6 ms·

There is something so fundamentally gross about Microsoft's vision of what role an operating system should serve. That there is an aftermarket of software that

There is something so fundamentally gross about Microsoft's vision of what role an operating system should serve. That there is an aftermarket of software that attempts to disable (but cannot remove!) the invasive dark patterns is alarming enough, but Microsoft may simply just... undo that, with the next unstoppable update. Then again, this is the company that answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation rather than an acknowledgement that Windows is bad.

wtallis 1y ago
> answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation Well, they actually did it twice in recent history: WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself. But that turned out to still be bad for development because it meant Linux software was now subjected to the performance problems of the Windows IO stack. So they responded with WSL 2, an ordinary Linux VM. And separately they also introduced the "Dev Drive" feature to let you create a filesystem that bypassed the worst parts of the Windows IO stack.
- AndrewDavis 1y ago
  > WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself Both FreeBSD and Illumos were running Linux applications (at various levels of compatibility) many years prior to wsl v1. Joyent even went as far as re-implementing the Docker api to allow running OCI images natively in LX zones. Hence, it wasn't even that novel of an idea.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    Achieving it on Windows was fairly novel, though: we hadn't had something like that since the XP days.
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      Even that’s not true. cygwin, mingw, and others have been around for decades.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
        Those are runtime environments provided by DLLs (requiring recompilation), not Wine-like translation layers. WSL 1 was something special, and it says something that Microsoft ditched it in favour of "we've invented virtual machines for the very first time!!!".
        hnlmorg 1y ago
        It’s been a while since I’ve played with Cygwin and I do recall there were a lot of stuff compiled for Windows, but couldn’t it also run Linux software run natively too? Admittedly back then I was working for a place that mainly developed in Perl, so I didn’t port a whole lot of ELFs across. So maybe I’m misremembering
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        I had to confirm this, but you are misremembering. https://www.sobyte.net/post/2021-11/cygwin-mingw-msys/ https://www.sobyte.net/post/2021-11/cygwin-mingw-msys/ gives a good rundown.
        hnlmorg 1y ago
        Ahhh. It must just have been shell scripts, Perl and the likes that I ran under cygwin then. Thanks for correction
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        bithead 1y ago
        When I was on the team migrating datacenters, we got ahold of tcpdump.exe which didn't need winpcap presumably because it was staticly compiled under cygwin - I'm fairly certain someone didn't write the entire thing including winpcap from scratch. It was nice because getting anything approved by the windows sysadmin group was like changing the tire on a moving truck. It was more than a godsend, because when a windows server was plugging into "the wrong vlan" we could just give them the tcpdump command to capture a CDP/LLDP packet and tell us which switch and port the box was physically connected to.
  - brynet 1y ago
    What's interesting is that the syscall-compatibility layers in the BSDs began with SunOS binary compat on NetBSD m68k/32-bit sparc-- which was created by Theo de Raadt. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/6ce3f21 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/6ce3f21 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/1a68594 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/1a68594 He also came to the same conclusion compat layers were a dead end (OpenBSD removed all compat_*(8) support, including Linux).
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    That’s arguably an easy task though because there is more commonality due to POSIX. But there are plenty of examples of compatibility layers like this throughout computing history. WINE, cygwin, Linux compat, etc. Microsoft even went down this road already in the 80s with Xenix before abandoning the idea of Unix. The only novel part of WSL was the marketing folks
    - AndrewDavis 1y ago
      Microsoft had a POSIX personality on NT since its release in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem Then with the release of XP it was replaced with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
  - p_ing 1y ago
    NT running POSIX applications pre-dates the existence of FreeBSD by a handful of months. The interesting thing about WSLv1 is the pico process concept, not the syscall compatibility.
- dangus 1y ago
  This begs the question of why Microsoft doesn’t just transition Windows to being a commercial Linux distribution, especially now that Windows licenses are so much less important to Microsoft’s business than they used to be.
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    That'd be a lot of work for no gain and substantial loss of control (due to GPL). How are they going to force adverts onto people if it becomes easy to just run a script to remove them?
    - immibis 1y ago
      Android is technically Linux, but you still can't remove the ads because it's all very locked down.
      - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
        You can remove the ads from Android in a similar fashion to how you'd remove ads in Windows (e.g. DNS blocking). However, if you've got root access to Android, then there's other methods available to you. Some phones don't allow you access to root mode, but presumably a Windows version of Linux wouldn't be running on locked hardware (or at least I wouldn't buy something like that).
    - dangus 1y ago
      It’s just as easy to run a script to remove them on Windows but most people don’t do that. I would say that this vision of Windows would involve Microsoft essentially producing a Linux graphical shell similar to Gnome and KDE with a bunch of convenience tools that are typical to the Windows experience. It would have defaults like the Bing brower and all the typical Windows revenue-generating stuff. I don’t think the GPL requirement to release code is a problem for the business model. Not all of the tooling has to be released as GPL and even if some of it does, the brand and commercial partnerships of Windows will mean that most people don’t go out and replace Windows with the hypothetical de-commercialized version. We see this with VSCode where Microsoft is totally fine to release the code with an even more permissive license than the GPL, but they keep the extension marketplace gated. If you want Microsoft’s extensions you have to use VSCode.
PeterStuer 1y ago
They allow these aftermarket products to work/exist as long as they remain niche. It keeps a select audience that would have jumped ship on Windows. The moment these 'solutions' would get mainstream traction they will be shut down.
- kylebenzle 1y ago
  [dead]
- p_ing 1y ago
  The ability to change the installed components or configuration of Windows via OOBE has been around since NT4, at least. These tools are nothing new nor novel; they're required for companies that want to have a custom image and removing default components is one of the more common things to do.
sneak 1y ago
…except for the inconvenient fact that Windows is the most developed-for (and thus developed-on) desktop OS in the world. Linux is catching up (mostly in gaming) but nothing comes close to the amount of engineer-hours poured into building Windows desktop apps.
- immibis 1y ago
  It's interesting you have to hedge it with "desktop" OS and the reason that's interesting is that desktops are mostly irrelevant. Microsoft has their niche, which is offices. This used to be the main application of computers, but now it is just a very large niche. The overwhelming majority of computer interactions are Android clients talking to Linux servers.
  - sneak 1y ago
    Desktops aren’t irrelevant. Desktops run llvm and Xcode and Excel and Autocad and Blender and Premiere and After Effects and a thousand others that are absolutely essential to designing, producing, testing, and marketing the thousand complex products you use daily. Just because lots of people use their phones primarily doesn’t mean that desktop computers aren’t responsible for producing literally trillions of dollars of shit every month. All those mobile apps? Developed and built and tested on desktops. The mobile phones themselves? Designed and built and QA’d using desktops. The payroll for the 200,000 people in the supply chain to get them to you? Desktops. The power grid. Airline reservation systems. CNC mills. MRI machines. Mortgage underwriting. Computer factories. Pick-n-place machines. These aren’t run off phones. You get the idea. Real business runs on real computers, still, no matter how many billions spend how many hours playing Candy Crush.
- linhns 1y ago
  True. And it’s baffling to see the flak it gets on here
  - sneak 1y ago
    It’s not baffling. The OS was always sort of bad, and under the current Microsoft leadership of the last dozen years it has gone to absolute and total shit. It’s bordering on unusable. There is no amount of money you could pay me to daily-drive the current release of consumer windows.
everdrive 1y ago
This pattern is actually how I decide whether or not a piece of software is worthwhile. First Windows install, what do you do? spend an hour or so attempting to disable or remove all the junk being pushed on you and fix terrible default settings. It's been a while for me with Windows, so I haven't had to battle with the online account requirement, Onedrive, etc. But, the general pattern remains. If an OS or software is just packed with stuff that's hostile to you, then it's either got to go (Windows) or be minimized as much as as is feasible. (smartphones & apps) This is actually what turned me off Ubuntu. It's not even close to being as bad as Windows, but I realized that on a fresh install I was attempting to get rid of snaps and the "buy premium" message when running apt, and a couple of other things. If something is being pushed on me, it's obviously bad for me, and good for the pusher.
- suby 1y ago
  I don't think the notion is always true of something being pushed on you automatically being bad for you. I agree that Windows is very user hostile, but something like mandatory updates where you cannot defer forever are good for less technical folks who, prior to this policy, were never updating and we had huge problems with botnets and malware running on people's machines. In a way it is like herd immunity where you benefit a bit from these botnet malware rings being less prominent than the past thanks to aggressive auto updates, even if you personally hate the policy and it's an annoyance to you. Or for another similar example, people going to remote parts of the world to vaccinate people to eradicate diseases like polio - things can be pushed on you, sometimes aggressively, and they can be a net benefit. That being said, I do agree that windows is user hostile and i won't run it myself.
  - everdrive 1y ago
    > I agree that Windows is very user hostile, but something like mandatory updates where you cannot defer forever are good for less technical folks Maybe if those were only security updates. Windows pushes new features, new crap, and re-enables and re-installs (!) stuff you've removed via this path as well.
    - 1y ago
emeril 1y ago
at least for now, I just make sure that any internet connection is "metered" to avoid updates + use an LTSC build + use a bunch of winhawk + openshell to make it...usable :( ms is def at the point of major enshitification

wtallis 1y ago

> answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation Well, they actually did it twice in recent history: WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself. But that turned out to still be bad for development because it meant Linux software was now subjected to the performance problems of the Windows IO stack. So they responded with WSL 2, an ordinary Linux VM. And separately they also introduced the "Dev Drive" feature to let you create a filesystem that bypassed the worst parts of the Windows IO stack.

AndrewDavis 1y ago
> WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself Both FreeBSD and Illumos were running Linux applications (at various levels of compatibility) many years prior to wsl v1. Joyent even went as far as re-implementing the Docker api to allow running OCI images natively in LX zones. Hence, it wasn't even that novel of an idea.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  Achieving it on Windows was fairly novel, though: we hadn't had something like that since the XP days.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    Even that’s not true. cygwin, mingw, and others have been around for decades.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      Those are runtime environments provided by DLLs (requiring recompilation), not Wine-like translation layers. WSL 1 was something special, and it says something that Microsoft ditched it in favour of "we've invented virtual machines for the very first time!!!".
      - hnlmorg 1y ago
        It’s been a while since I’ve played with Cygwin and I do recall there were a lot of stuff compiled for Windows, but couldn’t it also run Linux software run natively too? Admittedly back then I was working for a place that mainly developed in Perl, so I didn’t port a whole lot of ELFs across. So maybe I’m misremembering
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        I had to confirm this, but you are misremembering. https://www.sobyte.net/post/2021-11/cygwin-mingw-msys/ https://www.sobyte.net/post/2021-11/cygwin-mingw-msys/ gives a good rundown.
        hnlmorg 1y ago
        Ahhh. It must just have been shell scripts, Perl and the likes that I ran under cygwin then. Thanks for correction
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        bithead 1y ago
        When I was on the team migrating datacenters, we got ahold of tcpdump.exe which didn't need winpcap presumably because it was staticly compiled under cygwin - I'm fairly certain someone didn't write the entire thing including winpcap from scratch. It was nice because getting anything approved by the windows sysadmin group was like changing the tire on a moving truck. It was more than a godsend, because when a windows server was plugging into "the wrong vlan" we could just give them the tcpdump command to capture a CDP/LLDP packet and tell us which switch and port the box was physically connected to.
- brynet 1y ago
  What's interesting is that the syscall-compatibility layers in the BSDs began with SunOS binary compat on NetBSD m68k/32-bit sparc-- which was created by Theo de Raadt. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/6ce3f21 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/6ce3f21 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/1a68594 https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/1a68594 He also came to the same conclusion compat layers were a dead end (OpenBSD removed all compat_*(8) support, including Linux).
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  That’s arguably an easy task though because there is more commonality due to POSIX. But there are plenty of examples of compatibility layers like this throughout computing history. WINE, cygwin, Linux compat, etc. Microsoft even went down this road already in the 80s with Xenix before abandoning the idea of Unix. The only novel part of WSL was the marketing folks
  - AndrewDavis 1y ago
    Microsoft had a POSIX personality on NT since its release in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem Then with the release of XP it was replaced with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
- p_ing 1y ago
  NT running POSIX applications pre-dates the existence of FreeBSD by a handful of months. The interesting thing about WSLv1 is the pico process concept, not the syscall compatibility.
dangus 1y ago
This begs the question of why Microsoft doesn’t just transition Windows to being a commercial Linux distribution, especially now that Windows licenses are so much less important to Microsoft’s business than they used to be.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  That'd be a lot of work for no gain and substantial loss of control (due to GPL). How are they going to force adverts onto people if it becomes easy to just run a script to remove them?
  - immibis 1y ago
    Android is technically Linux, but you still can't remove the ads because it's all very locked down.
    - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
      You can remove the ads from Android in a similar fashion to how you'd remove ads in Windows (e.g. DNS blocking). However, if you've got root access to Android, then there's other methods available to you. Some phones don't allow you access to root mode, but presumably a Windows version of Linux wouldn't be running on locked hardware (or at least I wouldn't buy something like that).
  - dangus 1y ago
    It’s just as easy to run a script to remove them on Windows but most people don’t do that. I would say that this vision of Windows would involve Microsoft essentially producing a Linux graphical shell similar to Gnome and KDE with a bunch of convenience tools that are typical to the Windows experience. It would have defaults like the Bing brower and all the typical Windows revenue-generating stuff. I don’t think the GPL requirement to release code is a problem for the business model. Not all of the tooling has to be released as GPL and even if some of it does, the brand and commercial partnerships of Windows will mean that most people don’t go out and replace Windows with the hypothetical de-commercialized version. We see this with VSCode where Microsoft is totally fine to release the code with an even more permissive license than the GPL, but they keep the extension marketplace gated. If you want Microsoft’s extensions you have to use VSCode.

PeterStuer 1y ago

They allow these aftermarket products to work/exist as long as they remain niche. It keeps a select audience that would have jumped ship on Windows. The moment these 'solutions' would get mainstream traction they will be shut down.

kylebenzle 1y ago
[dead]
p_ing 1y ago
The ability to change the installed components or configuration of Windows via OOBE has been around since NT4, at least. These tools are nothing new nor novel; they're required for companies that want to have a custom image and removing default components is one of the more common things to do.

sneak 1y ago

…except for the inconvenient fact that Windows is the most developed-for (and thus developed-on) desktop OS in the world. Linux is catching up (mostly in gaming) but nothing comes close to the amount of engineer-hours poured into building Windows desktop apps.

immibis 1y ago
It's interesting you have to hedge it with "desktop" OS and the reason that's interesting is that desktops are mostly irrelevant. Microsoft has their niche, which is offices. This used to be the main application of computers, but now it is just a very large niche. The overwhelming majority of computer interactions are Android clients talking to Linux servers.
- sneak 1y ago
  Desktops aren’t irrelevant. Desktops run llvm and Xcode and Excel and Autocad and Blender and Premiere and After Effects and a thousand others that are absolutely essential to designing, producing, testing, and marketing the thousand complex products you use daily. Just because lots of people use their phones primarily doesn’t mean that desktop computers aren’t responsible for producing literally trillions of dollars of shit every month. All those mobile apps? Developed and built and tested on desktops. The mobile phones themselves? Designed and built and QA’d using desktops. The payroll for the 200,000 people in the supply chain to get them to you? Desktops. The power grid. Airline reservation systems. CNC mills. MRI machines. Mortgage underwriting. Computer factories. Pick-n-place machines. These aren’t run off phones. You get the idea. Real business runs on real computers, still, no matter how many billions spend how many hours playing Candy Crush.
linhns 1y ago
True. And it’s baffling to see the flak it gets on here
- sneak 1y ago
  It’s not baffling. The OS was always sort of bad, and under the current Microsoft leadership of the last dozen years it has gone to absolute and total shit. It’s bordering on unusable. There is no amount of money you could pay me to daily-drive the current release of consumer windows.

everdrive 1y ago

This pattern is actually how I decide whether or not a piece of software is worthwhile. First Windows install, what do you do? spend an hour or so attempting to disable or remove all the junk being pushed on you and fix terrible default settings. It's been a while for me with Windows, so I haven't had to battle with the online account requirement, Onedrive, etc. But, the general pattern remains. If an OS or software is just packed with stuff that's hostile to you, then it's either got to go (Windows) or be minimized as much as as is feasible. (smartphones & apps) This is actually what turned me off Ubuntu. It's not even close to being as bad as Windows, but I realized that on a fresh install I was attempting to get rid of snaps and the "buy premium" message when running apt, and a couple of other things. If something is being pushed on me, it's obviously bad for me, and good for the pusher.

suby 1y ago
I don't think the notion is always true of something being pushed on you automatically being bad for you. I agree that Windows is very user hostile, but something like mandatory updates where you cannot defer forever are good for less technical folks who, prior to this policy, were never updating and we had huge problems with botnets and malware running on people's machines. In a way it is like herd immunity where you benefit a bit from these botnet malware rings being less prominent than the past thanks to aggressive auto updates, even if you personally hate the policy and it's an annoyance to you. Or for another similar example, people going to remote parts of the world to vaccinate people to eradicate diseases like polio - things can be pushed on you, sometimes aggressively, and they can be a net benefit. That being said, I do agree that windows is user hostile and i won't run it myself.
- everdrive 1y ago
  > I agree that Windows is very user hostile, but something like mandatory updates where you cannot defer forever are good for less technical folks Maybe if those were only security updates. Windows pushes new features, new crap, and re-enables and re-installs (!) stuff you've removed via this path as well.
  - 1y ago

emeril 1y ago

at least for now, I just make sure that any internet connection is "metered" to avoid updates + use an LTSC build + use a bunch of winhawk + openshell to make it...usable :( ms is def at the point of major enshitification