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."
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").
They're not secret police because they're not secret, and they're not police. But in the same way, even if you broke no laws, they will punish you all the same. Small people punishing other small people for angering their "betters".
Explain to me how this is better.
macOS is nowhere near as bad as Windows. You can still use it without an Apple account, and there are no ads/spyware (unless you really want to pick straws) even if you do use an Apple account.
We have to make general purpose computers secure or they die out except for servers and hobbyists.
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.
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.
Also how's hardware support? Last time I used Linux on a desktop, admittedly a few years ago, I still had to futz around with wireless and video drivers routinely.
ps. Also, forget about iOS. Half the websites I try to use nowadays dont even work on Firefox on desktop and I need to use a chromium browser to get them to work.
* 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
And patiently explaining windows and apple is not the way :)
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fact that there’s no way for non-technical users to figure out if a given hardware configuration will actually work for them makes it a non-starter, especially when the spectrum isn’t “works perfectly” or “fails catastrophically” but the frustrating middle where it kinda works but not always. Suspend might work on Tuesday, multi-monitor will fail with this dongle but not this one. Nvidia Optimus will only work three times ever and you can’t turn off the dedicated GPU to save power or pass it through to a VM because of how it’s wired.
Fedora is my daily driver but I would never suggest that it’s as easy as “oh just install Fedora” when I had to painstakingly research every piece of hardware in my laptop to see what the support was like.
The day these issues are resolved, Windows is no more. To me at least.
For #2 as far as I know it is possible and I believe OpenSuse does this by default. https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Encrypted_root_file_system
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).
Do you want to send following data: <Data that will be collected,...> <legalese>:
Big font: NO Small font: Yes
This would be the fairest design for all. Users would be able to make informed consent, vendors get data on a moral good way.
For (3), there’s a pretty good chance just from code rot that your “settings” may not always work. Certainly not if some company’s entire business model seems to depend on the more anti-consumer values for “settings”, you can bet they will not heavily invest in testing their accuracy.
And the real problem for privacy-related settings is that if they ever fail to protect you, even being buggy for just a short period of time, your information is then out there. Leaked. Gone. Even if you close the barn door, the animals have left. It is the type of software that has to be working 100% of the time to really protect data.
So I don’t really want privacy “settings”, I want privacy, period. That should be the default and only behavior, where the user has the only keys.
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.
Some options:
- they don't care about the machines that don't have compatible TPMs (lower value customers?)
- a ploy to drive hardware sales?
- something else?
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...
- 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".
I wish everything I needed ran in linux.
I cut Windows out of my life almost entirely after the encroachment of user hostile policies such as telemetry and have found I don't really miss much.
However this does mean I don't get sync and other fancy features like locating the device and other remote stuff. Not particularly bothered, but I do wonder if my old MS account will get deactivated after a certain period of disuse. Perhaps I'll just login on the browser to keep it alive.
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.
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.
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.
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 can't imagine there won't be ways around all that pretty soon.
I think a way to override that forced signed firmware crap should be mandated by law, but things are going the other way. If flashing unsigned firmware voided the warranty and made goatse show up at boot or whatever to warn about possibly unwanted modification that would be fine. Not having that option at all is bad for making full use of the hardware, bad for privacy and bad for security.
(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)
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!"
We have 3x Windows 10 laptops, a MBP that dual-boots with Windows 10, and a Windows 10 tower. On top of that, I also run a Windows 10 VM.
All are running Enterprise edition (I have the Microsoft Action Pack, which includes 10x Enterprise eds licenses), so it doesn't force updates (though it can be a little naggy at times, but I think that's fair enough for security updates at least).
All machines are kept updated at least weekly, though I stay away from the bigger "feature updates" until they've had time to bed-in.
I haven't had a single problem at all with Windows 10 updates during the years I've been using it.
As an aside: even as a relative Windows fanboi, Windows 11 seems like a pointless and unwanted exercise in moving things around and making colours more garish for no reason - a waste of a version bump.
I sometimes had network issues after updates. Things like Outlook not being able to connect as the icon in the tray showed I wasn't online despite being online.
There were others, all fairly small but they were part of a pattern of worsening quality... they seem to be prioritizing looks and features over stability. Visual Studio is guilty of this too: feature-tastic but less stable than older versions.
Borked updates can be worked around: I disabled Windows update and put up with them but add to that the notifications, infantilization, less control, dark patterns and it all adds up to a "different" Microsoft than the Windows 7 days.
I was a bit of a fanboi too: Microsoft's ecosystem got me to where I am today in my career but no more. I'm done with the tech oligarchs and their increasing levels of control: Linux works really well for me and my clients use it for their infrastructure so no better time than the present :)
So a version that does let you install with just a local account right off the bat is a strict improvement from my point of view.
Maybe the article authors were unaware of that change to the Windows 10 install process - it certainly would explain the odd slanting.
Edit: interesting, from the replies it looks like you either have to not connect to the network or say you are going to join a domain (which was untrue in my case) that explains why i couldn’t find the option then!
Yes it does, I did it this week.
Unless things have changed in the last eight days this isn't right.
Edit: typo, had 'online' while I meant 'offline'.
edit: Specify that I was online while installing.
The end product was nice, but jumping through the hoops to get there was a pain. It's also rather annoying that I cannot figure out which particular setting(s) prevented the installation of third-party apps.
