I'm so frustrated with Microsoft. I want to like them -- I'm using (and loving) C# and Visual Studio, I've used Visual Studio Code with Go and Typescript, I'm using whatever they call their cloud version control system, and I'm really enjoying these things... but then they pull moves like this and make me question as to whether I really want to invest my skills and money in their tech. Say what you will about Google's data mining, but I think that putting ads right in the OS is in a whole other league. And as many of us geeks know, this is inevitably going to lead to calls from friends and family trying to figure out what the heck this thing popping up is, and if it's a virus. "Nope, it's just Microsoft."
I feel bad for the MS employees who are making awesome products but then have to deal with all the ridiculous fallout of Windows 10 decisions. Sorry for the rant, but these actions are honestly making me think about discontinuing my use and support of Microsoft's products, and I hope that someone somewhere is listening to us geeks.
That's why I don't like MS, and don't buy the whole "New MS and OS rainbows and unicorns" bit.
I judge companies on how they behave when they're "at the top" - MS in the late 90s-early 00's or Google (Android and search) in the late 00's - now.
The reason is that companies at the bottom have to behave nicely (Cyanogen learned that the hard way), community-cred is literally all they have. You judge companies behavior once they get to the top and can do whatever they want.
Now, back to the topic, MS was losing developer cred lately(and don't want to become IBM), so what do they do? They Open Source some developer tools and part of their language (less than Java, BTW). Oh, they also realize that developers were switching to Apple and Linux, so they added WSL.
It's not they became ethical, it's not that they're stopping vendor lockin, it's not that they're going to finally fully document the Win32 API (their online documentation is quite often inaccurate), it's not that they're going to allow you to stop their spying (unless you're a huge business who had enough purchasing power to actually leave - try telling the CIA that if they're using Windows, everything they type is seen at MS). They're at the top there and don't need to do any favors to anyone.
> it's not that they're going to finally fully document the Win32 API (their online documentation is quite often inaccurate)
Okay, this is tangential to your point, and I'm no fan of Microsoft's, but I really have to defend MSDN here. MSDN is by a wide margin the best and most complete API documentation I've ever seen. Yes, it's wrong sometimes, but that's because it fucking exists. Almost every function, and certainly every function a typical developer is going to care about, is documented. Even crazy obscure shit like wmvcore COM interfaces[1]. You don't even know what that is, but look at all that fucking documentation! Oh my god. My life would be so much harder as a Wine developer if it weren't for MSDN. Every win32 API developer at Microsoft deserves a gold fucking star for actually writing documentation. They certainly don't deserve chastisement for not being perfect.
Sure, it'd be cool if everything was perfect. Then we wouldn't need to write all these tests
$ cat src/wine/*/*/tests/*.c | wc -l
1085766
But we don't live in that world and it's far more interesting to compare like with like. When you take into account its scope, in terms of completeness and usefulness, MSDN is head and shoulders above every other API doc I can think of except maybe Java, which is also excellent. Certainly better than Apple, and don't even get me started on most open source APIs.
That's my point. I want that you publish what your API actually does. I've written programs which MSDN said wouldn't work. Clearly a bug in MSDN. Did MS not know? Or is it to trip up wine?
You may not understand something important about Windows API. Let me explain.
There's the documented, public functionality that Windows implements and wants all the applications to adhere to. This should be documented and it is.
Then there's the functionality that Microsoft had to implement behind the scenes because some important application used it in an incorrect way or it worked by accident. They didn't want that application to break with a new release of Windows. Now Microsoft doesn't want new applications to use this, so they don't document it. I think that is absolutely correct.
MSDN API documentation is meant for people that write applications the way Microsoft wants the applications written.
Wine isn't an application. They want to emulate what Windows does. The API documentation is not for that purpose and it shouldn't be.
That being said, there are APIs in Windows that are secret and undocumented. Those should not be used by applications. Windows isn't open source. Accept it.
MSDN really is pretty damn extensive, but I'd say the documentation for the Java ecosystem is considerably better. Especially the JavaDoc for the standard library.
The documentation is shallow, it does not even consistently describe all the parameters of everything. It's often wrong, it does not carry any information about bugs and lacks an easily reachable diff for older versions.
Yes, it has a page for everything. It's just that most of the pages are useless.
It used to be the best thing around, but it's not the 90's anymore. Almost all mainstream development platforms out there have better documentation than MS. (And it does not help that almost all of them also have saner APIs.)
I don't think this general notion, that a company can have some kind of intrinsic evil or goodness that is somehow immune to management changes, changes in competitive landscape, and generational shifts resulting from the passage of time, is really rational.
Companies are not people. Companies can't have nor lack a moral compass that tells them right from wrong.
Companies are run by people. These people are the ones making the business decisions and doing the work that enables the company as a whole to do ethical or not-so-unethical things.
The people running these companies can and do get replaced. And when enough of them get replaced, the past actions of a company will no longer be representative of its potential tendencies from that point onwards. This is very simply because a new set of people will be the ones making business decisions and doing the work, and these new people will become the real moral compass behind the company's decision making.
And let's not forget the fact that even people can change. So what's stopping them from changing while running a company, which would thereby be reflected in the actions of the company itself?
All of this change tends to happen slowly and gradually, but change itself, for better or worse, is inevitable as long as a company remains solvent.
Of course, I'm certainly not suggesting that I know for a fact that Microsoft itself has turned an entirely new leaf. In fact, I find all of their recent actions toward limiting user freedom and privacy as disgusting, exploitative and unethical as most others in this thread.
My point is, however, we should try to judge each individual action of a company on their own merit or lack thereof, rather than always viewing them through a lense tinted by some extrapolation of their actions from 20 years ago into some fundamental measurement of the company's intrisic goodness or evil. At the very least, we should try to make an effort to calibrate our lenses to weigh new information more favorably than old, because otherwise, even when the company itself may have long moved on, our opinions of them will forever be stuck in the past.
That's only true to a certain extent. Don't forget companies are mainly run by profits. That's what really ends up deciding how the company is run.
Do you think a "good guy CEO" would stop Microsoft from extracting billions of dollars worth of royalties for bogus patents from Android and Linux vendors? Of course not. If there was such a CEO, he'd be quickly shut down by the board. And if the board were "sweetheart angels" that would ask for that, too, they would be replaced by investors.
So companies are really more like a machine, and the people are more like cogs in it. The machine's main goal is to produce profits. If one of the cogs says "no, that's not what we primarily want!", it will very likely get replaced. It takes a tremendous amount of will power to fight against the machine's desires, and it's usually only strong founders that can do it (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk).
But those are the exception, not the rule. And even then, it's more about delaying profit gratification, rather than foregoing some profits altogether. It's about them knowing that if they do it their way, the company would be even more successful and profitable in the long term, while the machine's forces demand the profits right away.
Definitely a fair and salient point. Though I would argue turning a profit and acting ethically aren't always conflicting concerns.
In fact, ethical behavior is just another knob in the machine that people running a company can turn either way in their quest to maximize profit.
Erring on the side of too much ethical behavior can certainly impact profit in the form of lost efficiency and market opportunities, but we have to recognize that companies' customers are people too, and people generally have a distaste for unethical companies, and a fondness for ethical ones, that may influence their decision do business with them.
So turning the knob too far to either side can have direct and indirect implications for profit, and it's up to the people running the company to calibrate that knob in either direction.
Oftentimes the courses of actions a company can take on any given issue will not be a simple sorted array of choices with an obvious straightforward relationship in the form of less ethics -> more profit, but rather a complex decision matrix of causes and effects for which the outcome of any single option will be impossible to fully predict, and investors can generally see that too. So the people running the company will usually have some degree of freedom to experiment with which direction to turn the knob on ethics, and how far.
The only way unethical behavior affects profit is when it causes projecting the appearance of being an ethical company to become more expensive. To whatever extent that "people" avoid doing business with companies that they see as unethical, what they see is a company's image and branding, not their actual behavior. The balance is between unethical behavior and PR costs, not unethical behavior and ethical behavior; and that's even a gross simplification, because ethical behavior doesn't immunize you from bad PR.
I totally agree with your interpretation of the relationship between unethical/ethical behavior and bad PR, but you seem to be ignoring the opposite side of that coin. I hope this doesn't come off as combative, but I felt the easiest way to illustrate my point was by rewording your post:
> The only way ethical behavior affects profit is when it causes projecting the appearance of being an ethical company to become less expensive. To whatever extent that "people" prefer doing business with companies that they see as ethical, what they see is a company's image and branding, not their actual behavior. The balance is between ethical behavior and PR costs, not ethical behavior and unethical behavior; and that's even a gross simplification, because unethical behavior doesn't immunize you from good PR.
Maybe the effects of good PR can be less easily measured and felt than the obvious and immediate repercussions of bad PR, but the effects are certainly real and build up with time, so reasonable people can disagree as to what degree a company should pursue building up goodwill through ethical (likable) acts. Ethical decisions and behavior is the foundation upon which good PR is built. Even the most obviously opportunistic PR stunt must have some backing in an action the company has taken that can be construed by their audience as doing good.
You're getting crap for saying this, but you've hit the nail on the head. As people are replaced in a company, what does the company do? They backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left! In my experience, the net difference is next to nothing.
Companies take on the behavior of the personalities of the people at the top. Nadella, like Gates and Ballmer before him, was selected based on shrewdness, and everything flows from there. It's simple. The company will continue to bear the culture born of Gates because of their board (at the top), and their HR department (everywhere else).
I don't doubt that Nadella is likely every bit as shrewd as the CEOs that came before him, and that his decisions are driven by ulterior motives that are more than what meets the eye.
However, shrewdness is just one trait, and I think it's disingenuous to insist that we can reasonably ignore all other consequences of having a different human being running the company because their shrewdness makes them as interchangeable as planks on a wooden boat.
Personalities and management philosophies can't be reduced into some simple measure on a shrewdness scale, and the other differences between these real human beings that you don't seem to be taking into account can and do bring real change in how the company behaves and operates. Maybe not a lot of the change is concentrated on the axis that you've cherry-picked, but that doesn't mean we can dismiss all the other change that may have resulted from this change in management as "next to nothing".
Absolutely they do not "backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left!"
They in fact back fill the role with someone they think should be in charge of the future of the position (which is very often in a radically different direction), or more often than not eliminate the role altogether.
By your estimation, when Steve Balmer retired, the board would have hired another Steve. No, that's not the case. They hired Nadella who is different.
I am absolutely saying Microsoft's board replaced Ballmer with someone "like" him. To wit (as I said): shrewd. Ballmer shrewedly wrung all he could out of Microsoft's monopoly. People who think that Nadella is somehow some new, kinder, gentler Microsoft CEO are drinking the Microsoft-branded Kool-Aid. Nadella, per the popular notion, is only "embracing" open source out of a shrewd response to being forced to by the market. Moves like the one that inspired this entire article and discussion are proof of that.
Microsoft still sells (almost) no hardware, PC sales are dropping like a stone, corporate sales are lagging (my Fortune 150 switched to Windows 8 a YEAR after 10 was released), and Microsoft has to monetize seats of Windows somehow. What's left? Collecting and selling user data and advertising. This sort of thing has to have been approved by Nadella. Is this the move of a "kinder, gentler" CEO who just loves open source and freedom? No, it's a move by a shrewd person who is desperately trying to keep his company relevant in the face of phones, tablets, clouds, and social media.
The point of the paradox [1] is to replace/upgrade all the pieces with similar ones (planks with other planks). Unless you believe that human beings are interchangeable, it doesn't apply in this case
It's not the boat that's being replaced, but the crew. And life aboard the boat will change as the crew changes, but one crew member, even the captain, has limited power to change it all by themselves. So change comes, not necessarily very fast, or fast enough when the weather changes.
There certainly is. I'm not sure where in my post you're detecting that sense of absolutism you're reading into it. But culture, like everything else in a company, is also shaped by its people. Which means culture can change as well. Any change will be a slow process due to inertia, but it can and will happen if enough people in the company want it to happen.
The question is not whether a company can change, it's whether it will. The values and priorities that a company emphasizes condition employees and managers to think in a certain way. Changing that conditioning over a large population and after many years takes more than a few personnel replacements and a new mission statement. Any new people you add will be significantly outnumbered by existing employees, so how do you get "enough people" to want something they've learned to not see?
> The question is not whether a company can change, it's whether it will.
I think whether a company can change is the right question, because it stands to reason that if a company can change, then given enough time, it will change. How much time is "enough" for any given company is anybody's guess, and as stated in my original post, I'm certainly not claiming that in this case Microsoft has in fact changed for the better. But to rule out that possibility completely because of what they've done in the past strikes me as irrational.
You oversimplify things when you refer to it as a "PR stunt". It's a part of their current tactics: certain parts of MS, especially the Azure team, have no other choice than collaborate with the open source community if they want their business to grow.
You may remember Microsoft always wanted to win developers over. However, the programming ecosystem changed considerably since the 90s. Now, in order to get us back on board, they need to act differently than they did back then - and it seems it works as many people speak positively about the "new" Microsoft.
It's not new, the strategy is pretty much the same.
Microsoft is changing, and how far they are changing is to be seen.
The point people are making is that the only thing that has changed so far with Microsoft is their methods. And that their new methods still align with their old tactics and goals.
Would you call a gang member that now uses guns instead of knives a "changed man"?
> Would you call a gang member that now uses guns instead of knives a "changed man"?
The IRA stopped using bombs and guns, and took up pens and microphones. Their political goals never changed, but their methods did.
I'd say they're changed men. Using arguments instead of violence is ultimately a good thing.
Gang members often don't have a goal of "I wanna rob people". They want money. If they put on suits and ties and become software engineers because the pay is better---they're changed men.
So what does Microsoft want?
The most trite statement would be that they want market dominance and money for their shareholders. A "good" Microsoft would be one who due to government regulation or social approval cannot do bad things to achieve dominance.
This is the balancing act that we play with all companies---they want money, and society forces them to only gain money in socially approved ways thus we all benefit.
>Since when did HN mean having to choose one polar view point only?
That's not just HN. It's the state of discourse in general in 2017, particularly among internet strangers. You're either on my side 100% or you're wrong.
That's my point. It's not changing ethics, its just not being obtuse.
A classic example is Apple under Jobs. They weren't ethical (locked down iPhone) but they weren't obtuse.
WSL is a classic "shut up and take my money" - it's not open source, it doesn't let me write cross platform GUI, it just let's me keep windows as a desktop when me server is Linux.
The only thing is that MS (under Ballmer) was obtuse and didn't realize they lost the server, and now they do.
VSCode isn't cannibalizing their existing VS installations, its cannibalizing Sublime and Atom. So the most they spend on it is a team of programmers? It pays with mind share.
With .NET core also, they realized that no startup will touch .NET on the server because they don't want to spend money on a windows license. As MS isn't interested in being Oracle, they OS .Net for the server.
Note, they didn't OS .net for the desktop.
What will happen when they'll be be on top again? Will they keep Open Sourcing things (like Google is doing) or will it go back to Closed Source vendor lockin?
Likewise, last year it was noted at certain points in time it was very clear that target campaigns run by or for Microsoft on Reddit and HN were working to down/up-vote specific posts and write replies in their favour. The results and details of this were posted at least two or perhaps thee times before fading away, they might be on the internet archive somewhere, if I get a chance I'll try and hunt them down.
Well, it definitely is one, but you seem to mean "a conspiracy theory in the sense often depicted in mainstream media: unsubstantiated paranoid ramblings, see also: tinfoil hat".
I mean, it is unsourced, but it's not an unheard of idea, and should be quite Google-able. Microsoft has engaged in astroturfing many times (last in 2014 AFAIK) so it's entirely possible.
NeoGaf discussion with a list of news reports on MS astroturfing:
(I'm not associated with NeoGaf, I found it on Google, I vaguely recall it having some GamerGate-related stigma attached to it so I added this disclaimer)
That's kinda the problem with it. The time and resources one would involve to prove the point is substantial. And for what result ? At best a few people will get offended and that's it. MS has corrupted governments, insulted competitions and spied on its customers and yet they have been forgiven. So even if we prove what's is now a feeling, that they are on a PR campaign, it will achieve nothing.
Google is at the top in Mobile. Yet Android is 90% Open Source. It's not that even that.
If I want to install an APK, I can do it. No need to be a Enterprise or pay $100 for a developer license, anyone can install FDroid. And they let people write competitive software (Firefox, etc.) and set them as default. Actually, as a user, I don't have to see anything be Google if I don't want to.
Is Android any different from Windows in that sense?
It's open source in name only. All development is done behind closed doors and essentially dumped out in the open when Google determines it's ready for a release. No one else has say in the development process and you can't contribute changes either.
All the other things you mentioned, can also be done on Windows. I am not sure how that's different than what Windows does/is doing.
1. Most of Android is Open Source - see Amazon Fire, for example. Is there an equivalent of that on windows?
2. MS took apple's approach that everything (on their new platform) must go through the store.
Even if right now they give exceptions, it's as I said above an example of them trying to build market share. Will they have an "Unknown Sources" button when they get 80% of the market?
What are your objections to Chrome? Chromium seems like a reasonable project and everything that's not in Chromium seems to be pretty well Google specific and probably shouldn't be in Chromium IMHO.
> (Chromium), and forms the basis of several competitors to Chrome
Chromium was based on Webkit which actually came from Apple (and who forked it from KHTML from the KDE project). It's not Chromium that's the "basis" of competitors, it's Webkit that was the base.
> What tech company has ever been at the top and acted nicely?
It's not a binary option (nice vs. not nice) but a range from nice to not nice. Companies fall at different points on that spectrum. As examples; Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle all fall on very different points on this not-nice spectrum when they are/were at the top. The relative positions are subjective depending on who you relate to each (developer, competitor, user, recipient of legal threat or bystander), but in my circles there is a general consensus on the relative positions.
While there are a few counter-examples, for the most part, as Lord Acton said "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".
We need to prevent companies from controlling the market, and keep the powerful ones honest and accountable. Hating IBM, Microsoft and AT&T is all about fighting tyranny.
I would say they are purely sales focus and any remaining energy / time is spent saving face and convincing C(E/I)Os they're not just the best option, they're the only option.
Totally agreed. I really like Windows 10 - and then you have things like the advertising, forced resets of default browsers, forced reboots, and other things which, as a power user, do exactly nothing except piss me off.
If they just focused on the feature delivery and stopped trying to push their crap, it would be a legitimately great OS. Every time something like this happens, I get a little closer to jumping to a Linux desktop for good.
I'm just curios, disregarding performance aspects, what is there to like about w10 over, say w7? Two things that have put me off upgrading to w10 is the inconsistency of the UI, and the fact the user has less control over the system in a variety of ways.
There are a lot of legitimately great features that have been added for power users and developers since Windows 7. To give a few examples of things I make use of literally every single day:
- Windows Subsystems for Linux. I don't think this needs any further introduction.
- Client Hyper-V. It's a type-1 hypervisor that just works out of the box with completely seamless GPU passthrough (only to the root OS, i.e. the Windows 10 instance with Hyper-V enabled, but it's enough for gaming and running neural nets). Docker for Windows depends on this.
- Storage Spaces. A storage pooling system that supports thin provisioning, mirrored and parity redundancy, tiered caching, bit rot detection and correction (when used with their new ReFS filesystem), and works seamlessly with removable drives (I use a cluster of 2 2.5" external 4TB drives in mirror mode because I travel a decent amount, and 2 2.5" external drives are so much more pleasant to travel with than any NAS on the market).
- Huge improvements to window management, including virtual desktops, arrangement by snapping to all 4 corners on every monitor on multi-monitor systems, a super intuitive UI that lets you choose a different window to snap to the other side with 1 additional click, along with keyboard shortcuts for everything.
- First class pen support. I have a convertible laptop with a Wacom pen, and some of the features in the ink workspace like sketchpad and screen sketch have become indispensable to my workflow, and so damn convenient to use.
Windows 10 really is an excellent OS in its own right. It's such a shame that they keep undermining all the progress they've made by pulling crap like this.
and Environment Variables / PATH entries are now added as rows on a table, instead of appending to a super long string and trying to remember whether or not to put a slash and or a semi-colon at the end
The default terminals have improved significantly since Windows 7 for sure, but it still hasn't evolved into something that I genuinely enjoy using yet, at least compared to some of the other, much better terminals out there (missing tabs, splitting, extensibility, etc), so I'm hesitant to include that on my list.
I'm actually frustrated by it. I like the fact that I can finally CTR-C/CTR-V into the cmd line. But I spend my time interrupting scripts by just clicking on the cmd windows. It triggers the selection tool which blocks the script (this is mostly W10/WS2016 through RDP, I don't use windows 10 on laptops).
As far as I can tell, 10 has no killer feature, but has incremental improvements in a few areas that will be more relevant to some than others. It has better built-in support for modern hardware: common examples are USB3, NVMe, high-dpi monitors and touchscreens. It has some improvements under the hood in terms of security. It has DirectX 12 for gamers.
Well, I happen to like Hyper-V in the box, it tends to work better than VirtualBox or VMWare for that matter (at least in my experience)... Windows 8 pro comes with it too, but Win10's UX is finally there, where I hated windows 8's and would always revert to Classic Shell.
I also disabled Cortana and most of the search features beyond basic indexing and likewise don't use sync... I don't like the occasional Edge browser ad above my Chrome icon in the taskbar though. I'd still rather W10 than Linux... I use Ubuntu on my HTPC, and really like Unity, but it's just not quite as good, and there's the pretty regular quirk after updates run that I spend hours hunting down a solution for a few times a year. I also happen to mostly like my macbook, but there's not a viable solution to replace my main desktop.
I don't want to customize everything, I want nice defaults, where advanced features are tucked away... I also don't want to spend another 2 hours a few times a year fixing whatever problem the latest round of updates have caused. much more rare in windows in my own experience, I know two people who have had bad aftermath from updates, but one turned out to be bad ram that caused the issue.
All the same, I would much rather have macOS with a start/taskbar a little closer to windows... the instance previews are nice, and it's a bit easier to work across multiple monitors... Most of my time is spent in VS Code and a couple browsers, so as long as I have bash (comes with git in windows), I'm pretty much good in any OS...
I truly think these things are overblown. This article references "sync" providers, but having sync disabled I've never seen the ads they show. I also disabled Cortana and most of the new W10 stuff but never looked back after switching.
Edit: I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads.
W10 has multi-desktop support, which is great when you're doing distinctly different things with an overwhelming number of programs open. It also has better use of windowing if you use those features (snap works by quadrant, etc). So by pressing Win+Ctrl+D it creates a whole new desktop (empty taskbar), and you can switch between them with Win+Tab. I don't use this often but it was amazing the few times I reached for it.
Another small thing which bothered me but I've learned to rely on in W10 is if you have two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge of the left monitor, preventing your cursor from changing from the left monitor to the right monitor. This is useful for quickly minimizing or closing applications on the left monitor without mistakenly moving the cursor onto the right monitor.
I have not yet found anything which I've "lost control" over except item-level customization of the left-hand side of the start menu, which is where pinned programs would sometimes end up. Having the entire right-hand side of the start menu plus the task bar is really sufficient though so this isn't a big deal.
There are some other welcome improvements like the process list and/or performance monitor are improved, I can't remember specifically what wasn't available before though.
Of the three things you can find to praise Windows 10 for, two are power user features that Microsoft has long provided through power toys and sysinternals utilities. The last one sounds like Microsoft rediscovered Fitt's Law. I'm not prepared to give them any kudos for fixing such a glaringly obvious and simple flaw.
But on the other hand, the list of things that a typical power user or privacy-conscious user needs to tweak continues to grow, and some of them can only be disabled on editions that aren't available to consumers.
There is only one switch on a win10 machine that needs tweeking by the privacy-conscious user. If you really care about privacy you really need a non-proprietary OS.
The Windows 10 Settings app has a Privacy section. On its General tab, there are 6 options. There are also 15 more pages of options for different categories.
Where's the one big switch you claim covers everything of potential concern?
And the problem is not just to cover everything (I set up a script for that). But also to actively maintain the list for all the new intrusions on every "security" update. This is an absolute waste of my time by Microsoft.
I'm planning a hardware upgrade for my home PC. Making a beast of a machine. Intending to have Host OS Ubuntu ang guest Win10 with passthrough for the M2 drive and GFX. Games with near-native performance and privacy on the host platform. Best of both worlds.
go for it! I was very upset with the direction MS took with Windows 10 and have now been running Windows in a VM with graphics passthrough since 2015, with no problems
the only real problem I had with setup was sound: emulated sound had buffering issues, as did USB
I would suggest buying a cheap soundcard, giving it to the VM and running a cable between its output and line-in on your host (which hopefully has hardware support, so the sound doesn't have to be touched by the CPU by the host system)
be careful though, the hardware selection relies on trial and error quite a bit, devices have to support things like MSI interrupts, the board has to have proper ACS support, bios support has to be there, and so on
even picking things like graphics cards is a problem, some AMD cards support hot-plugging properly, others of the same generation don't
(and just because it's on the datasheet doesn't mean it works in practice :/)
I was on the same boat. Made the switch, and this weekend I'm sadly going back. Ubuntu's UI is just a mangled mess full of bugs. I lost so much fighting against stupid UI choices that I realized I was wasting way more time than if I just stayed on -heck- win7
I don't know just how many people did Unity successfully prevent from switching to Linux!
With regards to usability and customizability, IMHO Unity seems to get worse with each release, so eg. now it no longer supports screenlets, and even the "Unity Tweak tool" no longer seems to work for several useful "tweaks".
But, I just don't get why do people assume it's either "plain" Unity or back to Windows. Have you ever tried Kubuntu? Or MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce flavours? I personally find KDE Plasma 5 the best DE ever, period - that is, once you invest those few minutes customizing it / fixing its few oddities here and there. Why don't you try it out?
For me, my biggest beef with Unity was a death from a thousand papercuts. EG: i wanted to open a file in a program and had to navigate to the location, and couldn't just copy the folder path as I did on Windows. Or when I wanted to Alt-Tab between two windows of the same program, I couldn't do it with Alt-Tab. To remove it, the forums told me to launch a program which then for some reason didn't open when I double clicked on it. And then I realized that Sublime Text was not longer called Sublime Text but Ubuntu somehow renamed it to the last file opened as admin, which was aparently a well known bug with Unity.
Then I read that the next version of Unity is a rewrite from scratch, with usually means many new fun bugs, and just said 'forget it'.
Now, is any of these DE simple to use and with well-thought defaults? I can try out a few ones (after all I will do a clean wipe of my desktop) but sadly don't have the time to test more than a few DEs.
I think KDE, MATE, Xfce and Cinnamon have all (mostly) sane defaults, and are simple enough to use, so it's mostly a matter of personal preference. I'd choose KDE though - I have used Xfce for years before, and it always felt somewhat limited.
Have you made a decision on the card yet? I really wanted to do this on my primary desktop and ended up using a secondary machine which I stream non-Linux games via Steam. But I hate running that second machine all the time.
> I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads.
Pro does show adds (like app suggestions in the start menu or add on the lock screen). Enterprise is the one that doesn't (if you configure it properly).
>two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge
You have windows 8 to thank for that, they figure this out designing their "hot corners" feature. There's a 5px angle at each corner to catch the mouse. This idea is users learn to hit the top and slide across to get the corner, rather than try to nail the corner perfectly all the time.
You can go into settings>system>display to configure the alignment of the two desktops. It looks like they might both share the bottom edge rather than the top edge
Faster booting to a truly usable desktop rather than 1 minute to get a non-functional screen then another minute for enough of the OS to be brought up to do anything.
Page compression for low memory PC's is nice to have too.
Boot time is a non-issue if your boot partition is on an SSD, which is the case for most serious users today.
I actually measured the difference. My Windows 7 used to boot in ~20-22 seconds. With Windows 10 it went down to ~15-17 seconds. Sure, Windows 7 was a bit slower. However, it also didn't have forced reboots like Windows 10 does, which in my eyes more than makes up for it.
Performance is the big one. Win 10 - when it's good - feels like a super-polished Win 8. They fixed the "metro" app stuff to not be awful. It does a good job of getting out my way and letting me run what I want to run. It's when it intentionally gets into my way that I get cranky.
> I get a little closer to jumping to a Linux desktop for good
I wonder how bad Windows has to get before Linux on the desktop takes off? It's kind of depressing that as good as most Linux distributions / window managers are, they aren't compelling enough.
As someone who has managed to stay off windows for everything but gamedev (playing games on linux, only devving on windows because I find magical ways to crash the linux UE4 editor), I really think Vulkan is what will do it. Once we have Vulkan, it will be easier to get performance out of games and the underlying DE/WM, and it should simplify dev since we shoulnd't have to worry nearly as much about direct3d vs opengl.
I have been dissapointed at Epic and Valve for not investing a bit more resources into the linux ecosystem, but I think they are just playing a longer game. While a freedom geek like myself will force myself to get used to the sometimes more difficult ecosystem, the genpop needs an excuse to chase the medium... I think gaming is it, and vulkan is the thing that should help linux gaming.
Ryzen and it's low cost will also lower new pc barrier to entry, which should help, boosted along with lots of people wanting to dip into VR and therefore upgrading. More and more reasons for sections to move.
If the CIA/NSA leaks keep up and MS keeps alienting users like they have since Vista/8/10, gnu/linux userbase will continue to rise.
What would really make it though... is a killer AAA game or program that's on linux only. No port for windows, no bad windows gamers, you don't get to play, sorta thing.
As for distros, I just want to make a quick plug for (xfce) Manjaro... normally I distrohop very frequently, but I haven't had such an easy linux experience ever. Really worth trying at least in a VM.
I respectfully disagree. I don't think there's some feature that is enough to dislodge Windows. I think it's going to take something like iOS on the desktop.
By that, I'm not really talking about the touch-based UI (although that's part of it). I'm thinking about the app model. The model used by Windows is too complex (and Linux is even more so).
There are a lot of things Apple got right with iOS, but I'm especially fond of the security measures. Apps are sandboxed, they hide filesystem details, inter-app communication is mediated by the OS, and updating happens mostly transparently. The tight integration between iOS and the hardware for security reasons is also something that should be copied but will be difficult to do.
As a software developer, I couldn't use something like that to do my work, but most of the non-developers in my life could. Microsoft's current approach where they half-ass everything isn't going to work (IMHO). They are in no real danger though, because nothing else is challenging them today.
Potential challengers are around though. Apple is pretty close with the iPad Pro. Valve's Steam box is also on that path.
Quality is not the thing keeping most people away from Linux. It's not even software availability (although that is still relevant). It's PR and forced Windows distribution.
It's fast, does what I want almost all the time with no extra guesswork, and runs all the software I need to run without having to monkey around with WINE.
I love Linux, I love Linux desktops, but they cut into my productivity because I spend time fighting <esoteric edge case> rather than getting my work done. Windows (mostly) just gets out of my way. It's cases like this - when it gets in my way - that make me reconsider it.
Probably the settings app which is there to replace the control panel of old. It's very dumbed down, and frequently has to launch cpls itself to allow you to do more complex things.
FYI you can still get the control panel, just hit windows key and type "control panel". (Note, it appears for me after just CON, so you probably won't have to type the whole word, depending on what you have installed)
They removed that in the newest beta build. Now it has a menu option to the new settings app. Pretty stupid. They haven't even finished transferring everything yet.
I get most pissed off at the crapware that keeps getting re-installed. I don't want Microsoft's weather, news, money, music, contacts, calendar, etc... You can uninstall most of them by right clicking and choosing install but others require a PowerShell script.
My advice - do it all by script and keep the script because you are going to need it again when Microsoft decides to re-install all of it.
My Windows 10 Pro VMs always had some Candy Crush bullshit in the start menu and happily displayed celebrity news every time I had to open Edge (mostly to download Firefox).
Quite frankly, I liked the old Microsoft a lot more. Yes, things were more proprietary and closed, but at least they seemed to leave you alone once you paid for the product.
Now it makes perfect sense why the Windows 10 upgrade was "free", and they're giving away/opening up so much other software. They want to become like Google or any other ad-supported company, luring users in with the free/openness but then "monetising" them in this way. And I do not like that at all.
I don't like it either, but it's probably unsurprising given that neither corporations nor users tend to upgrade to new Windows versions in a reliable fashion.
I think using ad-based monetization was short-sighted and will damage their brand in the long term, but presumably they did the math and decided it was a good idea anyways.
Can you give me some examples of ad-based monetization, please? I'm on Windows 10 Pro with suggestions turned off, so all I've seen is a popup that suggests using Edge.
I don't see this as being particularly different from Google showing me an advert for Chrome every time I do a search....
> I don't see this as being particularly different from Google showing me an advert for Chrome every time I do a search....
I expect ads when I visit someone's store. I don't expect ads in my home, even if I'm just renting it from someone else. That's the difference that I see.
The suggestions that you have turned off, which happen to be opt-out rather than opt-in, and suggest non-Microsoft products, is a pretty blatant example of ad-based monetization, if you don't want to count promoting Microsoft's own products as advertising.
"Paid advertising" is where you take money from somebody, and the person you take money from controls the content. I don't see how Microsoft suggesting that you try Edge or OneDrive (which are free, and which you already have) fit into that category.
I was assuming you were talking about the suggestions that suggest apps on the start menu. Those are non-Microsoft apps. How do you think apps get on that list?
Just had a look at my Windows 10 Pro with suggestions turned off and there aren't any ads like that. Or maybe it's because I've never downloaded a game.
However, if I had found one, it doesn't seem like it would be worth too much hysteria.... though I confess that the Chrome adverts on Google's search page actually do annoy me. Slightly.
Of course, I use Google Search much much more often than the Windows 10 start menu ;-)
You get 5GB free, which is more than most people use, and that's in addition to infinite storage for email. OneDrive also compresses Office documents so they take up less space, and it automatically de-duplicates files.
It's a very useful 5GB, given that its part of the OS and you can save to it like an internal drive.
Of course, in the long run, Microsoft wants people o sign up for Office 365, which provides 1TB per person. That way you get 5TB of storage for peanuts, as well as the full desktop Office and integrated smartphone and tablet apps.
> You get 5GB free, which is more than most people use, and that's in addition to infinite storage for email.
I double-checked to be sure. My "free" 15GB of storage in Gdrive is actually 0GB (ie zero, nada, nothing) because I have almost 15GB of email in Gmail.
The same amount of email in Outlook still leaves 5GB free in OneDrive, for new users. (I have 25GB because Microsoft grandfathered my earlier storage.)
If you're shooting 4K with an iPhone then obvioulsy you'll use iCloud (also 5GB) not OneDrive. Good luck with that.
If you're a normal person then you'll probably use 200MB (my wife) to 1.5GB (me) shooting jpegs. I checked my folders.
If you think 5GB of OneDrive is a suitable option for a pro/semipro/serious photographer shooting RAW then I suspect you may have more serious problems than OneDive...
The Windows 10 upgrade was officially free for a year to encourage people to upgrade, which they wouldn't normally do. Microsoft made Windows 10 exactly the same as Mac OS, iOS or Android: you pay for it when you buy the hardware and the OS upgrades are free for the life of the device.
Also, Microsoft is not currently monetizing users, except via Bing. Microsoft does almost no ad selling (it farmed ad sales out to AOL), and it's the opposite of Google. There's roughly a 95/5 split, but with Microsoft, it's more like 5% ad revenues.
Unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't read any of your content (eg emails) for advertising purposes.
My problem is that they are coupling security updates and user-interface updates. The fact that they were offering the switch to Windows 10 didn't make it something that I wanted.
I can't stand the trend toward flat design. It was stupid with Windows 8, and I held out on Windows 7, hoping that 10 would bring some sense back to the interface. Instead, they doubled-down on the poor design, and I'm finding just how little I need to use Windows on a day-to-day basis, when Linux is becoming more and more user-friendly.
Unfortunately, it does mean that I only have until 2020 to finish up my backlog of Windows-only video games, before the long-term support of Windows 7 runs out.
The UI in Windows 10 is inconsistent and ever changing. Do you have to do something in the flat design portion or in the older Win7 style? It's akin to having to attempt to plug a USB2.0 cable into your computer three times.
I'm so sick of the inconsistency of the GUI that I just pop open PowerShell and gwmi things I want to manipulate.
One example is networking. I have a Windows 8 based tablet that I upgraded to 10. The networking is very iffy when rebooting and I often have to disable it and then re-enable the device in "Network and Sharing Center-->Change Adapter Settings". Trying to do this in the flat design way never works. Now what if I want to manage the list of WiFi networks or prioritize them? There use to be a link in the Network and Sharing Center in the bottom left. Once upon a time you could also click on the icon on your current active network which would then give you an option to manage.) That doesn't work for me anymore. I now have to do that in the flat design "Settings".
I also had to go into the registry to get a full pop-up keyboard. The option to enable it was just greyed out. And upgrading to the Anniversary edition on this 32GB tablet required a full reinstall and very carefully timed insertions/removals of a USB hub. Upgrading to Win10 from Win8 actually shortened the OS support lifetime for many of the 32GB tablets. Continued Win10 support requires updating of Win10...
Combine that with the Metro apps that I've paid money for just disappearing for good from my library, and I wonder why anyone puts up with this?
It was actually easier to do the 32 bit Linux UEFI workaround than reinstalling the Win10 Anniversary update.
You're not gonna like 2017 Linux then. The superflat, super-trendy themes have the most users and are pretty much the only ones that see regular updates. Which are required because tl;dr GTK3.
Vertex and -- honest to God! -- a Win 3.x lookalike are virtually the only decent alternatives that work for more than six months.
It's also needlessly frickin' huge. It's worse than Industrial (oh, the memories...). It's like it was designed for touch screens and tablets, not monitors and real computers.
Someone built a "smaller" version a while ago, but it hasn't been updated, so it no longer works on recent GTK versions.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. I used Ubuntu as my main OS in 11-12 and tried it again a month ago and am regretting it (the UI has a lot of weird bugs; heck I couldn't believe I would have missed Windows Explorer).
You only need that luck if you get your software from people who think coupling security updates and UI updates is a good thing. Fortunately, not everyone does.
Obviously Microsoft itself realises this, because Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product. In the spirit of sharing good luck, I wish you luck in finding any large corporate IT department that will adopt an OS as their standard platform without the ability to control exactly what gets updated and when.
The trick Microsoft seems to be trying to pull with Windows 10 is getting everyone else to be the beta testers for its enterprise customers. Commercially, I imagine that makes a lot of sense if you can do it, since surely those enterprise customers are far more valuable to you.
Other customers, who can choose from ever more alternatives for activities that used to use a Windows PC by default, might not be so keen. Casual home users rely more on alternative devices like phones, tablets, and consoles these days. "Prosumers" and small businesses can work with Apple gear or Linux, either on their own merits or simply because if a lot of the services you use are available online then it doesn't much matter what OS you're running locally anyway. With Windows 10 Pro being such an odd beast, I wonder how much longevity Microsoft's apparent strategy actually has.
Every website you use -- especially every Google and Facebook site -- is doing data-driven development where security and UI updates are made on a continuous basis. So are a lot of other programs, including browsers.
Welcome to the modern world.
> Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product.
Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially the same product. The timing is slightly different.
> I wish you luck in finding any large corporate IT department that will adopt an OS as their standard platform without the ability to control exactly what gets updated and when.
Try the US Defense Department, Accenture, and Bank of America.
Every website you use -- especially every Google and Facebook site -- is doing data-driven development where security and UI updates are made on a continuous basis.
That doesn't make it a good thing, though. Getting to our usual dashboard now takes about half a minute on Google Analytics instead of about two seconds, thanks to their latest UI update. Facebook have lost a small fortune in advertising revenue from my businesses because of all the times that they've changed their management pages so they simply didn't work when we were going to run ads.
So are a lot of other programs, including browsers.
And with my professional web development hat on, "evergreen" browsers that update every six weeks are among the worst things that have ever happened to the industry. It's the same culture that also brings us a new JS framework every five minutes and a new half-baked, non-standardised CSS feature every ten. None of this is good unless it actually helps people to do more online, and all too often the reverse is true.
Welcome to the modern world.
Thanks, but I'll keep my old school systems where things like stability and reliability matter more than this week's shiny new UI chrome. That's why we still run Win7, we run Linux servers, our web sites and apps only rely on standardised, well-established features, and so on.
Try the US Defense Department, Accenture, and Bank of America.
Are you seriously claiming that the US DOD and major financial institutions let Microsoft install arbitrary updates and reboot their systems whenever they feel like it? I find that impossible to believe.
As I said, Windows 10 Enterprise is essentially a different product.
> Are you seriously claiming that the US DOD and major financial institutions let Microsoft install arbitrary updates and reboot their systems whenever they feel like it? I find that impossible to believe.
They are among the organizations moving to Windows 10. In fact, most organizations are moving to Windows 10.
But the question under discussion wasn't who was moving to Windows 10, it was whether bundling of security and UI updates was the way things were going and whether giving up control over the update process is acceptable to everyone. My argument throughout has been that not everyone is willing to hand over that level of external control of their systems, and that Microsoft recognises this by having a very different upgrade regime for Windows 10 Enterprise.
It isn't clear at all that bundling security and UI updates is the way things are going. That may be true if you look at very narrow parts of the market, but for example all of our servers and pretty much every piece of software we run on them get separate, individually installable security updates that very deliberately don't change any other functionality (and with extremely high reliability, don't break anything in the process either).
But the adoption rates for Windows 10 show that it's acceptable to the vast majority of people.
That's still a stretch. Nearly two years after release, even with very aggressive promotion including literally giving it away to home users for one of those years, it looks like Windows 10 still has far less market share than Windows 7. I don't know see you can get to "vast majority of people" from there.
As for businesses, large enterprises may be moving towards 10, though I note that the citations you gave earlier were invariably future predictions by analysts rather than actual adoption numbers. However, as I keep saying, large enterprises are getting a version that is very different, because it doesn't suffer from problems like having mandatory updates (or telemetry etc.) that have been widely criticised in other editions.
In contrast, and in complete opposition to your earlier claim that most organisations are moving to Windows 10, I mostly work with smaller tech businesses, where approximately none are currently moving to Windows 10 as their standard platform and several are actively looking into alternatives. If that experience is even remotely representative of the wider customer base, the nerfing of the Pro edition is going to hurt Microsoft if they don't fix it before the 2020 deadline. These companies don't have "IT departments" and they don't want "enterprise licensing deals". They want to buy new PCs that they can use to do their work, and for the less technical businesses, they usually want those PCs to be something Bob from Customer Support can set up because he knows a bit about how the office network works and has a list of which software they usually install for new starters. Getting away from all the other hassle is a big part of why cloud-based services are so popular.
> it looks like Windows 10 still has far less market share than Windows 7.
On Statcounter numbers, Windows 10 has more usage than Windows 7 in the USA and the UK. That's unheard of for a new Microsoft OS, where most people don't update until they buy a new PC.
> I note that the citations you gave earlier were invariably future predictions by analysts rather than actual adoption numbers.
Some are already doing roll-outs and pilots are at an all-time high. It normally takes corporates much longer to get to this stage.
> by having a very different upgrade regime for Windows 10 Enterprise
On Statcounter numbers, Windows 10 has more usage than Windows 7 in the USA and the UK.
Here are a few more sources for you to consider:
StatCounter global[1]: Win7 47%, Win10 34% (of Windows desktops)
Wikimedia[2]: Win7 22%, Win10 9% (of all platforms)
USA government analytics[3]: Win7 25%, Win10 17% (of all platforms)
The only serious source I know that has consistently shown Win10 coming out ahead for a while is Steam, which is obviously looking specifically at the gaming market:
Steam survey[4]: Win10 49%, Win7 37% (of all platforms)
That's unheard of for a new Microsoft OS, where most people don't update until they buy a new PC.
It's also unheard of for a new Microsoft OS to be not just given away to home users for a year but promoted through a campaign that was widely accused of trying to trick people into upgrading even if they didn't want to.
Some are already doing roll-outs and pilots are at an all-time high.
There seem to be a lot more pilots than roll-outs, though, even in enterprise land. That in itself is quite telling.
Really? How is it "very different".
Enterprise users have full control over which updates to install and when. Home/prosumer/small business users do not.
But they could log your keystrokes. Honestly, I would rather the UPS read my postcards than my contractor keeping a camera in my house "to help them build houses better"
Haven't all the revelations from corporations and government agencies flipped your switch yet? At this point, how would you NOT assume that everyone who can access your data is not benefiting from its use and/or sale? I'd flip the question: is there any organization who has access to your data that isn't mining it to use against you (by targeting you for marketing purposes) and/or selling it to other parties? In fact, I'd go on to say that this activity is now the #2 gross domestic product of the US, right behind "convenience."
The difference is that I don't have a freeing of privacy on a cloud (and especially here it's an automated computer program that's doing the reading, it's not that engineers are reading my emails).
> Also, Microsoft is not currently monetizing users, except via Bing
I do not care if the ads in my file manager are free or paid for today. What reason do you have to believe the in-OS ad-delivery infrastructure that is currently operational will not be monetized? It's a reasonable extrapolation, especially given the following caption from the article "How can you tell this is an ad? The dollar sign is one clue."
(I have not tried actually running the installer, because I have no intention to deliberately use Windows 10.)
Also, MS has posted the full ISOs for free download on their site, so if you're really desperate and know how, you could just download them and crack it yourself. That would be unheard of a few years ago. The general message seems to be louder than before, although it has been the same for many years: if you really don't want to pay for it, we still want you to use Windows 10.
> "Microsoft made Windows 10 exactly the same as Mac OS, iOS or Android"
...which is precisely what a large portion of the userbase who chose Microsoft did not want.
Do you have any evidence that it's a large proportion of the user base? Windows 10 already makes up the majority of PC usage share in the USA and the UK (on Statcounter), and Microsoft says corporate adoption is at unprecedented levels for a new version of Windows. (Mostly pilots at this stage, obviously.)
More people use Window 10 than have used all versions of Mac OS going back to 1984, and in its first month, it had more users than Linux got after 20-odd years.
There are always hold-outs: I gather some people still cling to OS/2 and maybe even Amigas. There used to be a cult that said you'd have to prize XP out of their cold dead hands.
However, the fact is that Windows 10 absolutely has to work for the US Defense Department (which is already switching to Windows 10), Bank of America and practically all the S&P500, so you can be confident that it will.
>if you really don't want to pay for it, we still want you to use Windows 10.
Hasn't that always been Microsoft's modus operandi? They could have cracked down on pirated versions of their software (Windows, Office), but they didn't because they knew that piracy helped in making their software the de-facto standard.
I'm no expert here but this is contrary to the prevailing narrative. Can you link to any sources? Thanks.
I should note that though I switched away from Windows back in 2001, I think they're definitely on the right track under Satya Nadella. I'm a big fan. It would have been very, very easy for Ballmer's successor to nail the lid shut on the coffin into which they were climbing. He's turning that around and winning fans along the way.
I found myself in a similar situation back in 2011. The .NET ecosystem went stagnant as resources were shifted towards the upcoming Windows 8 release, and that in turn made everything weird. That weirdness continues today in the form of UWP.
I'm glad I extricated myself from their ecosystem when I did. As much as I loved C# and wanted Microsoft to succeed, it felt very much like being on board a sinking ship.
Typescript is supported by Google in Angular2, so it's not a completely Microsoft dominated effort. It's also just a transpiler so it doesn't call into a bunch of closed source Windows APIs which might not work quite right when implemented on non-MS platforms.
Can't speak for GP, but jumped over to Node myself near that time... spent a few years migrating .Net apps, and today mostly work in Node. I've enjoyed it a lot, despite some recent pain (going from Webpack 1 and nyc/mocha/chai to Webpack 2 and Jest) it's still been nicer than when I have to fire up VS (in a VM even) to help with a bug at work.
I will say the .net core stuff is looking really nice to work with though.
what really pisses me off, is a fact that somewhere in microsoft there was an actual meeting (even many), where this phrase “Show sync provider notifications.” was PROPOSED by a human (like you and me), then discussed and approved.
They're intelligent ones. And no, no some shady/remote executive. One of us (maybe a little more product oriented) who then wrote in some internal memo: "Using this phrase will result in tricking users of not disabling it. It's better to conceal it and not write the truth. It's better to cheat".
And then they signed it off and went home to their families and children. YUCK.
Almost everyone involved may have been unaware of the final purpose --- they could've been told/were thinking all along that this would be for something like "Your OneDrive is getting full" and not "Pay $$$ to upgrade your OneDrive!".
And these "how to stop Microsoft from pissing you off" tips are really a losing game for users, and Microsoft knows it.
Sure, maybe 0.01% of the market will always stop whatever Microsoft is pushing, but let's face it, most don't have time to learn all the tricks on how to stop all of Microsoft's tracking or advertising and whatnot. Plus, I bet Microsoft will change how this works in a near-future update, so this tip will become invalid. It did something similar for the tracking features that were getting stopped by people and tools early on.
One of Microsoft's flaws had long been that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. It acts more like a collection of independent companies than a cohesive whole, and this giving while taking is one more example of it.
I switched away from ms some time ago. I almost left Ubuntu because of the one Amazon link that comes in the default install.
Operating systems are abundant nowadays. Something has to be really good to not switch away from based purely on its own merit.
The real problem is compatibility with applications. I bet the real thing holding most to a single OS is that availability of their applications on a given OS.
Yeah, I had been using Ubuntu as my main OS until I got a new job at a place that is mostly Windows. There are a few applications that I need to use for work that simply aren't available on Linux (or even OSX). Work encouraged me to use MS tech, although I do most of my work in R. But I had had a good experience with VS Code and TypeScript, so I tried out C# for things that I normally would have done in Python. I guess that I could always boot to Linux and run a Windows VM...
The virus fear by family is worse than you suggest: now, it will be difficult to remotely diagnose whether they have a nasty virus/trojan/infected system or whether it's just Windows. They are emulating behavior from bad actors. I can't imagine how this got approved.
Google's data mining where Google aggregates a full profile about you and some billion other people. And (except china-like) there is no simple 'checkbox' to switch off. THIS, I call 'a whole other league'!
-- Of course I don't like the intrusion by MS either, but if people don't pay for the product (and updates!), this is what happens. Worse with Google/Facebook and now also with MS.
Google's product came as free, with the conditions upfront. When you signed up, you knew exactly what you are getting. It is also worth noting, that Google's paid product is not datamined. That comes with some slight surprises, for example, Google Now is useless. (So your off switch is right there, at $5/mo/user).
Microsoft product was paid upfront. You might have used it for years, or decades even, and only then it changed to paid and privacy invading. Bait & switch like.
So Google provided you with an additional option, that you could or could not take, you were informed with terms and conditions. Microsoft got you used to their product and then switched terms and conditions, they took the option away from you.
I agree somewhat. But Microsoft (or any company) cannot support a product for years without revenue. As an example I bought Win8 (unusable), free upgrade 8.1 (still terrible), free upgrades 10 (better, but still prefer mac/ubuntu). As people don't pay they have to change.
Google also changed. IIRC in the beginning they didn't collect 'everything' and had borders. At some point they merged all services. You are right with $5/mo/user, but I was not talking about GoogleApps, I meant 'the net' called Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdSense etc. which 'hunts' you down all over incl. Android.
I don't much care personally if they track me, but I don't think they should be allowed to do this. And I think it's significantly worse than what MS did here. It's also much more hidden.
When they started "admitting" that they made a mistake with the way they pushed the Win10 upgrade onto unwilling users, I was hoping that it was an early sign that they realized that they made a mistake, and were slowly working on reversing it.
The fact that they continue to roll out this sort of user-hostile "features" shows that it was just an empty marketing gesture.
Time to start some bounties on making Linux usable for desktop, I guess.
As seemingly one of the older guys on HN these days, I went through this kind of frustration several times already with Microsoft.
In the late 80s / early 90s Windows was, in my personal opinion, one of the worst UIs. It wasn't even a proper OS. Nearly every other personal computer shipped a better windowing system. But IBM-compatible PCs were dominant so whichever windowing system monopolised on that was going to be dominant regardless of their quality. This made me grumpy.
But then Windows 95 came along and it was actually pretty impressive. I liked Windows 95 - for a bit. However it didn't take long for the 9x to show it's warts and instead of fixing the constant stream of kernel panics, fixing their reliance on DOS bootloaders, or even just adding desperately needed power user tools (many power users like myself ended up writing our own utilities to get around Windows 9x's short comings) Microsoft just kept bundling new features; forcing the system requirements to jump significantly with each new iteration for seemingly no real functional benefit. Windows ME was easily the worst of all Microsoft's OS (it made Vista look usable in comparison).
But thankfully there was an alternative to the Windows 9x line, and to ME specifically. Microsoft had done some serious investment into their NT line and released Windows 2000. Hooray as because they added so many much needed usability little tweaks: shortcuts to Notepad (back then people still actually used Notepad) so no more clicking File->Save for quick edits. Windows 2000 was also rock solid compared to the Windows 9x range. In fact the only times I've managed to BSOD Windows 2000 was when playing around with undocumented APIs - so pretty much my own fault.
Windows 2000 also looked doubly good because around that time Mac users were stuck on OS 9 (albeit OS X was released shortly after). Mac OS 9 was just as poor as Windows 9x in terms of the frequency one would need to reinstall. Linux was obviously around at that time but we're talking before the time when people even joked about "this year will be the year of the Linux desktop". Linux was usable but a long way from being a recommendable desktop solution for those who want something to "just work". There was another option back then though: BeOS. Sadly by the time of Windows 2000 BeOS was in it's twilight years. Struggling to gain any traction and suffering from the blow of Apple buying up Next (and Jobs). I still used BeOS 5 a fair bit around that time though but more for fun than for productivity as Windows 2000 had better software support, better development tools, etc.
This was when I started to forgive Microsoft for releasing such substandard software in the 80s and 90s. It didn't last long though. XP was twice as resource hungry, twice as ugly and -upon it's initial release- offers nothing of benefit to 2000 aside quickly booting times. XP obviously branched off significantly with each new service pack but it was too late because I held onto 2000 for a long while and then by the time XP really evolved into a new entity, desktop Linux was already good enough that I'd migrated to it as my main OS (only using Windows for specialised "pro" tools). Then with the release of Vista I ditched Microsoft entirely. To be honest I'm glad I did because with each new release of Windows it's felt like control has been inched away from the power user in favour of dumbing things down for the tech-illiterate home users.
As someone who spent their entire career OS-hopping with no real alliance it was painfully obviously how Microsoft was hurting competition. But I guess that's what you do when you're on top. If you're an underdog then you fight for market share by being better at particular things - lots of things if needed. But when you're at the top it's all about retaining market share - so you focus on keeping people on your platform. A priority which doesn't necessarily fall in line with being technically the "best". However the internet has dislodged the importance of the OS. In many ways the browser is now the kernel. Sure many people -myself included- still prefer native applications but the rise of web apps has done more to aid Linux adoption than anything any single company has contributed (Canonical included). Bill Gates could see this coming though. Hence why he tried to dominate the webspace with Internet Explorer and platform specific web controls like ActiveX and it's predecessors. He did a pretty good job too - for a while.
I actually don't hate Windows 10. I have it on a spare work laptop as an emergency in case I manage to foobar my other Linux machines (I run Arch, so it's not too difficult to break if I'm feeling careless - but usually equally easy to fix as well). WSL is a nice feature, miles better than Cygwin ever was. The cmd terminal finally has some much needed usability tweaks. Overall it reminds me of the subtle usability improvements Windows 2000 pushed that made me warm to Windows nearly 2 decades ago. But I'm happy with Linux - it functions the way I personally find the most productive and, frankly, I doubt I would ever trust Microsoft as my primary platform again anyway. However it is amusing to watch new power users go through the same highs and lows with Microsoft as I had done in the 90s. It's just another one of those cyclic trends I've observed in IT (along with technology being discovered and reinvented)
>> Bill Gates could see this coming though. Hence why he tried to dominate the webspace with Internet Explorer and platform specific web controls like ActiveX and it's predecessors.
MS did not see the internet coming. I remember being at conferences in the '90s and speaking with boastful MS types about the "Microsoft Network", which required a paid subscription. "This internet stuff is just for universities, it doesn't have a future," one guy told me.
Of course, things didn't go that way, so Microsoft released IE5 and IIS and it was game on.
That's just one employee, not really a fair representation of MS upper management nor Gates specifically. I've seen interviews with Bill Gates in the mid 90s where he talks about a long term plan for subscription software over the internet (specifically regarding Office if I recall correctly). That's two decades before Office 365.
Let's also remember just how deeply Internet Explorer 4 integrated into Windows 95.
Microsoft were very aware of the potential of the web but that still doesn't mean they could control it.
Yes, it makes one wonder what's next, advertising in Visual Studio? Advertising in the command line shell? Third-party advertising in programs you compiled?
Yes this. I can't bring myself to upgrade our Windows PCs for fear of having to seek and destroy constant advertising when I'm just trying to get stuff done. I'm happy to pay for MS services but don't shove it in my face when it's inappropriate, and don't give me a sales pitch.
You can't just say you love Microsoft, except for this part though. Putting malware and spyware into their paid products after the fact is part of the cash machine that keeps the more attractive products afloat.
I feel bad for the MS employees who are making awesome products but then have to deal with all the ridiculous fallout of Windows 10 decisions. Sorry for the rant, but these actions are honestly making me think about discontinuing my use and support of Microsoft's products, and I hope that someone somewhere is listening to us geeks.