WindowsLies/BlockWindows | Hacker News Reader

WindowsLies/BlockWindows

github.com

32 pointschopin62 comments

It seems incredibly risky to block Microsoft hosts and stop updating Windows. I'd rather Microsoft abused my machine than an attacker.

I'm also curious: if someone has the privileges to run something like this, they're probably not under the thumb of an IT department, so why not switch to OS X or Linux?

"...why not switch to OS X or Linux"

One word: Games.

A problem which Valve is currently solving.

WINE has been solving it much longer ;)

If by "solving" you mean "adding even more problems". It's a crutch at best and a nightmare at worst. Why would you ever prefer WinE over a native version?

>It's a crutch at best

And sometimes it is a crutch that Microsoft doesn't provide. I recall Windows Vista causing some pain for old games - such as requiring the Screen/Resolution window open otherwise Starcraft would run with corrupt colours. Wine isn't perfect, and I expect it never will be. But short of a full virtualised Windows XP, it is one of the best ways to run those old games that aren't getting treatment from the likes of GOG.

WINE is an amazing piece of software, one of the most impressive out there. I prefer it because it lets me do what I need to do without disrupting everything else I have going on. I do usually have to use a VM since the programs I need most struggle on WINE, but to the extent that I can run something in WINE, I really appreciate it. It's definitely better than having to lose 10GB+ of RAM and 100GB+ of disk to a VM. With games, a VM is usually not an option due to the need to virtualize video hardware; WINE allowed me to play Source-engine games in Linux for hundreds of hours over the years before native ports came out. I wish they would get DX11 support out some day so I can play recent games, though.

WINE can make a lot of really cool stuff happen. I suggest you take another look.

Disclaimer: I contributed a patchset to WINE 4 years ago.

They're solving it for the future, sure. According to SteamDB I currently have 269 products in my Steam account of which only 78 are compatible with Linux; I doubt the majority of the rest will ever be ported to run on SteamOS/Linux.

Also, not every developer/publisher has - or is willing to commit - the resources to release their games on Linux/SteamOS. It's difficult enough to release a game for Windows that runs reliably on the multitude of hardware configurations out there. Duplicating that effort to release on another OS is a massive undertaking for some.

Dual boot?

I dual boot for games. In practice, I start Windows like twice a year. If the game isn't native and doesn't run in WINE, it simply never gets played. Just have too much stuff going on in main OS to stop it all for a few hours while I reboot and play.

How about sleeping instead of straight rebooting, and then booting to windows, so that when you restart and boot back into Linux you have everything the same way? If you have an SSD it's pretty fast to reboot to a different OS.

That's possible, but the problem isn't so much in my session being lost as it is in my services and processes not running anymore. I host a Plex server on my machine that serves the whole family, I rely on it for remote SSH if I need to get into the network from the road, I share files to clients from it, and so forth.

Really it's too important to take down very often. I've considered buying a separate box for Windows. I run Windows applications in either WINE or VirtualBox, but with games that don't support WINE, that doesn't work unless you have specific, hard-to-find hardware and an extra GPU. Since games are the only thing I'm missing out on, more and more games are getting Linux native versions, and I don't have much time for games anyway, I haven't actually pulled the trigger on the separate Windows machine yet, but one day I will.

I never (all right, not never, but at least in the last five years) understood dualboot. Why not just run one OS as a master and then a VM in it?

Hardware access and performance. It is only recently that the performance got OK-ish (through probably it is still not, if you feel that you have to get i7 6700K) and virtualizations started supporting PCI-Passthrough.

The setup is still not simple, your common dual-booter will not be able to setup it right, yet.

> virtualizations started supporting PCI-Passthrough

To get a graphics card actually capable of this, you either need to buy the commercial grade versions (Quadro and FirePro) with are much more expensive, or buy a specific card for this purpose and deal with tons of issues[1] like not being able to restart the guest without crashing the host.

[1]: http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_VGA_Passthrough_Tested_A...

ATI consumer cards do support PCI-Passthrough, it's Nvidia that you need Quadro.

But the setup is not a simple one of neither.

the vga arbiter stuff went away with UEFI based cards (about 2 years ago), consumer level cards now work without issue.

NVIDIA attempt to detect the VM and artificially disable the driver, but works perfectly if you tell KVM to hide the fact it's a VM (requires a flag to be set in the config).

the technical difficulty of pci passthrough consists of clicking "add pci device", then selecting your graphics card from the list.

If privacy is crucial, it's better to run Linux hosts and Windows VMs. But that doesn't work so well for high-end graphics, whether games or CAD. Or when even the fastest CPUs are too slow.

So then you run Linux VMs in a Windows host. In my experience, VMware is a better choice on Windows hosts. But it's been a few years, and maybe VirtualBox is doing better on Windows.

That's why I mentioned PCI-Passthrough. Then the guest can directly drive the graphics card, with it's native drivers.

But you and johncolanduoni both say that it's nontrivial. However, blibble says that it's easy with current ATI consumer hardware.

I know a few gamers who would like to relegate Windows to a locked-down VM ;)

Well, it was a while that I was looking at it. Combine that with my opinions about gamers' hardware and system software knowledge (not very flattering, outside of knowing which brands and models are "best"), that's how I came to the conclusion, that it might be difficult for them.

But do not take that as discouragement, your friends definitely should try it on their own.

Dual boot works fine, as long as the windows machine is the host, and the linux machine is the guest, since only on the host will you get reasonable gaming performance.

EDIT: Yes meant to answer the "Why dual boot when you can use a VM". My post meant to say "VM is cool is Windows is the host". Sorry.

I think he meant dual booting as in installing two operating systems side by side, and running one at a time on bar metal - not virtualizing anything.

You're thinking of virtualization. Dual booting is when you have both OS installed on different partitions/drives and you restart to boot a different one.

Uhm? No. You seem to confuse dual boot with virtualization. Dual boot means 'Reboot, pick a different OS in the bootloader'. Both Linux AND Windows would run with full performance, but never at the same time. There is no concept of host or guest.

Hah sorry, I was answering the wrong post, I meant to answer the post that said "why dual boot when you can run a VM", and the answer should be "VM works fine as long as..."

Sorry about that.

Lots of words: Countless niche, industry or company specific, but incredibly important, pieces of software most people have probably never heard of.

It doesn't block access to windowsupdate.com, it only blocks access to telemetry ingestion points, and seems to hide the updates which patches the code required to access them into windows 7/8 so they will never get installed (and uninstall them if they are)

So they don't trust Microsoft enough to let them collect core dumps, but they trust Microsoft enough to let them run arbitrary code on their machine…?

Maybe people fear that personal data might show up in the collected minidumps? Doesn't sound unreasonable.

Sure. But you still allow Microsoft to dump your entire RAM to an unrelated web server by letting them install random updates.

...which requires active malice on part of Microsoft.

Whereas automatic upload of core-dumps even under normal non-attack operating conditions might even be forbidden by law when, for example, working with sensitive personal or otherwise classified data.

> why not switch to OS X or Linux

To non-Canonical Linux or FreeBSD/OpenBSD please.

OSX and Ubuntu spy and expose you too, although Windows is by far the biggest offender here.

Here are two real-world (not hypothetical; a (self-employed) person I know actually has these) problems:

* The person needs to exchange forms in Word Documents with other people (agencies and public authorities) on a daily basis, and the exact formatting matters, so LibreOffice doesn't cut it.

* There is trade specific software for which there is no alternative (open source or paid), which the person couldn't replace with an alternative if there was one (because it's effectively agency mandated), and which only runs on Windows. (And to give you a sense of how special-purpose this is: it has it's own hardware VPN box which you have to put between your computer and the internet.)

So it's sad, but the requirement is not "at least as good as Windows" but "Windows".

Yeah, that’s probably a major advantage of OS X over Linux; access to native versions of what the general populace would consider 'major' applications.

Edit: Well, the edit just done to the parent comment makes my comment mostly useless now. :P At the very least, speaking to the specific example of Word documents, I’m not aware of any features that current Windows Word has that Mac Word doesn’t (that would result formatting not carrying over perfectly).

Mac Office is not the same as Windows Office.

It lacks the extended functionality (i.e. in Excel: PowerQuery/Pivot/Map, Inquiry) or for some reason doesn't work (Mac Excel does not work with psqlODBC - Windows Excel does).

Not in the world I'm living in.

Windows-only software is far, far more common than Windows+Mac software.

(The software I'm talking about is Windows-only. I know you might mean Mac Office.)

PS: And because writing portable software, deploying and maintaining it is apparently hard, companies are now switching to web-based solutions. Yay :(

I've seen a (reasonably big) company that has deployed a Citrix VDI cluster exactly for this purpose - for MacOSX/Linux users to deal with both of problems you have listed, plus a third one:

* Legacy Intranet websites that only work in IE.

Sure, it might work for big companies.

The person I'm talking about is self-employed and not, erm, technologically affine, so why not just stick with Windows?

Sounds like that is an excellent opportunity for this person to invest some time into honing one's technical skills.

> why not just stick with Windows?

Hm... because Windows is essentially a platform for Microsoft and assorted 3rd parties (most of which are not even affiliated with them) to spy on and meddle with you beyond any reasonable control or limitations?

Maybe this is suprising to the HN crowd, but there are many people who would never want to move to OSX from Windows (or Linux). I had to use OSX for two years, the only compelling part of it is the proper *nix shell, other than that, it was very unconvenient (and slow) for me (on a top-end MBP).

Same here, I only use it because I have to make my applications work on OS-X and to me it is the worst operating system that I've ever had the opportunity to try. I took my time to learn how to do things the OS-X way, but I prefer Linux or Windows a lot. There are things like about it though, like the self-contained application packages, although you can have them on Linux as well, just not as unified.

Agreed. I've used Windows since 3.1 (MS-DOS before that) and I bought a Macbook a few years ago to learn iOS development. I dabbled with Linux as a desktop OS for a few years too (but that's another story for another time...).

As a generally keyboard-centric user I've found OS X to be awful. Inconsistent behaviour when using Cmd+Tab (which switches to most recently used app) versus Cmd+` (which cycles through app windows instead) is frustrating to say the least. Finder is vastly inferior to Windows Explorer and I find myself dropping into the shell way too much just to do simple file management tasks (cut and paste anyone?). Being unable to tile, snap or maximise windows is also rather frustrating; yes, you can fullscreen an app and yes, you can drag and drop another window onto a fullscreen app [in El Capitan] to tile them side by side but that's so clunky it's almost a joke when on Windows I can hold down the Win key and use the arrow keys to snap windows to the screen edges.

I could go on, but I'll stop there...

I like Windows, too. I've been using it exclusively for a few months after being on Linux and OS X for years. I hated OS X, but that seems like a personal preference (I rarely come across people who hate it).

I was asking because disabling Windows Update (which someone has corrected me, this tool does not do) seems more extreme than switching to a different OS.

> so why not switch to OS X or Linux

For me : Autodesk Software, Silverlight video streams, Microsoft Office & Atmel Studio

Microsoft Office is available on OS X.

True, but it's lacking some functionality compared to the Windows version. Also if you depend on third party extensions to Office you probably won't be able to use the OS X version.

Aw, bless.

If you read the Excel team AMA [1] you'll see the most repeated question is "when will Excel be as good on OSX as it is on Windows".

[1] https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_microso...

I use a music production program called FL Studio, which is Windows only, I've used it for over 12 years and am really productive with it. Switching to OSX would also mean switching to different production software with a completely different workflow and losing the fact that I can almost use my current program with my eyes closed. Linux is not a viable option at all for music production.

Wine works very very well

> so why not switch to OS X or Linux?

Did you ever consider that some of us actually like Windows?

Well I think the commentator did consider that. By the way they put the question I think they want to make us feel stupid for liking windows.

By the way I put the question, it was a neutral question. I was mistaken about this, but I thought the tool from the link would disable Windows Update.

If someone is that concerned about spying, to cripple Windows and make it unsafe (again, a mistaken impression my part) it seemed more logical to switch operating systems.

(I recently switched back to Windows from OS X and Ubuntu because I hate OS X and Ubuntu is too buggy.)

Does it install Linux?

That would be next version of this.

Hmm lets see... Autochk\Proxy (acproxy.dll) - Proxy Auto Config, also provides uPNP services for NAT traversal, could cause issues if you have a system proxy configured, some applications (mainly games) might also experience NAT traversal issues, IIRC Steamworks games like CS:GO/CS:S use it for NAT traversal.

Disables quite a few Media Center services including services that are needed if you are using your PC for HTPC or consuming some services Netflix's Silverlight player used to use ehDRMInit not sure if this is still the case.

It uninstalls several performance and compatibility updates, as well as updates to Windows Update itself which might actually prevent you from receiving updates properly.

Host block, well blocks MSN, bing, Skype and some other services which probably have nothing to do with Windows Telemetry, and worse has a script that actually modifies the routes on your machine which are going to be horrible to debug, not to mention outright stupid.

echo block www.microsoft.com route -p add 184.31.194.59/32 127.0.0.1

Seriously?

Don't block Windows updates. Don't be retarded.

Just stop using Windows. If you don't play PC games there is little reason to still be using it.

There is lots of Windows only software that people rely on other than games.

I'm more referring to the people that might look at this and say, "Oh, this looks great. Let me run this." If you have that much of a problem with Windows (as I do) just don't run it--not just a general comment on Windows.

"M$"? Is the author 12?

Impossible. "M$" spelling is an artefact of at least 10-15 years ago. And author should have been at least 12 back then to pick this up.

Regardless, author does have a valid point here, despite somewhat puerile literary style.

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