I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice.
Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some tweaking and setup and a bit of command line hacking, but it's really awesome to have all my machines doing my bidding -- I tell them what to run, when/what to update, and I'm in control of synchronizing settings/files between them.
With Windows/OSX (and Ubuntu to a lesser degree, which I'd used previously), you can only kind of hope that it does what you want, and when it doesn't work, you kind of bang on it a bit to try and get it to change its behavior. All the while, the computer is doing a large number of things you don't really want it to do (what are all these processes? why is it connecting to x.y.domain.net? what data is it sending? why does it insist on trying to get me to log in to XXCloudY? I don't want to use that), but which you're kind of powerless to stop (aside from e.g. blocking connections with another physical network device), even if you knew what was happening. But you don't.
I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.
While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being an island. I like handing off calls from my phone to my laptop when I'm at work. It began frustrating me years ago when I couldn't just flick a few files off of my e-reader to a friend's phone despite the prevalence of available networks.
Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.
I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on.
I'm hopeful that people will find ways to invest in its development and find a way to introduce a competing product that is both secure, in the control of the user, and a delight to use -- able to integrate with a plethora of devices and, for the most part, just work.
> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago.
Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled.
> It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers.
Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is!
> And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.
All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.
> I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on.
Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don't see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.
Woah, really? There are plenty.
Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately.
AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one).
Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.
Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.
OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.
To put it shorter: pretty much any software which isn't trivial to write or requires domain knowledge. The only decent examples of these in the FOSS world I can remember are Blender and Krita.
> Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.
Ardour is the basis for Harrison consoles which are fairly well respected. I would also comment that open source audio plugins tend to look much worse than they actually sound. Totally vanilla UI for an audio plugin doesn't inspire much confidence in the audio quality (watch Century of the Self for more on that). I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason. Cubase is far less programming work than Reason IMHO.
Sample libraries aren't "source code" and in that sense they cannot be truly "open sourced". Creative content such as this is more on the Creative Commons side of matters -- for better or worse.
UI is usually bad indeed, but I wouldn't really care that much if the actual effects would be done alright. They are not.
> I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason
Well, doesn't really matter: the point still is there's no decent FOSS DAW. Ardour is not terrible, but… just no. And there still is no real use for DAW without any instruments or effects anyway.
But, as a side note, I've never heard of a musician writing some more or less sophisticated music (that is not Prodigy) with Reason. I've used it for a while, and it's pretty nice, all this "hardware interface" concept is really cool, but it's very limited and very limiting. It's like, well, using Mac or Windows vs using Linux — what I can do is strictly defined by the developer, no much freedom out there. Cubase is complicated and glitchy as hell, but with it I really can do pretty much whatever I want. Simpler (and much cheaper) alternative to Cubase I would say might be Reaper, but not Reason.
> Sample libraries aren't "source code"
No, that's not the problem. Sample libraries for KONTAKT are sample libraries for KONTAKT. It is not a bunch of .wav files, it's a proprietary format, which wouldn't work with some other sampler out of the box — unless you specifically make it to, which (I guess) might be not trivial, as it's made specifically to avoid competition. So even if you buy sample libraries for that, or download it from torrents or whatever — it's not about library licensing, it's about being unable to use it with anything but KONTAKT.
> Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.
Nuance Dragon SDK runs on Linux, it's not FOSS but it runs there.
Just no GUI / Command Line App.
> OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.
Nuance and ABBYY SDKs running on Linux. Quite well.
Just no GUI / Command Line App.
Oh and you don't need to use FOSS only just because you are using a FOSS OSS.
And yes Audio / Video is pretty weak on Linux, thats true. However for most other things there are good enough tools.
Especially LibreOffice is really really great.
It's better for Users migrating from Office 2003 than to migrate to 07/10/13/16. However there are weaknesses, too, like the Dictonary.
Also some bigger Office's Macro's aren't easy replaceable. However Linux is good enough for the most.
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.
Yes. Photoshop and Lightroom.
And before you all jump in and slather me with suggestions of Darktable, Shotwell, GIMP, ASP, RAWtherapee et al please know that NONE of these are a true substitute for Lightroom and Photoshop.
Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it's slow. Particularly for wedding photography as there's just nothing that can offer the same level of speed AND quality that you get from Adobe's programmes. Running them on WINE is hit and miss and very slow for me, and the newest CC versions don't seem to be supported as far as I could see.
I ran Linux Mint for the last year and switched to Windows 10 a few days ago. I absolutely love Linux Mint and would switch back to it immediately (especially as Windows seem a lot more long-winded in terms of 'developer' stuff so far) if I didn't need Lightroom and Photoshop but I just couldn't get a fast enough workflow together.
I'm a massive Linux fan, and I'd literally jump back to it this evening if someone can show me in the comments below a workflow that can match what Lightroom/Photoshop offer. But the reality is there are certain types of requirement that Linux just can't provide yet and, tough as it is to swallow, that's the truth of it.
Unfortunately I only have Intel graphics at the moment, so I can't use that. I will look into a cheap card if it does work though, I really would rather use Linux if I can.
I'm always surprised how Photoshop is the first thing that comes up when naming software not available for Linux.
Truth is, unless you're in the business, regular people don't need more than what Gimp offers. Never speak of CAD software etc...
They make terrible examples as to why not use Linux. Additionally, as a Linux user I can't think of working with Windows because all the things that it lacks: freedom, software quality (no one sane would trust software from an appstore as you can trust a distro repository), the shell, the efficient use of memory/cpu, the simple software that does the job, all the tools at hand for anything, the fact that 99% of the times the solution to your issues is in stack overflow already, the fact that you're not a customer, but a user. Linux has KDE/Gnome for those that prefer shiny heavy desktop, xfce/lxde for those that like it simple. So many things that Windows just can't offer because it tries to monetize you, regardless of it's countless teams of well paid devs. So I personally can't switch to Windows because it lacks basic functionality that I'd expect from an OS.
One reason I do most of my programming from Windows is because I find Linux programming tools to be either very bare-bones, UI/UX-wise or some kind of ill-fitting cross-platform Java thing. I'm talking about run of the mill stuff like a Git UI, Diff Viewer, Text editors, Icon editors and other specialty image and file editors...and also bigger apps that people usually name.
Maybe you prefer a terminal and maybe your terminal can do what my GUI tools can do or maybe they can't or vice-versa. There's going to be a lot of bias when you work and give your life to these things. To me, Linux is a really nice server or device that I use to run stuff but that's all it will ever be until it has a plethora of high quality GUI apps that I want to use.
What apps do you use? I'm just switching over from Linux to Windows and I've been a bit 'lost' without the terminal. I'd love to hear what you're using whatever it is, doesn't matter if it's not specifically for what I'm doing, it would just be great to get a bit of knowledge of what's available for Windows.
Depends on what I'm doing. TortoiseGit is my preferred Git UI. Notepad++ (used with "Notepad replacer") is my quick text-file editor, but mostly I use the free Visual Studio 2015 edition for working on whole projects. When I'm doing Node.js projects I use Microsoft's Node.js Tools extension which has really nice autocomplete and debugging features. Also the WebEssentials extension includes editors for all sorts of web-related file types that I need to edit like LESS/SCSS/Coffescript/etc. Beyond Compare is my diff/patch utility as I mentioned somewhere else. It's totally worth the very low price-tag. Some other stuff I use: Greenshot, Postman, ScreenToGif, IcoFx (free version), Paint.NET, Pencil, yed, mIRC, VirtualBox for my *nix VMs, Putty, WinSCP, 7+ Taskbar tweaker, KeePass. I have also run PostgreSQL, Redis and MongoDB directly on Windows in the past. If I'm using Linux to run code that I'm editing, I can edit it right in the terminal or use the WinSCP feature of keeping a directory in sync so that I can edit everything on Windows but have it stored directly in the Linux VM when I hit the save button.
There are some pain points and growing pains. It could take a while to put together the kit that works for whatever you're doing. One thing that really annoyed me about VS was that it was adding UTF-8 BOM and CR/LF to every file. I had to install and configure extensions like "line endings unifier" and "fix file encoding" to change it. But I always just stop what I'm doing and lookup how to change VS or Windows if it does stuff that I don't want and I usually find an acceptable solution.
Used gimp since v0.54 back in the 90's. It's sure come a long way since then. I've been using v2.9.x on Linux and lately trying it on Windows 10. Not so good on Windows, but the Linux version seems pretty solid.
IOW for most users, including me, gimp 2.9 will be good enough for most anything we're likely to throw at it. And BTW I think xfce works well, reasonably complete (except for controlling Wacom drawing tablets). To me KDE/Gnome, might as well be using Windows...
> Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it's slow
So... you're saying that there are substitutes, but that they aren't as fast, you don't want to use them and that (getting back to the discussion) you don't view the privacy concerns with commercial OSes as sufficient incentive.
If so, why not just say that and avoid all the pointless flamage.
Nope, I actually said those (predominantly) Linux programmes are not substitutes - it's right there in the comment.
I'm not hating on Linux, I have just used it totally as my daily driver for the last year, I prefer it and would go back to it as I said but I actually need the speed and quality that Lightroom and Photoshop afford.
They cannot currently be replicated by FOSS alternatives unfortunately.
Partly I think the UNIX philosophy gets in the way slightly, as Lightroom offers both catalogue, RAW development, printing, book creating and galleries in one place. This is important as when you manage multi terrabyte catalogues and hundreds of thousands of photos, having a single tool to keep track of everything is a real speed boost.
There are some pretty awesome options in Darktable and RawTherapee but it takes longer to get to the same place as Lightroom and neither tool offered the same ease of noise control.
GIMP on the other hand isn't Photoshop, doesn't aspire to be and is no substitute for the full power Photoshop gives you. It's just got non-destructive layers in the latest release hasn't it? Maybe it'll start to be a bit more of a contender if that's in place now.
I wish Adobe would just bite the bullet and release on Linux, there are tens of thousands of votes/comments for it on the various forum and feedback sites calling for it stretching back probably 10 years.
There are substitutes, but they are of such poor quality and such user unfriendliness that they're inaccessible to all but the most technically inclined, patient and sympathetic users.
That's sort of the story of desktop Linux, to be honest.
And Ubuntu was keytracking in searches, collects data on its users usage, and does centralized update authority as well. It's marginally better for a substantially inferior experience with much worse hardware support. Especially if you're on a modern laptop.
Again, I fail to understand why we're off on this "linux sucks" tangent in a discussion about privacy. You too sound like you're just making a value judgement (though you use some more colorful language) that software quality trumps privacy. Well... fine. Just say that and be done.
People aren't going to "say that" just because you demand it. So you're saying that, yes, using a text editor to edit JPEG files is a pain, error-prone, and horribly time consuming, but privacy. Fine, just say that and quit cajoling people into falling into your argumentative traps.
Someone said "I switched to linux, it's great", someone else said "I'd like to, but it's missing some key features/workflows/whatever that I need". I really fail to see how that's "flamage". It's a Windows thread, after all, he/she didn't bring Linux into it.
Perhaps privacy isn't their exclusive value. I think that's also a perfectly valid argument in this discussion.
> IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled.
This is not really true. For example, high-dpi is still a complete crapshoot, font rendering is often bad bordering on terrible. Unity itself is a usability disaster that hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar) most of the time. Network manager (Ubuntu) breaks frequently. I could go on...
I switched my parents to Ubuntu about 5 years ago. They didn't even blink, and for me maintenance is easier since I can even upgrade the OS over ssh. Zero problems so far.
> hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar)
I don't know Unity; are you referring to it using a global menu bar, as OSX does? Because the latter is a wonderful idea as far as I'm concerned - it save screen real estate, reduces unnecessary distractions, and has no negative effect on functionality.
By default in Ubuntu (and I know of no way to change this) the global menu bar in Unity is just an empty gray slate until you hover over it and "File", "Edit", "View", etc. appear. This means you have no idea where your mouse should be going until you've reached the top of the screen and have to move left/right until you get to the desired menu.
Oh, fair point - that sounds ridiculous! Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method (which is to just always show a global menu bar, that acts pretty much like any standard GUI menu, populated with items pertinent to the active application)?
Don't say that thing until you try something for yourself! In the latest versions of unity, the global menu is integrated with the title-bar of the window itself. It means, you move the mouse pointer to the title area (which the user naturally does to invoke a menu anyways) and the menu appears there. Moreover, once you get into the habit of doing this, it comes naturally, so the above point that it is non-intuitive to user is just ridiculous. And speaking of:
> Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method
The advantage is that unity makes a more sensible use of your screen-real estate. Firstly, by combining both title bar and menu bar into one, you have just one bar on the screen when the window is maximized (which is how about 95% of users use it about 99% of time).
Secondly, since menu bar is hidden by default, the only thing you focus on is the window or app content, and the title which also relates to the content. I personally find this kind of workflow much better to work.
I tried using a fully Open Source desktop from 1998 to 2007. I finally gave up, because things were "better" but still far worse than windows. It's only gotten worse since then. One of the biggest examples I can see right now is the support compiler chains give in terms of the development process. Visual Studio makes simple what open tools like emacs make near impossible. Remote debugging on windows is a matter of downloading and running the remote debug server, and connecting to it with the local copy of windows. Visual Studio will install any requisite dependencies, transfer app over, and run it all with just pushing debug remotely. For the things I'm working on, where I need access to various hardware devices, such availability is a godsend, and as far as I can tell, any Linux based development environments make such difficult if not impossible to replicate. Other things I notice are Free Software checkers for things like MISRA-C compliance, which puts C programs through much more rigorous checks for safe usage and avoiding poor design decisions. Being open source shouldn't be an excuse for the software to have a fraction of the features other environments have.
Remote debugging is actually quite simple when using QtCreator, gdb and gdbserver. MISRA-C is not just "more rigurous" checking, it significantly restricts the way C is written. It is also a commercial standard that must be bought by implementers.
IMO Windows is a primitive development platform out of the box, one needs to install many tools, a lot of them commercial to replicate what's available on Linux. I've done my share of development on both and strongly prefer investing more effort and time into open source tools instead of some proprietary solution that I have to pay for and which I am not guaranteed to be able to use in future projects.
I can't find any diff viewer or git client that integrates directly into any file browser in Linux, like I get with the (FOSS) TortoiseGit and the ~$50 Beyond Compare diff tool i use which I've been using on many projects for years...
I can't even find a diff/patch tool on any platform as good as BC. It has all sorts of heuristics and plugins for different file types and a ton of really advanced features that are easily accessible from it's UI. And those are just 2 of my most basic tools that I use heavily (and I use the keyboard to do everything).
Moving onto text editors, I think the choices on Linux are basically like having to choose between learning Klingon or Vulcan. It's exhausting just thinking about it.
There is nothing even remotely "primitive" about Windows as a development platform. You let the air out of your own argument when you say things like that.
> Windows is a primitive development platform out of the box
I think it'd be hard to argue that a fresh, clean install of windows isn't an absolutely primitive development platform.
Not that I think it's too relevant of an argument in this discussion, as no developer runs an "out of the box" install as a dev platform, but countering arguments that were never made doesn't seem too productive.
> Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is!
I get that and I don't want to denigrate contributors. I've contributed to FOSS of one stripe or another over the years myself.
However I'd probably do a much better job at it if I was paid a decent salary and allowed to work on it full time. And the software would be better for it if I had a team of similar developers, user experience and design people, etc.
Being all things to all people is a great way to be nothing particularly amazing at one thing... something a desktop experience needs.
> All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.
It's tough! I think that's the primary reason for porting games to Linux. It'd be great if there was more to the gaming world than Windows. However for small studios there's no incentive to develop for Linux: there's just not a market big enough to sustain a business.
How do you break out of that? I dunno. A black swan maybe.
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.
Wacom drivers. There aren't any shipped by Wacom for Linux. The open source ones are a stop-gap and better than nothing but aren't as good. Ergo Gimp is a marvelous piece of software but not comparable to Photoshop for professional uses.
I'd add that any alternative that wants to gain traction must provide some benefit over its contemporaries. Software freedom just doesn't cut it for more pedestrian uses of computers.
I can think of several applications provided by the Omni group which have no real analog in FOSS that I'm aware of.
I enjoy toying with linux mint occasionally and have for years, but I think for average user, Linux needs to get as much printer support as humanly possible. I used to say Tax Software was a deal breaker but I guess you CAN get that in the browser now I suppose.
I just suspect if I load Linux to revive say my aunt's old laptop, it'll probably struggle with wifi, have printer issues and she'll be annoyed if she bought taxcut at the store and gets home realizing she can't use it.
a big plus is I think netflix runs natively in the chrome browser now, or pretty soon. Netflix was a hassle for years that made it so I knew I couldn't just recommend Linux to the common man.
Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is!
Of course, something that satellites and most embedded devices have in common is minimal need for user interaction. It would be perfectly unsurprising if the world's best embedded OS turned out to be the world's worst desktop OS.
>Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is!
That makes nice PR to bad it isn't all that true. According to the linux foundation more than 80% of kernel development is done by people being paid for their work.
Getting paid to do something doesn't necessarily mean the payment is the top priority. They might just have been lucky enough to get companies to pay them to do what they would be doing anyway. The question is: could they get a better/higher-paying job working on something else?
Come move over to windows. I have. I'm not unhappy.
1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now.
2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them.
3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.
4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.
5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.
> 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now.
I've done "Windows" development for about half of my 20-year career, and PHP/Rails for the other half. (It's all mixed together; I'm talking about overall effort.) My job, for the past 2 years, has been 100% Visual Basic .NET. (Personal projects continue in Rails.) I'm sick to death with it, and eagerly await a side gig in Rails and OS X, which should lead to a massive side project in Java. I can't wait. I'll take development on OS X and Linux every day of the week and twice on Sunday over Windows and Visual Studio. Some days, like today, I don't know what I was thinking taking this job.
I guess it all comes down to personal preference, but today was a perfect example. I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives.
And I mostly HATE IntelliSense, always popping up and covering what I'm trying to type, and Visual Studio's stubborn way of screwing up my code with its auto-completion of IF statements. Yet I leave it on, for the 5% of the time I want to actually use it.
It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run. (So I do that work on my home PC.) And they run their own DNS system, which doesn't know that about half the internet exists. Oh, and the proxy has recently started killing my application for one user at random. No, these aren't Windows or Visual Studio's problems, but these SORTS of problems are frequently part of a "Windows development ecosystem" found in large companies that pay a lot of money to rubbish consultancies.
> I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives.
Well I mean... I could tell you my java/maven nightmare stories as well. Dependency hell is not something anyone gets to escape, even if you're using newer hotness like NPM or Go. Oh god, Go's dependency management is a trap.
> It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run.
There is no escape for us, except to burn our way out.
> 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now.
That seems to be subjective. I like the debugger in Visual Studio but I much prefer emacs and Makefiles. Even if emacs is often slow to highlight large C files.
To each their own.
> 2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them.
The article is fairly light on comments regarding retention policy.
> 3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.
The surface book is intriguing to me due to having the built-in pen support. I love my Wacom but I hate lugging it around.
Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.
> 4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.
I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.
> 5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.
This is an interesting turn of events. It's also the new black it seems: Apple with Swift, CLR.
I mainly want it because hardware vendors support it. You most likely can't get better than OpenGL 4.1 until the next major update to OSX even if your hardware supports 4.5!
> That seems to be subjective. I like the debugger in Visual Studio but I much prefer emacs and Makefiles. Even if emacs is often slow to highlight large C files.
You can use makefiles. I use leiningen, without docker.
> Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.
Specifically referring to Surface. In general, Microsoft makes pretty good hardware. But uh, Apple's hardware isn't good in anything but a relative sense. Their build quality has been on the decline for a long time.
> I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.
That's not something Apple will let happen, though. We both know that. Android though? Already works via Skype. I'm not sure I like that tech stack either but... it's not like google hangouts is exactly "good."
> It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.
I think these "spyware features" actually help a ton with that. Without some level of usage data (anonymized is great) how are you supposed to know how your product is actually being used.
Free software isn't in competition with non-free software. Free software is 100% up-side. It's not either-or, unless you see a reason for it to be.
I need to support Windows for a paycheque, but I use Linux and free options wherever I realistically can, and it has improved my quality of life drastically. Even before I cared about privacy, I grew sick of the constant licensing treadmill. The privacy concerns, however, have long-since passed my tolerance, and I now consider proprietary software itself to be a backdoor. If I must run proprietary software for some practical reason, I will use tools like firewalls, virtualization, and proxies, to limit its potential.
> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.
I don't quite understand this. I've been on the bleeding-edge (using testing packages) of Arch for quite some time now and have had fewer problems than when I used, say, Fedora or Ubuntu.
> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.
I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides.
With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine.
But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too.
I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.)
I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud.
If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."
After hopping through every distro you mentioned, I ended up with Arch, which I've been running happily for several years now in VMs, desktops, laptops and even my retina macbook pro. Up to date kernels and drivers means I no longer have to deal with the pain of proprietary GPU drivers (Mesa3d is already better than the OSX drivers and rapidly improving).
The initial setup takes about an hour if you've never done it before (I keep the installation guide open on my tablet and go through it step by step.) Once you've done it once, reinstalling takes maybe 15 minutes on a fast internet connection.
That said, if you've decided your tinkering days are over, then your best bet is OSX. Myself, I have to use OSX, Windows and Linux for dev work, and Arch is the only distro I can tolerate these days. The lack of a graphical installer means it's certainly not for everyone, however, once the initial setup it's a breath of fresh air, compared to the constant buginess of Ubuntu and ($god forbid) Fedora.
It's important to emphasize that Stallman advocates and emphasizes _freedom_.
"For privacy's sake, you must avoid nonfree software since, as a consequence of giving others control of your computing, it is likely to spy on you. Avoid service as a software substitute; as well as giving others control of your computing, it requires you to hand over all the pertinent data to the server."
But free software can still do bad things. RMS is currently discussing (within GNU) standard guidelines for privacy expectations for GNU projects, which I'm encouraged by; once those are released, it'd be a good thing for other non-GNU projects to follow as well.
Microsoft is pretty good at catering to the desires of enterprises, so you're right, but in the linked article I see at [0] that with a typical consumer license of Windows, I can reduce the "telemetry" level, but only to "Basic" from the default level of "Enhanced" (side note: how is it "enhanced" if it's the default?).
While the Enhanced level accounts for a lot of the usage-specific statistics detailed in TFA, Basic still sends a lot of valuable data to Microsoft. And, despite paying for Windows, you can't turn it off unless you get an Enterprise/Academic license.
I'm objecting to the claim that users are "powerless to stop this [data collection] even if they knew what was happening, and they don't." To the contrary, it's very clear what is being collected and how to turn it off. As well as what you can't disable in cheaper versions, and which versions you need to buy in order to get that option.
Obviously consumers would like Microsoft to sell them a product with more features for cheaper. But that's no different from any business ever, yet people are throwing a shitfit all over the internet based primarily on misinformation.
Not having your privacy violated is not a feature, it's a form of extortion. Being violated is not the default state, they specifically added code to the product I pay for to do so. I should be able to disable or remove it.
That's the core of Stallman's point. He's an extremist, but there's merit. If it's my software, I need to be able to turn parts of it off.
As I pointed out, I view his attitude to some degree as extremist. But if I am going to pay $200 for a piece of software, I do rightfully expect to be able to configure how it works, and it not to include privacy abuse traps.
I understand that if you choose to use Google, you are paying for it with your privacy, which is why I avoid using it. But when I pay real money for a piece of software, it should not be violating my privacy anyways.
You can "configure how the software works" to some extent even if you only get the free version. As a rule, more expensive licenses give you more features. If you don't think windows 10 pro is a good enough value, that's fine. But characterizing it as some kind of immoral violation of your rights makes me not take you seriously.
I use VS Pro and wish it had the testing tools that Enterprise did. Not enough to pay that much, though. Should I be mad about a violation of my right to IDE test suite integration?
For an stupid, arbitrarily chosen definition of consumer. Microsoft primary business is selling enterprise licenses.
Complaining that the professional license doesn't have all features available in response to my own analogy with VS makes me think you have no interest in the actual truth and just want to argue for its own sake. Is that accurate?
No, it's that your constant defense of Microsoft makes no sense. It's not a logical decision for Microsoft to make. It's hurting their business and their reputation, for almost no appreciable gain. Microsoft has the best chance in the last decade of retaking their market share and their position of power in the tech industry, but they're shooting themselves in the head.
It doesn't matter what their 'primary business' is. What matters is that their reputation plays into decisionmaking. What someone has to deal with at home is going to remind them of their irritation when it's time to make up their mind on a purchase at the office.
My "constant defense of Microsoft" is correcting a single way in which people are misinformed. I have never taken the stance that this is or isn't the correct decision for them. Just explaining what the factors are and what the decision actually did because so many people can't be bothered to look it up themselves.
The shitfit is this sort of cognitive dissonance. As Apple does a lot of this shit without discussing it and has for years, but mysteriously people are comfortable with OSX.
And of course, mobile apps are saturated with complex metrics collections. Every major phone app ships with a huge sum of metrics embedded that can be monitored and almost no mobile apps discuss this.
Need we even mention web sites and their inescapable universal surveillance of their users? Even if cookies are turned off, there is so much we can (and do!) use to track users with startling specificity.
Microsoft is just a brand people like to yell about. It's a well-known brand name and people who want to express but not actually show education about digital privacy desperately cling to it to signal they are "IN THE KNOW."
OSX example: Even 7 years ago Little Snitch on OSX was reporting to me every Apple App was trying to establish a connection home every time I opened it.
I just blocked it and didn't bother to inspect the packets.
The part you are missing is the more users use Microsoft than OSX. See how many of these people are complaining about being Microsoft users and feeling like they need to ditch Windows. These people probably didn't complain about Apple as much (or at all) because it didn't affect them. Now Microsoft has brought it to their front door, and they are forced to deal with it head-on (note: just accepting / ignoring the situation is also a form of "dealing with it").
That list looks less like valuable user data and more like basic telemetry data that is mostly useful to anyone trying to provide a good OS experience.
I did intentionally write "valuable" instead of "intrusive," as you're right -- that is very useful data to aid Microsoft in developing Windows. But as a user, I ought to be able to at least opt out. But typical Windows users cannot, even if they might think that they are by downgrading from Enhanced to Basic.
I think the fact that they call it "basic" rather than "none" makes it abundantly clear that some basic data is still being collected, and you're not completely opting out. Surely there's a limit on how stupid a user can be before you're allowed to stop designing for them.
If they asked nicely, I might consider it. Microsoft is not asking nicely, with Windows 10, so far as I can see; they're just... taking what they want.
Arch Linux is not exactly ideal for security and it requires too much technical knowledge to offer privacy for the masses.
The unfortunate reality is that non technical uses will never achieve the same level of privacy and security as technical ones.
I personally feel like I have no choice Windows is collecting way too much data for me to be conformable using and Apple is just a benevolent dictator for now it can change its mind at any point and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it so I see Linux as the only choice.
Not to mention that most development tools i use these days are way easier to use on Linux then on Windows.
If I need Photoshop or some software that only runs in Windows I can always run them in a VM.
yeah, Ubuntu is getting out of hand. but Debian continues to be awesome. though i love Arch's documentation effort, it's just perfect.
on another note, i just helped my mom set up an iPhone. try it once with no previous accounts for anything. it's maddening! dozen of EULAs, several different accounts needed for every menial thing, dumb and dumber password restrictions, options to skip useless accounts hidden in the UI...
> I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX
I believe they are going down that road too, eventually. They are also going to dump Intel at some point not too far off, which may not matter to many Mac users but it will be significant to the hackintosh crowd.
I've been trying to switch to (Arch) Linux -- away from OS X -- for a few years now, with no luck. Mostly because the only hardware I have is Apple hardware, which is notorious to get working with Linux drivers as good as it is with built-in Apple drivers. That's the main thing stopping me from making the full switch. And using Linux inside a VM isn't ideal either, it's kind of the worst of both worlds.
I did have fair share of trouble with my own apple hardware. My mid-2010 mac mini required me to create a modified ISO with EFI booting disabled, and it took me a while to figure out how to get sound working on the HDMI output; my old macbook pro has kernel panics on startup that I never figured out, and my new macbook had trouble getting wifi set up; and I have yet to configure the trackpad to get it to work the way I want it to. There are a lot of other people that have struggled through issues, though, and so the bbs.archlinux.org forums and the wiki docs are helpful, but I had to do a fair amount of trial and error and figuring stuff out myself to get what I did running.
I'm currently using custom-built desktop systems (which run arch linux like a dream; most everything just worked out of the box) for most of my daily work, though, and my longer-term plan is to sell off my mac hardware and replace it with hardware that runs linux with less fuss.
I still can't imagine why Microsoft would think it's worth the bad publicity to not offer the option to disable telemetry, considering how few people tend to deviate from defaults in general, and how tiny a percentage of their users even care about privacy to begin with (evident from the commercial success of Windows 10).
They've been getting so much goodwill for all the other great things they've been doing lately. It just seems downright foolish to squander all of that for a few extra basis points in their telemetry data from those rare few users who care about privacy but are forced to use Windows 10 anyways for whatever reason.
Those who care about privacy but do have a choice in OS will simply avoid Windows 10 altogether because of the mandatory telemetry, which is telemetry data that they wouldn't be getting anyways. A certain percentage of these people could be Windows 10 users if it weren't for the mandatory telemetry. Would they really rather have people using other OSes, than having them use Windows 10 without giving them telemetry data?
So many aspects of their position on this issue seems completely irrational to me.
I would consider Win10 if there is an option to disable the phone home stuff. Without the LTSB license, you simply cannot deactivate all stuff. Why are various IP addresses and domains white listed in signed kernel mode dlls?
Microsoft still thinks the will get away with this. Their bad. They will get problems with their mass collection of data from sensitive areas like doctors, lawyers, etc.
Windows 7 is a very good OS until at least 2020 (minus recent phone-home updates). And every other OS including OSX, iOS, Android and Linux are more forthcoming and less hostile to the end user. (all tracking, crash reporting and phone home features can be deactivated in all OS except Win10)
> Microsoft still thinks the will get away with this.
It wouldn't be the first time they overplayed their hand in the area of privacy. Recently they were trying to tell everyone their new Xbox was going to be constantly on and watching them in their living room even if they shut it off. When there was a huge uproar they backtracked.
The more baffling thing is they went as far as to prevent you from blacklisting the telemetry servers via hosts file. The data SO important to them they put that amount of effort into obtaining it.
The only reason I can think of that doesn't resort to tin foil hat theories is to prevent a rise of "windows 10 privacy enhancement" software.
I agree with this comment and your responses in the following discussion to it. Microsoft has made such huge strides, and it's costing them a lot of that because of their hardline attitude on this. And it actually stands contrary to their own advertising, where Microsoft highlights themselves as a more privacy-respecting alternative to using Google products which track you.
The cost/benefit decision here for Microsoft just makes no sense.
Remember that a large corporation often acts schizophrenicly, because there are so many decision making bodies that have conflicting interests within the company. (I took this comment from someone else on HN a while ago)
From the headlines that have been popping up lately about Windows 10 usage I believe the news cycle is about to produce 'Windows 11 Beta is around the corner!' type of headlines any day now.
Likely kinda how Mac OS X has been X or version "10" forever, but has actually had a decades' worth of version updates. At the end of the day it's just a branding change and a change in expectation management.
They do offer those options. People would just rather complain that the free upgrade they got doesn't have features they want - but apparently not enough to actually pay for them.
I assume you mean the Enterprise version? Last time I checked that wasn't something individual consumers can just go out and buy.
But regardless of that, from Microsoft's perspective, does it make any sense to not offer the option to disable telemetry on all versions? From what I see, all it's doing is giving them bad publicity while driving potential users away to other platforms. And for what? Probably a few basis points in telemetry data that won't even make a dent to the overall trends in their telemetry data.
Both the enterprise and educational versions offer you full control. Consumer versions offer what I consider to be enough control, but obviously that's subjective.
If you offer the option to disable telemetry, some people will disable it. If there is any pattern to which people do this, and we all know there is, it introduces sampling bias and casts aspersions on any conclusions you draw from that data.
It seems like they're trading one bias for another. I suspect that the population of users likely to disable telemetry have a lot in common with the population of users likely to just stick with Windows 7 and remove the updates that added telemetry collection.
Personally, I'd probably be satisfied if Microsoft gave me the tools to examine the telemetry that my computer wants to send. Not making that available to users makes me feel like they have something to hide.
Yes they're definitely trading one bias for another in this case. Users who value privacy simply won't use Windows 10 to begin with. And you can't collect telemetry data from non-users.
Users who turn off telemetry can still give you one crucial data point: the percentage of users who do care enough about privacy to turn off telemetry. But this data point is something they simply can't capture because of their insistence on making telemetry mandatory. And any future decisions they make with regards to privacy and telemetry usage will now have to be based on speculation instead of hard data.
In addition to biasing their telemetry data to the subset of users who don't care strongly about privacy, this decision also has a real cost in terms of adoption rates, market share, and damage to the goodwill they've slowly built up over the years in other areas. I just can't see why they'd think this is a worthwhile tradeoff.
They already made that trade by allowing enterprise customers to turn it off.
They also tell you exactly what types of data they collect, along with where and how. That's not consistent with wanting to hide the extent of their telemetry.
What they do for enterprise customers is a moot point to me, an individual, when I can't buy an enterprise-edition license from Microsoft.
I've seen hand-wavy explanations, in general terms, of the data collected. I don't want that. I want to see the actual data collected from my specific machine. Even a bullet-point list including items like "total time executing binaries tagged as 'game'" would be preferable.
There are some good examples of the categories of data that they collect and some information about which features, programs, and apps might collect that data. There are examples within the categories, but not an exhaustive list. Maybe there are more complete lists available for each separate feature. I'd be interested in seeing an explanation, collected into one place, of which pieces of data are influenced by which settings, which ones can't be controlled, etc.
> If you offer the option to disable telemetry, some people will disable it. If there is any pattern to which people do this, and we all know there is, it introduces sampling bias and casts aspersions on any conclusions you draw from that data.
This is true enough, but consider this: Giving the option to disable telemetry will result in users users who would disable it. Not giving the option to disable telemetry will result in users who who simply won't use Windows 10 because of mandatory telemetry.
With the former option they still get a data point in terms of the percentage of their users who care enough about privacy to turn off telemetry. With the latter option they don't get this data point, but in return they get some telemetry data from users who would disable telemetry if it was available, but don't care enough about privacy to use a different OS because of it (i.e. the telemetry data they have available is still biased to the subset of users who don't care very strongly about their privacy).
Is the data from this latter group of users important enough to be a worthwhile tradeoff for getting data on the percentage of your users who do care strongly about privacy and the damage to their market share and the damage to the goodwill they've built up over the years? My answer would be no.
Offering the option to disable telemetry means Microsoft won't get telemetry data from the intersection of users who 1. don't just roll with the defaults for everything (many UX studies have shown that this applies to only a tiny percentage of users), and 2. care enough about privacy to want to turn telemetry off (this number is likely tiny relative to the overall Windows 10 userbase considering how great the adoption rates of Windows 10 has been so far despite mandatory telemetry), and 3. use Windows 10 (a significant percentage of users in 2. have already avoided Windows 10 specifically because of the mandatory telemetry).
That intersection of users seems absolutely miniscule relative to the overall Windows 10 userbase, and in most cases the telemetry data they contribute is not going to be any larger than a margin of error in Microsoft's Windows 10 overall telemetry trends.
Nobody is going to argue that telemetry isn't useful for developers, but at some point you have to decide if it's worth it to force users into giving you telemetry data if it means driving potential users away to competitors and giving fuel to a very vocal minority of users that write unfavorable articles and comments on news sites, blogs, and social media at every opportunity because of this decision.
Agreed that there should be a way to opt out, and I think there is on the install screen. Whether or not it's a complete kill switch probably depends on a particular definition of "telemetry," and in today's cloud connected world it's probably hard to draw a line.
> many UX studies have shown that this applies to only a tiny percentage of users
Ironic because that's exactly the kind of thing telemetry is excellent for proving. It's quite useful for informing and providing quantitative feedback on UX.
> Whether or not it's a complete kill switch probably depends on a particular definition of "telemetry," and in today's cloud connected world it's probably hard to draw a line.
Recording how long someone's had their browser open, how many hours of games they've played or how many photos they've viewed is not a log or a crash dump or in any way related to quality.
How about copying/pasting code, inserting tabs into code, inserting break points into code, how many projects you have, references, when you save, why your code wont compile.
Visual Studio is probably the primary reason I'm even bothering with Microsoft but fuck me they collect a lot of unnecessary shit. They claim its "anonymous"... Some of this doesn't seem so anonymous to me:
> ...how many hours of games they've played or how many photos they've viewed...
That part jumped out at me too. This probably means they're recording the name (or even hash?) of every executable you run and comparing to a list of known game .exe files. In addition they're recoding how long you have been using each executable (if not start/stop timestamps).
I'm not a security expert but it seems like this kind of information could be correlated with (for example) Tor exit node traffic to unmask a Tor user or other fun surveillance uses.
Hashing .exe names is way too much work. Since Vista Microsoft has provided an opt-in way for a game installer to optionally flag "Hey, I'm a game". This was used for the mostly useless "Games Explorer", but also little bits of other functionality.
Also, the Microsoft Store has an entire category called "Game" and can just use that.
Worst case though, by "game" it might just use the Window's Xbox app's determinant for shortcuts like Win+G which is essentially, from what I gather, "Does it use DirectX? y/n".
Please share what these options are and how to implement them. All I've seen so far are lists of hoops you have to go through that may eventually be changed back with a future update.
They were probably asking so that when you pointed the "options" out explicitly it would be clear that, no, in fact, they don't "offer those options" to the majority of Windows 10 users.
Let's start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower.
What's more concerning about these data aren't these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren't (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system.
Any entity knowing that I have even turned on my PC---without explicit action to notify someone of such, such as posting this message or sending e-mail---is a privacy violation.
Such statistics would be very useful to society. Tracking people as a group to figure out how they behave. Its only when the tracking targets individuals that it get creepy.
"New York'ers goes to the toilet x times a day" is fine vs "John Doe goes to the toilet x times a day" is not.
Just saying that it can be garnered, I have no idea on whether it is used, although store loyalty cards obviously play into targeted coupons you receive at the checkout.
What I would like to know if how much of this tracking is not blocked by installing something like Spybot's Anti-Beacon (https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/) and using a Local Account. If all it takes is to install a similar tool when I buy a new machine, it's not a big deal. There are many other tools I need to install anyway (winrar, etc).
Yep. I just ran across one of those .rars the other day and was surprised that it wouldn't decompress properly. Then I realized I hadn't tried to unzip one of those on that particular computer in a long time and my version of 7zip was just really out of date. Updated to the current version and it worked fine.
I fully agree with the complaints, but I never understood why this outrage doesn't happen about e.g. Gmail (or all of ChromeOS for that matter). Lots of people virtually live in Google Apps, which certainly does a lot more tracking than Windows 10 does.
The argument that "it's OK because it's on the web" just doesn't cut it anymore guys. An application is an application.
We should just be as angry about browsers that do tracking and web apps that do tracking as we are about OS'es that do tracking.
When you started using Gmail or ChromeOS, you started with understanding, that you are using a browser and everything happens pretty much on Google servers.
When you started using Windows, it was pretty much offline affair. Many people were connected to internet only occasionally, if at all.
So basically, Gmail/ChromeOS was adding something to your options - you have a new service, you can decide whether you can start using it - or not. Windows is taking away from you - you were using it for years, maybe decades, most of the world is dependent on it, and suddenly, the rules of the game change and you cannot do anything about it.
I'm not happy about Gmail tracking, but the information Gmail has access to is limited to what ends up in that email account. An OS's access is potentially everything on the computer.
To me, privacy is about control (deciding who gets to see what) and having an OS that phones home with who knows what information means I have no control once information touches my PC.
Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information.
Last I looked Microsoft's privacy policy was vague enough that it could include almost anything and everything on a PC as well as whatever Windows can infer about your local network.
> Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information.
You're right, at the end of the day it comes down to trust. Microsoft's behaviour in this case - making it hard to disable telemetry, being vague about collection details and unresponsive to questions - means that it's hard to trust them. In a hypothetical world where they were upfront with what was collected, responsive to questions, and allowed users to disable all data gathering easily the same feature set might be easier to swallow.
Edit: I forgot to mention how aggressively Microsoft has been shoving Windows 10 down user's throat. I've had several non-technical friends end up with Windows 10 by mistake (and against their wishes) - another sign that Microsoft doesn't give a shit about users' wishes.
Rational or not, it's somehow creepier when an OS is doing it, as opposed to most of the crunching being done on Google's servers.
If you have any feeling at all for how an OS operates, Windows 10 with default settings has the air of someone creepily muttering to themselves and fidgeting with something under the table (half the time some component is eating 20% of the CPU). Then the second you walk away they spring up and maniacally run into a closet and commence making mysterious banging noises (walk away and some component spins up to 100% CPU and stays there, fans commence howling). You walk back into the room and there they are - sitting, red, panting, comically failing at looking nonchalant. It's a unique combination of creepy and comical, all in all.
Whereas with Google docs, you really have to know what you're looking for to see manifestations of all the tracking, though of course that doesn't make it better.
The "its on the web argument" has a technical backing to it. Google own's their own servers, and understands what their own hardware and software is doing. Collecting metrics on all that makes sense.
It is when you change it to an individual level that it becomes problematic. Instead of talking about what is happening with a product across all users, you are now talking about what a specific person is doing. And that is why tracking at the OS level is more problematic than at a web server level - by definition, my OS is personal usage.
I'm actually more annoyed by gmail tracking than windows tracking.
It seems I can disable the windows tracking. Microsoft can spy on others, but if can opt out I don't care that much, it is just one more annoying default to change when I use a new machine like unchecking the "hide known extensions".
I run my own mail server. But gmail, yahoo and hotmail represent like 99% of my personal contacts. That means that these three companies have pretty much access to all of my personal emails, with personally identifiable information (my first name, last name, email address) and I have no way to opt out, other than convincing my contacts to stop using these services (good luck with that!). I didn't ask for that tracking. I do not agree with google having access to my emails, I did not agree to google's terms and conditions. I am not a gmail customer. But my private correspondence is still recorded by gmail.
It's expected with gmail (although I don't like it) because every interaction I have with gmail is sent over the wire to google's servers. That isn't the case with my operating system.
Have you tried changing the default search engine? It's SIGNIFICANTLY convoluted. It took me about ten minutes to figure it out and I am 100% confident my parent would be incapable of changing it. I've watched them try.
I had to install a plugin for chrome to redirect bing to chrome. Just in case I ever happen to click on the search bar in the bottom which searches the internet.
Can you turn that off? So that it only searches your local pc?
I personally turn off the actual bar because I have a lot of pinned icons and I'm already used to hitting the Windows key to type a search query anyway.
But at least as far as regular old Win-key search, you can definitely change a setting to only include local results. I tend to do it simply because I'm in the habit of typing to search local files in the Windows/Start menu and doing web searches via the browser. Web results in my Start/Win searches would just clutter up results so I've been disabling them since Win8.
Not sure if this extends to the search bar in the taskbar but I'm reasonably sure they're the same thing with a different location/interface. I'll have to enable the search bar to check for sure though.
MS has received and paid about €561m monopoly infringement fines from EU Commission for "forgetting" again to provide the choice of browser in the first 14 months of Windows 7 [1], totalizing €2bn fines from EU. Times seem to have changed though, as no-one seems to be pursuing MS for Windows 10.
Microsoft doesn't have the monopoly it once did with the proliferation of tablets and such. Anti-competitive behavior is fine as long as it isn't monopolistic. Every browser on iOS is a UI on top of the mobile Safari engine - the equivalent of Windows only allowing IE and browser skins - but that type of anti-competitive behavior is OK because Apple only controls 30% of the mobile devices and its users choose to buy into said anti-competitive environments.
Only if enabled. It's a tick box in the settings menu for "search" that I've disabled since it was introduced in Win8. I'm sure it's useful for some people since they typically open a browser to search more often than they search for local files (and Microsoft wants people to use their services). Still, for me, web results just get in the way of local searches and I'm used to typing in the Start/Win menu for local, not web so new installs get their options adjusted accordingly.
Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I'll run, Microsoft!
The moment Ballmer switched from "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!" to "Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers!", I knew it was time to start migrating myself to Linux and Mac.
When I saw that Microsoft started putting ads in the start menu, I began to seriously wonder if there isn't some sort of "Trading Places" type bet going on over there to see who can run the OS into the ground first!
The messed up thing, is that they are getting such good press on their open-source initiatives and research projects, but really seem to be screwing themselves on the OS.
Then again, maybe they know something I don't know, and we will see some resurgence of Windows somehow.
MS was never about "Developers developers developers". They're more about that today than they have ever been before, in fact.
What ballmer actually meant in his demented rage was "Developer lock in, Developer lock in, Developer lock in!". Linux is a million times friendlier to developers.
The new MS is getting there, but the new MS also has its glaring flaws, like the ones being discussed here.
When your start menu (or whatever the hell it's called now) serves you ads you know you can give up on that OS and that the vendor does not care about the user.
Yup. What the hell are these people thinking? That an operating system is a shopping mall?...
... and they're probably right anyway. Computing went mainstream, people who need tools and not toys are niche now, and mass market doesn't cater to niches.
It's more proper to say that there are a lot of people who "need" a different sort of toolset. It's not about "toys"; it's about the machine as an information device for a life outside of the machine. As much as any of us like to complain about things like intrusive "peronalized" search everywhere and targeted ads and so forth, there's a reason why such things sell (until people are told what needs to be involved in making it work).
Honestly, most people are fine with the magic until they realize how much surveillance the magician does. I have no idea how they think it's supposed to work, but then most folks don't know how any part of their computer works.
And worse is that the only reason I have windows in the first place is to play games. I don't need to do anything else on it, but I have to have it in my life because big game companies will not make games for linux. Hell, I'm so excited for Oculus Rift, but at this point they have even dropped Mac support (understandably, they don't have the graphics power), so if I want to experience VR currently, I'm completely limited to windows, not even playing indie and valve games on linux.
Which is fine by me - I consciously choose to boot into my gaming PC and start up Steam. My gaming friends are a small fraction of my friends. And spending habits are pretty easy as well - basically whenever there is a major Steam sale. And you are still able to play a lot of games offline.
My point with the above is that the risks are far less than with a general purpose operating system. How can I ever trust Windows as a platform for running the Tor Browser on? How could I trust any closed system?
Windows 8.1 with Bing (come on, who thought that's a good name for an OS?) has tiles that are ads for aps and games in various stores. No searching needed, these ads are baked in and served when you click start button. (Or whatever that's called now.)
There was some bad update that asked you to confirm what you wanted to open certain file types when you had already set the default, but I've never seen the telemetry tracking options change, and I've double-checked the settings a few time to verify that they haven't changed.
Ubuntu is great. "Hmm, I wonder if Brasero is installed. b-r-a- Oh! I hadn't even considered wearing a bra before. I shall click through and buy one right now."
Generally: no. By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps, but that's as far as it goes.
The live tiles for stores can show pictures of products. You can elect to remove them if you don't like them.
Live tiles are one of the most powerful and useful features of the windows start menu. Like any feature, it's conceivable they could be misused. Unlike notifications, the user has complete, simple, and quick control over offending input.
You're missing out. Win10 is very good to developers these days.
> By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps, but that's as far as it goes
Yeah, those are ads. It's like when the homescreen of my Kindle that I paid more for to get without "Special Offers" started showing books I may be interested in buying based on my reading history. Also known as ads.
It's insulting. I'm sure over their entire customer base it comes out as a positive feature for them, though. People more likely to click through to the store when they see a game name or screenshot they recognize, while only alienating a few.
At least, as you said, they offer an explicit and easy way to disable them, unlike Amazon at the time, who then took years to add an option to disable those.
Which, by the way, is all I'm asking for on the telemetry front as well. Opt-in by default all you want. Bury the setting three panels deep (don't reset it at your whim, though). I'll feel insulted and slightly dirtied, but I'll disable it and move on, active Windows customer that I am.
That's very misleading. The option is called "Suggestions" and it's on by default. I'm convinced they called it that because if they called it "Ads", everyone would turn it off.
> By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps
That is far from only problem. Here is a screenshot of a Win10 start menu, out of the box, at default settings. Count the ads:
Well one can hope that they evaluate the pictures your looking at in the photo app and use that to insure the ads shown in the start menu provide value and joy to the user.</snark>
I think the newer agile software development process requires companies to focus more on monitoring rather than testing, in order to understand how software is being used and also to figure out what needs to be improved/fixed. Microsoft is just implementing such processes in their products just like every other company. We would be hypocritical to say that we can make use of that processes but not Microsoft, just because we say so. It's important to realize that this monitoring based software development approach is going to stick around, and we have better chances of coming up with some strict guarantees around how that data is used, protected and anonymized rather than not collecting data at all.
I would rather that while we realize we don't want Microsoft to do it to us, we shouldn't do it to others either. Golden Rule: If you don't want to be tracked, stop writing software to track others.
I remember a time when so-called "beta testers" would be given your broken software for free, in exchange for providing bug reports. Now I guess everyone gets your broken software, gets data-mined in arbitrary ways, and maybe the next step on the version treadmill makes things less awful.
If you 'absolutely must' use Windows 10, would it be possible to firewall off every outbound port from this machine to prevent this sort of tracking? Or does it just use Port 80, piggybacking on the normal http traffic?
Has anyone done a comprehensive analysis of exactly how this info is being sent?
I doubt you could with Windows Firewall, but my firewall (Comodo) seems to do the job.
You can find all the known domains and addresses for the Microsoft telemetry and advertising networks through some searching online. I added them all to my hosts file as well as block lists in Comodo Firewall.
I did both because I assume Microsoft has wired access for some of these services in such a way that the hosts file would be ignored, as well as Windows Firewall.
I have my firewall also set to request user action on EVERY outgoing connection (all incoming stealthed, so no open or closed response) and so far all I have allowed out in terms of Windows processes is Windows Update. I haven't even allowed the error reporting.
The OS is still ticking along just fine.
Honestly though this whole approach they ahve taken with Windows 10 has really turned me off. It reeks of anti-consumerism. I basically just use this Windows 10 machine as a gaming machine now, and all my personal and professional computing is done on a separate Debian machine.
Microsoft won't be getting another penny from me for anything ever again.
"Piggybacking"? Presumably, they're hitting a REST API served up on an HTTP server on port 80 or 443 (hopefully 443...)
And sure - stick it behind a NAT, learn the servers that the systems reports to, block those (or set up your own DNS); nothing that the average mainstream consumer is capable of doing.
The IPs are hardcoded in windows ethernet driver, no shit.. So yeah, spoffing it through DNS won't work. You have to have a physicall firewall between your PC and the internet and target these specific IPs to block efficiently.
The lazy way to firewall it without doing all that analysis would be to run it in Virtualbox with network access disabled. Do your networking on the host outside of the VM and exchange files between the host and the VM through a shared folder. If you need sharing between multiple windows machines, you can run Syncthing or similar on the hosts to synchronize the directories backing the shared folders across them. I run a setup like this at home for my other half, who needs to use windows for some things but balks at signing up for their cloud service.
Do your networking on the host outside of the VM and exchange files between the host and the VM through a shared folder.
This is what I do when I run Windows XP under VMware Fusion. Works like a charm for the few apps I need. I don't care if my XP is unpatched, it can't get to the Internet.
But I thought that Windows XP SP 2 (what I use) was the final version of Windows that didn't need to check in with Microsoft periodically (every few weeks?) or it would stop working. At least that's what Microsoft's original plans were; perhaps they relaxed that requirement?
I did notice that Windows 10 often messes with my firewall rules. I had a custom firewall rule to keep a port open. Windows deleted the rule when upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and deleted it again during a recent Windows update. So not sure your firewall rule would survive very long the "new Microsoft"...
Sigh I really wish it was easier to use a non-tracking OS.
Personally, I use Hardened Gentoo and actively avoid downloading binaries + a lot of other tweaks to the "standard" Linux setup to patch what I see as obvious holes. Perhaps I need to elaborate more on a blog post.
It is very inconvenient yet for me I accept it as a price worth paying. The great thing about Linux though is that there are many middle roads. On one hand, you could just use Ubuntu (hey, they even turned off the tracking stuff in 15.10) and the Tor Browser, and then you've pretty much eliminated most of the casual advertiser-level tracking (if you follow basic hygiene). On the other, you could go and build your own custom distribution with packages audited by you and always built from source, only after having verified personally all the developers' GPG keys...
Not parent, but W10 convinced to me commit to using only Linux at home. Used to be Linux-exclusive for years in college, so I figure why not. My work and portables are all OS X, which is still far more privacy conscious than W10.
I agree.
At work I'm forced to use windows and osx (supporting enterprise users), but I've begun testing various linux os's (mint,arch,elementary) as preparation to leave windows behind for personal use.
I've actually found it to be liberating in a weird way.
Have you found a favourite distro? I started using Ubuntu a couple of years ago on my home laptop, but when that new design came out with that horrible big side bar, I kind of gave up on it.
I also ended up buying a new laptop that came with Windows 7 so the Ubuntu one sits in the attic rotting. Still, I'm still tempted to move back to a good GUI based Linux distro if I can find one. I just haven't got the time these days to start installing different ones and testing then out.
I use Xubuntu on Work PC, Home PC, Media PC and Laptop.
I love XFCE, It's fast, stable, easily configured, uses normal GTK stuff so fits with the Gnome apps, is a regular plain old desktop (main menu, window buttons/taskbar).
Mostly the thing I like about XFCE is I don't have to think about it, it just does it's thing, stays out of my way and doesn't break a user interface covenant I'm used to all the way back to Win95.
Of course you can run XFCE on pretty much any distro but the Xubuntu folks do an excellent job of packaging it all up and having access to Ubuntu's PPA's is a big win since pretty much everything is packaged for it.
Exactly. I'm not a fan of any of the "popular" desktop environments. I liked Gnome 2 and didn't mind using it (RHEL desktops) but for several years XFCE has been my favorite. It has all the features I need but isn't too intrusive and stays out of my way. I'm not really a big Ubuntu fan either but I can't complain too much about Xubuntu.
It's also the only one I've tried that allows me a taskbar per screen with only window entries from that screen, something I've done since Gnome 2, You can sorta do it with plugins with Gnome but they break all the time, KDE can do it in theory but KDE is awful (I'd like to like but never have).
So far as someone fairly new to linux, I'm liking Linux Mint Cinnamon.
My second choice would be Elementary https://elementary.io/ but it was running a little slow on my laptop.
They still come with some kind of tracking, like Chromium downloads binary blob that manages your microphone, or Firefox that includes telemetry and crash reporting, but at least you can easily recompile Fx without pocket, WebRTC etc. which you can't do in Win10.
From the MS blog mentioned I find this section, or how it's formulated, rather interesting and disturbing:
"3. Advertising Data We Don’t Collect
Unlike some other platforms, no matter what privacy options you choose, neither Windows 10 nor any other Microsoft software scans the content of your email or other communications, or your files, in order to deliver targeted advertising to you."
Most people would read that as "MS doesn't scan your files, communication or email period" when it in fact just mentions one case in which they dont...
> a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings.
I'm pretty certain they didn't get permission to look at their users movie collections or DVR recordings, they were just flagged for high usage and they went right in to see what those users were storing. For any form of data collection they do, it's a guarantee they're analyzing the outliers... in fact they're practically bragging about the fact they do.
"But we WILL spy on everything you do to figure out if our untargeted advertisements are working, and to create detailed profiles which we could share with other companies who do send out ads..."
Open source OSes look more and more attractive every day...
I still haven't upgraded and I'm preventing the updates to 7 that add the telemetry nonsense, but I can't help feeling like I'm getting more and more watched every day.
This is the one that worries me -- "More than four billion hours spent playing PC games"
Tracking usage in Microsoft's own software is one thing. But for the OS to understand which 3rd party apps are games, and track hours spent on them has some deeper implications.
75% of our users watch pornography at least twice a week. On average it takes 4.73 minutes for males between 28 and 33 years of age, with a household income of between $65-75k pa, who work in the advertising industry and who are married with 2 or more children and personal debt over $25k and at least one car, and a search phase of "mature big tits" to finish watching it.
Not having read the EULA / Terms of Service (I don't run Windows 10), Would running a script to turn off / block the tracking and data collection violate the agreements?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection add a new 32 dword "AllowTelemetry" and set the value to 0.
Then, open Services and stop & change startup to disabled on "Connected User Experiences and Telemetry" and "dmwappushservice".
There are bunches of tools and scripts around to do it, but those 2 things are really all that you need to do. Microsoft doesn't stop you from "opting out" of Telemetry by making these changes. All windows updates / etc still work.
One reason that I did not use Win10 so far(Windows 7 for Tax and the rest is Linux), to be fair, Microsoft is not alone doing this in the big-data-mining era.
I wouldn't use Windows (especially 8+) for anything other than superficial activities like gaming. It's a shame as Windows is more polished, but I miss the days when an OS was an inert thing you didn't have to think about (damn you Internet!).
Personally, I love linux Mint. It beats every other operating system that I've every tried, but occasionally I've had to know some CS concepts in order to keep it running/ fix bugs. This is more a linux problem in general, but it's easily worth it as a CS student.
I don't understand the hate. Windows 10 is a great operating system and I am happy to use it. It is much more stable than Ubuntu Linux or any other OS I've ever used.
"2.4 billion questions asked to virtual assistant Cortana"
Things like that are really completely harmless. Microsoft already owns your ass by means of auto-updater (so does every vendor from which you download software updates) It is not time to be paranoid. As long as Microsoft keeps releasing quality products, they can anonymously track how long Windows users watch porn for all I care.
I'm as cynical as they come, and that's still more than I thought they were actually collecting. Counting every picture viewed? Every minute spent in the browser? I was thinking along the lines of "unexpected shutdown".
Details of usage tracking? What details? All I see are some vague statistics and some rhetoric about Microsoft "really really caring about your privacy, guys."
Well, on one hand it's not a big deal because it's all the EULA and you've presumably read it and agreed it to it before booting up.
On the other, it's a pretty big deal because I view my computers as extensions of my brain. And I view the ability to do things privately in my brain of paramount importance.
Now, I understand why software builders like to build in telemetry (it allows them to tweak their products to be more popular and sell data to advertisers) but I cannot accept such a thing for a general-purpose operating system.
Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some tweaking and setup and a bit of command line hacking, but it's really awesome to have all my machines doing my bidding -- I tell them what to run, when/what to update, and I'm in control of synchronizing settings/files between them.
With Windows/OSX (and Ubuntu to a lesser degree, which I'd used previously), you can only kind of hope that it does what you want, and when it doesn't work, you kind of bang on it a bit to try and get it to change its behavior. All the while, the computer is doing a large number of things you don't really want it to do (what are all these processes? why is it connecting to x.y.domain.net? what data is it sending? why does it insist on trying to get me to log in to XXCloudY? I don't want to use that), but which you're kind of powerless to stop (aside from e.g. blocking connections with another physical network device), even if you knew what was happening. But you don't.