14 ms·

In my (admittedly biased) view, microsoft sacrificed security in the name of "usability". The problem is with what they considered "usability". It looks like in

In my (admittedly biased) view, microsoft sacrificed security in the name of "usability". The problem is with what they considered "usability". It looks like in their view, "easy of use" simply meant "keep it working the way users are used to do". This created many bad habits in windows users: always clicking next, installing software from untrusted sources, hiding extensions of files, need for the user to install drivers after pluging a device, use of administrator rights even for simple tasks, rebooting the computer to make something work, periodic reinstalling the OS to make it faster.... and many other behaviors that are very very strange for people who don't use windows. The other problem it created is that windows users expect things to be like that. Even if something is better they will have difficulty using it if it is different from how windows users are used to. Certainly this helps to keep windows market while making everybody pay a hefty price. I'd bet if it wasn't because of android, ios and smart tv's; because they are different enough from what users think a "computer" is; windows users would expect a port to connect some form of media for software installation on these devices. These habits afflict even power users, developers and administrators. Just consider how long windows lived without a reasonable powerful command line. I was more than once looked down from "windows experts" because for them, using a command line like is commonly done on linux is a "thing of the past". People should learn some windows behaviors are not normal. Your computer shouldn't get slower over time, installing software from untrusted sources is not normal, an extension is part of the name of a file and it should not be hidden, using the computer as administrator should be reserved for administrator tasks only, your desktop area is not /tmp/, drivers belong to the kernel and devices should work as soon as they are plugged in, the command line is not a thing of the past... We are all paying the price for not killing these myths.

inetknght 4y ago
> We are all paying the price for not killing these myths. I can't tell you how many times I've taken on teaching a novice or junior developer and then had to un-teach them all the shit that Windows teaches users.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  There is a funny symptom among windows users when they have a notebook/laptop: they need a mouse. Even when the notebook has a good trackpad, they still need a mouse. I tried to investigate why this happens. What I suspect: windows overuse/abuse clicks. The user must click so many points, they don't care about using the keyboard or shortcuts. Also, AFAIK, only recently windows has support for things like two-finger scroll and right click by tapping with two fingers; most users don't even know this is possible and look surprised when I show them that. They have a need for a mouse. They scroll the text using the scrollbar, they use it even for moving the caret to the above line when writing code! It makes me sad just looking at that.
  - spookie 4y ago
    Most students that age play videogames
  - kiririn 4y ago
    Give me a mouse (with a good sensor and no acceleration) over keyboard navigation any day I appreciate there are people who swear by the keyboard driven text editors etc. But I feel like these people do not appreciate how fast you can be with a good mouse, low input lag and muscle memory
  - inetknght 4y ago
    I admit I also use a mouse even on laptops. I hate trackpads. But my text experience is much more blended. If I move around a lot in a file then I might drag the scrollbar with the mouse. But if it's a few lines or maybe just a few pages then I'll use arrow keys (or tmux's or vi's equivalent) and sometimes pageup/pagedown. I particularly prefer being able to use globs and regular expressions for everything though. Files for all devices -- only relying on permissions -- is absolutely wonderful. And the best part is not (usually) having configuration hidden in some registry ... just use `grep -P` on `/etc` to find what needs to change.
wowokay 4y ago
I’m not sure about the command line not being a thing of the past, it’s not something I do on my current gen devices, game consoles/smart phones/watches/tablets. In fact for the general software user I think terminal commands are a thing of the past.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  > In fact for the general software user I think terminal commands are a thing of the past. For the general software user.... maybe. Seen advanced users and developers acting like that makes them seem very likely underestimating or ignoring the power of features like history and how you can combine and compose commands.
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    How do you justify "maybe" when it's not only the general software user but many advanced users too. Maybe even most of them. What is actually left is a tiny group of people compared to all the computer population. Terminal is a thing of the past. No use pretending it isn't.
    - marcodiego 4y ago
      > What is actually left is a tiny group of people compared to all the computer population. Certainly not on HN. You could say the same about assistive technologies, for example. Also, the current "computer population" still is a distortion. A lot of people started using computers to access the internet and have some entertainment. This is being replaced by smartphones, tablets and smart tv's. So, the advanced users share on "computer population" is (I think) increasing. You can see some evidence of people using less the "computer" and more other devices: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202207 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-20...
    - thelopa 4y ago
      If the terminal is a thing of the past, you can leave me behind. Come find me when you can replicate the power and brevity of a relatively simple tool like “find -exec”. Then we can talk about the real power tools!
bilekas 4y ago
You have a point, and a few I do agree with, but to play devils advocate here, there is a reason they are trying to make it 'out of the box' as possible. It's a business for them and ease of use is the key. I don't believe however they just disregard the security issues, I know a lot of the old school engineers involved in a lot of the core of older OS' and I can say hands down they're some of the best and most responsible engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Over time microsoft have gotten a little bit better with open source for example, again because they realised that bigger community assistance helps their bottom line. Personally, in terms of proprietry OS' I do prefer their model over Apple/Redhat. And for many many years I despised Micro$oft.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  > It's a business for them and ease of use is the key. I have no personal problem with ease of use or market success because of it. I do have a personal problem with the feeling that it looks people behave almost like they are being brainwashed to believe some very very bad behaviors are "ease of use". > I don't believe however they just disregard the security issues, As an example, AFAIK windows still hides extensions by default.
  - bilekas 4y ago
    > As an example, AFAIK windows still hides extensions by default. I'll bite on this one, it was always a weird choice as IIRC it was always there before back in 3.1 - xp!
  - Falkon1313 4y ago
    Yes, hiding extensions is indeed really stupid. That's one of the first things I turn off when installing Windows. Meanwhile Mac does user-hostile things like hides scrollbars by default (so you don't even know something is scrollable) and also scrolls backwards by default (scroll up to scroll something down, scroll down to scroll something up). Those are a couple of the first settings I fix when I setup a new Mac. To this day I've never figured out how to get the edit keys (home, end, pgup, pgdn, insert, delete) to work properly. Those are all things that Windows does get right by default. Also Windows has window management built-in by default without needing a 3rd-party app, unlike Mac. For a windowed GUI-based operating system, that's a pretty big deal.
owalt 4y ago
Primarily a Windows user here (though not really by choice) and I guess I'll bite - what does it matter what people put on the Desktop? Are there any security implications of not keeping it tidy? The rest of your points I fully agree with, but that one sticks out as weird to me.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  Yes, this one I have to admit it is probably some form of OCD on my part. I get nervous when I see windows users using they desktops as /tmp/ ... it looks so disorganized! Then I remember it is really a personal thing... then I remember windows does have "C:\Temp" but whatever you put there is not deleted on the next reboot. Whatever I do that I know is temporary, will go to /tmp and I know it will be deleted after I reboot. Windows users are not used to this concept and use their desktops as a makeshift /tmp/. They have to delete the files themselves and sometimes just forget it quickly growing to an aberrant state where the desktop is extremely polluted. It may be some form of OCD with me, but it is very common among windows users and it IS ugly.
  - tentacleuno 4y ago
    > Whatever I do that I know is temporary, will go to /tmp and I know it will be deleted after I reboot. Only problem with that is that if I remember correctly, on some distributions, the /tmp folder is actually held in-memory. This means that, the more stuff is in there, the more RAM is going to be used up. There's also /run/user/1000 which is more of a systemd thing, and that's definitely mapped to memory (at least it is on Fedora).
saagarjha 4y ago
> People should learn some windows behaviors are not normal. Your computer shouldn't get slower over time, installing software from untrusted sources is not normal, an extension is part of the name of a file and it should not be hidden, using the computer as administrator should be reserved for administrator tasks only, your desktop area is not /tmp/, drivers belong to the kernel and devices should work as soon as they are plugged in, the command line is not a thing of the past... Playing devil’s advocate, the Unix/Linux model of things doesn’t have to be “normal” either. Why should file extensions be a thing? Why shouldn’t people use their desktop as they please? Why put drivers in the kernel?
- marcodiego 4y ago
  > Why should file extensions be a thing? Because they are part of the name of the file. Note: my file manager even identifies the mime type without extension. That is how it should be, changing the extension should not make the file harder to use. To this day, AFAIK, windows file manager still uses the extension to identify file type, thus allowing the user to easily change it may break expectation. GNOME's nautilus, KDE's Dolphin and even Apple's finder do it right: press f2 and you can rename the file without changing the extension, unless you go out of you way for that. It is also a security breach: image.jpg and image.exe may look the same. > Why shouldn’t people use their desktop as they please? Sure they should! But the fact that the OS lacks a working /tmp incentivizes a form of use that is disorganized and ugly. > Why put drivers in the kernel? Read about complaints about wacom tablet driver phoning home or printers drivers doing the same. To use my wacom tablet I simply plugged it. Since it is on the kernel, it will work on any architecture the kernel support. They didn't spent a dime to make it working on my raspi, for example. Also, once it is in the kernel, whoever change any internal api will fix every driver code to keep it working, so things that work once will work for a very long time. I met people who lost a TCE scanner and an ASUS mini projector because it wasn't supported by the most recent windows versions. The ASUS mini projector (disclaimer: I had a little involvement in the development of its driver) works on my rockpi4 just by plugging it; the windows experience with it is far from that simple.
  - elxx 4y ago
com2kid 4y ago
> drivers belong to the kernel Pre-Windows Vista, Sound drivers were responsible for a double digit % of Windows crashes. So they got ripped out. And video cards drivers aren't exactly the most famously reliable bits of code, having the entire display subsystem be restartable is an amazing boon to stability. > Your computer shouldn't get slower over time Wish someone told my Android phone that! > installing software from untrusted sources is not normal > devices should work as soon as they are plugged in, That is one of the things Windows popularized. Auto-mount is a Linux thing. Heck I remember circa 2005 being yelled at online because I expected my USB mouse to work under Linux when I plugged it into my laptop, something Windows had been doing since 1997 or so.
- kaetemi 4y ago
  I have a generic USB mouse that doesn't work even on present day Linux. Works just fine on Windows.
  - TheGoddessInari 4y ago
    I have a USB mouse with 12 side buttons, and it "just works" because USB HID.
  - washadjeffmad 4y ago
    I have a mouse that will blue screen Windows Server at boot but works fine under Linux.
  - sph 4y ago
    Must be some terrible hardware because I haven't seen a USB mouse have OS-specific issues in two decades. I bet it's a $5 mouse from the turn of the millenium.
    - kaetemi 4y ago
      It's a new one, made in China.
      - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jsmith99 4y ago
Those aren't all windows specific. Nothing like adding untrusted ppa repositories or pasting magic commands from a random blog into the terminal because it fixed someone's problem once, or piping wget into the shell, or being free with the sudo. I think bad habits are cross platform.
323 4y ago
90% of what you said about Windows stopped being true at least 7 years ago, it doesn't get slower anymore, you don't need to reboot all the time, users are not admins, ... > installing software from untrusted sources is not normal Funny, because you also hear exactly the opposite critique here all the time: trusted sources (App Store/Google Play/Windows Store/macOS Store) are walled gardens and represent a war against general computing and owning your device. I know you meant the Linux package repositories, but it applies to all stores.
- lawl 4y ago
  The difference between stores and repositories is the ability to add your own sources that you may or may not trust, making it not a walled garden. (And yes, that does make snaps a walled garden)
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    This is a great point regarding walled garden vs repositories with respect to choice. The original point though was implying repositories were better because they are trusted. However if choice allows trusting a new repository you just came across, choice similarly is fine to trust an .exe from the internet too. Not advocating for random .exe installing BTW. But honestly, for 99% of what we do we make trust choices based off Reputation and Probability guesses for outcome. We mostly don't have a clue what the executable code will do exactly. In this case, I have a hunch that a well known repository is likely not to feed me malware. But I also figure that VLC/7-zip/notepad++ probably won't either. So will happily download their .exe. And I don't want anyone removing that option.
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  Exactly. I for one, love the fact that I can find some old or niche game or hobbyist program, get it directly from their website, install it, and use it that simply. Sure I use the package manager in linux, and the google play store on android, and brew on mac, but they're all very limited and clunky by comparison. There is (relatively) little software for them. And if you want something older, or that isn't in the mainstream package manager, then you have to do unpleasant workarounds to trick or coerce the system into installing it. Then once you install something you have to hunt to find it, and there are bits scattered all over the system. That's one thing I don't like about Windows, is that while it got much better at everything else, it also inherited the 'scatter stuff everywhere when installing' mentality from linux (or somewhere), and even went a step beyond that with the registry. But at least we're beyond the days of 'DLL hell' and programs are usually pretty good about uninstalling themselves now. And there is some benefit to having user data under the user directory (especially for backups), although that could be an easy checkbox option during install or configuration. Still would be better if 'portable program' style installation, where you just unzip it in a directory and there it is, the whole thing, right where you put it, was the default.
delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
> People should learn some windows behaviors are not normal > drivers belong to the kernel No, they do not. A modern computer is extremely modular, and the driver subsystem should be equally modular and allow easy plug-and-play. The Windows NT driver model excels at this, and the Linux model of compiling drivers into the kernel is comparatively asinine. Every time I update the Nvidia driver on Arch I have to wait for it to compile into the kernel with DKMS. For the record, I find some UNIX behaviours equally anachronistic. - 'Every file is a bag of bytes' - 'A dot in front of a file/directory means it's hidden' - 'The OS as an IDE' - 'Config files are plaintext files that need to be parsed by every single program' (this is now leaking into Windows, too) etc.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  >> drivers belong to the kernel > No, they do not. A modern computer is extremely modular, and the driver subsystem should be equally modular and allow easy plug-and-play. I get this. > The Windows NT driver model excels at this, and the Linux model of compiling drivers into the kernel is comparatively asinine. The linux driver model guaranteed me much better compatibility when using the SAME driver under different architectures and they continued worked when the kernel was updated. > Every time I update the Nvidia driver on Arch I have to wait for it to compile into the kernel with DKMS. This is a good example of the problems that happen when a driver is not in the kernel. >For the record, I find some UNIX behaviours equally anachronistic. Sure! One of my favorites: you can't have a directory with ":" in its name on your PATH.
maxloh 4y ago
Package management in Linux is a pain in the ass. It is too easy to remove preinstalled packages and if you do so, it will be a potential failing point in your system until something happened. You need to install packages for some basic features and everyone was just install and forget. People don't remove packages after they have served their purpose. Those packages will stay in your system, occupying space and slowing up everything. The worse thing is that there is no easy way to "diff" the original system, and find out what have you installed/removed.

inetknght 4y ago

> We are all paying the price for not killing these myths. I can't tell you how many times I've taken on teaching a novice or junior developer and then had to un-teach them all the shit that Windows teaches users.

marcodiego 4y ago
There is a funny symptom among windows users when they have a notebook/laptop: they need a mouse. Even when the notebook has a good trackpad, they still need a mouse. I tried to investigate why this happens. What I suspect: windows overuse/abuse clicks. The user must click so many points, they don't care about using the keyboard or shortcuts. Also, AFAIK, only recently windows has support for things like two-finger scroll and right click by tapping with two fingers; most users don't even know this is possible and look surprised when I show them that. They have a need for a mouse. They scroll the text using the scrollbar, they use it even for moving the caret to the above line when writing code! It makes me sad just looking at that.
- spookie 4y ago
  Most students that age play videogames
- kiririn 4y ago
  Give me a mouse (with a good sensor and no acceleration) over keyboard navigation any day I appreciate there are people who swear by the keyboard driven text editors etc. But I feel like these people do not appreciate how fast you can be with a good mouse, low input lag and muscle memory
- inetknght 4y ago
  I admit I also use a mouse even on laptops. I hate trackpads. But my text experience is much more blended. If I move around a lot in a file then I might drag the scrollbar with the mouse. But if it's a few lines or maybe just a few pages then I'll use arrow keys (or tmux's or vi's equivalent) and sometimes pageup/pagedown. I particularly prefer being able to use globs and regular expressions for everything though. Files for all devices -- only relying on permissions -- is absolutely wonderful. And the best part is not (usually) having configuration hidden in some registry ... just use `grep -P` on `/etc` to find what needs to change.

wowokay 4y ago

I’m not sure about the command line not being a thing of the past, it’s not something I do on my current gen devices, game consoles/smart phones/watches/tablets. In fact for the general software user I think terminal commands are a thing of the past.

marcodiego 4y ago
> In fact for the general software user I think terminal commands are a thing of the past. For the general software user.... maybe. Seen advanced users and developers acting like that makes them seem very likely underestimating or ignoring the power of features like history and how you can combine and compose commands.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  How do you justify "maybe" when it's not only the general software user but many advanced users too. Maybe even most of them. What is actually left is a tiny group of people compared to all the computer population. Terminal is a thing of the past. No use pretending it isn't.
  - marcodiego 4y ago
    > What is actually left is a tiny group of people compared to all the computer population. Certainly not on HN. You could say the same about assistive technologies, for example. Also, the current "computer population" still is a distortion. A lot of people started using computers to access the internet and have some entertainment. This is being replaced by smartphones, tablets and smart tv's. So, the advanced users share on "computer population" is (I think) increasing. You can see some evidence of people using less the "computer" and more other devices: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202207 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-20...
  - thelopa 4y ago
    If the terminal is a thing of the past, you can leave me behind. Come find me when you can replicate the power and brevity of a relatively simple tool like “find -exec”. Then we can talk about the real power tools!

bilekas 4y ago

You have a point, and a few I do agree with, but to play devils advocate here, there is a reason they are trying to make it 'out of the box' as possible. It's a business for them and ease of use is the key. I don't believe however they just disregard the security issues, I know a lot of the old school engineers involved in a lot of the core of older OS' and I can say hands down they're some of the best and most responsible engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Over time microsoft have gotten a little bit better with open source for example, again because they realised that bigger community assistance helps their bottom line. Personally, in terms of proprietry OS' I do prefer their model over Apple/Redhat. And for many many years I despised Micro$oft.

marcodiego 4y ago
> It's a business for them and ease of use is the key. I have no personal problem with ease of use or market success because of it. I do have a personal problem with the feeling that it looks people behave almost like they are being brainwashed to believe some very very bad behaviors are "ease of use". > I don't believe however they just disregard the security issues, As an example, AFAIK windows still hides extensions by default.
- bilekas 4y ago
  > As an example, AFAIK windows still hides extensions by default. I'll bite on this one, it was always a weird choice as IIRC it was always there before back in 3.1 - xp!
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  Yes, hiding extensions is indeed really stupid. That's one of the first things I turn off when installing Windows. Meanwhile Mac does user-hostile things like hides scrollbars by default (so you don't even know something is scrollable) and also scrolls backwards by default (scroll up to scroll something down, scroll down to scroll something up). Those are a couple of the first settings I fix when I setup a new Mac. To this day I've never figured out how to get the edit keys (home, end, pgup, pgdn, insert, delete) to work properly. Those are all things that Windows does get right by default. Also Windows has window management built-in by default without needing a 3rd-party app, unlike Mac. For a windowed GUI-based operating system, that's a pretty big deal.

owalt 4y ago

Primarily a Windows user here (though not really by choice) and I guess I'll bite - what does it matter what people put on the Desktop? Are there any security implications of not keeping it tidy? The rest of your points I fully agree with, but that one sticks out as weird to me.

marcodiego 4y ago
Yes, this one I have to admit it is probably some form of OCD on my part. I get nervous when I see windows users using they desktops as /tmp/ ... it looks so disorganized! Then I remember it is really a personal thing... then I remember windows does have "C:\Temp" but whatever you put there is not deleted on the next reboot. Whatever I do that I know is temporary, will go to /tmp and I know it will be deleted after I reboot. Windows users are not used to this concept and use their desktops as a makeshift /tmp/. They have to delete the files themselves and sometimes just forget it quickly growing to an aberrant state where the desktop is extremely polluted. It may be some form of OCD with me, but it is very common among windows users and it IS ugly.
- tentacleuno 4y ago
  > Whatever I do that I know is temporary, will go to /tmp and I know it will be deleted after I reboot. Only problem with that is that if I remember correctly, on some distributions, the /tmp folder is actually held in-memory. This means that, the more stuff is in there, the more RAM is going to be used up. There's also /run/user/1000 which is more of a systemd thing, and that's definitely mapped to memory (at least it is on Fedora).

saagarjha 4y ago

> People should learn some windows behaviors are not normal. Your computer shouldn't get slower over time, installing software from untrusted sources is not normal, an extension is part of the name of a file and it should not be hidden, using the computer as administrator should be reserved for administrator tasks only, your desktop area is not /tmp/, drivers belong to the kernel and devices should work as soon as they are plugged in, the command line is not a thing of the past... Playing devil’s advocate, the Unix/Linux model of things doesn’t have to be “normal” either. Why should file extensions be a thing? Why shouldn’t people use their desktop as they please? Why put drivers in the kernel?

marcodiego 4y ago
> Why should file extensions be a thing? Because they are part of the name of the file. Note: my file manager even identifies the mime type without extension. That is how it should be, changing the extension should not make the file harder to use. To this day, AFAIK, windows file manager still uses the extension to identify file type, thus allowing the user to easily change it may break expectation. GNOME's nautilus, KDE's Dolphin and even Apple's finder do it right: press f2 and you can rename the file without changing the extension, unless you go out of you way for that. It is also a security breach: image.jpg and image.exe may look the same. > Why shouldn’t people use their desktop as they please? Sure they should! But the fact that the OS lacks a working /tmp incentivizes a form of use that is disorganized and ugly. > Why put drivers in the kernel? Read about complaints about wacom tablet driver phoning home or printers drivers doing the same. To use my wacom tablet I simply plugged it. Since it is on the kernel, it will work on any architecture the kernel support. They didn't spent a dime to make it working on my raspi, for example. Also, once it is in the kernel, whoever change any internal api will fix every driver code to keep it working, so things that work once will work for a very long time. I met people who lost a TCE scanner and an ASUS mini projector because it wasn't supported by the most recent windows versions. The ASUS mini projector (disclaimer: I had a little involvement in the development of its driver) works on my rockpi4 just by plugging it; the windows experience with it is far from that simple.
- elxx 4y ago

com2kid 4y ago

> drivers belong to the kernel Pre-Windows Vista, Sound drivers were responsible for a double digit % of Windows crashes. So they got ripped out. And video cards drivers aren't exactly the most famously reliable bits of code, having the entire display subsystem be restartable is an amazing boon to stability. > Your computer shouldn't get slower over time Wish someone told my Android phone that! > installing software from untrusted sources is not normal > devices should work as soon as they are plugged in, That is one of the things Windows popularized. Auto-mount is a Linux thing. Heck I remember circa 2005 being yelled at online because I expected my USB mouse to work under Linux when I plugged it into my laptop, something Windows had been doing since 1997 or so.

kaetemi 4y ago
I have a generic USB mouse that doesn't work even on present day Linux. Works just fine on Windows.
- TheGoddessInari 4y ago
  I have a USB mouse with 12 side buttons, and it "just works" because USB HID.
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  I have a mouse that will blue screen Windows Server at boot but works fine under Linux.
- sph 4y ago
  Must be some terrible hardware because I haven't seen a USB mouse have OS-specific issues in two decades. I bet it's a $5 mouse from the turn of the millenium.
  - kaetemi 4y ago
    It's a new one, made in China.
    - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jsmith99 4y ago

Those aren't all windows specific. Nothing like adding untrusted ppa repositories or pasting magic commands from a random blog into the terminal because it fixed someone's problem once, or piping wget into the shell, or being free with the sudo. I think bad habits are cross platform.

323 4y ago

90% of what you said about Windows stopped being true at least 7 years ago, it doesn't get slower anymore, you don't need to reboot all the time, users are not admins, ... > installing software from untrusted sources is not normal Funny, because you also hear exactly the opposite critique here all the time: trusted sources (App Store/Google Play/Windows Store/macOS Store) are walled gardens and represent a war against general computing and owning your device. I know you meant the Linux package repositories, but it applies to all stores.

lawl 4y ago
The difference between stores and repositories is the ability to add your own sources that you may or may not trust, making it not a walled garden. (And yes, that does make snaps a walled garden)
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  This is a great point regarding walled garden vs repositories with respect to choice. The original point though was implying repositories were better because they are trusted. However if choice allows trusting a new repository you just came across, choice similarly is fine to trust an .exe from the internet too. Not advocating for random .exe installing BTW. But honestly, for 99% of what we do we make trust choices based off Reputation and Probability guesses for outcome. We mostly don't have a clue what the executable code will do exactly. In this case, I have a hunch that a well known repository is likely not to feed me malware. But I also figure that VLC/7-zip/notepad++ probably won't either. So will happily download their .exe. And I don't want anyone removing that option.
Falkon1313 4y ago
Exactly. I for one, love the fact that I can find some old or niche game or hobbyist program, get it directly from their website, install it, and use it that simply. Sure I use the package manager in linux, and the google play store on android, and brew on mac, but they're all very limited and clunky by comparison. There is (relatively) little software for them. And if you want something older, or that isn't in the mainstream package manager, then you have to do unpleasant workarounds to trick or coerce the system into installing it. Then once you install something you have to hunt to find it, and there are bits scattered all over the system. That's one thing I don't like about Windows, is that while it got much better at everything else, it also inherited the 'scatter stuff everywhere when installing' mentality from linux (or somewhere), and even went a step beyond that with the registry. But at least we're beyond the days of 'DLL hell' and programs are usually pretty good about uninstalling themselves now. And there is some benefit to having user data under the user directory (especially for backups), although that could be an easy checkbox option during install or configuration. Still would be better if 'portable program' style installation, where you just unzip it in a directory and there it is, the whole thing, right where you put it, was the default.

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago

> People should learn some windows behaviors are not normal > drivers belong to the kernel No, they do not. A modern computer is extremely modular, and the driver subsystem should be equally modular and allow easy plug-and-play. The Windows NT driver model excels at this, and the Linux model of compiling drivers into the kernel is comparatively asinine. Every time I update the Nvidia driver on Arch I have to wait for it to compile into the kernel with DKMS. For the record, I find some UNIX behaviours equally anachronistic. - 'Every file is a bag of bytes' - 'A dot in front of a file/directory means it's hidden' - 'The OS as an IDE' - 'Config files are plaintext files that need to be parsed by every single program' (this is now leaking into Windows, too) etc.

marcodiego 4y ago
>> drivers belong to the kernel > No, they do not. A modern computer is extremely modular, and the driver subsystem should be equally modular and allow easy plug-and-play. I get this. > The Windows NT driver model excels at this, and the Linux model of compiling drivers into the kernel is comparatively asinine. The linux driver model guaranteed me much better compatibility when using the SAME driver under different architectures and they continued worked when the kernel was updated. > Every time I update the Nvidia driver on Arch I have to wait for it to compile into the kernel with DKMS. This is a good example of the problems that happen when a driver is not in the kernel. >For the record, I find some UNIX behaviours equally anachronistic. Sure! One of my favorites: you can't have a directory with ":" in its name on your PATH.

maxloh 4y ago

Package management in Linux is a pain in the ass. It is too easy to remove preinstalled packages and if you do so, it will be a potential failing point in your system until something happened. You need to install packages for some basic features and everyone was just install and forget. People don't remove packages after they have served their purpose. Those packages will stay in your system, occupying space and slowing up everything. The worse thing is that there is no easy way to "diff" the original system, and find out what have you installed/removed.