this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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It's good that these tools exist, but it's so frustrating that it's a constant cat and mouse game of Microsoft trying to make their products as cumbersome and shit as possible and the community trying to salvage Windows to the best of their ability.
At what point do OEMs just say actually nah, I'm tired of you making our laptops frustrating to use?
At what point do they say fuck it I'm going the Valve route and moving away from a company that wants to undermine my products and my brand?
uhh they will include copilot key in keyboard in new laptops...
Very useful, just like my dedicated Cortana key. 🤡
The people who use tools like this are in the minority. The majority (probably the vast majority) of people use Windows as it is out of the box.
The number for people I have seen with search box still enabled in taskbar tells me that's true.
Everyone. Everywhere.
It blows my mind, but then I realise that we here on Lemmy are the 1% of IT users.
Yeah right‽ Why do people keep the full search box enabled? It takes up so much space. I usually switch to the search button.
I even see quite a lot of people in IT (not talking about tech or devs) that keep it enabled.
I think it's one of those things that just becomes mentally invisible after a while. Like Microsoft slowly just drops in a new bar here, a stock ticker there, and there's a point where a majority of folks are like "...Was that always there?" and don't bother hunting for a way to turn it off like we do lol.
Yes, I know.
But it's not like these people actually love ads all over the place, or bing results in start menus, or popups asking them to pwetty pwease use OneDrive, or can you pwetty pwetty pwease use Edge instead of Chrome, they just either:
don't know they can get rid of that stuff
don't trust tools and are afraid they'll break something or the tools will contain a virus
don't care enough to research this crap
view using their PC as a chore anyway, and so power through the annoyances
I don't own a Mac, and don't intend to, but of the biggest things people like about them is that there are far fewer of these types of annoyances.
It's not just extreme power users that can be irked by all this crap - they're just the ones who do things about it and chat on forums about it. A normal person just sighs and thinks ugh I'd rather just do this on my phone
Damn, good one.
It's not just Microsoft. Never heard of always on DRM? Or government making it difficult for people to receive assistance (disability or homeless)?
You're under the impression that most people care about the horrible parts of windows?
I think they do.
Enough to do much about it, other than maybe buy a MacBook if they have money to burn? Nah.
But enough to use their PC less and try to do as much as possible on their phone/iPad? Honestly, yeah, I think so.
I hear normies complaining about stuff in Windows all the time. It's just when you go "well you could..." they turn off and don't want to do anything about it, because to them you may as well be giving them advice on how they can hack their washing machine to wash clothes faster. It's just an appliance.
Is your point that you think laptop and desktop makers could increase sales by ditching windows? That feels like suicide to me and I am a Linux lover. At what point do they do that is what you asked. When they're desperate enough to take a risk, if ever, would be my guess
LTT put out an (surprisingly insightful) video about ChromeOS and how it's kind of secretly spreading Linux. I don't think its crazy to say that in 5-10 years ChromeOS or similar will be the default and Windows will be a premium add on or something.
"premium"
lol honestly maybe competition will force them to reverse the ehittification of their product
I doubt it. Google will squander it away one way or another. It could work on a technical level, I’ve been using flex since before Google bought it for family members, it’s just poorly advertised and explained.
It's google, they'll just stop working on it.
To be fair, Window$ has been bloat since the very day M$ stole it from its Unix roots, and Linux is everything that the OS could've been were it not run by money-grubbin' cringelords.
Unix roots? Lol wtf
Why wtf?
Microsoft started as a UNIX-based programming company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Hell you see remnants of it in the reserved filename list.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file?redirectedfrom=MSDN
Devices in windows are not typically "files" like they are in unix/linux... So why CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³ are all reserved? Because they maintained compatibility with features businesses used at the time... and never deprecated the function.
Edit:
Why are we downvoting literal computer history? It is a known fact that Windows started on Unix systems. It's a known fact that they released their own BSD-based software up to and including a full fledged Unix-based OS, and it's a known fact that MS-DOS 1 and 2 were both Unix compatible. This is LITERALLY the definition of "roots". Are we so touchy here that we can't acknowledge actual computing history?
Hmm, I always thought MS was founded to steal/modify MS DOS. Interesting that they briefly did Unix stuff, but I still take issue with the way op phrased it. "Their Unix roots" makes it sound like they were heavily invested in Unix and carried that forward even into windows. I don't know if they used any of that code in windows, but if they did you'd never know it by using dos or any windows version I've seen. Even despite both having command line interfaces, almost everything is different from Unix except the command "cd", to my recollection.
“Started as”
Yeah, no. Yes Xenix was a thing but it would be incorrect to say that it ever was their main product.
I don’t think anyone has ever hinted on that NT has a unix code base except for some “borrowed” networking code from bsd.
They made several full versions of it... It was not simply a one off product.
Also,
So they were simultaneously created AND interoperable (from a program development perspective). This was a full fledged item.
Edit: to elaborate a little better. If they were simultaneously developed... and interoperable. And one item is Unix-based outright. Then it's safe to say that the other item (MS-DOS) in this case is also pretty steeped in Unix roots.
Sounds like an ageist to me. As far as I knew, Microsoft's first product was msdos but I guess I'm just too unintelligent and "young" (lol) to know better
Windows doesn't have any Unix roots. MS built MS-DOS from QDOS, a clone-port of CP/M, which comes from PDP mainframe software. Windows was written mostly from scratch to run on top of MS-DOS, and was influenced by Visicorp and Apple's GUIs.
And modern desktop Linux isn't a good example of an alternative. It's much more fiddly and less polished than Windows (though Windows 10 and 11 have not been as polished as 7). Even Mac OS is more polished, and does have true Unix roots (via BSD), though it does have a lot of the Apple "fisher-price" product design.