Every day I feel like a passive spectator watching the industry move in a direction that is worrying: more telemetry, harsh rules about binary signing that hurt small developers, difficulty of accessing one's own system with full privileges, online accounts required everywhere, pushes to do away with traditional "general-purpose computers" in favor of restricted devices oriented around consumption.
I know that this post is peak HackerNews hipsterism/"old man yells at cloud," so I want to try to make it constructive: what can be done, at this point? What is the strategic move, beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use? Is it too late and we've entered "hope for the best" territory?
Edit: To clarify, I do already use Linux, which wasn't clear from my initial wording. It's just that I worry it isn't "enough."
Being a Windows or macOS user starts to feel a bit like living in a Cold War Eastern Bloc country, doesn't it? The government knows what's best for you, now be a good citizen and don't make such a fuzz about it, if we all follow the great vision of the Party the future will be glorious, promised!
The big difference is, if you make a fuzz, Apple or Microsoft won't send the secret police after you (not yet anyway), so I guess the only option left is organized outrage on social media (or flee the country to an uncertain future in the "Free West").
It might be time to accept that the general public does not need "general-purpose computers". We're at a fork in the road, and both paradigms of computing are here to stay. It's up to us to make sure our branch of the fork is great at what it does, not fight the one that's backed by the giants. It's
not all grim, there are some wins for consumers, not the least of which is security and user friendlyness.
You're not alone. My disillusionment with what computing has become is reaching the point of me considering a career change, preferably one with as little computer interaction as possible. But that means going back to school.
When even Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi jump on the bandwagon of "oh, we changed your configuration behind your back whether you like it or not," it's hard for me to have hope for the future. But Windows 11 is beyond the pale. As it is, I've already skipped Windows 8 and 10, and 11 is an even harder pass.
To me this is a problem of user effort. Free open source software is not advertised as aggressively as paid versions so you have to go out and find it rather than it coming to you. There is still a preconception that paid software is somehow better than free open source software despite the abundant evidence to counter it. If you are scared of Linux then don't be. Something like Linux Mint is closer to Windows 7 (the last UI friendly version of Windows IMO) than Windows 10 and 11. Wine (for running Windows programs on Linux) is so good these days you can sometimes even play graphics intensive games using it.
There are more options than ever before to avoid corporate lock-in nowadays. It just doesn't come to you - you have to go to it.
I've changed my personal laptop to Linux, and my development platform from desktop/PC to html5/web. I think (hope?) there's too much momentum with the free web for the same tricks to happen there.
>beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use?
Why is this off the table? This is precisely what you do. The other thing you do is tend your own garden and not worry about what operating system other people use.
Dare I say that MacOS and Windows are no longer for you or I.
With almost all OS updates I find the focus of new features are things that I never use even on my personal machines as a regular user, though I recognize many people do use these features. Computers are appliances for most people. Steve Jobs vision is coming to full fruition. Smart phones just had to show how it could work. And for most people computers are infinitely more usable and less scary today.
With that being said, I do think Windows 11 looks quite nice and there are a lot of little quality of life improvements. Also the removal of the awful tiles in the start menu will save me time from removing each tile one by one, so I can’t be all mad here.
I imagine if you have Windows 10 Pro you can upgrade to 11 Pro for free. I also wonder if the consumer version of Windows 11 just starts becoming truly free because Microsoft knows they will make money on search, subscriptions, and enterprise.
This direction feels too natural to me: there's so much motivation for a corporation to control the consumer that I don't see how any individual solution will enact change as a steeply uphill battle. The whole situation is almost like climate change, where the corporations responsible are too big and too misaligned to change.
If it's not too late to radically alter our economic system to combat climate change (which I certainly hope it isn't) I think we can fix tech by almost extension.
> Every day I feel like a passive spectator watching the industry move in a direction that is worrying ... What is the strategic move, beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use?
The solution is to stop being a passive spectator and to start making proactive decisions. To make proactive decisions, you will need to decide what is important to you since you will never find the perfect solution. (There never was a perfect solution in any domain, only better and worse ones for a particular situation.)
If you've decided that you need Windows, that's fine. You will have to deal with the consequences of that particular decision, but it does not have to dictate every decision that follows. You can still choose applications that don't impose some sort of consumption model, require online accounts, or depend upon telemetry. I don't know what the situation is like for commercial software under Windows (surely there are some vendors who respect privacy), but there are always open source alternatives to consider. Feel free to choose according to your circumstances. If you're a graphics designer who needs Adobe products for your job, but can get away with LibreOffice for administrative tasks, then choose that mixture. Even though your decision won't put any pressure on Adobe, someone else's decision may (e.g. an office worker who uses Office 365 and Inkscape).
The way I see it, there are two big problems with the computer industry today: people don't like to acknowledge competing products that may better serve their needs when there is already a dominant player, and those who are aware of the alternatives are rarely willing to support them. In effect, this problem is partially the making of consumers who have been behaving as passive spectators.
Our error was to assume that the general person had a need for computation, when all they have a need for is information and communication. Sure in the 90's they brought newer faster computers but back then those newer computers were much better, and some people will buy the iPhone Max Pro when they don't need it, because it is the best/biggest and they are buying a status symbol. I am sure some of the upgrades back then where for the same reason.
For information, you can bring your phone with you everywhere but it is hard to do so with a laptop, so a phone wins. Phones are also easy to use for calls/messages and video, where the camera is actually better than anything available on a laptop.
A few people might want to balance their budgets, but it is also pretty easy to do on your phone, as your bank probably has an app that you can use and if not, your phone is plenty fast to do that.
Gamers might be the last who cares about the more powerful computers, but even then dedicated gamer phones exist, so maybe that niche is also slowly aging out as new gamers grew up with phones.
If you want some sort of solution, I think having a really good Linux build that works and which can be deployed on laptops in the moment a person gets too tired of windows is always a solid idea.
The plan is to use technology to make it so you can't own anything anymore.
The tech monopolies want their tithe. That's why you can't buy Photoshop or office anymore.
Soon you won't buy Windows, you will simply rent it forever. One day you won't own your phone or computer either. It's far more profitable to extract rent from your customers indefinitely when you're the only game in town.
The government needs to step in. By a great many metrics were living in another 30's gilded age, robber barons and all.
You are dismissing exactly the strategic move that's within reach.
Windows basically does not exist for home users except a few Western countries, and even there it's just due to inertia.
I've had great success with Ubuntu for non-technical users. For games you get a game console or play something in the browser. For everything else Ubuntu will do just fine.
Same with macOS... Regular folk have no reason to buy macOS. It's pure class signaling at this point.
Of course, there are business tools on each of these OSes, but if you make money with Adobe tools might as well buy the Pro OS.
To everyone reading this who feels uneasy about this, has broader concerns about the direction of desktop computing generally and Microsoft Windows specifically I say this: "give Linux a go".
You may not like it, you may go back to Windows and decide that the dark patterns are worth the cost of things 'just working' etc, but I implore you to at least give it a go. Burn a Live USB. Boot it up and have a look around. If you're coming from Windows 10, try Linux mint or anything with the 'Cinnamon' Desktop.
I say this mostly because the Hackernews crowd is generally pro-Linux as a concept, but sceptical of Linux as a daily driver. Those that do use it as a daily driver will (in my anecdotal experience) have been using it for 5-10 years or more and will have been used to making a good deal of compromises, or are tech savvy enough to have been able to fix things in the bad times.
But in the last few years desktops have gotten really good. You will likely find one that you like out of the latest versions of Cinnamon, KDE or Gnome. Or MATE/XFCE/LMQT if you want to go back for a lightning-quick old school feel.
Since 2018, thousands of games now work. It's now 'good enough' for pretty much all single player games. I ask people who haven't tried Linux since before then to have another try (or at the very least to look up the games they play on ProtonDB to see if they would work nowadays).
In short, a larger (albeit probably still small) number of people who would have jumped the Windows ship in 2015 instead of going to 10 will actually be able to do so now instead of upgrading to Windows 11.
+1
Don't get overwhelmed by the miriad of Linux distros to choose from. As OP said, start with Linux Mint. It is super user-friendly and based on Ubuntu/Debian which makes it stable and widely supported in terms of applications, drivers, etc. You can always switch to something more exotic later if you want, but IMHO Mint is one of the best there is for a normal Desktop experience.
While using Linux itself as my desktop OS isn't a problem for me (I'm quite comfy with Arch + KDE, also yes the obligatory I use arch btw :p), my problem so far which has always caused me to just go "f it, back to Windows I go" has been productivity.
Basically what I'm missing is an equilavent to Visual Studio for my line of "work" (game modding and reverse engineering with IDA + x86dbg and working with the win32 API). Writing and especially debugging windows binaries with mingw + winedbg has been painful for me so far, also I simply couldn't find any IDE/editor I could get comfortable with (I've tried VS code, kdevelop, qt creator and vim so far). Contrary to that VS simply let's me create a new project with a few clicks which lets me immediately get to work, gives me premade Release / Debug configurations with (mostly) sane defaults, an intuitive GUI for managing compiler + linker settings, running and debugging with the click of a button with multiple views for resource consumption, local vars and what not, the ability to easily debug dump files, etc. etc.
Essentially in the time I tried to get basically anything done on any of the other toolsets I've probably already done some actual work on VS. It just works perfectly for my use case.
The last time I've tried running Linux I actually went through the effort of setting up a KVM VM with dGPU pass through + intel gvt-g to drive the SPICE display (I have a laptop with an integrated + dedicated gpu and that seemed like the most intuitive setup) and - while it did work fairly well - the refresh rate was kind of off (even after patching QEMU to allow for more than the hardcoded 30Hz) and there was some weird stutter that I couldn't resolve (I've tried setting up virtio devices + installing the corresponding drivers, enabling hyper-v enlightments, changing the amount of vcpus, core pinning, static hugepages, etc. already, nothing helped in my case unfortunately). Those along with the realization there isn't much of a point of not simply running it in bare metal if I'm going to be in the VM most of the time anyways, brought me back to where I am right now: running Windows out of necessity / comfort.
Not sure what to classify this wall of text as (a mixture of rant and search for suggestions?) but that's essentially the cause of the "dilemma" (nothing short of a first-world problem basically) I'm in right now: I want to run Linux as my desktop OS and regularly try to do so but as soon as I want to be productive I just have to reach out to Windows again.
> Burn a Live USB. Boot it up and have a look around.
Note however that if your device is designed to run Windows you may have occasional problems with WiFi or suspend. This is not a Linux fault. I am using a laptop designed for Linux and it is rock-solid.
Four reasons I gave up Linux each time I tried:
1. Laptop battery falling to half what I get under Windows.
2. No full-disk encryption, there is always one partition that stays in clear.
2. There is no hibernate.
3. I need to run Office apps (I can't force my employer and all our clients to suddenly forget Office).
The day these issues are resolved, Windows is no more. To me at least.
> Microsoft does allow you many, many options to guard your privacy within Windows 10—but it’s also betting you won’t bother.
I think this sums up the issues I have with most of the discussions where "consumer choice" or "personal responsibility" are touted.
Yes, those are valid and important concepts - but if a company is emphasizing "choice" while at the same time having a vital interest that people "choose" against their own interests (or even manipulating people to that effect), the argument becomes obvious bullshit.
It's like food companies emphasizing "consumer choice" whenever stricter regulations are on the table, yet at the same time opposing anything that would actually allow consumers to make an informed choice (like easy to understand nutrition labels).
Everybody is focusing on local/MS account. But for me the more insidious requirement is mandating TPM chip. Not only in the short term a ton of computers will either have to be discarded (because you can't add a TPM chip to an existing system despite 'open' PC architecture), or stay on outdated Win10, in the long term the DRM implications are worrying.
Many PC motherboards have a TPM header either dedicated or sometimes shared with the USB 3.0 header.
You can buy a 20 pin TPM module for about £3 which can plug into the standard header and for about £7-8 for those snowflakes like ASUS that use the same 20 pin interface but with a slightly modified pin out.
The only question would be the BIOS initialization, but many OEMs have already released new BIOS revisions with added/better external TPM support or have announced their intention to do so.
For those system who don’t have a TPM header, Intel PTT and AMD’s PSP fTPM would provide the required compatibility.
And this is a good thing if this was still optional it would not put pressure on manufacturers to add TPM support as a standard feature.
Windows 10 will be supported to at least 2025 with feature updates and probably longer with critical security updates.
The fact that people complain about this is ridiculous.
This will be the most straight-forward thing to happen. I predict that MS will have to start another massive campaign to get people to upgrade again, like they did with WinXP. I wonder how well that will work if it means buying a new PC though.
I predict they will give up this requirement. Not only do a lot of systems not have TPM and secure boot, probably half of windows 10 systems don’t have them set up correctly to meet the requirement which means a ton of people will meet the requirements on paper and then get confused as to why windows won’t upgrade.
"In unrelated news, piracy levels have steadily increased since Microsoft unveiled the latest version of their popular OS. Bizzarly pirates seem to be targetting the 'Pro' variant exclusively. Microsoft officials stated that this is a worrying sign that even stronger online security and surveillance is necessary. The company has therefore been working on a new authentication system, which will require the user to be hooked up to an EEG at all times to remain connected to their session. Microsoft said this will be their most secure platform yet!"
My list of applications that I need to run on Windows, instead if Linux, has almost completely disappeared (I can only think of one). I have used Linux for probably 15 years and can say that the user experience has never been better (for the lay person that just wants something that works).
The final nail in the coffin of Windows for me is Steam Play. So many of my Windows games just work, right out of the box on Linux. It feels like magic compared to the old days of trying to hack together a workable Wine config...
My suspicion is the option to allow installation via a local account (by disconnecting the network) will remain come RTM. They're likely just pressing the issue now to gauge reaction.
My reaction will be to finally bother to install a Linux installation. Sure a lot of people say that then do nothing but seriously after losing my hotmail account and not being able to reach anyone for help and knowing my password and still being locked out I have no plans on creating another Microsoft account.
They have already been pushing this heavily in the Windows 10 installer to either “gauge the reaction”, or more likely, to let everyone know that this is coming and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The time of “gauging the reaction” is over and now it will be the requirement.
Every so often after a patch Tuesday windows 10 will try to force me the login with a MS account. I have to hit ctrl-alt-del a few time and logout of the local user to get around this garbage. I am so sick of this.
Could future of computing be just computer clients leveraging the cloud compute? If services like Google Stadia becomes as ubiquitous as email, no average user would bat an eye on required web login.
You want to render a complete VR map of a nation? Maybe you require petabytes of ram and compute power of a today's server farm? Worry not, your phone weighing 140g can do it, all by leveraging cloud compute.
Even if this future doesn't materialize, incentives for MS are clear and this requirement shall open up more integration opportunities than before.
Also there is no competition.
Linux has the following problems which have largely remained unsolved, since the community fails to even recognize them as an issue.
1. No 1080p or 4K video playback on Netflix.
2. Not even 720p video playback on Amazon Prime Video.
3. Games take a performance hit.
4. Single click installations of .deb almost never works.
.exe and .dmg are a much better user experience.
5. Ubuntu store is broken. It sometime loads, most times it doesn't.
6. Absence of Adobe.
7. An average user is expected to open up terminal when things go wrong and thing often do go wrong.
An OS company can divide their customers into Developers, Video/Audio Editors, Content Consumption, Office work and Gamers. Linux only and only caters to us Developers.
> local account users ... won’t be able to sync content or use Windows 11’s ability to sync or recommend content from other devices.
Is that meant to make you feel like you'd be missing out on something? Do people still fall for this kind of language, or is it just the marketing department patting themselves on the back?
Yeah, I'd love to cripple my own ability to get "recommended content" (we all know what that is) from anywhere at all.
Thank God for the massive increase in CPU power of ARM microcontrollers and the retro-computing movement.
Such as the Teensy 4.1, which can run CPM in emulation among other things. With a large capacity SD card, you could store a great deal of info on a non-compromised device.
I believe that people will start using them as secure methods to store personal information away from the prying eyes of Microsoft et al.
From the article:
> The Windows 11 Home MSA requirement isn’t permanent, just unavoidable.
Combine that with the fact that "essential telemetry" can't be disabled by normal means (and thus Windows will continue to send "diagnostic" data to Microsoft) and it seems one's PC is not unlike one's Android phone...
One of the most commented features of Windows 11 seems to be the ability to run Android apps. I was very excited about it... but then, if I want to use my Android apps on Windows 11, I am going to need not only my Google account, but also my Microsoft account and something called an Amazon account.
That's a lot of accounts to just run an app.
A lot of third parties to share my personal data with.
A lot of Terms of Service to read and a lot of GDPR "consent" clicks for me to give away my privacy.
While I definitely appreciate "end to end" working ecosystems, it was always a bit of a relief to be able to go back to an "open" PC. I guess that choice is still available, as long as it's not powered by Windows.
I don’t think this is about telemetry. I think this is about Messaging. With Teams being integrated into Windows, every Win11 user will be a new Teams user and will push Teams to the billions of users eventually.
I'm betting that windows 10 LTSB will be supported until windows 11, or 12 (or whatever) LTSB is released.
(ps. I cant switch to Linux 100%, I need to use windows for work as I am a game dev.. It's probably possible to do my job entirely in linux with wine and whatnot, but in software development it is a pretty bad idea to make ones job unnecessarily more difficult and complicated, and throw up barriers to shipping)
My PCs at home run linux. I run a Windows 10 VM on qemu/KVM for work, and that has worked for me for 16 months of remote work.
The crazy hardware requirements for windows 11 won't apply to VMs apparently. And my work will provide me with a Microsoft account, so that is fine. Plus it's a work-only machine, clear segregation.
I've been on Windows forever. Since DOS 3 or 4 I think (giving away my age there!) and until recently (last few years) it has fulfilled every one of my requirements, that is, games, development, consumption.
I'm a .NET developer so the Windows ecosystem was a no-brainer: Visual Studio just works... sort of. As an end-user everything works: I don't need to install drivers, hit the command line or anything.
Windows has been great over the years.
However...
The last few years have been a downward spiral. Not just downward, but accelerating downwards.
It started (for me at least!) with the forced upgrade from Windows 7 (or 8, can't remember), then came the utterly shit Windows updates - The updates for Windows 10 are shite. Plain and simple. A couple of years ago I'd had enough so I disabled Windows updates so that I could install them well after their release date as I was sick of being their beta-tester. There are literally bugs with every update now. I know we are talking about a few years ago, but I absolutely did not have issues with updates on Windows 7. Ever! Windows 10 has at least one show-stopping bug every couple of months now (it seems like that anyway).
It's now getting to the point that not only do I have less control over my own paid-for installation of Windows, but each update reduces my control ever more... I've harped on about it before (not just in this post, but others too) but disabling updates is a lesson in frustration. It's possible to do it but if you update later, they are switched back on - happens every time!
Then there's the telemetry! I'm not going to labour this point as it has been done to death already over the years but the sheer fucking arrogance of a company that takes my money, reduces my control over my paid-for product, then says "oh, we're going to take data from your operating system whether you want us to or not" is beyond the pale! Yes, yes, I know Android spying is the stuff of legend but it has been like that from day one! It's how Google makes its money. Microsoft used to not be dicks about you having control over your OS. Those days are long gone.
Dark patterns! Let me say NO to things and then just fuck off please! Why does everything have to be infantilized? Why does the YES button say "Yes please! I want rainbows and unicorns" and the NO button say "I'm a climate-denying terrorist if I click this". Worse, is when the "no" button says "maybe later" or "not right now". I hate that crap. And why do you have to make the positive button (I say positive, but I mean the button that's more beneficial to Microsoft!) massive and outlined when the other one is tiny and just text? Microsoft aren't the only ones that do that... I need to point that out!
The need for the OS to constantly keep me informed, or tell me about X, or jump in my face with this thing, or show me the latest news tipped me over the edge.
I want my operating system to do the following:
1. Store and launch my software
2. Be secure
3. Stay out of my way!
That's it.
I've had a few goes at Ubuntu and found it lacking. Nothing major but a few annoying things related to hardware: sound popping, graphics glitching, FF crashing, printer stopping working. Stuff like that but I'm on Pop! OS now. Just installed 20.04 the other day after playing with 20.10 for a couple of weeks (not a fan of 21.04 and I like the LTS idea especially when my livelihood depends on said computer!).
I can still programme .NET stuff with Rider (getting the hang of it, it's quite nice and it is way more responsive than VS which has become a buggy nightmare over the years!). Docker allows me to run SQL server (still use that quite a lot) and, interestingly the Docker SQL image runs faster than SQL server when it was installed natively on my Windows box... weird! It's very noticeable too.
Anyway, I'm too old to fight with the OS any more, and POP! seems to be ticking all the right boxes for now. I have to keep a W10 VM around for a couple of things but it's off most of the day.
Edit: I had a go at the "leaked" version of Windows 11 and I wasn't enamored. As a friend of mine once said: "Same shite, different smell!"
Though can't you just register an account like MickeyMouse123 @hotmail and use that? I know it's annoying but doesn't seem the end or the world. That said I dumped Windows after 7 and am a happy Mac/Linux user.
Could one get a fake Microsoft account with an email address and phone number tied to a service like Mailinator? Sure, if it were possible it would only be a temporary solution, but that's better than nothing.
[+] [-] olivierestsage|4 years ago|reply
I know that this post is peak HackerNews hipsterism/"old man yells at cloud," so I want to try to make it constructive: what can be done, at this point? What is the strategic move, beyond something like going with Linux or BSD for personal use? Is it too late and we've entered "hope for the best" territory?
Edit: To clarify, I do already use Linux, which wasn't clear from my initial wording. It's just that I worry it isn't "enough."
[+] [-] flohofwoe|4 years ago|reply
The big difference is, if you make a fuzz, Apple or Microsoft won't send the secret police after you (not yet anyway), so I guess the only option left is organized outrage on social media (or flee the country to an uncertain future in the "Free West").
[+] [-] fouronnes3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flyinghamster|4 years ago|reply
When even Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi jump on the bandwagon of "oh, we changed your configuration behind your back whether you like it or not," it's hard for me to have hope for the future. But Windows 11 is beyond the pale. As it is, I've already skipped Windows 8 and 10, and 11 is an even harder pass.
[+] [-] davidhyde|4 years ago|reply
There are more options than ever before to avoid corporate lock-in nowadays. It just doesn't come to you - you have to go to it.
[+] [-] mysterydip|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diegoperini|4 years ago|reply
* VPN for network encryption
* Black hole filters for telemetry
* OS-like special purpose software running as admin to escape from default OS tooling (i.e browsers, game launchers)
* Throwaway accounts for all online services
* VMs for everything else
* A strong stomach to endure this burden
[+] [-] DavideNL|4 years ago|reply
- Vote for a political party which creates laws to protect privacy
- Donate to companies like Signal, Noyb.eu, EFF who had success fighting for user privacy
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|4 years ago|reply
Why is this off the table? This is precisely what you do. The other thing you do is tend your own garden and not worry about what operating system other people use.
[+] [-] etempleton|4 years ago|reply
With almost all OS updates I find the focus of new features are things that I never use even on my personal machines as a regular user, though I recognize many people do use these features. Computers are appliances for most people. Steve Jobs vision is coming to full fruition. Smart phones just had to show how it could work. And for most people computers are infinitely more usable and less scary today.
With that being said, I do think Windows 11 looks quite nice and there are a lot of little quality of life improvements. Also the removal of the awful tiles in the start menu will save me time from removing each tile one by one, so I can’t be all mad here.
I imagine if you have Windows 10 Pro you can upgrade to 11 Pro for free. I also wonder if the consumer version of Windows 11 just starts becoming truly free because Microsoft knows they will make money on search, subscriptions, and enterprise.
[+] [-] toomanyducks|4 years ago|reply
If it's not too late to radically alter our economic system to combat climate change (which I certainly hope it isn't) I think we can fix tech by almost extension.
[+] [-] II2II|4 years ago|reply
The solution is to stop being a passive spectator and to start making proactive decisions. To make proactive decisions, you will need to decide what is important to you since you will never find the perfect solution. (There never was a perfect solution in any domain, only better and worse ones for a particular situation.)
If you've decided that you need Windows, that's fine. You will have to deal with the consequences of that particular decision, but it does not have to dictate every decision that follows. You can still choose applications that don't impose some sort of consumption model, require online accounts, or depend upon telemetry. I don't know what the situation is like for commercial software under Windows (surely there are some vendors who respect privacy), but there are always open source alternatives to consider. Feel free to choose according to your circumstances. If you're a graphics designer who needs Adobe products for your job, but can get away with LibreOffice for administrative tasks, then choose that mixture. Even though your decision won't put any pressure on Adobe, someone else's decision may (e.g. an office worker who uses Office 365 and Inkscape).
The way I see it, there are two big problems with the computer industry today: people don't like to acknowledge competing products that may better serve their needs when there is already a dominant player, and those who are aware of the alternatives are rarely willing to support them. In effect, this problem is partially the making of consumers who have been behaving as passive spectators.
[+] [-] tomjen3|4 years ago|reply
For information, you can bring your phone with you everywhere but it is hard to do so with a laptop, so a phone wins. Phones are also easy to use for calls/messages and video, where the camera is actually better than anything available on a laptop.
A few people might want to balance their budgets, but it is also pretty easy to do on your phone, as your bank probably has an app that you can use and if not, your phone is plenty fast to do that.
Gamers might be the last who cares about the more powerful computers, but even then dedicated gamer phones exist, so maybe that niche is also slowly aging out as new gamers grew up with phones.
If you want some sort of solution, I think having a really good Linux build that works and which can be deployed on laptops in the moment a person gets too tired of windows is always a solid idea.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deviledeggs|4 years ago|reply
The tech monopolies want their tithe. That's why you can't buy Photoshop or office anymore.
Soon you won't buy Windows, you will simply rent it forever. One day you won't own your phone or computer either. It's far more profitable to extract rent from your customers indefinitely when you're the only game in town.
The government needs to step in. By a great many metrics were living in another 30's gilded age, robber barons and all.
[+] [-] Black101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emouryto|4 years ago|reply
Windows basically does not exist for home users except a few Western countries, and even there it's just due to inertia.
I've had great success with Ubuntu for non-technical users. For games you get a game console or play something in the browser. For everything else Ubuntu will do just fine.
Same with macOS... Regular folk have no reason to buy macOS. It's pure class signaling at this point.
Of course, there are business tools on each of these OSes, but if you make money with Adobe tools might as well buy the Pro OS.
[+] [-] Zhyl|4 years ago|reply
You may not like it, you may go back to Windows and decide that the dark patterns are worth the cost of things 'just working' etc, but I implore you to at least give it a go. Burn a Live USB. Boot it up and have a look around. If you're coming from Windows 10, try Linux mint or anything with the 'Cinnamon' Desktop.
I say this mostly because the Hackernews crowd is generally pro-Linux as a concept, but sceptical of Linux as a daily driver. Those that do use it as a daily driver will (in my anecdotal experience) have been using it for 5-10 years or more and will have been used to making a good deal of compromises, or are tech savvy enough to have been able to fix things in the bad times.
But in the last few years desktops have gotten really good. You will likely find one that you like out of the latest versions of Cinnamon, KDE or Gnome. Or MATE/XFCE/LMQT if you want to go back for a lightning-quick old school feel.
Since 2018, thousands of games now work. It's now 'good enough' for pretty much all single player games. I ask people who haven't tried Linux since before then to have another try (or at the very least to look up the games they play on ProtonDB to see if they would work nowadays).
In short, a larger (albeit probably still small) number of people who would have jumped the Windows ship in 2015 instead of going to 10 will actually be able to do so now instead of upgrading to Windows 11.
[+] [-] jlkuester7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _piif|4 years ago|reply
Basically what I'm missing is an equilavent to Visual Studio for my line of "work" (game modding and reverse engineering with IDA + x86dbg and working with the win32 API). Writing and especially debugging windows binaries with mingw + winedbg has been painful for me so far, also I simply couldn't find any IDE/editor I could get comfortable with (I've tried VS code, kdevelop, qt creator and vim so far). Contrary to that VS simply let's me create a new project with a few clicks which lets me immediately get to work, gives me premade Release / Debug configurations with (mostly) sane defaults, an intuitive GUI for managing compiler + linker settings, running and debugging with the click of a button with multiple views for resource consumption, local vars and what not, the ability to easily debug dump files, etc. etc. Essentially in the time I tried to get basically anything done on any of the other toolsets I've probably already done some actual work on VS. It just works perfectly for my use case.
The last time I've tried running Linux I actually went through the effort of setting up a KVM VM with dGPU pass through + intel gvt-g to drive the SPICE display (I have a laptop with an integrated + dedicated gpu and that seemed like the most intuitive setup) and - while it did work fairly well - the refresh rate was kind of off (even after patching QEMU to allow for more than the hardcoded 30Hz) and there was some weird stutter that I couldn't resolve (I've tried setting up virtio devices + installing the corresponding drivers, enabling hyper-v enlightments, changing the amount of vcpus, core pinning, static hugepages, etc. already, nothing helped in my case unfortunately). Those along with the realization there isn't much of a point of not simply running it in bare metal if I'm going to be in the VM most of the time anyways, brought me back to where I am right now: running Windows out of necessity / comfort.
Not sure what to classify this wall of text as (a mixture of rant and search for suggestions?) but that's essentially the cause of the "dilemma" (nothing short of a first-world problem basically) I'm in right now: I want to run Linux as my desktop OS and regularly try to do so but as soon as I want to be productive I just have to reach out to Windows again.
[+] [-] abraxas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsflover|4 years ago|reply
Note however that if your device is designed to run Windows you may have occasional problems with WiFi or suspend. This is not a Linux fault. I am using a laptop designed for Linux and it is rock-solid.
[+] [-] nokya|4 years ago|reply
The day these issues are resolved, Windows is no more. To me at least.
[+] [-] xg15|4 years ago|reply
I think this sums up the issues I have with most of the discussions where "consumer choice" or "personal responsibility" are touted.
Yes, those are valid and important concepts - but if a company is emphasizing "choice" while at the same time having a vital interest that people "choose" against their own interests (or even manipulating people to that effect), the argument becomes obvious bullshit.
It's like food companies emphasizing "consumer choice" whenever stricter regulations are on the table, yet at the same time opposing anything that would actually allow consumers to make an informed choice (like easy to understand nutrition labels).
[+] [-] Santosh83|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|4 years ago|reply
You can buy a 20 pin TPM module for about £3 which can plug into the standard header and for about £7-8 for those snowflakes like ASUS that use the same 20 pin interface but with a slightly modified pin out.
The only question would be the BIOS initialization, but many OEMs have already released new BIOS revisions with added/better external TPM support or have announced their intention to do so.
For those system who don’t have a TPM header, Intel PTT and AMD’s PSP fTPM would provide the required compatibility.
And this is a good thing if this was still optional it would not put pressure on manufacturers to add TPM support as a standard feature.
Windows 10 will be supported to at least 2025 with feature updates and probably longer with critical security updates.
The fact that people complain about this is ridiculous.
[+] [-] xg15|4 years ago|reply
This will be the most straight-forward thing to happen. I predict that MS will have to start another massive campaign to get people to upgrade again, like they did with WinXP. I wonder how well that will work if it means buying a new PC though.
[+] [-] johnwalkr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpoacher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlkuester7|4 years ago|reply
The final nail in the coffin of Windows for me is Steam Play. So many of my Windows games just work, right out of the box on Linux. It feels like magic compared to the old days of trying to hack together a workable Wine config...
[+] [-] nirui|4 years ago|reply
- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
Or just search "Microsoft Account Problem".
[+] [-] nly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 14|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|4 years ago|reply
I wish everything I needed ran in linux.
[+] [-] siddhant09|4 years ago|reply
You want to render a complete VR map of a nation? Maybe you require petabytes of ram and compute power of a today's server farm? Worry not, your phone weighing 140g can do it, all by leveraging cloud compute.
Even if this future doesn't materialize, incentives for MS are clear and this requirement shall open up more integration opportunities than before.
Also there is no competition.
Linux has the following problems which have largely remained unsolved, since the community fails to even recognize them as an issue.
1. No 1080p or 4K video playback on Netflix.
2. Not even 720p video playback on Amazon Prime Video.
3. Games take a performance hit.
4. Single click installations of .deb almost never works. .exe and .dmg are a much better user experience.
5. Ubuntu store is broken. It sometime loads, most times it doesn't.
6. Absence of Adobe.
7. An average user is expected to open up terminal when things go wrong and thing often do go wrong.
An OS company can divide their customers into Developers, Video/Audio Editors, Content Consumption, Office work and Gamers. Linux only and only caters to us Developers.
[+] [-] kijin|4 years ago|reply
Is that meant to make you feel like you'd be missing out on something? Do people still fall for this kind of language, or is it just the marketing department patting themselves on the back?
Yeah, I'd love to cripple my own ability to get "recommended content" (we all know what that is) from anywhere at all.
[+] [-] shrubble|4 years ago|reply
Such as the Teensy 4.1, which can run CPM in emulation among other things. With a large capacity SD card, you could store a great deal of info on a non-compromised device.
I believe that people will start using them as secure methods to store personal information away from the prying eyes of Microsoft et al.
[+] [-] isodev|4 years ago|reply
Combine that with the fact that "essential telemetry" can't be disabled by normal means (and thus Windows will continue to send "diagnostic" data to Microsoft) and it seems one's PC is not unlike one's Android phone...
One of the most commented features of Windows 11 seems to be the ability to run Android apps. I was very excited about it... but then, if I want to use my Android apps on Windows 11, I am going to need not only my Google account, but also my Microsoft account and something called an Amazon account. That's a lot of accounts to just run an app. A lot of third parties to share my personal data with. A lot of Terms of Service to read and a lot of GDPR "consent" clicks for me to give away my privacy.
While I definitely appreciate "end to end" working ecosystems, it was always a bit of a relief to be able to go back to an "open" PC. I guess that choice is still available, as long as it's not powered by Windows.
[+] [-] jftuga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e-clinton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sstephant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isodev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everyone|4 years ago|reply
(ps. I cant switch to Linux 100%, I need to use windows for work as I am a game dev.. It's probably possible to do my job entirely in linux with wine and whatnot, but in software development it is a pretty bad idea to make ones job unnecessarily more difficult and complicated, and throw up barriers to shipping)
[+] [-] mickotron|4 years ago|reply
The crazy hardware requirements for windows 11 won't apply to VMs apparently. And my work will provide me with a Microsoft account, so that is fine. Plus it's a work-only machine, clear segregation.
[+] [-] aj3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Understated_|4 years ago|reply
I've been on Windows forever. Since DOS 3 or 4 I think (giving away my age there!) and until recently (last few years) it has fulfilled every one of my requirements, that is, games, development, consumption.
I'm a .NET developer so the Windows ecosystem was a no-brainer: Visual Studio just works... sort of. As an end-user everything works: I don't need to install drivers, hit the command line or anything.
Windows has been great over the years.
However...
The last few years have been a downward spiral. Not just downward, but accelerating downwards.
It started (for me at least!) with the forced upgrade from Windows 7 (or 8, can't remember), then came the utterly shit Windows updates - The updates for Windows 10 are shite. Plain and simple. A couple of years ago I'd had enough so I disabled Windows updates so that I could install them well after their release date as I was sick of being their beta-tester. There are literally bugs with every update now. I know we are talking about a few years ago, but I absolutely did not have issues with updates on Windows 7. Ever! Windows 10 has at least one show-stopping bug every couple of months now (it seems like that anyway).
It's now getting to the point that not only do I have less control over my own paid-for installation of Windows, but each update reduces my control ever more... I've harped on about it before (not just in this post, but others too) but disabling updates is a lesson in frustration. It's possible to do it but if you update later, they are switched back on - happens every time!
Then there's the telemetry! I'm not going to labour this point as it has been done to death already over the years but the sheer fucking arrogance of a company that takes my money, reduces my control over my paid-for product, then says "oh, we're going to take data from your operating system whether you want us to or not" is beyond the pale! Yes, yes, I know Android spying is the stuff of legend but it has been like that from day one! It's how Google makes its money. Microsoft used to not be dicks about you having control over your OS. Those days are long gone.
Dark patterns! Let me say NO to things and then just fuck off please! Why does everything have to be infantilized? Why does the YES button say "Yes please! I want rainbows and unicorns" and the NO button say "I'm a climate-denying terrorist if I click this". Worse, is when the "no" button says "maybe later" or "not right now". I hate that crap. And why do you have to make the positive button (I say positive, but I mean the button that's more beneficial to Microsoft!) massive and outlined when the other one is tiny and just text? Microsoft aren't the only ones that do that... I need to point that out!
The need for the OS to constantly keep me informed, or tell me about X, or jump in my face with this thing, or show me the latest news tipped me over the edge.
I want my operating system to do the following:
1. Store and launch my software
2. Be secure
3. Stay out of my way!
That's it.
I've had a few goes at Ubuntu and found it lacking. Nothing major but a few annoying things related to hardware: sound popping, graphics glitching, FF crashing, printer stopping working. Stuff like that but I'm on Pop! OS now. Just installed 20.04 the other day after playing with 20.10 for a couple of weeks (not a fan of 21.04 and I like the LTS idea especially when my livelihood depends on said computer!).
I can still programme .NET stuff with Rider (getting the hang of it, it's quite nice and it is way more responsive than VS which has become a buggy nightmare over the years!). Docker allows me to run SQL server (still use that quite a lot) and, interestingly the Docker SQL image runs faster than SQL server when it was installed natively on my Windows box... weird! It's very noticeable too.
Anyway, I'm too old to fight with the OS any more, and POP! seems to be ticking all the right boxes for now. I have to keep a W10 VM around for a couple of things but it's off most of the day.
Edit: I had a go at the "leaked" version of Windows 11 and I wasn't enamored. As a friend of mine once said: "Same shite, different smell!"
[+] [-] tim333|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouric|4 years ago|reply