18 ms·

> I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. Then, how is Microsoft supposed to properly track your interests and sell that information to

by jgaa 4y ago

> I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. Then, how is Microsoft supposed to properly track your interests and sell that information to their "partners"? It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system. What they make today is basically a spyware-platform where you can run applications if you are really disciplined and persistent. I don't understand how people keep up with it. I've used Linux on my desktops and laptops for decades now.

damnesian 4y ago
> I don't understand how people keep up with it One word: Adobe. Once the Adobe suite goes completely online, Windows will be considered a lot less essential in the office, at least on the client end.
- margorczynski 4y ago
  Most big corps are based on Office365 - Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams. And all of that integrated tightly together. I don't think most big companies will move away from Windows completely, there is simply no worthy competitor to replace the office suite and to have it all integrated from top to bottom.
S_A_P 4y ago
You forget that it organizations are now able to install even more spyware made by Microsoft called o365 that is used to track worker productivity and a host of other tools such as netskope that make windows take 45 seconds plus to launch an approval dialog to escalate privileges.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
I used to dualboot with Slack and some version of Windows, since the early 2000s, although I stopped somewhat when VMs became a thing anf then WSL. I genuinely liked Windows 7, but 10 was a start down a bad path and 11 is just too far gone.
sircastor 4y ago
I’ve wondered for a bit if there’s a future where Windows turns into A Linux distribution with some extra tools and runtimes for legacy executables. Microsoft has some really expensive software it has to maintain. Office is also maintained on multiple platforms, but it feels like Windows is starting to be a drag on the company - lots of resources for not a lot of income. As wild as it would be, offloading a lot of dev to the OSS community would free up resources to differentiate their product.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  Windows is Windows because of the huge API, all the legacy support, the graphics subsystem, all the DirectX stuff etc. If the somehow did switch to running a Linux kernel for some reason, it wouldn't be noticeable to the end user at all. I can't see that ever happening though.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  As a mostly Linux user, I disagree. You simply can't replace Windows with Linux, at least not in the near future. Here is a page which summarize Linux shortcomings on the desktop: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t... One reason I think Linux (the kernel) would be a poor fit as a Windows replacement is the lack of a stable driver ABI. Linux is a monolithic kernel and all the drivers are expected to be part of it. It is a model that works because it fully embraces open source and community driven development. But not all manufacturers want that, first because they may not want to, open their code, or maybe they can't due to licensing arguments. It also means they need to invest significant resources into getting their code accepted by the community. The Windows driver model drove its rich hardware ecosystem. And if you think switching to a Linux driver model is going to be better, more free, think again, because we already have that with Android. Manufacturers fork the kernel and don't give much back to the community, just having them comply with the GPL is a struggle, and hardware support besides what is built into the phone is extremely limited, and because they don't work with the community, support for what's in the phone isn't carried on for more than a couple of years. And Windows really strong point is backwards compatibility. For example, I still use the "free" Photoshop CS2, 20 years later, works perfectly fine as a binary, I can run stuff that dates back from the 3.11 era, though as I understand it, it is mostly emulation at this point. This is part of the reason people use Windows. Microsoft tried to start clean with Windows RT, it was a failure. Apple can get away with it because they have complete control over their ecosystem, not Microsoft. Also, games.
4ggr0 4y ago
The only reason I don't use Linux on my personal PC is that I use it for gaming. My homeserver runs linux and at work I use Linux, shrug.
- orange_fritter 4y ago
  I bought a Windows gaming laptop in December, first time Windows gaming since 2010. Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it. I've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc. Perhaps I am too pampered/spoiled, but I'm pretty sure 99% of Windows users are just experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    > Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it. > 've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc. Probably because most of us don't have such issues. I have both a Windows box and an OS X box, and they both need about the same amount of rebooting (maybe once a week? I don't actively keep track). My current Windows box (about 4 months old) has never crashed. My previous Windows box rarely crashed (but it was >10 years old, so it _did_ have some crashes).
  - ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
    If you don’t work in tech and you aren’t actually interested in tech which is quite a large proportion of home users then switching away is too much work.
  - kgwxd 4y ago
    I haven’t seen a bsod in over 15 years on any of the 4 personal or handful of work machines I’ve used in that time. Last one I can even remember seeing was in Vista and it was from legit hardware failure. Can’t remember the last time I was forced to reboot either. It’s been suggested plenty, but ignored without issue.
ftl64 4y ago
It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot have taken so many hours of troubleshooting that could've been spent doing something actually productive. Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.
- junkilo 4y ago
  *NIX is the only viable choice for mission-critical desktop stability in 2023. But that isn't to say Windows isn't feature complete. It is still king when it comes to gaming. Desktop stability and reliability hasn't been a top-level OKR at Microsoft for many years. The company has been growing more product driven for years and falling victim to roadmaps being driven by muggles. The only place where you can actually design a truly stable and reliable desktop is with open-source kernels and user software.
- aNoob7000 4y ago
  I did the same thing with Ubuntu. I used it roughly for a year before getting tired of having to find workarounds for things like a webcam. I moved over to a Mac mini and life has been good. I still think the future is Linux. I see Microsoft and Apple taking their O/S in directions that are anti-consumer.
- xpil 4y ago
  My personal record is 11 months on Mint. I have also used Ubuntu, Fedora and (a long time ago) SUSE. But as you say, sooner or later something comes up that forces me to go back to Windows. Things like poor GPU performance for certain applications (like Obsidian for example) or GRUB acting up or WLAN/GPU drivers suddenly not working after a kernel upgrade and so on. Would you mind sharing your Win10 setup? I use it too, but it's a stock version with just some basic cleanup.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
> I don't understand how people keep up with it. For gaming / work. You wont have a better OS to work on as a .NET Developer considering Visual Studio is top tier, I guess VS on Mac comes second close, and Project Rider, but otherwise, Windows is the main platform. I otherwise use Linux on personal devices.
- LtdJorge 4y ago
  I found Rider much more enjoyable to use than VS. It doesn't implement so many languages, tools, etc, as langd come in plugins. It's much faster than VS with Resharper, and as a bonus, it is similar in usability to the rest of Jetbrains IDEs, which I was already using it. I only used .NET for modern Unity development, tho. I was using VS for C/C++ before using CLion and Riderfor that.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    Last I used it it was unusable, but this was during the .NET 1.1.1 days, so I will have to check it out again.
- tracker1 4y ago
  Rider is definitely usable on Linux... it works on MacOS and Windows as well, and imo, better than VS for Mac. I've pretty much stuck to VS Code for pretty much everything, though the conspiracy theorist in me thinks MS intentionally gimps functionality in the VS Code extension support for .Net (they've shown this a couple times, live reload for example). I work in .Net for a lot of backend code, mostly in WSL/Linux on VS Code. And it's not been horrible, though I'm much more efficient with Node or Deno at this point. Since .Net Core (and now .Net 5+) the space has changed a lot.
Rediscover 4y ago
Agreed. I've used Linux since I was afraid to touch BSD (in early-mid 1990s, i386 and TMS). I grew up on nix and found the whole shit-can of ~1992 horrible. Then Linux appeared. Of course I switched. Now I am back to BSD and Linux (Slackware). I have never had a prob (save for some audio with a CS* chip that was fixed by loading MS-NT & copying their firmware from a hot running machine and dumping it back into some otherOS - Dell Lat 360 or 36x).
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
I've used a Linux desktop for decades and I'm sick of it. My Windows machine never bricks itself on updates. All my hardware works with it. Getting something as basic as Bluetooth or 3D rendering working doesn't require a PhD. I don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for philosophical engineering reasons. I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I don't buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the goddamn thing. I would pay the NSA money in addition to letting them spy on me if I could just have a working fucking computer.
- blibble 4y ago
  > I don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for philosophical engineering reasons. have you used Windows in the last 20 years?
  - drno123 4y ago
    While Windows UI changes a lot, all old apps work fine in Win11. I guess the author was referring to Wayland bull…t
  - lukevp 4y ago
    “Have to update” is the key here. You can still run apps from windows 95 if you want to.
    - blibble 4y ago
      I can run X applications from the 80s on Wayland meanwhile Windows 11 has 4 or 5 different UI styles in control panel
      - asveikau 4y ago
        I don't run Wayland, but a few times per year I find myself picking up some unmaintained X thing and running it with a recent OS. I'd say on average compatibility is much better on Windows. Binary compatibility on Linux is often out of the question. Frequently this means picking up some old libs. libc5, old stdc++... For really old stuff with fewer dependencies that may not be a problem. As you get into a more modern era where software started to pile on large heaps of dependencies it becomes more challenging. Source compatibility typically means porting, sometimes nontrivial. Likely something is written in a time capsule of that era's poor C and C++ standards compliance. (i.e. C89 or C++98 existed, but compilers of the day accepted lots of nonsense, so software of that era doesn't even conform to those.) In contrast the Win32 API or COM is designed around binary compatibility. Maybe early 2000s dependencies (when MS started getting worse at this) are a problem. I think Win16 on modern amd64 is also a problem. But on average, compatibility is higher.
hitpointdrew 4y ago
>It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system. Mostly true, it's been a long time since Microsoft made a CONSUMER operating system. Windows Server isn't plagued with this crap, it costs a whole lot more, but doesn't have this nonsense. Also, isn't designed to be a desktop, the recommend install model these days is to install without the desktop gui (you basically get a powershell prompt, and that's it).
- intrasight 4y ago
  Came here to say same. I install Windows Server as my base OS and everything else including my "desktop" Windows, runs as a VM. This lets me hack up my desktops - both Windows and Linux - without concern, as I can rollback to a snapshot. I can't imagine not having this. If you do Windows development you'll probably have a Visual Studio license which will include a server license for "testing". I use that license as my base OS.
DeathArrow 4y ago
I've tried for decades to enjoy Linux desktop experience but simply couldn't. As for these news you can disable them if you find them annoying.
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  you can try, but you lose the weather info

by jgaa 4y ago

damnesian 4y ago

> I don't understand how people keep up with it One word: Adobe. Once the Adobe suite goes completely online, Windows will be considered a lot less essential in the office, at least on the client end.

margorczynski 4y ago
Most big corps are based on Office365 - Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams. And all of that integrated tightly together. I don't think most big companies will move away from Windows completely, there is simply no worthy competitor to replace the office suite and to have it all integrated from top to bottom.

S_A_P 4y ago

You forget that it organizations are now able to install even more spyware made by Microsoft called o365 that is used to track worker productivity and a host of other tools such as netskope that make windows take 45 seconds plus to launch an approval dialog to escalate privileges.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

I used to dualboot with Slack and some version of Windows, since the early 2000s, although I stopped somewhat when VMs became a thing anf then WSL. I genuinely liked Windows 7, but 10 was a start down a bad path and 11 is just too far gone.

sircastor 4y ago

I’ve wondered for a bit if there’s a future where Windows turns into A Linux distribution with some extra tools and runtimes for legacy executables. Microsoft has some really expensive software it has to maintain. Office is also maintained on multiple platforms, but it feels like Windows is starting to be a drag on the company - lots of resources for not a lot of income. As wild as it would be, offloading a lot of dev to the OSS community would free up resources to differentiate their product.

Zurrrrr 4y ago
Windows is Windows because of the huge API, all the legacy support, the graphics subsystem, all the DirectX stuff etc. If the somehow did switch to running a Linux kernel for some reason, it wouldn't be noticeable to the end user at all. I can't see that ever happening though.
GuB-42 4y ago
As a mostly Linux user, I disagree. You simply can't replace Windows with Linux, at least not in the near future. Here is a page which summarize Linux shortcomings on the desktop: https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t... One reason I think Linux (the kernel) would be a poor fit as a Windows replacement is the lack of a stable driver ABI. Linux is a monolithic kernel and all the drivers are expected to be part of it. It is a model that works because it fully embraces open source and community driven development. But not all manufacturers want that, first because they may not want to, open their code, or maybe they can't due to licensing arguments. It also means they need to invest significant resources into getting their code accepted by the community. The Windows driver model drove its rich hardware ecosystem. And if you think switching to a Linux driver model is going to be better, more free, think again, because we already have that with Android. Manufacturers fork the kernel and don't give much back to the community, just having them comply with the GPL is a struggle, and hardware support besides what is built into the phone is extremely limited, and because they don't work with the community, support for what's in the phone isn't carried on for more than a couple of years. And Windows really strong point is backwards compatibility. For example, I still use the "free" Photoshop CS2, 20 years later, works perfectly fine as a binary, I can run stuff that dates back from the 3.11 era, though as I understand it, it is mostly emulation at this point. This is part of the reason people use Windows. Microsoft tried to start clean with Windows RT, it was a failure. Apple can get away with it because they have complete control over their ecosystem, not Microsoft. Also, games.

4ggr0 4y ago

The only reason I don't use Linux on my personal PC is that I use it for gaming. My homeserver runs linux and at work I use Linux, shrug.

orange_fritter 4y ago
I bought a Windows gaming laptop in December, first time Windows gaming since 2010. Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it. I've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc. Perhaps I am too pampered/spoiled, but I'm pretty sure 99% of Windows users are just experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  > Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it. > 've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc. Probably because most of us don't have such issues. I have both a Windows box and an OS X box, and they both need about the same amount of rebooting (maybe once a week? I don't actively keep track). My current Windows box (about 4 months old) has never crashed. My previous Windows box rarely crashed (but it was >10 years old, so it _did_ have some crashes).
- ed_elliott_asc 4y ago
  If you don’t work in tech and you aren’t actually interested in tech which is quite a large proportion of home users then switching away is too much work.
- kgwxd 4y ago
  I haven’t seen a bsod in over 15 years on any of the 4 personal or handful of work machines I’ve used in that time. Last one I can even remember seeing was in Vista and it was from legit hardware failure. Can’t remember the last time I was forced to reboot either. It’s been suggested plenty, but ignored without issue.

ftl64 4y ago

It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot have taken so many hours of troubleshooting that could've been spent doing something actually productive. Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.

junkilo 4y ago
*NIX is the only viable choice for mission-critical desktop stability in 2023. But that isn't to say Windows isn't feature complete. It is still king when it comes to gaming. Desktop stability and reliability hasn't been a top-level OKR at Microsoft for many years. The company has been growing more product driven for years and falling victim to roadmaps being driven by muggles. The only place where you can actually design a truly stable and reliable desktop is with open-source kernels and user software.
aNoob7000 4y ago
I did the same thing with Ubuntu. I used it roughly for a year before getting tired of having to find workarounds for things like a webcam. I moved over to a Mac mini and life has been good. I still think the future is Linux. I see Microsoft and Apple taking their O/S in directions that are anti-consumer.
xpil 4y ago
My personal record is 11 months on Mint. I have also used Ubuntu, Fedora and (a long time ago) SUSE. But as you say, sooner or later something comes up that forces me to go back to Windows. Things like poor GPU performance for certain applications (like Obsidian for example) or GRUB acting up or WLAN/GPU drivers suddenly not working after a kernel upgrade and so on. Would you mind sharing your Win10 setup? I use it too, but it's a stock version with just some basic cleanup.

giancarlostoro 4y ago

> I don't understand how people keep up with it. For gaming / work. You wont have a better OS to work on as a .NET Developer considering Visual Studio is top tier, I guess VS on Mac comes second close, and Project Rider, but otherwise, Windows is the main platform. I otherwise use Linux on personal devices.

LtdJorge 4y ago
I found Rider much more enjoyable to use than VS. It doesn't implement so many languages, tools, etc, as langd come in plugins. It's much faster than VS with Resharper, and as a bonus, it is similar in usability to the rest of Jetbrains IDEs, which I was already using it. I only used .NET for modern Unity development, tho. I was using VS for C/C++ before using CLion and Riderfor that.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  Last I used it it was unusable, but this was during the .NET 1.1.1 days, so I will have to check it out again.
tracker1 4y ago
Rider is definitely usable on Linux... it works on MacOS and Windows as well, and imo, better than VS for Mac. I've pretty much stuck to VS Code for pretty much everything, though the conspiracy theorist in me thinks MS intentionally gimps functionality in the VS Code extension support for .Net (they've shown this a couple times, live reload for example). I work in .Net for a lot of backend code, mostly in WSL/Linux on VS Code. And it's not been horrible, though I'm much more efficient with Node or Deno at this point. Since .Net Core (and now .Net 5+) the space has changed a lot.

Rediscover 4y ago

Agreed. I've used Linux since I was afraid to touch BSD (in early-mid 1990s, i386 and TMS). I grew up on nix and found the whole shit-can of ~1992 horrible. Then Linux appeared. Of course I switched. Now I am back to BSD and Linux (Slackware). I have never had a prob (save for some audio with a CS* chip that was fixed by loading MS-NT & copying their firmware from a hot running machine and dumping it back into some otherOS - Dell Lat 360 or 36x).

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

I've used a Linux desktop for decades and I'm sick of it. My Windows machine never bricks itself on updates. All my hardware works with it. Getting something as basic as Bluetooth or 3D rendering working doesn't require a PhD. I don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for philosophical engineering reasons. I can rebuild an engine, but I pay a mechanic to do it. I don't buy cars as pet projects. I just want to drive the goddamn thing. I would pay the NSA money in addition to letting them spy on me if I could just have a working fucking computer.

blibble 4y ago
> I don't have to replace half the GUI apps when suddenly Microsoft decides to redesign its whole UI layer for philosophical engineering reasons. have you used Windows in the last 20 years?
- drno123 4y ago
  While Windows UI changes a lot, all old apps work fine in Win11. I guess the author was referring to Wayland bull…t
- lukevp 4y ago
  “Have to update” is the key here. You can still run apps from windows 95 if you want to.
  - blibble 4y ago
    I can run X applications from the 80s on Wayland meanwhile Windows 11 has 4 or 5 different UI styles in control panel
    - asveikau 4y ago
      I don't run Wayland, but a few times per year I find myself picking up some unmaintained X thing and running it with a recent OS. I'd say on average compatibility is much better on Windows. Binary compatibility on Linux is often out of the question. Frequently this means picking up some old libs. libc5, old stdc++... For really old stuff with fewer dependencies that may not be a problem. As you get into a more modern era where software started to pile on large heaps of dependencies it becomes more challenging. Source compatibility typically means porting, sometimes nontrivial. Likely something is written in a time capsule of that era's poor C and C++ standards compliance. (i.e. C89 or C++98 existed, but compilers of the day accepted lots of nonsense, so software of that era doesn't even conform to those.) In contrast the Win32 API or COM is designed around binary compatibility. Maybe early 2000s dependencies (when MS started getting worse at this) are a problem. I think Win16 on modern amd64 is also a problem. But on average, compatibility is higher.

hitpointdrew 4y ago

>It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system. Mostly true, it's been a long time since Microsoft made a CONSUMER operating system. Windows Server isn't plagued with this crap, it costs a whole lot more, but doesn't have this nonsense. Also, isn't designed to be a desktop, the recommend install model these days is to install without the desktop gui (you basically get a powershell prompt, and that's it).

intrasight 4y ago
Came here to say same. I install Windows Server as my base OS and everything else including my "desktop" Windows, runs as a VM. This lets me hack up my desktops - both Windows and Linux - without concern, as I can rollback to a snapshot. I can't imagine not having this. If you do Windows development you'll probably have a Visual Studio license which will include a server license for "testing". I use that license as my base OS.

DeathArrow 4y ago

I've tried for decades to enjoy Linux desktop experience but simply couldn't. As for these news you can disable them if you find them annoying.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago
you can try, but you lose the weather info