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I find it totally incomprehensible how anyone could possibly still use Windows seriously as a developer/hacker/programmer/interested in computing. Installing s

• jonathantf2 5y ago
  > with no way to automate anything Most things in Windows can be automated with PowerShell, application installs are usually just a silent install switch away.
• __del__ 5y ago
  i was similarly perplexed but upon reflection i may understand it. windows kept me at the level of "power user," and i suspect it lulls many into that complacency. sure i wrote a few windows programs, debugged a few i hadn't written, and i ran some pretty niche tools, but i wasn't truly hacking on my system. most of it was off limits anyway, but more importantly i had stopped learning because i was a power user with niche tools and that felt like plenty. with linux i can patch software to satisfy whims and have it cooperating with the package management ecosystem in minutes. suppose i want to do something simple, like suppress an annoying error message i don't care about. i expect that downloading the source code, grepping for the error, removing it, compiling, packaging, and installing will take me something like 3 minutes of effort. seriously. these power users don't know what they're missing.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  > I find it totally incomprehensible Happy to help > Installing software in Windows is insane, relies on you to blindly trust an exe, non reproducible, and with no way to automate anything These three points are wrong, but I understand your confusion. You don't blindly trust an exe, you download it via https from the official website. The installs are "reproducible" to a point that 99% of users care about. You can automate installations for popular software quite easily. > Don't conflate problems with your proprietary software and Linux. Shockingly you may have to adapt and learn something new, or find something equivalent. "Conflation" is the wrong word there. But regardless, ironically you're conflating "not knowing" new software and complaining about bugs in new software. You seem to be saying that no one should do either, simply because both are a case of "not knowing". It's very popular to dismiss bugs in Linux software as someone "not knowing" how to use it, but it's lazy thinking. > Don't conflate weird hardware issue as a fault with Linux for not supporting it. Blame the manufacturer for doing something esoteric. That's wrong. On what basis do you say that all hardware issues on Linux are the result of the manufacturer doing "something esoteric"? In reality, having looked into it myself, it's very possible to hold Linux partly at fault for ALL hardware issues. Why? Because you may not know this but on Linux, unlike Windows, all drivers effectively must be approved and included in the kernel source code by L. Torvalds himself. That sets an incredibly high bar for driver availability, and causes Linux to lag behind other OSs in terms of driver support. Bet you also didn't know that hardware manufacturers need to retest their driver after every kernel update, because the kernel team often breaks things, and if the manufacturer doesn't keep on top of their driver code, it'll fall into disrepair. (Meanwhile on Windows your Windows vista drivers from 2007 will work in Windows 11(!) > Not to mention all the blatantly user hostile features in Win 10/11 Most people do not experience features in Windows 10/11 that they consider harmful. You may experience them as harmful. You may see others experiencing them and consider them harmful. But most people who experience them do not find them harmful. Got it? > inconsistencies (O(10) ways to decorate a window??) Most people don't care about that, believe it or not (most people are smart enough to not fall off their chair and explode when they encounter a strangely-styled window border) > I personally do not trust Microsoft at all. Why do I get the feeing most posts like this could be summarized thusly...
  • foxes 5y ago
    >The installs are "reproducible" to a point that 99% of users care about I would hardly call click an pray, and then having to redo this every time you want to set up a fresh install reproducible or deterministic. My standard for that is using Nix. >if the manufacturer doesn't keep on top of their driver code, it'll fall into disrepair Imagine actually having to care about the products you release. >Most people do not experience features in Windows 10/11 that they consider harmful. I think any sane person should consider advertisements in their file explorer harmful. For a person using their computer for basic tasks, office work, some productivity I'd point them to a Mac. Otherwise if you are a developer I'd still recommend Mac or make the switch to Linux. Windows is just too far gone. Just because a lot of people don't know any better, doesn't mean they would still be okay with the current status quo, if they knew what the alternatives are. It's like driving a car. American cities seem like some hellish dystopian carscape, and everyone is trapped in the system, but they perpetuate it.
    • phendrenad2 5y ago
      > I would hardly call click an pray, and then having to redo this every time you want to set up a fresh install reproducible or deterministic. My standard for that is using Nix. Your standard is overengineered and a waste of time. No one needs that. IT is not paid a million dollars per year, we can spare a few man-hours. > Imagine actually having to care about the products you release. Actually, imagine NOT having to care because Windows exists and will allow you to ship one driver and it'll work forever. Wouldn't that be nice? Think of the cost savings. Think of the driver stability. Stop imagining, it's reality. > I think any sane person should consider advertisements in their file explorer harmful. Well you thought wrong, most people don't care or are very mildly annoyed/bemused. If you only read HN and TheRegister, you might come away thinking that everyone is suffering life-altering psychological trauma from that Candy Crush ad, but it's simply not a major issue.
• rstuart4133 5y ago
  > I find it totally incomprehensible how anyone could possibly still use Windows seriously as a developer/hacker/programmer/interested in computing. Spoken like a true developer. I have one nit: I don't think anyone does use Windows for hacking. It's too locked down, too resource hungry, utterly opaque and the number of platforms it runs on can be counted on one hand. No one in their right mind would put Windows on a RPi. I'm not sure what Windows is now. It's not a particularly reliable, robust, light, secure or stable platform for the masses to run apps and games on. iOS, Android (and WinPhone in its day) do a far better job. It's far too heavy, expensive and inflexible to use as a server platform. That leaves one niche: the company wide computer system for companies that can't build their own. Windows is the king of the "company owned, controlled and monitored computer". Admittedly it's a huge market, and they own it. If there are competitors that aren't selling "rent all your computing resources on our cloud infrastructure", I can't see them. And the companies that have the wherewithal to build their own corporate computing structure are few and far between: Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like. You won't find the vast bulk of normal businesses such as Bridgestone, local hospitals or banks in that list. But equally, that market is ripe for the plucking. Microsoft does an appallingly bad job at it. To wit: most of the ransomware, and company owning (like Sony) are in fact failures in the security model Microsoft has sold these companies. If you look at the model Microsoft is peddling nowadays, it's almost the reverse of the best model we've developed so far, trustless. It's the "corporate locked down VPN" style, based on InTune. And it's not getting better. Microsoft's software engineering processes have been getting worse, as in the poor API documentation now regularly commented on here, the testing rates have dropped and the effect is noticeable, Windows just keep getting slower and bigger. (Admittedly many Linux distro's are also getting bigger and slower, but Linux has distro's pulling in both directions: feature rich but big and tiny but few features. Users: take your pick. Windows is headed in one direction only.) To add insult to injury, the companies are now being forced to rent computing resources from Microsoft's cloud for things like SSO (Azure AD), one drive storage, and even device control (InTune is cloud based). So Microsoft's corporate customers are being dragged toward a Google cloud like model where they rent every CPU cycle and byte of storage anyway. I thought Kim Jong-un's take down and complete ownership of Sony would be enough to trigger change away from the Microsoft model. Clearly it wasn't. Now I'm not sure what it will take.