> Microsoft can sell me their operating system in a minute if they just stop all the stupid telemetry, remove the bloat and by default turn all privacy and security options to on and not off
I don't think Microsoft is in the business of selling desktop OSs anymore, despite the fact that they still charge money for them. All of their behavior suggests complete disdain for the desktop and users of the desktop. I think Windows is only still being developed because it is a delivery platform for ads and telemetry. For the moment I'll still take it over the alternatives, but I'm confident Microsoft will eventually push me over the edge.
I have the opposite experience. MS has enabled our company to save tens of thousands of dollars because of their unwillingness to compromise on backwards compat. Literally we take CD's burned a decade(s) ago and the software installs and functions just fine. In our field, software tends to cost five digits and upwards so its a big F* deal. I can't imagine any other vendor coming even close. I don't particularly care for their other products, but Windows has earned a ton of respect from me.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I still choose Windows over the other desktop OSs. PowerShell is also great. The problem is that they take this great base and plaster a slow, dysfunctional, half-thought-out, user-hostile interface on top of it stuffed with telemetry, ads, and dark patterns designed to push you to their cloud services.
The question as always is what you could replace it with. We have an unfortunate situation where Microsoft had a near-monopoly on the desktop for so long that credible alternatives are lacking for many users. Even if they like some particular flavour of Apple or *nix as an OS, the applications they need might not be available on that platform. I wonder what the forever-defenders of Windows think they will do if Microsoft continues along the course set by Nadella and the current senior team and the situation with intrusions and lack of control over your own equipment continues to deteriorate.
Honestly I'm probably just going to stop using computers so much if that happens. Linux Desktop has consistently proven that it has no interest in doing anything in a sane or consistent manner, and Apple is just as bad as Microsoft in terms of fucking shit up for no reason, only in different ways.
If we're very very lucky, something like Haiku will gain a hypervisor, WINE port, and graphical acceleration, then take off in popularity and become the last refuge of the desktop. I'm pretty skeptical it'll go down like that though.
Who do you imagine this "Linux Desktop" is, that you attribute lack of interest to?
Various groups make desktop environments that may be used on Linux, as diverse as KDE, Gnome, Chrome, and Android. It could possibly make sense to complain about one or other of them, or even several. As it is your complaint is entirely nonsensical, a category error like saying red is too hot.
Well no. The new settings panels in Windows 10 certainly do suck ass and contribute to the general UI fragmentation, but the systems that are the foundation of the Windows operating system are not disparately developed hodgepodges. The same cannot be said for Linux Desktop, although with SystemD taking over everything that might not remain true indefinitely.
This weekend I was traveling with my kubuntu machine and despite searching for at least 20 minutes, I was unable to find the controlpanel/settings page/widget/app that will allow me to connect a WiFi network, so I gave up and switched to gnome.
Yes, but I won't because I find that posts like yours are only interested in performative argumentation for the sake of convincing some nebulous group of "future readers" that Linux Desktop is worth considering.
I'll save you the trouble: Dear readers, Linux Desktop is fine if you like the way it works. I encourage using tools you like. If you haven't tried it, it might work for you.
I don't like the way works, I've expounded upon the details many times, and I'm not interested in further performative argumentation on the subject.
With ARM, the lack of control might deteriorate even further. While the underlying architecture might not have much to do with it, the accelerators in these SOCs just give more options for Microsoft to collect data and lock down devices even further.
I'm curious if you think statements like this really help paint the Linux Desktop community in a good light. Because honestly as much as I don't like a lot of things about how Linux Desktop works the community is also a significant factor in driving me away.
Kinda. I mean, yeah I shouldn't judge every Linux Desktop user by assholes, but it doesn't take very many asshole Linux Desktop evangelists to make somebody not want to deal with the Linux Desktop community because of the likelihood of running into an evangelical asshole.
It's like how women gamers talk about having to deal with misogynist assholes online. Sure, there aren't that many misogynists really, percentage wise, but there's plenty enough to make running in to one a near certainty.
I think it's odd that you think you can make comments like these repeatedly as if you're brand new and as if you don't appear everytime Linux is discussed anywhere on this site to rehash your same opinions over and over again.
Dude, I was complaining about Windows in this thread, offhandedly mention I didn't like MacOS or Linux either, and some fucking childish evangelist crawls out of the woodwork to liken me to a domestic abuse victim.
Filing bug reports is a exercise in getting abused.
I installed a clean install on a Raspberry PI, installed emcas (which I have used for about thirty years), and found a utility did not work (I will conceal the guilty - it is a common story)
I filed a bug report, and was abused because I was using a emacs distribution that was three years old - how could I possibly think that any problems I saw be anything but my fault , and didn't I have better things to do than waste their time with my idiot ramblings.
What sort of silly child acts like that? What a crock!
Some parts of the Free Software community are much better. (Rust, for example, nothing but respect for my idiot ramblings). But some parts are still full of the "bigger dick" egomaniacs....
Large enough portions of the FOSS community that plenty of us can relate.
> What "silly child" abuses unpaid maintainers? Oh, right, you.
Filing a bug report is not abuse, it's literally why there are bug trackers. Take a good long look at what you're doing here and ask why it might be that people hate dealing with people like you.
>Filing a bug report is not abuse, it's literally why there are bug trackers. Take a good long look at what you're doing here and ask why it might be that people hate dealing with people like you.
Doing a quick search to see if the bug you are reporting has been reported before is a requirement on pretty much every single one of them though
Still not an excuse for being a dick to the person reporting it.
This is one of my pet peeves with the FOSS community: they want to be taken seriously as an alternative to proprietary software, but they are completely unwilling to act like professionals in any way, and then the complain that people are sticking with proprietary alternatives.
>they want to be taken seriously as an alternative to proprietary software
They are.
>but they are completely unwilling to act like professionals in any way, and then the complain that people are sticking with proprietary alternatives.
Yet, chances are you are using an open source web browser to access an open source web server through a lot of piping that is modern networking, with open source parts inside and out.
> Yet, chances are you are using an open source web browser
You mean this browser run by and for a gigantic multinational advertising corporation who's de-facto monopoly on the browser market is a subject of frequent griping?
I don't mind if you feel like you have been driven away. Your feelings are your business. Complaining about your feelings is pointless and rude.
It is nobody's responsibility to make you happy. Imagining otherwise is just a formula for remaining unhappy. Blaming others for it will not improve anybody's life, including your own.
My advice is, adopt responsibility. You might be able to improve somebody else's life along with your own.
You don't think likening someone's choice of non-ideal OS over your preferred one to domestic abuse might just be a little bit, I don't know, childish?
I mean, why do you care enough about what OS I choose to even bother insulting me anyway?
I don't think Microsoft is in the business of selling desktop OSs anymore, despite the fact that they still charge money for them. All of their behavior suggests complete disdain for the desktop and users of the desktop. I think Windows is only still being developed because it is a delivery platform for ads and telemetry. For the moment I'll still take it over the alternatives, but I'm confident Microsoft will eventually push me over the edge.