I'm a big fan of WSL, which has kept me on Windows for years more than I otherwise would have.
But I can't stand the scammy adware infused OS Windows has become and will be moving to Apple Silicon full-time when the next gen M3 Desktop hardware is out.
As a recent M2 Macbook Air owner I'm surprised how much software supports ARM/Apple Silicon natively, where everything I use daily as a .NET developer worked OOB [1]. It's also great for running multiple OS's, e.g. you can install a headless Ubuntu with `brew install lima` or install and run latest ARM Windows 11, Ubuntu and Fedora OS's with UTM [2] which saved me a Parallels License I thought I needed to run Windows on macOS.
I wanted to add a new user account on my new Windows 11 system. It came with Windows Home right. So when I went to add one, it told me that feature is disabled because I have poor man's Windows, go to this other program. So I go to program B. Guess what program B told me? It told me I was using poor man's Windows to go back to program A to add a new user. I had to do it via command line. After I was about to remove my Hotmail user (I just wanted offline only users) I said screw this, and installed POP_OS! instead, installed Steam, and move on with life. I even played the good 'ole Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux thanks to Proton.
I think at this point I have nothing keeping me using Windows other than the rare game that Proton doesn't support, but my old gaming rig still works and plays most games, so I can easily swap. It pisses me off though, because my Windows 10 box for some reason, at some point, any new program I install does not show up in the start menu whatsoever. I've not even been able to find anything on Google that remotely answers why its broken. At least with Steam I dont have to worry about it, but if I hit Windows Key and type anything, I dont see any programs I installed like three years ago. Freaking weird.
Anyway, I think moving forward I'll be buying Mac or Linux Systems. I'll let employers buy me Windows boxes.
Unfortunately Linux is still far from ready. It's awesome that it can run Steam games quite seamlessly, and it can even run non-Steam games if you fiddle around a bit and find the magic incantations. But - I tried using it for things like GoG, and quickly found out that there is actually no way of running GOG on Linux, even with Proton/Wine, unless maybe if I go and install a bunch of other 3rd parties. Not to mention, installing the Nvidia drivers without first running an apt upgrade on my newly installed system quickly broke the whole thing to where it wouldn't even boot.
So back to Windows it is, and hoping that they respect the GDPR enough to protect me from the worse of their snooping.
I'm a big fan of PopOS after using it for over a year now. I hadn't used desktop Linux for over a decade and expected the usual hassle and obscure fiddling, but in all honesty I've found it easier to use than not just Windows (obviously, it's a shitshow these days) but even Mac too (which wouldn't let me configure my suspend settings without running obscure shell commands copied off the internet, and required me to set up homebrew to get any decent software store, and broke git on every single system update, and...)
I use linux as a daily driver since probably around 2006, but to say it’s a replacement for windows, it’s just not the case, your example for “readiness” is video games, a lot don’t care about that but rather other productivity software, Adobe suite and Adobe acrobat, MS suite, some CAD/3D software, a lot of engineering software like simulators and what not, and you either have crappy alternatives (like anything to replace adobe) or none in the case of other software. That’s why I still have Win10 on a non-upgradable CPU, and as long as I can run these software there, will not update.
> But I can't stand the scammy adware infused OS Windows has become
Set up the drivers for a professional level ASUS motherboard last night, during the installation of the drivers, which was essential because LAN and Wifi didn't work without them. It showed me ads for Norton 360 and WinRar over and over during the installation that seemed to take way longer than it should.
Then it told me an update was required and preselected in the update was install WinRar and Norton360.
Like ASUS, please I'm begging you, just charge me the $0.20 to $1 more that these ads earned you direct to me. Please just charge what you need to make a quality professional product and have some self respect for what you're shipping.
This only happens because it's become normal all across windows software and tools.
Why not Linux (depending on your line of work). Wider hardware choice, easier to upgrade, and no corporate oversight. Doesn't cover all use cases but it's a good option these days.
With computers like framework and system76, the community for hardware support is solid too now. Seriously considering a switch from M1. I feel like macOS is half baked development environment. I only stay because I never bought a Linux supported computer and I got the M1 air very cheap. But I am considering getting a framework as I just damaged a usb-c port and I am not entering apple’s repairability problem.
The problem with PC hardware is that yes, there's more choice, but it's all mostly bad. Nobody other than Apple manages to put a decent and reliable trackpad on their machines for example, and all PC laptops I've used have at times gotten really loud. If you're okay with non-Windows OSes, hardware choice is the main reason to pick Apple machines.
Also, Linux is coming along rather well on Apple Silicon machines.
Not the person you responded to, but I'm in the same boat; I went from grudgingly using it due to being the 'best' in practice, to seeing it as something I need to move away from.
I've used the 'big three' (windows/macos/linux) desktop OSs at work and home in recent years. Here's my ranking:
1) Linux
2) MacOS
3) Windows
Where I have control to use what I want, linux is my choice. At work though, I need to jump through endpoint management and security theater nonsense, so I am stuck choosing between MacOS and Windows.
I do all my deployment to Linux Servers, but I want my main Desktop to just work and plan on sticking to the primary OS the hardware was built for. Don't need broad hardware support, it just needs to support M3 hardware when it comes out. I'm also running macOS software like Pixelmator Pro and Affinity software suite.
I'm already running multiple Docker Linux containers, headless Ubuntu on lima and GUI Ubuntu and Fedora VMs in UTM, so don't feel like I'm missing out on the Desktop Linux experience.
I could definitely do most of my development on Linux given .NET SDK and JetBrains products supports it, but I'll be waiting a few years at least for Asahi Linux to get feature parity before running it natively.
The frustrating thing about shopping for x86 laptops (as you probably will be if you’re wanting to run Linux) is how few models come even a little close to comparing to MacBooks in terms of battery life even with tools like tlp running and CPU throttled down as far as it’ll go, and that’s to say nothing about heat and fan noise.
I’ve been looking around and the only two 12-14” options I can find that match that description are the HP Dragonfly G4 and ASUS Zenbook S OLED (AMD), and those still fall several hours short of the M2 Air, and the M3 Air will likely widen that gap with its SoC being on a smaller process node.
You're joking right? Sure, something built in 2002 will probably still work well in Linux, but that's often the case for Windows, and on a Windows system, the hardware AND the proprietary software it came with will probably still work.
Meanwhile, in Linux land, if you don't buy very very very specific hardware you can never hope to have functional sleep.
Linux is ok nowadays, but why? The Mac hardware is already better, and Apple isn't too annoying. You'll have more random nonsense to deal with on Linux, some of it not their fault.
I became a new MacOS user when the M1 was released.
One thing I really like is that it's so much more similar to Linux than Windows. Many of my favourite Linux server tools also run on Mac. They're either included or are a "brew install x" away.
Everything from cron to nginx (for local web dev) works like a charm. Combine this with the extreme ease of doing office-type work on a Macbook: Excel works, printing / scanning works. Add in multi-day battery life and a kickass CPU. Price this the same or lower than the equivalent Windows machine. It's a learning curve to go from Windows to MacOS, but well worth it, and a total no-brainer for most non-gamers.
Every time I click the play button on my keyboard, Apple Music launches and asks if I want to start a subscription. There's no (normal) way to make it so that play will launch, or even reliably play, Spotify.
MacOS is covered in non-removable Apple adware like this but somehow always gets a pass.
... yes apparently I can install an app that force quits Music every time it launches, or I can modify system permissions, but...why can't I just uninstall it?
people can't manage to block "malware" on a Windows system but somehow manage to use a dev tools? and the idea that a Mac costs the same or less as a dell/hp is ludicrous. the cheapest MacBook air is $1000, while a Windows laptop is $500. sorry to destroy your ideology but at least be honest and say I prefer a Mac and can afford it suck windows can pound sand.
I want so badly be a big fan of WSL, but I just can't, I'm hitting too many issues for it to be productive and I had to jump back into a proper Linux environment...
> But they make it really hard to rely on. From random shutdowns, GPU unreliability to data corruption and performance differences with just using Linux directly, I had to move away from it and back to Linux because I felt like I slowly losing my mind troubleshooting these issues.
> Latest issue was that the virtual disk file continued to grow beyond 500GB large while Linux still reported that it was just 20% full from the inside. So, reading about things, I gave optimize-vhd a try and boom, full disk file was corrupted.
I wish it was working properly, because I have to use Windows for other things anyways and I don't really care about ads because I don't feel like they're getting in the way when I use the OS. But that WSL basically doesn't work properly is such a showstopper.
Yeah I don't understand the love for WSL. Within the first couple weeks of using it, I've run into
* Time doesn't stay in sync after sleeping, which breaks package updating.
* It doesn't get the DNS servers it should from DHCP, so you have to go manually edit /etc/resolv.conf
* The filesystem is super slow, and git commands take multiple seconds.
All stuff that can be worked around, but I don't have to deal with this crap when just running Linux, and all Windows gets me is a clunky UI and ads. It's mystifying to me that everyone is somehow capable of managing fleets of Linux servers just fine, but for some reason managing developer Linux workstations is impossible, so we end up with these Rube Goldberg machines.
It really is a shame. I've wanted to build a gaming pc for years now, but the dev experience is compromised on windows, and the gaming experience is compromised on linux. People on windows will tell me to 'just use WSL', and people on linux will tell me to 'just use proton'. Both are decent, neither are great. I currently have a linux laptop, and a ps5 and both excel at their respective roles
> I want so badly be a big fan of WSL, but I just can't
I'm the same. I use WSL daily at work, but it's more of a "better than nothing" sort of thing for me. Every time I use it, I wish I had a real Linux system instead.
Modern hardware can power VMs within 1-5% of native and passthrough PCI-e devices... there's virtually no excuse to risk your machine's health and security by exposing it to Windows on bare metal in 2023.
Darn, no GPU support for UTM. I'm using solidworks on Parallels/ARM windows 11 on my 14" M1 macbook pro and it works well, slightly faster than on my 2019 intel 13" macbook pro with bootcamp. I would love to move away from parallels and stop repurchasing it every time MacOS is updated and it stops working.
How well does the file system perform when it writes through the hypervisor on those VMs?
I’ve tried running Docker for development environments on macOS but gave up because writing and reading files from macOS host was 2 orders of magnitude slower than native performance.
I use one Windows desktop for a LLM & Stable Diffusion server (among others). I like to conserve power, so I have remote power switch (just a smart plug) and configured wake on Lan with very short time to sleep. I have been very happy with it working, until it suddenly stops responding.
I walk back to it and 5 out of 6 times it's Windows update blue full screen that essentially reads "we're changing settings for browser". That one time is BSOD
Younger kids are getting used to Linux via Steam and the Steam Deck, and support for games on Linux are increasing constantly. I'd wager that the upcoming generation will be less kept to Windows, which will be a good thing.
Microsoft stuff is a whole separate world that I've never explored, so I was surprised to learn that .NET isn't just for developing Windows applications. What's your workflow with that, and is it compromised in any way by developing outside of Microsoft's platform?
.NETs (fka .NET Core) is cross platform since inception and now runs fast and flawlessly on Linux and macOS. I only use it to build server (i.e. non GUI) Apps.
The tooling and workflow is just as good on Windows as I’m able to use Jet Brains Rider / VS Code to develop .NET projects on both.
Having a full native Unix Terminal and using tools like Docker is nicer on macOS, installing and building OSS projects is better supported but Finder is worse than Explorer which is IMO the biggest drawback.
The easiest way is to stop using Windows. Either Microsoft sees decrease in users and rolls back ads; or its keeps pushing on and makes things even worse. Either way, you no longer see the ads.
No, there shouldn't be a law, unless you intend to outlaw in-app advertising entirely, which will make a lot of people sad that there are no free smartphone games anymore, but okay.
You look at Windows Notifications? I don't because they're worthless. I disabled widgets. I don't use Edge. Marketing and other BS is hardly on my radar anymore and my Windows 11 experience is a good one.
I have completely turned off notifications in Windows because I think they're worthless and recently Windows itself has started ignoring that setting and sending me ads through notifications.
> I got a Windows Notification the other day while playing a game telling me about a "Grand prize giveaway"
By my exp, I'd wager it was a third party using Windows' baked-in nag system, via Chrome.
That is, you've got a bit of crapware in Chrome that is sending notifications and Chrome cheerfully forwards them to Windows. I see this on customer systems with some regularity.
Degrading a user's experience seems to be one place where MS and Google are happy to cooperate.
When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate the point, he asked if we had seen the movie, E.T. Of course, we all had. It was the Star Wars-level blockbuster of the summer of 1982. He asked if we remembered the bus scene. None of us could. "You know, 'Uranus?'" Oh, right. Yes, we all remembered that line. Then he asked us if we could remember what any of the other kids were doing. Nope. They were standing, yelling, throwing things, and generally being disruptive. He said, as a principal, this anarchy on a school bus horrified him. It never even registered with us.
This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later.
People on this site "govern" our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping it from happening again. Even after 30 years of "being on the internet," I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one shows up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention.
The people who use Windows for any more than gaming (and a lot of them, too) are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn't be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like hundreds other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off.
It doesn't matter that we get upset about this. It's already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The economics just don't matter to Microsoft. I have to conclude that the size of the "power user"/developer community on Windows is dwarfed by the rest. The only surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.
> It's already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation.
I have a few points against this.
First is that it is not that important if we can revert M$ (yes, sorry, I'll refer to them this way for this comment) behavior, the most important is that we should have alternatives. For that we must push hardware and software vendors to support other OS's, specially Linux.
Second is that, by making a choice, we can influence statistics and this influence may be becoming strong enough to give us some bargain powers (a lot of recent open source drivers only became economically viable because of that). I don't know how much worse is the Android-land but most "normal" people are using their mobile devices more than their desktops, the same shift doesn't happened to power users. This made the share of power users on desktop to grow significantly recently, specially after the pandemic. Actually, I partly assign to this the current uptick of the Linux desktop (more than 3% with ChromeOS above 4% recently).
We may be a minority, but we are no longer a minority that can be ignored. A share of 7% of under served proficient users is a huge market wanting to be pleased. Vendors can not ignore us any longer.
We should not waste our efforts trying to convince M$ not to turn their OS into a ad-infested wastebasket; Let it be! We should concentrate our efforts so that we can comfortably live without depending on M$.
Very true. Go shadow a "normal" user of a web browser without adblocking, and you'll see they spend so much time dismissing popup after popup after popup. It's totally normal to them and doesn't even irritate them. The act of finding and tapping the tiny "X" is practically automatic and second nature.
Same for people who don't curate their phone notifications. I was standing in line at a fast food restaurant and had a good look at some guy's phone he left unlocked on one of the tables. It was just notification after notification. Ding, buzz, ding, ding, buzz, ding-ding, ding-ding, buzz-buzz, ding, ding. The top notification area had something displaying there 100% of the time. How can people even live like that?
Another example. My elderly parents still watch cable TV. When I visit them, I can't even bear the loud and constant ads, but it doesn't even phase them--they don't even notice them. My brain is about to explode after watching an hour long show.
Normal people don't even know of a world without being constantly bombarded with interruptions and messages.
Very accurate. Think also about something you use daily but don't care much about. Maybe you have a "point A to B" car that just needs decent MPG. Car equivalent to Windows is a sagging Altima or a screeching Mirage.
We know that the non-tech people do check with their tech friend or family member for recommendations. What we all can do is recommend our friends/family member about such thing and move them away from such platforms.
You start off with a maybe interesting point (Matthew 7:3) and then instead of the obvious conclusion "all software / operating systems are full of flaws, their advocates don't notice the familiar ones and do notice other ones" you go for "windows users are dumb hurr hurr"? Isn't the point of your frame of reference story that it's not "headteacher smart, students dumb" but "headteacher attention drawn to different things than student attention"? I aggressively deal with annoyances in Windows, I run Windows 10 Pro in the UK and stay away from cloud services and Edge and Bing so maybe I don't see as many adverts as others?
Yet recently on Ubuntu Server I mistyped a Ceph command related to Rados Block Device (rbd), transposing the last two letters I wrote "rdb". Ubuntu told me:
user@server:~# rdb
Command 'rdb' not found, but there are 22 similar ones.
user@server:~#
What is anyone supposed to do with that message?? That is incomprehensible that someone would go to the effort of programming that message thinking it was in any way useful. How did that make it past code review and Canonical bundling into mainline Ubuntu server? It can go with the Ubuntu Server installer which, when there's no network connection asks if you want to continue installing without network access and when you say yes the next step prompts for a proxy server address to get to the internet and the step after tries to connect to the internet to apt update - just running through that one single time or even thinking it through is enough to show the problem there, but apparently Canonical developers ... didn't do either? Or the Ubuntu minimized install option which installs without a text editor of any kind despite being a bloaty 6.3GB and managing to include bash, dash, readline, Python3 and Perl, but 1.7MB of vim.tiny is too much; designed by Silicon Valley doofuses with gigabit internet and no idea of the value of a billion bytes?
The specks in Windows are barely noticable in comparison to these planks. Or compared to the poor functionality of macOS finder against Windows Explorer. These are among the hundreds of other digital annoyances Linux users put up with all day long which they "don't understand and can't fix" or rather, which their reference frame has excluded from consideration. (see also: Zawinski's Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenager's development model[1] - they're so used to broken software replaced with broken software endlessly that they can't imagine anything else). Wait, which is the speck and which is the plank? The lesson is Linux users/developers dumb hurr hurr, was it?
[edit: have you opened Windows Notepad and pressed F1 for help recently? You'll be greeted with a Bing search for 'get help with notepad in windows'. Who is that supposed to help??].
Uh, thanks? The phrase, "damning with faint praise" comes to mind.
Indeed, my point was precisely the one you, yourself, referenced, but then you turned "most people just don't even notice any more," (because they don't see it like the people on this forum do) into "Windows users are dumb." I simply didn't say that. If you're implying that because I said they don't know how to turn notifications off, I didn't say that because I think they're too stupid to learn how to do so. A simple search would fix it. They just don't feel it's worth the effort. They don't want to spend time shaving that yak. And I sometimes can't blame them, because, in another month, there's going to be another set of notifications to squash from the continual churn of new purchases and signups. It's an eternal vigilance.
> The lesson is Linux users/developers dumb hurr hurr, was it?
I.. don't know what to say to that. It's like you were responding to a different comment than mine or something.
Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.
I know very few people outside of gamers that have a full computer outside of one given for work.
This is one of the many reasons that my windows computer is solely for gaming (and I use a debloated Windows 10 LTS install) and never has anything sensitive on it. Any general computing tasks happen on my Mac.
I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is. I value being able to play my games without hassle more.
This is seriously disgusting behavior from Microsoft (and not the only example of Windows turning into an ad machine) but they also realize they have a stronghold so what is the choice for most normal consumers. It’s not Linux as much as technical people love to say it is.
> Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.
They did. But they looks in the wrong mirror from the wrong angle. They probably asked a few business people in microsoft what can the company do to increase revenue, and that's what they came up with.
> I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is.
The more people that play on Linux and leave negative reviews for products that don't work the more vendors will spend time on it. Id's say voting with our wallets is worth it.
I disagree with the idea of leaving negative reviews just because a game doesn’t support a specific platform. It’s the same toxic fanboy wars we see if a game doesn’t come out on a specific console or available on a specific store.
Doing so costs money for a small portion of the community. Ultimately these studios are businesses and have to make financial choices.
I do fully recognize that this is a chicken and the egg problem. But proton is not a perfect solution and I even had to install Windows on my steam deck to play some of the games I want to play.
At the end of the day I’m a gamer first and a fanboy second. I want to play the games.
I see no evidence that the desktop will "die out". It may change form, and it may be used by a smaller percentage of the computing public, but the idea that we're going to see a time without significant usage of desktop (or laptop) computers within the foreseeable future just seems laughable to me.
It smacks, to me, of the idea that the only thing worth being in the market is the very top: the company selling the biggest product, making the most money—otherwise you might as well not even bother.
>Their current approach to Windows seems to be to milk it as much as possible before the desktop dies out.
I'm starting to think that this is what Microsoft's goal is.. pushing people to the mobile platform deliberately and getting people use to it. where there is less control over the experience.
> Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.
But they did! It's the thing that the browser runs on. And since ads in the browser belong to Google and Facebook, MS has only the OS and their own apps left to cash in on ads. /s
> I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is. I value being able to play my games without hassle more.
I play all my games on Linux via proton without hassle. I made the switch 2 years ago and haven’t run into any major issues. At one point, I was playing Elden Ring hassle-free while my friends playing on Windows faced stuttering issues. I am unable to play sim-racing in VR because iRacing uses a Linux-hostile anti-cheat, but that’s the only time I’ve had an issue. Personally, I’m fine avoiding anti-cheat because I don’t like how it interacts with my personal device. Currently, I am playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on ultra settings, and it has worked phenomenally since day one.
Overall, I would say my gaming experience is surprisingly better on Linux than it was on Windows, and I’m absolutely shocked that’s the case.
I’m with you on proton. It’s totally hassle free and I’ve been using it for everything but call of duty and non-steam games (even though they should work with wine I think).
I think you mistake gamers and normal consumers who do have a choice. Maybe they don't want to pay more for Mac, and that's the only leverage. If they don't play games, they lose nothing.
And yet, with all that supposedly terrible cruft, it's still a more stable and reliable interface to program against than pretty much anything in Linux world.
The best Linux api is Win32.
Oh, and that also means if you wrote Windows API compliant code in 1998, it still works today.
Why not try Start -> Run c:/windows and see what happens?
> "magic paths with drive letters, spaces, and tildas (for you kids, that 8.3 DOS compatible path names)"
Linux systems have magic paths like /sys and paths with tildes (isn't that where /~username in URLs came from?) and path/filenames with arbitrary byte sequences which cannot even be displayed safely: https://dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html
> "VBA, and all associated viruses"
VBA is Visual Basic for Applications, it came from Office not Windows.
Microsoft owns or has partnerships with many game studios, and they'll always keep that advantage. You can easily ditch Windows if you ditch video games, which is what I did.
I want everyone here to completely get over the fantasy fairytale idea that Microsoft can be moved on this by typical "consumer feedback" types of responses.
We've been here too long, and we know what Microsoft is and what they do.
Switch operating systems, or push for EXTERNAL changes in law and policy.
This toxic shit is intentional, and the people who direct the business are very pleased with the money they are making. This will not change without force of law. The market is getting exactly what it wants.
Yup. The flipside being that, at least until recently, "the market" didn't know that Linux was an alternative here. It's starting to. Of course, half the people here in HN love that, and the other half actively and/or passively work against it.
My way of dealing with this is simple, I just don't care. If I were forced to use Windows at work, it'd be annoying, I might curse a few times, but I'd still get my work done at the end of the day.
Sure, but what I'd like to get more people to do (I do this, I teach IT for a living) is to think of it perhaps a little like ecology/ the environment? None of us can individually solve climate change, but that doesn't mean "do nothing."
First steps are to talk about it. We've handled shitty companies before, with regulation and other means, we could do it here. Or at least try, which is worth it.
I build my own PC and bought a new license for Windows Professional and it still is filled with adware and other MS bullshit. Like what does "professional" even mean?
"You might argue that this is Microsoft’s operating system, or that when using Microsoft’s browser and search engine it’s well within its rights to try and sway people away from Chrome."
"Microsoft’s behaviors here are totally beyond a simple webpage prompt. I shouldn’t have to be dismissing pop-ups that appear on top of my apps and games, or ones that magically appear after I update my copy of Windows."
> What should Windows 11 users do to let Microsoft know that such behaviors are intrusive and offensive?
They'll tell you to use the Feedback Hub, but all of that feedback promptly gets discarded or drowned out in the SNR of overzealous "insiders" acting as free QA for Microsoft praising every horrible decision they make.
Feedback Hub is a black hole: everything that goes in never sees the light again and has no purpose other than training machine learning models (a form of textual Hawking radiation?).
Sadly, it's similar with Apple discussions. "X is not working as described on Ventura and was like that since update to Big Sur" "try restarting your Mac"
> What should Windows 11 users do to let Microsoft know that such behaviors are intrusive and offensive?
Leave it for a proper OS.
It might not be possible for your company issued computers if they don't allow you to use something else[1][2] but for your personnal uses it is fairly easy.
[1] I doubt it would be configured to receive popup ads in that context anyway
[2] Having a toxic work environment is a good reason to change job. I personnally count being forced to use Windows as a toxic env.
Microsoft is enrained in industrial and businesses because of legacy. Example is that number of industrial sensors need an application to configure their operating parameters, Often they only run on Windows OS. The need to run legacy prevents moving to an different OS
IT is often engrained in Microsoft's environments. It is by no means easy to walk away from Microsoft unless it is personal computing.
At least now at work, I was given a research ticket to find out which legacy Windows OS applications are viable to run in WINE. And how viable it would be move our main product application away from Windows.
PS. You have to pay me to engage with Microsoft and run Windows OS.
> It might not be possible for your company issued computers if they don't allow you to use something else[1][2] but for your personnal [sic] uses it is fairly easy.
It's not that easy, unless you're willing to make a bunch of sacrifices for the sake of using a different OS. Windows is by far the dominant desktop OS, and there's a lot of software people need and want to use that's available only for it.
The only thing that a user can do is switch OS. Microsfts goal is to extract as much profit as possible. The main factors that oppose enshitification are users leaving (revenue is lost) or regulation (increases costs).
And I think this highlights the real problem. The issue isn't that MS is pulling some nonsense. It's that I can't really vote with my feet and stop using Windows.
What should Windows 11 users do to let Microsoft know that such behaviors are intrusive and offensive?
Downgrade to Windows 10.
If enough users did this, they might realise that people still want to use Windows, but without the user-hostility, so will be more incentivised to change things back to how they were instead of just squeezing harder on what remains of their userbase.
> > What should Windows 11 users do to let Microsoft know that such behaviors are intrusive and offensive?
> Downgrade to Windows 10.
Windows 10 introduced things that would have been (and were) deemed unacceptable by people who care about things like this at the time, too. You could have said all this about Windows 8 or Windows 10 with a retreat to Windows 7 being the prescription. Many people did.
The only message a move like this sends is that if Microsoft moves slowly enough, people will accept basically anything as 'the less user-hostile alternative'.
If a user can't switch to another OS, you can run Windows Server. I run that in my home lab when I have to use a Windows based OS for certain scenarios.
Windows 7 really was the last good Windows release. After that we got the hideous Metro redesign, then all the telemetry and shoving of Edge etc. down our throats.
I still worry that the Wachowski's were right when they wrote that line in The Matrix about the peak of human civilisation.
I actually think its about connectedness. We're too overconnected for our own good, the connections are shallow and manipulative and that connectedness is exploited by the powerful to connect more of us further in ways. Downward spiral of dystopian future ensues...
For the controlling corporations instead of employee's you have exploitees and the rest of humanity are the exploited.
In fact just before I wrote this I felt bad about reading a different forums post of a stranger complaining they got a cream pie thrown in their face and then finding out later it showed up on Tik-Tok. I too have too many shallow meaningless connections which can be used against me... even if its empathy for a stranger affected by some dipshit wanting likes for their social media account. And all that's with some level of anonymity - I didn't even watch the video. Telemetry is way more evil and calculated and directable...
I do think the Internet peaked in the early 2000s. Things started to take a downward turn as social networks like Facebook and Twitter really took off and simple recommendations started being replaced by algorithms and endless scrolling to encourage nonstop consumption. The limited hardware and network speeds prevented some of that from being possible.
We're definitely overconnected these days. I think it'd be a net positive for humanity if the centralized social networks and mega services died.
Remember when you got really excited for new Windows releases? Remember when Windows asked politely to activate automatic updates and assured you "No information is collected that can be used to identify you or contact you"?
Aside from some some odd duplication in the system UI (they have like three different "control panels" with overlapping functionality), Windows 10/11 are not such a bad UX. As long as you actively op-out of all the BS they keep adding on daily basis, of course.
Readit News
But I can't stand the scammy adware infused OS Windows has become and will be moving to Apple Silicon full-time when the next gen M3 Desktop hardware is out.
As a recent M2 Macbook Air owner I'm surprised how much software supports ARM/Apple Silicon natively, where everything I use daily as a .NET developer worked OOB [1]. It's also great for running multiple OS's, e.g. you can install a headless Ubuntu with `brew install lima` or install and run latest ARM Windows 11, Ubuntu and Fedora OS's with UTM [2] which saved me a Parallels License I thought I needed to run Windows on macOS.
[1] https://servicestack.net/posts/postgres-mysql-sqlserver-on-a...
[2] https://mac.getutm.app
I think at this point I have nothing keeping me using Windows other than the rare game that Proton doesn't support, but my old gaming rig still works and plays most games, so I can easily swap. It pisses me off though, because my Windows 10 box for some reason, at some point, any new program I install does not show up in the start menu whatsoever. I've not even been able to find anything on Google that remotely answers why its broken. At least with Steam I dont have to worry about it, but if I hit Windows Key and type anything, I dont see any programs I installed like three years ago. Freaking weird.
Anyway, I think moving forward I'll be buying Mac or Linux Systems. I'll let employers buy me Windows boxes.
Edit: Typo'd Proton as Photon ;)
So back to Windows it is, and hoping that they respect the GDPR enough to protect me from the worse of their snooping.
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Set up the drivers for a professional level ASUS motherboard last night, during the installation of the drivers, which was essential because LAN and Wifi didn't work without them. It showed me ads for Norton 360 and WinRar over and over during the installation that seemed to take way longer than it should.
Then it told me an update was required and preselected in the update was install WinRar and Norton360.
Like ASUS, please I'm begging you, just charge me the $0.20 to $1 more that these ads earned you direct to me. Please just charge what you need to make a quality professional product and have some self respect for what you're shipping.
This only happens because it's become normal all across windows software and tools.
Also, Linux is coming along rather well on Apple Silicon machines.
I've used the 'big three' (windows/macos/linux) desktop OSs at work and home in recent years. Here's my ranking:
1) Linux 2) MacOS 3) Windows
Where I have control to use what I want, linux is my choice. At work though, I need to jump through endpoint management and security theater nonsense, so I am stuck choosing between MacOS and Windows.
I'm already running multiple Docker Linux containers, headless Ubuntu on lima and GUI Ubuntu and Fedora VMs in UTM, so don't feel like I'm missing out on the Desktop Linux experience.
I could definitely do most of my development on Linux given .NET SDK and JetBrains products supports it, but I'll be waiting a few years at least for Asahi Linux to get feature parity before running it natively.
I’ve been looking around and the only two 12-14” options I can find that match that description are the HP Dragonfly G4 and ASUS Zenbook S OLED (AMD), and those still fall several hours short of the M2 Air, and the M3 Air will likely widen that gap with its SoC being on a smaller process node.
You're joking right? Sure, something built in 2002 will probably still work well in Linux, but that's often the case for Windows, and on a Windows system, the hardware AND the proprietary software it came with will probably still work.
Meanwhile, in Linux land, if you don't buy very very very specific hardware you can never hope to have functional sleep.
One thing I really like is that it's so much more similar to Linux than Windows. Many of my favourite Linux server tools also run on Mac. They're either included or are a "brew install x" away.
Everything from cron to nginx (for local web dev) works like a charm. Combine this with the extreme ease of doing office-type work on a Macbook: Excel works, printing / scanning works. Add in multi-day battery life and a kickass CPU. Price this the same or lower than the equivalent Windows machine. It's a learning curve to go from Windows to MacOS, but well worth it, and a total no-brainer for most non-gamers.
MacOS is covered in non-removable Apple adware like this but somehow always gets a pass.
... yes apparently I can install an app that force quits Music every time it launches, or I can modify system permissions, but...why can't I just uninstall it?
> But they make it really hard to rely on. From random shutdowns, GPU unreliability to data corruption and performance differences with just using Linux directly, I had to move away from it and back to Linux because I felt like I slowly losing my mind troubleshooting these issues.
> Latest issue was that the virtual disk file continued to grow beyond 500GB large while Linux still reported that it was just 20% full from the inside. So, reading about things, I gave optimize-vhd a try and boom, full disk file was corrupted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37308850
I wish it was working properly, because I have to use Windows for other things anyways and I don't really care about ads because I don't feel like they're getting in the way when I use the OS. But that WSL basically doesn't work properly is such a showstopper.
* Time doesn't stay in sync after sleeping, which breaks package updating.
* It doesn't get the DNS servers it should from DHCP, so you have to go manually edit /etc/resolv.conf
* The filesystem is super slow, and git commands take multiple seconds.
All stuff that can be worked around, but I don't have to deal with this crap when just running Linux, and all Windows gets me is a clunky UI and ads. It's mystifying to me that everyone is somehow capable of managing fleets of Linux servers just fine, but for some reason managing developer Linux workstations is impossible, so we end up with these Rube Goldberg machines.
I'm the same. I use WSL daily at work, but it's more of a "better than nothing" sort of thing for me. Every time I use it, I wish I had a real Linux system instead.
Stay smart, stay protected.
I’ve tried running Docker for development environments on macOS but gave up because writing and reading files from macOS host was 2 orders of magnitude slower than native performance.
I walk back to it and 5 out of 6 times it's Windows update blue full screen that essentially reads "we're changing settings for browser". That one time is BSOD
The tooling and workflow is just as good on Windows as I’m able to use Jet Brains Rider / VS Code to develop .NET projects on both.
Having a full native Unix Terminal and using tools like Docker is nicer on macOS, installing and building OSS projects is better supported but Finder is worse than Explorer which is IMO the biggest drawback.
See also: fake search results when looking for chrome in bing
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/6/23736289/microsoft-bing-ch...
Nope, not malware. Just Windows.
https://i.imgur.com/xVstzqc.png
https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/15u6gx8/windows_...
> Nope, not malware. Just Windows.
Yeah, I got one the other day promoting some game or game studio.
Honestly, there outta be a law. We don't need this kind of "innovation."
So, it was indeed malware.
By my exp, I'd wager it was a third party using Windows' baked-in nag system, via Chrome.
That is, you've got a bit of crapware in Chrome that is sending notifications and Chrome cheerfully forwards them to Windows. I see this on customer systems with some regularity.
Degrading a user's experience seems to be one place where MS and Google are happy to cooperate.
https://promos.microsoftrewards.com/US/en/SS/88/rules
Edit: Chrome isn’t even installed, I use Firefox.
This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later.
People on this site "govern" our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping it from happening again. Even after 30 years of "being on the internet," I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one shows up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention.
The people who use Windows for any more than gaming (and a lot of them, too) are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn't be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like hundreds other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off.
It doesn't matter that we get upset about this. It's already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The economics just don't matter to Microsoft. I have to conclude that the size of the "power user"/developer community on Windows is dwarfed by the rest. The only surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.
I have a few points against this.
First is that it is not that important if we can revert M$ (yes, sorry, I'll refer to them this way for this comment) behavior, the most important is that we should have alternatives. For that we must push hardware and software vendors to support other OS's, specially Linux.
Second is that, by making a choice, we can influence statistics and this influence may be becoming strong enough to give us some bargain powers (a lot of recent open source drivers only became economically viable because of that). I don't know how much worse is the Android-land but most "normal" people are using their mobile devices more than their desktops, the same shift doesn't happened to power users. This made the share of power users on desktop to grow significantly recently, specially after the pandemic. Actually, I partly assign to this the current uptick of the Linux desktop (more than 3% with ChromeOS above 4% recently).
We may be a minority, but we are no longer a minority that can be ignored. A share of 7% of under served proficient users is a huge market wanting to be pleased. Vendors can not ignore us any longer.
We should not waste our efforts trying to convince M$ not to turn their OS into a ad-infested wastebasket; Let it be! We should concentrate our efforts so that we can comfortably live without depending on M$.
Same for people who don't curate their phone notifications. I was standing in line at a fast food restaurant and had a good look at some guy's phone he left unlocked on one of the tables. It was just notification after notification. Ding, buzz, ding, ding, buzz, ding-ding, ding-ding, buzz-buzz, ding, ding. The top notification area had something displaying there 100% of the time. How can people even live like that?
Another example. My elderly parents still watch cable TV. When I visit them, I can't even bear the loud and constant ads, but it doesn't even phase them--they don't even notice them. My brain is about to explode after watching an hour long show.
Normal people don't even know of a world without being constantly bombarded with interruptions and messages.
In case it can be as useful for you, or anyone else, as it has been for me: https://www.fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/frm-eng/MMCN-9E...
Yet recently on Ubuntu Server I mistyped a Ceph command related to Rados Block Device (rbd), transposing the last two letters I wrote "rdb". Ubuntu told me:
What is anyone supposed to do with that message?? That is incomprehensible that someone would go to the effort of programming that message thinking it was in any way useful. How did that make it past code review and Canonical bundling into mainline Ubuntu server? It can go with the Ubuntu Server installer which, when there's no network connection asks if you want to continue installing without network access and when you say yes the next step prompts for a proxy server address to get to the internet and the step after tries to connect to the internet to apt update - just running through that one single time or even thinking it through is enough to show the problem there, but apparently Canonical developers ... didn't do either? Or the Ubuntu minimized install option which installs without a text editor of any kind despite being a bloaty 6.3GB and managing to include bash, dash, readline, Python3 and Perl, but 1.7MB of vim.tiny is too much; designed by Silicon Valley doofuses with gigabit internet and no idea of the value of a billion bytes?The specks in Windows are barely noticable in comparison to these planks. Or compared to the poor functionality of macOS finder against Windows Explorer. These are among the hundreds of other digital annoyances Linux users put up with all day long which they "don't understand and can't fix" or rather, which their reference frame has excluded from consideration. (see also: Zawinski's Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenager's development model[1] - they're so used to broken software replaced with broken software endlessly that they can't imagine anything else). Wait, which is the speck and which is the plank? The lesson is Linux users/developers dumb hurr hurr, was it?
[1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
[edit: have you opened Windows Notepad and pressed F1 for help recently? You'll be greeted with a Bing search for 'get help with notepad in windows'. Who is that supposed to help??].
Uh, thanks? The phrase, "damning with faint praise" comes to mind.
Indeed, my point was precisely the one you, yourself, referenced, but then you turned "most people just don't even notice any more," (because they don't see it like the people on this forum do) into "Windows users are dumb." I simply didn't say that. If you're implying that because I said they don't know how to turn notifications off, I didn't say that because I think they're too stupid to learn how to do so. A simple search would fix it. They just don't feel it's worth the effort. They don't want to spend time shaving that yak. And I sometimes can't blame them, because, in another month, there's going to be another set of notifications to squash from the continual churn of new purchases and signups. It's an eternal vigilance.
> The lesson is Linux users/developers dumb hurr hurr, was it?
I.. don't know what to say to that. It's like you were responding to a different comment than mine or something.
I know very few people outside of gamers that have a full computer outside of one given for work.
This is one of the many reasons that my windows computer is solely for gaming (and I use a debloated Windows 10 LTS install) and never has anything sensitive on it. Any general computing tasks happen on my Mac.
I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is. I value being able to play my games without hassle more.
This is seriously disgusting behavior from Microsoft (and not the only example of Windows turning into an ad machine) but they also realize they have a stronghold so what is the choice for most normal consumers. It’s not Linux as much as technical people love to say it is.
They did. But they looks in the wrong mirror from the wrong angle. They probably asked a few business people in microsoft what can the company do to increase revenue, and that's what they came up with.
> I would love to ditch Windows and go to Linux for gaming but as good as proton is.
The more people that play on Linux and leave negative reviews for products that don't work the more vendors will spend time on it. Id's say voting with our wallets is worth it.
Doing so costs money for a small portion of the community. Ultimately these studios are businesses and have to make financial choices.
I do fully recognize that this is a chicken and the egg problem. But proton is not a perfect solution and I even had to install Windows on my steam deck to play some of the games I want to play.
At the end of the day I’m a gamer first and a fanboy second. I want to play the games.
I see no evidence that the desktop will "die out". It may change form, and it may be used by a smaller percentage of the computing public, but the idea that we're going to see a time without significant usage of desktop (or laptop) computers within the foreseeable future just seems laughable to me.
It smacks, to me, of the idea that the only thing worth being in the market is the very top: the company selling the biggest product, making the most money—otherwise you might as well not even bother.
This is toxic thinking.
I'm starting to think that this is what Microsoft's goal is.. pushing people to the mobile platform deliberately and getting people use to it. where there is less control over the experience.
I'm so glad I switched to PopOS[1] Last year.
[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
But they did! It's the thing that the browser runs on. And since ads in the browser belong to Google and Facebook, MS has only the OS and their own apps left to cash in on ads. /s
I play all my games on Linux via proton without hassle. I made the switch 2 years ago and haven’t run into any major issues. At one point, I was playing Elden Ring hassle-free while my friends playing on Windows faced stuttering issues. I am unable to play sim-racing in VR because iRacing uses a Linux-hostile anti-cheat, but that’s the only time I’ve had an issue. Personally, I’m fine avoiding anti-cheat because I don’t like how it interacts with my personal device. Currently, I am playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on ultra settings, and it has worked phenomenally since day one.
Overall, I would say my gaming experience is surprisingly better on Linux than it was on Windows, and I’m absolutely shocked that’s the case.
So I feel like most normal consumers have already made that choice and they don’t need windows or Mac.
I wish it would just quietly die in a corner.
As a developer Windows has brought us such highlights as:
* backslash instead of forward slash
* magic paths with drive letters, spaces, and tildas (for you kids, that 8.3 DOS compatible path names)
* its own custom C/C++ project format rather than make, that accidentally gave birth to CMake
* VBA, and all associated viruses
* exclusive file locks
I can't be bothered to go on, but the man-hours/years/decades/centuries spent on making code work on Linux and Windows is spectacular.
The best Linux api is Win32.
Oh, and that also means if you wrote Windows API compliant code in 1998, it still works today.
Why not try Start -> Run c:/windows and see what happens?
> "magic paths with drive letters, spaces, and tildas (for you kids, that 8.3 DOS compatible path names)"
Linux systems have magic paths like /sys and paths with tildes (isn't that where /~username in URLs came from?) and path/filenames with arbitrary byte sequences which cannot even be displayed safely: https://dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html
> "VBA, and all associated viruses"
VBA is Visual Basic for Applications, it came from Office not Windows.
We've been here too long, and we know what Microsoft is and what they do.
Switch operating systems, or push for EXTERNAL changes in law and policy.
The other stuff is futile.
First steps are to talk about it. We've handled shitty companies before, with regulation and other means, we could do it here. Or at least try, which is worth it.
I build my own PC and bought a new license for Windows Professional and it still is filled with adware and other MS bullshit. Like what does "professional" even mean?
Steve Jobs said it best: they have no taste.
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"Microsoft’s behaviors here are totally beyond a simple webpage prompt. I shouldn’t have to be dismissing pop-ups that appear on top of my apps and games, or ones that magically appear after I update my copy of Windows."
Windows 11 is doing what it was programmed to do: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM?t=57
Sadly, this kind of user-hostile behavior is increasingly common and a form of enshitification (https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/) of the operating system.
What should Windows 11 users do to let Microsoft know that such behaviors are intrusive and offensive?
They'll tell you to use the Feedback Hub, but all of that feedback promptly gets discarded or drowned out in the SNR of overzealous "insiders" acting as free QA for Microsoft praising every horrible decision they make.
We've been in this world long enough, and we should be smarter about understanding that.
Leave it for a proper OS.
It might not be possible for your company issued computers if they don't allow you to use something else[1][2] but for your personnal uses it is fairly easy.
[1] I doubt it would be configured to receive popup ads in that context anyway [2] Having a toxic work environment is a good reason to change job. I personnally count being forced to use Windows as a toxic env.
IT is often engrained in Microsoft's environments. It is by no means easy to walk away from Microsoft unless it is personal computing.
At least now at work, I was given a research ticket to find out which legacy Windows OS applications are viable to run in WINE. And how viable it would be move our main product application away from Windows.
PS. You have to pay me to engage with Microsoft and run Windows OS.
> It might not be possible for your company issued computers if they don't allow you to use something else[1][2] but for your personnal [sic] uses it is fairly easy.
It's not that easy, unless you're willing to make a bunch of sacrifices for the sake of using a different OS. Windows is by far the dominant desktop OS, and there's a lot of software people need and want to use that's available only for it.
Downgrade to Windows 10.
If enough users did this, they might realise that people still want to use Windows, but without the user-hostility, so will be more incentivised to change things back to how they were instead of just squeezing harder on what remains of their userbase.
> Downgrade to Windows 10.
Windows 10 introduced things that would have been (and were) deemed unacceptable by people who care about things like this at the time, too. You could have said all this about Windows 8 or Windows 10 with a retreat to Windows 7 being the prescription. Many people did.
The only message a move like this sends is that if Microsoft moves slowly enough, people will accept basically anything as 'the less user-hostile alternative'.
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I actually think its about connectedness. We're too overconnected for our own good, the connections are shallow and manipulative and that connectedness is exploited by the powerful to connect more of us further in ways. Downward spiral of dystopian future ensues...
For the controlling corporations instead of employee's you have exploitees and the rest of humanity are the exploited.
In fact just before I wrote this I felt bad about reading a different forums post of a stranger complaining they got a cream pie thrown in their face and then finding out later it showed up on Tik-Tok. I too have too many shallow meaningless connections which can be used against me... even if its empathy for a stranger affected by some dipshit wanting likes for their social media account. And all that's with some level of anonymity - I didn't even watch the video. Telemetry is way more evil and calculated and directable...
We're definitely overconnected these days. I think it'd be a net positive for humanity if the centralized social networks and mega services died.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YbYdfaD0oA