2 to me. See https://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=CentOS_5&p=x&f=1 https://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=CentOS_5&p=x&f=1 and https://int3ractive.com/blog/2019/things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu-mate/ https://int3ractive.com/blog/2019/things-to-do-after-install... I found some screenshots of MATE desktops from ten years ago. Those did look like GNOME2. However it appears that since then MATE chosen to embrace a new identity too.
  - Jach 5y ago
    Look instead at MATE's homepage: https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/ Or their screenshots. For Ubuntu MATE, select "Traditional" in your link's step 1. You can also look at the final screenshot of https://learnubuntumate.weebly.com/traditional-menu.html https://learnubuntumate.weebly.com/traditional-menu.html Sure, MATE has evolved to give more options, and distros seem to like defaulting its look to something non-traditional, but the traditional look is still very GNOME2 and very much alive. I've got an old desktop from 2009 that's run Gentoo the whole time , I never upgraded to GNOME3, but I did switch to MATE when it came out, and haven't had to mess with it since apart from trying out different icon sets or other small theme changes. It looks basically the same as ever, even compared to my old laptop screenshots from 2007 -- I still have my wobbly windows from Compiz (fka Beryl) too.
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      TBH, both Ubuntu and Gnome have completely lost my trust as far as making stable and predictable environments. The Mac-like global menubar which they've grafted on without being able to adopt the applications is an atrocity IMO. I consider Windows 95 / NT4 / 2000 to be "peak desktop GUI" and use distros which allow me to emulate that look, feel, and behavior. I use it until it fails to deliver that experience and then keep trying other distros until I find another one who has not yet rotted out. So far, I have only had to switch distros a handful of times.
bavell 5y ago
> [...] Linux do the same thing. My Arch + AwesomeWM setup I've been running for the last 5+ years would disagree with you. Kinda one of the reasons I went with this setup, I have total control over all updates, installed software, etc.

romwell 5y ago

>I loved and lived Windows for a decade I know it's probably a typo, but I can't help but imagine the wonderful OS that Windows 6 never was :)

forgotmypw17 5y ago
Not sure where the supposed typo is, I started with 3.11, then used 95, NT4, 98, 2k, and around XP/Vista is where I realized it's time to move on because of the increasing upgrade nags and the UI being changed without my consent... I still stuck around until Windows 7 because I had just grown so into it, was very comfortable with keyboard controls, etc. Then a computer I knew upgraded itself to Windows 8 without being asked to, and started booting into a bsod...
- RedShift1 5y ago
  There was never any free and forced upgrade to Windows 8, I assume you mean Windows 10?
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    You may be right, perhaps it was Windows 8 to Windows 10. But even in the days of XP, upgrade nags were already in effect, and one keypress or mouse click at the wrong time (when the popup appeared) could send you down that road. Unless you already anticipated it ahead of time (from past experiences) and went through the settings and disabled automatic update checking. The overall intent and attitude matters more to me than the details, and the general intent of Microsoft (and Apple, and Gnome, and Ubuntu, and many others) seems to be "we know how your desktop should look and operate better than you do." This is completely the opposite of what I want, which is to have a workstation which is configured to facilitate my work, where nothing changes without my explicit REQUEST.