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I worked part-time at a gas station many years ago. When the chores were done, I'd often be reading the newspapers, or straightening things out, and I'd inevita

I worked part-time at a gas station many years ago. When the chores were done, I'd often be reading the newspapers, or straightening things out, and I'd inevitably end up reading the labels of snacks and drinks and such. Eventually, I'd end up reading all of the asterisk'ed statements on the junk food, and it left me with a severe distaste for 'marketing speak', as well as how less-than-honest some of the labels were. This distaste carried over from snack food products to just about all consumer goods. Windows 8 forced defaults that people didn't like on desktops. You could fix this relatively quickly, but my issue is the principle of MS assuming that MS knows better than their users. Otherwise, I was a fan, so long as I could use educational licenses for free. Windows 10 was kinda nice, but is (imo) roughly when MS decided that they should force their ways on people. No matter what settings I provided to their update service, it would inevitably decide that I must update and restart when I was trying to use my damn machine. Multiple times in college, I'd get up from what I was working on to do some little 15-minute task, and find that Windows had shut down and was in the process of updating. After the second time I lost work, I made some registry edits to block the auto-install and auto-restart. Updates would get run at my convenience, finally. Microsoft managed to make updates easy, and then painful again. Around that same time, it felt like the 'marketing speak' was starting to talk down to me, infiltrating dialog boxes, and implying that Microsoft knew better than I did as to how I should be using my machine. When once dialogs were simply informational, they were now suggestive and intrusive, and groan-inducing. It's only gotten worse, and more pervasive. I updated my PC a few times when trying to get Elden ring to work last week, and ran into the infamous full-screen not-normally-closable Edge advertisement. The 'close' button was disabled, rightclick in taskbar->close did nothing, and the ONE option available was to click 'Get Started', implying that I as a user agree with this all in some way. Instead, I killed the window via task manager, and decided that my next desktop PC will be linux-first, with a locked-down Windows partition for when cross-compat isn't available for my use cases. I view an OS as a piece of software that allows me to make use of the hardware in my PC, and not as a service. Cue me, some years ago setting up something for Windows, and being told by the installer that "Windows is a Service". Bullshit!

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> my issue is the principle of MS assuming that MS knows better than their users. Web devs do this too when they decide to change scrolling behavior. One website I went to decided that 1 click should be half a line of scrolling and override my 1 click = 2 lines behavior. I'm just trying to figure out what would possibly make a web dev think overriding a user-defined setting with the dev's own personal preference is a feature. They had to go out of their way to spend time to develop that, which made me spend time figuring out exactly which JavaScript file to block with to prevent that from happening again. > [win 10 forced updates] Aggravating indeed, but I don't think Microsoft is entirely to blame. There are plenty of users that would just never update their systems if it wasn't forced. How many XP machines were vulnerable to MS08-067 for YEARS after a patch was available? But yeah...I planned on doing a CPU-Mobo-RAM trifecta upgrade next year, along with a new NVMe drive, and take that time to upgrade to Windows 11, but the more I hear about it, the more I think I should just stick with 10. After tweaking, it behaves well enough. Win11 just doubles-down on dark patterns and anti-consumer bullshit. I'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat if all my games worked on it.
- gigaflop 5y ago
  > Web devs My big gripe with websites is when they break my standard 'flow' of opening links in a new tab to view later, or my 'flow' of web use in general. For years upon years, I'm taught by experience that clicking a link should either replace my current window or open a new one, and that middle-clicking will ignore that, opening the linked content in a separate tab. Great! I can do a (cognitive) lazy-load and effectively finish my first train of thought before further narrowing my field of focus. Now, when searching on Google Maps for restaurants in an area (and plenty of other sites for other purposes), middle click does nothing (aside from engaging the scroll thing that I never use). I must follow Google's flow of clicking, being taken to a new tab, and returning to my original one in order to complete my original task, since I also can't just rightclick->open in new tab. All this, on an element that is made to look like a hyperlink, but not actually act like one. It's just some cheap-feeling .js SPA that acts more like an app than a website, which makes me do extra work to accomplish a given task. > Updates I totally understand wanting security patches to be made available at high speed and wide breadth, and if Windows Update spun off security updates into some sort of module for Windows Defender, I'd be much more willing to accept the nags to update. However, I don't think it's in MS's interest to do so, as that would mean less auto-installed telemetry, and less MS-beneficial default settings being auto-applied or re-applied upon update, less people 'accidentally' defaulted back to Edge and Bing. We're also in a different internet ecosystem than the XP days. Software is often built to expect constant connectivity, or be entirely reliant on it. A somewhat relevant example is how PC versions of Call of Duty dropped support for dedicated servers after Modern Warfare (One or two more releases had dedicated servers, but I can't be bothered to remember which). My clan from those days ran a Hardcore-mode Search and Destroy server, and we were able to form and govern our own community, because we effectively 'owned' an instance of the game server, and had control over it. Nowadays, you hit quick-play, drop in, and everyone is just as unimportant and anonymous as the next person. When the main servers are offline, so are you, because the lobbies are yet-another-instance of some VM or server software hosted in the cloud by the company. The game exists as a 'Live Service', which just means that they're going to drip out some purchasable content and 'season passes' for bundles of the dripped content. I'll be rebuilding pretty much my whole PC in the next 2 or 3 years, since everything in it is getting old (and a GTX 1080 isn't as good as it used to be), and Linux will be my main OS since I play much fewer games anyways. Windows will be for when I just need DirectX and whatever proprietary DRM/Anticheat spyware for my software to be usable, and I'll practice ripping out telemetry from the OS when I get bored.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

> my issue is the principle of MS assuming that MS knows better than their users. Web devs do this too when they decide to change scrolling behavior. One website I went to decided that 1 click should be half a line of scrolling and override my 1 click = 2 lines behavior. I'm just trying to figure out what would possibly make a web dev think overriding a user-defined setting with the dev's own personal preference is a feature. They had to go out of their way to spend time to develop that, which made me spend time figuring out exactly which JavaScript file to block with to prevent that from happening again. > [win 10 forced updates] Aggravating indeed, but I don't think Microsoft is entirely to blame. There are plenty of users that would just never update their systems if it wasn't forced. How many XP machines were vulnerable to MS08-067 for YEARS after a patch was available? But yeah...I planned on doing a CPU-Mobo-RAM trifecta upgrade next year, along with a new NVMe drive, and take that time to upgrade to Windows 11, but the more I hear about it, the more I think I should just stick with 10. After tweaking, it behaves well enough. Win11 just doubles-down on dark patterns and anti-consumer bullshit. I'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat if all my games worked on it.

gigaflop 5y ago
> Web devs My big gripe with websites is when they break my standard 'flow' of opening links in a new tab to view later, or my 'flow' of web use in general. For years upon years, I'm taught by experience that clicking a link should either replace my current window or open a new one, and that middle-clicking will ignore that, opening the linked content in a separate tab. Great! I can do a (cognitive) lazy-load and effectively finish my first train of thought before further narrowing my field of focus. Now, when searching on Google Maps for restaurants in an area (and plenty of other sites for other purposes), middle click does nothing (aside from engaging the scroll thing that I never use). I must follow Google's flow of clicking, being taken to a new tab, and returning to my original one in order to complete my original task, since I also can't just rightclick->open in new tab. All this, on an element that is made to look like a hyperlink, but not actually act like one. It's just some cheap-feeling .js SPA that acts more like an app than a website, which makes me do extra work to accomplish a given task. > Updates I totally understand wanting security patches to be made available at high speed and wide breadth, and if Windows Update spun off security updates into some sort of module for Windows Defender, I'd be much more willing to accept the nags to update. However, I don't think it's in MS's interest to do so, as that would mean less auto-installed telemetry, and less MS-beneficial default settings being auto-applied or re-applied upon update, less people 'accidentally' defaulted back to Edge and Bing. We're also in a different internet ecosystem than the XP days. Software is often built to expect constant connectivity, or be entirely reliant on it. A somewhat relevant example is how PC versions of Call of Duty dropped support for dedicated servers after Modern Warfare (One or two more releases had dedicated servers, but I can't be bothered to remember which). My clan from those days ran a Hardcore-mode Search and Destroy server, and we were able to form and govern our own community, because we effectively 'owned' an instance of the game server, and had control over it. Nowadays, you hit quick-play, drop in, and everyone is just as unimportant and anonymous as the next person. When the main servers are offline, so are you, because the lobbies are yet-another-instance of some VM or server software hosted in the cloud by the company. The game exists as a 'Live Service', which just means that they're going to drip out some purchasable content and 'season passes' for bundles of the dripped content. I'll be rebuilding pretty much my whole PC in the next 2 or 3 years, since everything in it is getting old (and a GTX 1080 isn't as good as it used to be), and Linux will be my main OS since I play much fewer games anyways. Windows will be for when I just need DirectX and whatever proprietary DRM/Anticheat spyware for my software to be usable, and I'll practice ripping out telemetry from the OS when I get bored.