10 ms·

It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, tak

It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me. Honestly MacOS isn't much better. Linux is still crap software, but we've reached the point where most things can be done on Linux, so good riddance. I hope that more people switch and Linux continues to improve. There's actually interesting improvements being made in the Linux world too, like NixOS.

Animats 3y ago
> It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. It is. At Windows 7, they pretty much had desktops right. Everything mostly worked. They'd finally fixed the crashing problems. (How? The Static Driver Verifier validated that third-party kernel drivers would not crash the rest of the system, and a classifier applied to crash dumps routed similar crash dumps to the same maintainer.) The UI was reasonable for a desktop, and wasn't a clone of the mobile UI. No ads. Didn't phone home too much, and you could turn off auto-update. No issues with installing your own software. Then Microsoft tried to make desktop look like mobile and tablet. Desktop began to look like a big phone, optimized for content consumption and fat finger selection. The result was something that was neither a good desktop nor a good content consumption device.
- Solvency 3y ago
  Everyone loves to use the meme "enshittification" but fat fingerization started the whole downward trend. In fact, most UI is designed for a big fat doughy hand to sloppily slap a single giant rounded button.
- PicassoCTs 3y ago
  I sat near an administrator who loudly cursed all day, because they force that gui down upon all system internal tools and ruined the info-density of the dashboards.
  - sithadmin 3y ago
    As someone that’s been forced to reluctantly wear the ‘Windows sysadmin’ on and off for the past ~15 years due to circumstances beyond my control…this just sounds like the complaint of someone too lazy to learn PowerShell.
    - anothernewdude 3y ago
      The linux subsystem, despite being about as wrongheaded as running linux user space on the Windows OS can be as an idea, solves that problem. Nobody needs PowerShell, unless you're dealing with very old systems. And in that case, you're already lost.
      - vetinari 3y ago
        The point of learning powershell is not because it is some great shell, but the available bindings to many subsystems, that allow you to admin them; including many toggles and options, that are not available in any gui. Bash running in wsl does not have these bindings.
        anothernewdude 3y ago
        You've convinced me. Getting away from Windows as quickly as possible in the fastest direction is definitely the goal.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Other UNIXes and mainframes did it first, in regards to emulating Linux kernel in some form or fashion. WSL makes sense in the context that Microsoft was too dumb to keep improving Windows NT UNIX subsystem, and to throw away SUA as well. Regarding WSL, it can't be used to admnister Windows systems anyway.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  > you could turn off auto-update I would not mess with that bit these days
  - pierat 3y ago
    There is a difference between: 1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha. 2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later. Windows is #1. Linux is #2. Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks. And, I absolutely despise software with "Mothership knows best" crap. (It's also why I despise Ubuntu's SNAP. Same shit.)
    - cedilla 3y ago
      The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. If the system doesn't eventually force them to update, they just won't. That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else. If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool. Windows 10 / 11 always ask you when you want to apply the update.
      - funcDropShadow 3y ago
        > The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. They will learn when they have been hacked often enough. We should stop treating everyone as children. Oh no, children are now treated like adults.
        mikub 3y ago
        Unfortunately I think they won't learn. What most of them will do is to click the next banner that shows "We detected a Virus on your computer. Please click here to fix this.", but they will will absolutely refuse to click on that popup in Windows that tells them to update, because Microsoft is the ultimate evil that can't be trusted.
- quantified 3y ago
  When you have things about as good as they'll reasonably get, having a group as large as that dev organization going full throttle is more likely to make things worse. From the top of the mountain all directions are down.
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    Because the promotional systems in these gargantuan orgs fundamentally value shipping over maintenance.
- alisonatwork 3y ago
  On the flip side, Windows 8 was a superior interface for the Surface and similar devices to either 10 or 11. While I wouldn't want to go back to 8 due to subsequent quality of life improvements for developers like WSL and winget, I still miss the UI every day. It looked clean and simple and worked great with a touchscreen and keyboard alike. Trying to navigate a Surface on Windows 11 with the utterly useless widgets hijacking the left swipe, the microscopic start menu, the on screen keyboard which can no longer be undocked and resized and the now-missing notification toggles is an exercise in frustration. The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile is exactly what led to the current enshittified version of the Windows user interface imo. Microsoft overcorrected and have now ended up in a worse place than they were when they started.
  - shifto 3y ago
    For the longest time, I was a die-hard MS guy, fully immersed in their ecosystem. From my Surface Pro to the Lumia Windows Phone, I embraced every facet of their landscape. It was like the stars had aligned perfectly, granting me a seamless and efficient workflow across all my devices. But then, as if the planets themselves shifted out of harmony, everything fell apart and now we are here. We get these slivers of full-integration from time to time. We see it today with the Vision Pro. It's not hard to imagine what could be! But I'm not counting on it anytime soon.
  - Zardoz84 3y ago
    The fact is that Windows 8.1 was far better that the shit hole that Windows 10/11 has become. Windows 7 was the last great Windows. Windows 8.1 was the last decent/good Windows.
    - FeloniousHam 3y ago
      I use Windows 11 for work, I really like the UI. Consistent, simple, powerful. Never crashes on me. I use (and love) a Mac at home, and spent years in Ubuntu/Gnome.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I disagree. Win 8 was awful, but Win 10/11 -- while they're far from good -- at least removed several of the worst aspects of 8.
- tim333 3y ago
  Yeah Windows 7 was cool. After that I though I can't be bothered with further versions and switched to mac. Which is fine though I miss some stuff like that Windows lets you use what hardware you like. And what software - maybe my biggest annoyance with MacOS is when they decided 32 bit software was suddenly verboten because why not. I mean who'd want to use Photoshop PS6 when you could use the new subscription spyware version.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  everyone who has tried to combine mobile and desktop UI's has always fucked it up. I'm absolutely convinced it can't be done while servicing both well.
  - mostlysimilar 3y ago
    See: basically the entirety of web design nowadays.
tux1968 3y ago
> I hope that more people switch It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being free of a walled garden and adware platform.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  I have a hard time imagining a world where Linux is used in a more diverse set of operating environments than it already is.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    The answer is stuff like ChromeBooks and Steam Decks. The classic desktop open source/free software ecosystem that people are thinking of when they say “Linux” is driven by a technical community, so the types of problems that will be solved are the ones that bother technical people, not non-technical ones. There’s some overlap of course, (everyone wants the fonts and colors in their terminals to look nice, right?) but it is just a side effect of the fact that technical people are also people.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  Linux is good enough, but in terms of stability and performance for user applications, it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS. There really isn't a company or organization that focuses on that, besides maybe Valve. We need more attention on it, for our own sanity, but most of the money is in enterprise servers.
  - tux1968 3y ago
    > it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS There are tradeoffs. Linux's advantage is that it's not an adware platform, or a walled garden. For my money, I don't care about extra performance or stability, it all works well enough for me. Of course, that doesn't help if your particular application doesn't work on Linux, you're out of luck. I just don't think it's a worthwhile goal, to try to attract those people to Linux. If they want to fight for it themselves, great! But there's not much benefit for those of us who are already happy on Linux, to work to attract anyone else.
PicassoCTs 3y ago
Internal promotion-point systems similar to google decouple large companies from customer demands and reactions. One huge hamster-wheel producing unwanted features and deprecating the one thing that kept windows valuable, the customers are already trained in to the operating system when they enter the workforce.
npteljes 3y ago
People won't change, because people don't use their PC for the OS. This is why it's important to have systems that bundle Linux, for example, with the UX worked out as much as possible, like how it is on the Steam Deck.
- bediger4000 3y ago
  Sure Windows is for the most part, libWord, libExcel and libPowerPoint. Linux (and BSDs) are important to people who want to do things that are hard to do in a tightly integrated office suite.
  - npteljes 3y ago
    I don't think this is the point, and many other technologists, including past myself, doesn't seem to get it. Much to technologists dismay, people's technology choices doesn't really involve the technology itself. The thought process is more similar to choosing a car for its color. This is what large enterprises realize, and which is why they shift focus away from the product or service itself, to how the product or service gets into the users hands. Apple is chosen by the people, so they focus on UX, image, status, on being an aspirational product. Microsoft has a different focus, it's businesses, government, education. They aim to be infrastructure, a public service that's proprietary. What is common is that all of them is that they all build a moat. Consciously making it hard for people to switch. Microsoft does this by making its services and formats into standards, but not opening up the standard itself, and also making it hellishly complex. So now, if you want to interface with your government, you can send your document in docx. And what views and edits docx is MS Office. And what platform that runs on is Windows. That's it, and that's why the OP article is sensationalist. Microsoft is not driving away people by making their lives more complex, the people have nowhere to go, and they are often not the ones choosing Microsoft in the first place.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
firecall 3y ago
MS Edge is the most egregious offender, for me. There’s a nice UI under all of the offensive promos and news they force onto you. My kid just got a new school laptop, preloaded by the school. He opens up Edge and Boom! It’s spamming him with fake Ads and horror news stories about war. Thanks for that MS. It’s like they really do not understand what made Google Search so popular back in the say. FWIW, I do think macOS is a lot better :-) Also, the world of Linux GUIs really needs to pick up its game. They just never seem very good; accomplished, reliable, feature competitive. Today’s Ubuntu UI/UX isn’t even competitive with macOS from a decade ago IMHO and for my use cases :-)
- Yaggo 3y ago
  I bought my first Windows pc recently (a gaming rig). I was shocked to find that even Minesweeper had ads! “Microsoft has no taste” seems to still hold.
  - butlike 3y ago
    "You've run out of flags! Click here to go to the Minesweeper Store, or wait an additional 2:29 minutes" I can't even believe I'm saying this: but all joking aside, I MIGHT be inclined to buy a cosmetic skin for smiley if they offered it.
Paradigma11 3y ago
Nobody wants to pay for an OS any more, so thats the sustainable strategy they are going for.
- MrDresden 3y ago
  OEMs pay for it and pass that cost on to consumers.
beretguy 3y ago
> Linux is still crap software [citation needed]
- butlike 3y ago
  "The package is corrupted. Please use dpkg to correct it."
  - beretguy 3y ago
    Oh… I see… That’s a convincing argument. Well, in such case I see no other option but to use Windows. (/s)
piva00 3y ago
> Honestly MacOS isn't much better. Any examples to why macOS isn't much better?
- butlike 3y ago
  launchctl is a strong example.
xinayder 3y ago
> Linux is still crap software I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2019 and I can tell you that the moments I got pissed off where due to companies being extremely hostile towards Linux (ahem, Microsoft) and making their shit with proprietary Windows libraries. Linux is not difficult, it's much easier to learn than to spend 5 hours on Windows trying to find out which UUID refers to the now-hidden old printer configuration dialog. Really, even setting up a firewall or hardening your Linux PC is much simpler than Windows.
- culopatin 3y ago
  When you say “Linux is much easier” we can’t pick this weird anecdote of troubleshooting a printer. Is the average printer setup in Linux much easier? What about getting wifi going out of the box? Or Bluetooth? Or even finding out if something is not right? I don’t want to sound like a Window defender (heh) but let’s be honest here. If I open device manager and I see a little triangle I know something is wrong. In Linux… ???? Where do you even go? I get that this is hacker news but Linux unless very polished will forever be a power user platform. Don’t ask my mom to open the terminal in 2024, she would rather pay the bills with cash in person.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I don't know what average means in this context but my experience is that linux printer setup is far easier than windows. CUPS has come a long way over the years.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    > What about getting wifi going out of the box? It's 2024. WiFi even works out of the box on Debian now. > Or Bluetooth? Getting some random device to connect to Bluetooth is a lottery - on both Windows and Linux. It's a horrible standard. That said, it usually works on both. > In Linux… ???? Where do you even go? If we are talking about printers and one of bigger Linux desktop environments, a little red triangle in the notification area usually. Yes, it will be different to where a Windows user will expect to find it. But given the dance you have to perform between the old control panel, the new settings app, and having to google to find devmgmt.msc I would hope it is different. Windows is no longer has the nice consistent management UI of the XP days. Modern windows is the mess you get after decades of organic growth with very little cleanup. I can just imagine the public derision an open source developer would receive if they delivered something as bad as that.
graemep 3y ago
> All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me. But have they lost by doing that? They have not lost desktop users to any great extent, especially in the business market Windows is still dominant. They have lost some home desktop share to MacOS and ChomeOS, but they have gained a lot more access to user data.
samcat116 3y ago
> All they had to do was not not change things I'd argue they should have changed things more.
coldtea 3y ago
>All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me Managers have to justify their role... so they add stuff and come up with new money-making schemes...
WuxiFingerHold 3y ago
> but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need With all the built in advertising Windows reminds me of Frito's TV in Idiocracy. What an augural movie, btw. > Linux is still crap software Ubuntu is rock solid and easier to use than Windows. Linux Mint, Fedora and Pop!_OS too.

Animats 3y ago

> It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. It is. At Windows 7, they pretty much had desktops right. Everything mostly worked. They'd finally fixed the crashing problems. (How? The Static Driver Verifier validated that third-party kernel drivers would not crash the rest of the system, and a classifier applied to crash dumps routed similar crash dumps to the same maintainer.) The UI was reasonable for a desktop, and wasn't a clone of the mobile UI. No ads. Didn't phone home too much, and you could turn off auto-update. No issues with installing your own software. Then Microsoft tried to make desktop look like mobile and tablet. Desktop began to look like a big phone, optimized for content consumption and fat finger selection. The result was something that was neither a good desktop nor a good content consumption device.

Solvency 3y ago
Everyone loves to use the meme "enshittification" but fat fingerization started the whole downward trend. In fact, most UI is designed for a big fat doughy hand to sloppily slap a single giant rounded button.
PicassoCTs 3y ago
I sat near an administrator who loudly cursed all day, because they force that gui down upon all system internal tools and ruined the info-density of the dashboards.
- sithadmin 3y ago
  As someone that’s been forced to reluctantly wear the ‘Windows sysadmin’ on and off for the past ~15 years due to circumstances beyond my control…this just sounds like the complaint of someone too lazy to learn PowerShell.
  - anothernewdude 3y ago
    The linux subsystem, despite being about as wrongheaded as running linux user space on the Windows OS can be as an idea, solves that problem. Nobody needs PowerShell, unless you're dealing with very old systems. And in that case, you're already lost.
    - vetinari 3y ago
      The point of learning powershell is not because it is some great shell, but the available bindings to many subsystems, that allow you to admin them; including many toggles and options, that are not available in any gui. Bash running in wsl does not have these bindings.
      - anothernewdude 3y ago
        You've convinced me. Getting away from Windows as quickly as possible in the fastest direction is definitely the goal.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Other UNIXes and mainframes did it first, in regards to emulating Linux kernel in some form or fashion. WSL makes sense in the context that Microsoft was too dumb to keep improving Windows NT UNIX subsystem, and to throw away SUA as well. Regarding WSL, it can't be used to admnister Windows systems anyway.
whiplash451 3y ago
> you could turn off auto-update I would not mess with that bit these days
- pierat 3y ago
  There is a difference between: 1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha. 2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later. Windows is #1. Linux is #2. Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks. And, I absolutely despise software with "Mothership knows best" crap. (It's also why I despise Ubuntu's SNAP. Same shit.)
  - cedilla 3y ago
    The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. If the system doesn't eventually force them to update, they just won't. That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else. If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool. Windows 10 / 11 always ask you when you want to apply the update.
    - funcDropShadow 3y ago
      > The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. They will learn when they have been hacked often enough. We should stop treating everyone as children. Oh no, children are now treated like adults.
      - mikub 3y ago
        Unfortunately I think they won't learn. What most of them will do is to click the next banner that shows "We detected a Virus on your computer. Please click here to fix this.", but they will will absolutely refuse to click on that popup in Windows that tells them to update, because Microsoft is the ultimate evil that can't be trusted.
quantified 3y ago
When you have things about as good as they'll reasonably get, having a group as large as that dev organization going full throttle is more likely to make things worse. From the top of the mountain all directions are down.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Because the promotional systems in these gargantuan orgs fundamentally value shipping over maintenance.
alisonatwork 3y ago
On the flip side, Windows 8 was a superior interface for the Surface and similar devices to either 10 or 11. While I wouldn't want to go back to 8 due to subsequent quality of life improvements for developers like WSL and winget, I still miss the UI every day. It looked clean and simple and worked great with a touchscreen and keyboard alike. Trying to navigate a Surface on Windows 11 with the utterly useless widgets hijacking the left swipe, the microscopic start menu, the on screen keyboard which can no longer be undocked and resized and the now-missing notification toggles is an exercise in frustration. The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile is exactly what led to the current enshittified version of the Windows user interface imo. Microsoft overcorrected and have now ended up in a worse place than they were when they started.
- shifto 3y ago
  For the longest time, I was a die-hard MS guy, fully immersed in their ecosystem. From my Surface Pro to the Lumia Windows Phone, I embraced every facet of their landscape. It was like the stars had aligned perfectly, granting me a seamless and efficient workflow across all my devices. But then, as if the planets themselves shifted out of harmony, everything fell apart and now we are here. We get these slivers of full-integration from time to time. We see it today with the Vision Pro. It's not hard to imagine what could be! But I'm not counting on it anytime soon.
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  The fact is that Windows 8.1 was far better that the shit hole that Windows 10/11 has become. Windows 7 was the last great Windows. Windows 8.1 was the last decent/good Windows.
  - FeloniousHam 3y ago
    I use Windows 11 for work, I really like the UI. Consistent, simple, powerful. Never crashes on me. I use (and love) a Mac at home, and spent years in Ubuntu/Gnome.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I disagree. Win 8 was awful, but Win 10/11 -- while they're far from good -- at least removed several of the worst aspects of 8.
tim333 3y ago
Yeah Windows 7 was cool. After that I though I can't be bothered with further versions and switched to mac. Which is fine though I miss some stuff like that Windows lets you use what hardware you like. And what software - maybe my biggest annoyance with MacOS is when they decided 32 bit software was suddenly verboten because why not. I mean who'd want to use Photoshop PS6 when you could use the new subscription spyware version.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
everyone who has tried to combine mobile and desktop UI's has always fucked it up. I'm absolutely convinced it can't be done while servicing both well.
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  See: basically the entirety of web design nowadays.

tux1968 3y ago

> I hope that more people switch It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being free of a walled garden and adware platform.

whatshisface 3y ago
I have a hard time imagining a world where Linux is used in a more diverse set of operating environments than it already is.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  The answer is stuff like ChromeBooks and Steam Decks. The classic desktop open source/free software ecosystem that people are thinking of when they say “Linux” is driven by a technical community, so the types of problems that will be solved are the ones that bother technical people, not non-technical ones. There’s some overlap of course, (everyone wants the fonts and colors in their terminals to look nice, right?) but it is just a side effect of the fact that technical people are also people.
zeroCalories 3y ago
Linux is good enough, but in terms of stability and performance for user applications, it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS. There really isn't a company or organization that focuses on that, besides maybe Valve. We need more attention on it, for our own sanity, but most of the money is in enterprise servers.
- tux1968 3y ago
  > it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS There are tradeoffs. Linux's advantage is that it's not an adware platform, or a walled garden. For my money, I don't care about extra performance or stability, it all works well enough for me. Of course, that doesn't help if your particular application doesn't work on Linux, you're out of luck. I just don't think it's a worthwhile goal, to try to attract those people to Linux. If they want to fight for it themselves, great! But there's not much benefit for those of us who are already happy on Linux, to work to attract anyone else.

PicassoCTs 3y ago

Internal promotion-point systems similar to google decouple large companies from customer demands and reactions. One huge hamster-wheel producing unwanted features and deprecating the one thing that kept windows valuable, the customers are already trained in to the operating system when they enter the workforce.

npteljes 3y ago

People won't change, because people don't use their PC for the OS. This is why it's important to have systems that bundle Linux, for example, with the UX worked out as much as possible, like how it is on the Steam Deck.

bediger4000 3y ago
Sure Windows is for the most part, libWord, libExcel and libPowerPoint. Linux (and BSDs) are important to people who want to do things that are hard to do in a tightly integrated office suite.
- npteljes 3y ago
  I don't think this is the point, and many other technologists, including past myself, doesn't seem to get it. Much to technologists dismay, people's technology choices doesn't really involve the technology itself. The thought process is more similar to choosing a car for its color. This is what large enterprises realize, and which is why they shift focus away from the product or service itself, to how the product or service gets into the users hands. Apple is chosen by the people, so they focus on UX, image, status, on being an aspirational product. Microsoft has a different focus, it's businesses, government, education. They aim to be infrastructure, a public service that's proprietary. What is common is that all of them is that they all build a moat. Consciously making it hard for people to switch. Microsoft does this by making its services and formats into standards, but not opening up the standard itself, and also making it hellishly complex. So now, if you want to interface with your government, you can send your document in docx. And what views and edits docx is MS Office. And what platform that runs on is Windows. That's it, and that's why the OP article is sensationalist. Microsoft is not driving away people by making their lives more complex, the people have nowhere to go, and they are often not the ones choosing Microsoft in the first place.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

firecall 3y ago

MS Edge is the most egregious offender, for me. There’s a nice UI under all of the offensive promos and news they force onto you. My kid just got a new school laptop, preloaded by the school. He opens up Edge and Boom! It’s spamming him with fake Ads and horror news stories about war. Thanks for that MS. It’s like they really do not understand what made Google Search so popular back in the say. FWIW, I do think macOS is a lot better :-) Also, the world of Linux GUIs really needs to pick up its game. They just never seem very good; accomplished, reliable, feature competitive. Today’s Ubuntu UI/UX isn’t even competitive with macOS from a decade ago IMHO and for my use cases :-)

Yaggo 3y ago
I bought my first Windows pc recently (a gaming rig). I was shocked to find that even Minesweeper had ads! “Microsoft has no taste” seems to still hold.
- butlike 3y ago
  "You've run out of flags! Click here to go to the Minesweeper Store, or wait an additional 2:29 minutes" I can't even believe I'm saying this: but all joking aside, I MIGHT be inclined to buy a cosmetic skin for smiley if they offered it.

Paradigma11 3y ago

Nobody wants to pay for an OS any more, so thats the sustainable strategy they are going for.

MrDresden 3y ago
OEMs pay for it and pass that cost on to consumers.

beretguy 3y ago

> Linux is still crap software [citation needed]

butlike 3y ago
"The package is corrupted. Please use dpkg to correct it."
- beretguy 3y ago
  Oh… I see… That’s a convincing argument. Well, in such case I see no other option but to use Windows. (/s)

piva00 3y ago

> Honestly MacOS isn't much better. Any examples to why macOS isn't much better?

butlike 3y ago
launchctl is a strong example.

xinayder 3y ago

> Linux is still crap software I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2019 and I can tell you that the moments I got pissed off where due to companies being extremely hostile towards Linux (ahem, Microsoft) and making their shit with proprietary Windows libraries. Linux is not difficult, it's much easier to learn than to spend 5 hours on Windows trying to find out which UUID refers to the now-hidden old printer configuration dialog. Really, even setting up a firewall or hardening your Linux PC is much simpler than Windows.

culopatin 3y ago
When you say “Linux is much easier” we can’t pick this weird anecdote of troubleshooting a printer. Is the average printer setup in Linux much easier? What about getting wifi going out of the box? Or Bluetooth? Or even finding out if something is not right? I don’t want to sound like a Window defender (heh) but let’s be honest here. If I open device manager and I see a little triangle I know something is wrong. In Linux… ???? Where do you even go? I get that this is hacker news but Linux unless very polished will forever be a power user platform. Don’t ask my mom to open the terminal in 2024, she would rather pay the bills with cash in person.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I don't know what average means in this context but my experience is that linux printer setup is far easier than windows. CUPS has come a long way over the years.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  > What about getting wifi going out of the box? It's 2024. WiFi even works out of the box on Debian now. > Or Bluetooth? Getting some random device to connect to Bluetooth is a lottery - on both Windows and Linux. It's a horrible standard. That said, it usually works on both. > In Linux… ???? Where do you even go? If we are talking about printers and one of bigger Linux desktop environments, a little red triangle in the notification area usually. Yes, it will be different to where a Windows user will expect to find it. But given the dance you have to perform between the old control panel, the new settings app, and having to google to find devmgmt.msc I would hope it is different. Windows is no longer has the nice consistent management UI of the XP days. Modern windows is the mess you get after decades of organic growth with very little cleanup. I can just imagine the public derision an open source developer would receive if they delivered something as bad as that.

graemep 3y ago

> All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me. But have they lost by doing that? They have not lost desktop users to any great extent, especially in the business market Windows is still dominant. They have lost some home desktop share to MacOS and ChomeOS, but they have gained a lot more access to user data.

samcat116 3y ago

> All they had to do was not not change things I'd argue they should have changed things more.

coldtea 3y ago

>All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me Managers have to justify their role... so they add stuff and come up with new money-making schemes...

WuxiFingerHold 3y ago

> but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need With all the built in advertising Windows reminds me of Frito's TV in Idiocracy. What an augural movie, btw. > Linux is still crap software Ubuntu is rock solid and easier to use than Windows. Linux Mint, Fedora and Pop!_OS too.