Microsoft, I Forgive You | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft, I Forgive You

m.signalvnoise.com

207 pointsvalgaze212 comments

I felt the same way for years - I was a Slashdotter, used to run a Linux desktop for about a decade and talk about 'MS' and occasionally use a dollar sign. Hey, I was 20, everyone was doing it.

I recently had a conversation about how much I like powershell on HN. Someone called me a 'microshill' and I smiled a smile that comes with age.

"I smiled a smile that comes with age"

That smile that says "You'll understand eventually. It's best to leave your computing to the pros, they'll make sure it's done right and you don't hurt yourself."

Alternatively, and the way I read it, it's the smile that says, "How ironic that I, the biggest Microsoft hater that ever walked the planet, is now being accused of being biased towards Microsoft. The 'me' of 15 years ago would never have believed it."

The way I read it was "It's naive to think that companies (like people) are just black and white, and that nothing good can come out of an evil company, or vice versa. The fact that I like some of its technologies doesn't necessarily mean I agree with the company's direction."

Although, M$ (woo) has changed significantly over the years.

DHH did make a good point about taking Google down a peg :-)

Google has had some goofs as well as hits, and at the end of the day, they are just a marketing company that forces their employees to write in Java and C++. Eeeeooohw.

(I have fewer issues with Apple, but I'm sure they will do something obnoxious soon enough - maybe even now if I had to write iOS apps)

Exactly this, and not the parent. Linux gave me a lot - I learnt about sockets, system calls, shell, perl (I've forgotten all the perl), Python and worked for Red Hat & IBM's Linux group, and I wouldn't change that for the world or tell someone they'll "understand eventually" - I'm not that rude nor do I believe that at all.

I still deploy on Linux. But I hack node all day on a Surface Book, using ConEmu/posh and it's rad.

Can you go into more detail on your setup? I've got a surface pro I'm thinking about turning into a little mobile coding station but I've been using my little lubuntu netbook for so long I'm not sure where to even start.

Sure, here are my dotfiles:

https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile/blob/maste...

I use ComEmu, the openssh, Pcsx, PSReadLine packages, Sublime, git, Sourcetree (might try VSStudio but have better things to do than change editor ATM), node version 6.

Sounds more like hubris to me.

Same thing I heared of a bunch of Linux users that switched to Macs, because the OS was now a Unix.

"I'm getting old, I don't have time anymore to build all this stuff and configure my system. I just want something that works." And now most of them are switching back.

But yes, I think MS got better since they dropped Ballmer.

Sometimes people do have this attitude (and they need not necessarily be old), but in this case it seems like you're bringing some baggage to the table.

I use Windows daily, and I'm not sure how to feel when I consider the daily attempts against my choices and privacy. It feels like they try to be nice but unintentionally mess up sometimes.

Feelings aside, they've done solid open source work, quality of which can't be overstated.

But... Powershell, really? The Linux subsystem exists now, you know :)

edit: the Powershell thing was just an opinion tease, come on everyone^^

> But... Powershell, really? The Linux subsystem exists now, you know :)

Piping objects is better than parsing text.

Exactly. The amount of time I've wasted creating regexs to describe & cut out data with grep, sed and awk, vs a simple '| select some-field' in powershell these days is huge.

Every time I fired up powershell to give it a try, I'm always immediately turned off by:

- How sluggish it feels. A remote bash shell on a raspberry pi feels more responsive to me than a local PS on a beefy PC.

- The way it is opened as a command prompt, in an unresizeable window (unless you fiddle with the settings every time), with no possibility of using shortcuts for copy/paste.

- Also, the default color scheme and font is horrible. I'm aware that it is trivial to fix it in the settings, but why turn off immediately first time users ?

For a normal user (not an IT admin) what are the benefits of learning Powershell for normal day use ?

What would be the best place to start, are there some good tutorials ?

Long time powershell lover here, many of us used to just always have an ISE instance running for its flexibility, but recently I found this post and have not looked back since.. my prompt is a Ctrl + ~ away :)

https://hodgkins.io/ultimate-powershell-prompt-and-git-setup

I've tried and failed to dig PowerShell as well - I had someone explain to me once that it really only "feels good" when you're constantly doing stuff that's directly in its wheelhouse. If you're more developer than sysadmin and you only occasionally need to script something, it'll never feel very comfortable.

My "scripting" needs don't involve sysadmin-flavored work or distributing scripts to be run on different machines or environments, so I use Linqpad pretty much as a pseudo-shell and scripting environment on my own box and couldn't be happier with it. F# is good for short scripts as well; I've been trying to use it more but it's slow in Linqpad, and I'm addicted to my productivity in C#.

> The way it is opened as a command prompt, in an unresizeable window (unless you fiddle with the settings every time), with no possibility of using shortcuts for copy/paste.

God yes. Windows shell folk use ConEmu the same way everyone on OS X uses iTerm - see pheouk's link below.

It only opens as a command prompt if you open a command prompt; you can launch powershell.exe directly. Also, as of Win10:

- CTRL+A, CTRL+C and CTRL+V shortcuts work (as does CTRL+C as a BREAK command--it understands by the context of whether or not you have text selected)

- There are a bunch of new shortcuts[1]

- If you edit the properties of the Powershell terminal once, it should stay resizable (I think--correct me if I'm wrong, please)

- If you right-click on the Taskbar and edit the properties, you can make the Win+X menu replace its Command Prompt and Command Prompt (Admin) with Powershell Prompt and Powershell Prompt (Admin) [2]

- If the terminal isn't to your liking, you can try using the Powershell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) that comes with Windows. The Powershell ISE has debugging, syntax highlighting, and support for multiple tabs.

- Pretty much anything you see in a new Windows 8/8.1/10-style window (e.g. the Settings menu that has largely supplanted the Control Panel) is, under the hood, written in Powershell... So anything that they do, you can do with Powershell.

- You can make GUI applications relatively easily [3]

Most of the benefits of Powershell are the same benefits of any other CLI--you get repeatable, powerful commands that can run locally or remotely and that will function basically the same on any two given systems (assuming same version of Powershell and same Execution Policy setting).

Powershell is relatively verbose, but that means that everything is pretty clearly named to indicate its purpose and function. The commandlets have excellent documentation, complete with description, usage instructions, examples, and links to additional online resources/articles. Also, it has tab-autocompleting out the wazoo. And you can use wildcards with the Get-Help command--want a Powershell command for manipulating Services settings but don't know if such a thing even exists? `Get-Help service`. Want to see a list of every Powershell alias, commandlet, etc? `help *` (help is an alias of Get-Help).

If you're accustomed to BASH, you can enjoy the default aliases that Powershell makes for BASH commands (e.g. cd is mapped as an alias of the Powershell command Set-Location).

OH! And you can browse the registry as a filesystem! Try `cd HKLM:\` to access the Registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows10GetsAFreshCommandProm...

[2] http://lifehacker.com/replace-powershell-with-the-command-pr...

[3] http://www.drdobbs.com/windows/building-gui-applications-in-...

Thanks for the very detailed and useful post, I will definitely try it.

I should have specified that my last experience using it was with Windows 8.1, I don't think I have tried yet on 10.

If you think powershell is slow, try powershell ISE; it's even slower.

Speaking of remote, the whole mechanism of PS remoting has never made sense to me either. It should work like SSH: encrypted interactive session across a well-defined port.

Agreed, coming from a Windows background posh remoting is just odd. Thankfully:

    get-packagesource -provider chocolatey

    install-package openssh

It's beta but I use it as a daily driver.

You'd think this would be true, but I've written a few non-trivial things in PowerShell and I always found it frustrating. The problem with the object pipeline is discoverability. When I'm writing a Bash script and I don't know what a command will return, I can just run it and see. Meanwhile, in PowerShell, I have to rely on repeated attempts at pretty-printing and/or external documentation, and I've found both to be lacking in several cases.

While I'm at it, another thing I didn't understand was why they chose to copy Bash's behavior of having anything printed or returned un-suppressed inside a function be part of its return value. That makes it harder to refactor and clean up your code.

I rely a lot on the built-in ConvertTo-Json command as a good way to get a sense of a full PS object. I've seen very neat GUI "object browser" tools you can pipe to from PS in screencasts, but don't do enough PS work to ever recall their names.

I just pipe to 'select *' now but converto-json sounds excellent.

> You'd think this would be true, but I've written a few non-trivial things in PowerShell and I always found it frustrating.

I've written some trivial things in powershell and found the complexity grows at functionality squared. Wouldn't go near it for anything complex.

> Piping objects is better than parsing text.

One interface (text) is better than N interfaces, so no, piping objects is worse, because non .NET languages cannot participate in its API.

> But... Powershell, really? The Linux subsystem exists now, you know :)

Right, but running Powershell for Linux on the WSL doesn't work quite right...

> I'm not sure how to feel when I consider the daily attempts against my choices and privacy.

This is my biggest complaint about Windows as a power user. I have no control over it: I can't shut off all of the telemetry reporting. I can't turn off Defender's active scanning and have it stay off for more than a day. I can't say "Don't reboot for upgrades between 6am and 10pm." "<video game> has been denied access to the video drivers" halfway through a game, forcing a restart.

I used Windows for my daily computer from 98 to 7. My work machines transitioned to Macs around that time, and I made that same transition with my other computers around the same time - the build quality and battery lifetimes were just too good to ignore. My gaming rig stuck with it and made the leap to 10, but it aggravates me in one fashion or another every time I turn it on.

So, I guess I'm headed the opposite way of most commenters. I considered XP and 7 to be the glory years for a daily driver, and now I can't get away from the platform fast enough.

Although I get your point, Windows has more powerfull configuration options than you might think as a user. E.g.Windows defender can be permanently disabled through administrative templates for your computer.

But it's a massive pain in the ass to do it.

Like I kinda want it, but not all the time.

Just like I kinda need to be forced to update, but not just suddenly "Well, that's it, we're shutting down now".

It's my fucking computer, if I really don't want to restart right now, what's the big fucking deal?

> It's my fucking computer, if I really don't want to restart right now, what's the big fucking deal?

The big deal is that, it's probably a pretty important security update. Forcing a patch prevents you from turning into the poster a few steps above, complaining that Windows is insecure and people lost data because of it.

> Forcing a patch prevents you from turning into the poster a few steps above, complaining that Windows is insecure and people lost data because of it.

Restarting the computer without ability to abort doesn't sound like a good data retention plan.

Well, for awhile. Software updates come along and re-enable these features all too frequently.

Not to mention, this feels a bit like how we used to have to manage Linux on the desktop: don't like X? Here's a configuration file you can edit. At least until another update comes along and breaks it.

It's been years since I've enjoyed chasing down new settings and finding what was reset every few days.

> I can't shut off all of the telemetry reporting. I can't turn off Defender's active scanning and have it stay off for more than a day. I can't say "Don't reboot for upgrades between 6am and 10pm." "<video game> has been denied access to the video drivers" halfway through a game, forcing a restart.

I can't speak to your video driver issue (reinstall it maybe?), but the rest of the things certainly can be done.. You can turn off Windows Defender permanently (or at least active scans). You certainly can schedule updates to 2 AM.

Not within Windows 10. At least, not without editing registry entries or setting yourself up with a domain to administrate settings as if you're part of a corporation. These are things that require too much work to research and (repeatedly) implement when there are other equally good OSes out there. I could spend an equivalent amount of effort and have as good of a day-to-day experience with Ubuntu or Debian.

Availability of gaming titles aside, there's just nothing that Windows does anymore that other OSes don't do.

Same here.

I was already doing Windows 3.x and 95 development by the time I installed Slackware 2.0, from floppies as my CD-ROM wasn't yet supported.

Spent almost a decade buying Linux magazines, writing M$ on forums, but also kept doing Windows related stuff when needed, also helped porting Windows software to UNIX, thanks to my Windows skills.

The technology I use varies with the customer, but Windows, .NET, UWP, VC++ is where I have more fun.

Well you're in good company. I was in that crowd too and honestly I feel much more optimistic about the future of Win10 then I ever have about Desktop Linux.

I like powershell too, easiest privilege escalations ever.

Hold on a moment there, oldtimer. I don't know how many minutes you have left, but spare one for a spring chicken if you can. You reminisce your early days of Slashdot and Linux, but indicate it was consensus gentium, as if there is no other worthy motivation behind such interests. Beware the myopia of senescence, lest the ominous and suffocating bloat of Vista flash before your eyes in all its menace, or you find yourself wandering aimlessly in the streets searching for the Start Menu, or mourning the inextricable bubbly mess of Windows 8, or gasping before the telemetric hemorrhage of your personal data in Windows 10. Liberty is more than a fugacious trend, and even Slashdot has an enduring place beyond vernal whim.

Please take no offense to these words. My very dear friend – who is, judging by his similar views, towering wearily above the great sequoias – argues just as you do. But perhaps it should be said as this instead:

Forgotten in dotage, but never forgiven.

I'm not sure I feel the same way, and I will probably be downvoted for it.

Microsoft's entire existence is largely based on incredibly aggressive, (perhaps) unethical behavior against its perceived rivals. FUD, threats of litigation and patent extortion, etc. Trying to destroy the entire open source movement. Why do they need forgiveness? They are a profit-seeking entity that has tried to crush many things I hold dear. Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do long ago. It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.

I agree with the sentiment in the article because of an important point you mentioned:

> Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do

As DHH points out; and to a similar vein if we swap Google for Microsoft in your quote above, fragmenting the industry is the safest and best way to serve users. Google seems to have succeeded in it's goal to control the worlds information-- and whether you believe this or no; having 3 powerful entities competing with each other is much better than many small ones trying to dethrone a hostile winner.

Small startups will always try and innovate where they can, but there are now different inroads as a single leader can not always banish them.

I agree with you. I agree on the macro-scale. I do not want one company to have the ability to do the things you mentioned. I am sure Microsoft is doing much of this new initiative out of self-interest, but it is good for the community. I like vscode, they have an extremely easy to use && intuitive Azure interface and a massive amount of open courses and docs on how to use it, and tons of other code, docs, resources ect.

I don't want Amazon to be the only cloud provider.

I don't want google to be the only search engine.

I don't want os x/win to be the only 2 operating systems.

I don't want Apple to be the only vertically integrated handset maker.

I don't want a single option for payment/wallet

I don't want a single app store.

All these things are better addressed when there is competition, and the competition between several large players leaves room for smaller companies to enter and innovate.

This is key. It was funny, I was watching Adam Conover's "Election Special" this week, and the big point at the end it came down to was that partisanship was making us dumber. Largely, because of cognitive bias. And my first thought that is was true of our allegiances to tech companies, product stacks, etc. as well.

We need options, we need to be willing to find the good and bad in each company or product we use. And we need to put ourselves in a position where we can easily switch as advantageous.

The difference is, for all those things, there really is viable competition out there.

There's lots of cloud providers besides Amazon (including MS themselves).

There's several search engines besides Google (again including MS's Bing, plus DDG)

Apple isn't the only big handset maker. Samsung probably sells many more units which are arguably much better (they have much better screens for instance, plus SDcard slots). There's many, many more besides them too: Sony, Huawei, LG, etc, and countless models from each.

There's many options for payment besides ApplePay: Google has something, plus you can just use a regular debit or credit card or good ol' cash.

There's more than one app store: Apple has one and Google has one, and there's a few other non-Google Android ones too.

In all these cases, the alternatives aren't some tiny little niche player, they're huge. Apple sells a minority of smartphones today, though they make the most profit.

The big standout is OSes: good luck finding a job that doesn't force you to use Windows. If I want to avoid the big player in each of the other items in your list, it's pretty easy to do. I can easily go without ever using Google Search, or an iPhone, or ApplePay or the Apple app store. It's not that easy for me to avoid having to use Windows; that shuts me out of a LOT of jobs (almost all of them really). (Even worse if I want to avoid using either Windows or OSX. Good luck with that.)

I think you missed the point I was making: diversity of ecosystems is important. Microsoft provides diversity to many of the ecosystems above. Having 2-3 competitors is much better than a single one, and Microsoft has shown that they need to win developers by providing value to the community.

I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough because between Google, Win, OS X & numerous flavors of linux there are a lot of choices. There is also "the web" and Solaris & BSD as well. Google is peerless for search. Leaving aside email, apps & core other services like web infrastructure, there is no replacement for google. It is important to realize that not only is Google peerless, but that all search engines run PageRank. By that I mean, they copy pagerank by creating extremely similar algorithims and using all of the ideas google pioneered. No one has innovated in the search space except google. backlink totals is an utterly meaningless metric and authority/reputation are subjective.

Google has adjusted to their original thesis of course, however everyone else adjusts to google. If you are selling something in a market that speaks English, you want to be at the top of Google. That is it. SEO means google optimization. No one can be better at being google than google, but I would likek to see someone try and be better than them at search.

>I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough

Here I completely disagree. In practice, there's only 2 PC OSes, the horribly broken and intrusive Win10 and the overpriced walled-garden OS X. Almost no one uses Linux on the desktop; even Linux fans have abandoned it from what I can tell, to my chagrin (they've all gone to Macs). If you're talking server-side, that's different and is really the only place where there's enough diversity IMO.

As for Google being peerless, DDG works fine for me for most things. For programming help, I use Google though. And everyone knows Google totally sucks for porn.... (Bing is the leader here!)

Otherwise, I do agree that diversity is good, but my point before is that there is reasonable diversity in most of those places. I don't feel any kind of compulsion to get an iPhone, for instance. Android works just fine for me and most people I know, and the iPhone users I know all seem to be deluded by Apple's marketing, and also people who really have no business buying the most expensive phone out there considering their finances.

Addendum: this isn't to say that I wouldn't welcome more diversity in many places. But it's not like people haven't tried: Microsoft still hasn't quite thrown in the towel with Windows Phone, but it sure never went far. Blackberry used to be a big thing, now it's basically dead. There were some other attempts, like FirefoxOS, Meego/Maemo, etc. which all flopped hard. The problem with a platform is that the things dependent on that platform become powerful, so people choose their platform based on what runs on it. If I want access to all the apps in the Google Play store, I need to run Android, not WinPhone, for instance. The same thing has hampered Linux-on-the-desktop adoption enormously (and not on webservers, since that's all standards-based and frequently uses additional stuff like PHP and MySQL which run great on Linux).

> Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do long ago.

I like to imagine where would we be if Wintel never happened. Would we be running multi-core RISC machines running Unix-like OSs since the mid-90's? Would computers be completely different? Would we be running something inspired in Plan 9 or Smalltalk or Lisp Machines?

> It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.

It's because they were so successful we only got consumer-level 64-bit CPUs in 2003 and multi-core ones in 2004 and it took longer for those to become mainstream.

If you see what an Amiga could do in the mid-80's, what Atari was doing with Transputers, you realize Microsoft was not leading - Microsoft compatibility actually held us back.

I don't forgive you.

I don't forgive you for putting ads on my Start Menu. Or on my lock screen. I don't forgive you for taking away my choice on when I want to update my computer. I don't forgive you for firing your QA team and then using the public as your beta testers. For taking away features in Windows Pro that could force people to upgrade to Enterprise. For us having to pay for support on top of buying your software. For not allowing home users to turn off Telemetry. For all of the product confusion and terrible naming conventions. I won't even go into past practices...

I don't get how years of screwing everybody over can suddenly be turned around with some marketing saying "we <3 linux" and open sourcing a few projects out of desperation. They only <3 Linux because they have to. It's going to take a long time for me to regain their trust.

And you are not alone. It has been too much. If not for certain high value programs that run best on a native system, I would not start the old VMWare-virtualized Windows 7 up again.

There are sufficiently good (and cheap) solutions in the Linux community. First Microsoft has to fix what they have been doing wrong for years. And then then have to answer the question what additional value they are providing for the money a company has to pay for their "services".

Hype articles can not undo evil.

(for them to regain your trust)

> putting ads on my Start Menu. Or on my lock screen

Anecdotal, but I haven't seen any ads in those places. Been using Win 10 since the preview. I'm not a fan of the "metro" interface/apps. I am a fan of the underlying tech in Windows and the general focus on usability and reliability. My laptop "just works" in every sense of the phrase, and it feels more responsive to my choices and demands than competing platforms (OSX and Ubuntu).

There are ads for Microsoft products in the app store and ads for Office on the start menu in "stock" Windows (installed from MSDN ISO - not from a hardware vendor). The lock screen has an (optional?) theme which displays high-res photos from Microsoft. Some of those photos have been game ads.

I personally think it's unobtrusive, but the ads are there.

The lock screen is especially annoying. They can show ads fine but it takes several seconds to start accepting input from my keyboard.

I don't see the logic of a lock screen. Why doesn't it directly enter my password? Why must I swipe away the wallpaper to access the password box? I mean it's not like my phone that I wake up the laptop just to look at the lock screen notifications. If I wake up my laptop, I'm gonna unlock it! Really dumb ui.

Probably because it is the phone UI.

I agree. Additionally (at least in my experience) - the steps to go through to show the password box are maddeningly different. Sometimes moving the mouse works, sometimes typing on the keyboard works, sometimes neither work and I have to use ctrl-alt-delete.

I have seen both, once or twice months ago on my W10 Pro. [0]

Now they just have new and ever updating artwork on my login screen and it is actually really nice. Often there is a link to "see more" or something in the top left corner and very often I click it and spend up to two minutes looking at nice photos on bing[1]. Yep. I know I have been binged, but i kinda like it, just don't try to search for programming questions, those belong on ddg, worst case with a !g appended.

[0]: this is a bit shameful IMO, pushing ads on paying customers. Please Microsoft employees who hang around here: spread this inside MS, - don't spam paying customers!!!

[1]: this is totally OK with me as long as you do it like you do today with a bit of taste. I actually enjoy it quite a bit. Hopefully it is easy to turn off for those who don't like it.

Microsoft is imitating Google and switching their business model to spyware-as-a-service.

And almost everyone's falling for it, just like they did for Google.

I agree the privacy and cripple ware issues are bad, but to me that pales in comparison to the decade-plus of shipping vulnerable code that allowed anyone to root your system by serving one bad ad or emailing you one jpeg. I can't fathom how many families lost their photos, or paid hundreds of dollars for a tech to run mbam. How many identities were stolen, how many small businesses lost money, how much productivity lost. All because of the license agreement absolving them of ALL liability and product guarantees.

This is grave, it had a substantial negative impact,spanning over 10 years, and nothing was done about it. If there ever were an unforgivable offense, this was it.

So... you're also going to hate Linux since they left Dirty Cow unpatched for 9 years?

Get real, perfect and secure code doesn't exist.

Then what are their customers paying for? You are aware that paying for something is a contract, presumably for a product or service of value. So effectively you consider the malware a value to the customer ? . You think ignoring security is acceptable?

An EULA is displayed the first time you turn your PC on (or during the Windows setup), if you had read it you would probably know what are you paying for.

Anyway, I suggest you to read the Open Source licenses before hating on Windows about malware, all of them basically say: "If you break your computer it's not our fault", like the following excerpt from the GPL:

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.

I don't condone malware, but it is pretty obvious that the most popular platform will be the most targeted by malware authors. Too many people fall for the "I don't need AV, I don't use Windows" fallacy, but every software is vulnerable.

The best advice I can give you is the following one: Don't run untrusted code.

So because FOSS has bugs it's OK for a multi-billion dollar corporation to have wanton disregard for quality?

It's "pretty obvious to me" that the biggest software vendor on earth would be aware that their product would be targeted as you say and provide adequate or even reasonable protection for their customers. Not hide behind their EULA as their product was being used in organized crime. This is the "unforgivable offense" I mentioned.

Have you ever heard of "Windows Defender"? They got more than 96.2% of detection rate according to AV Comparatives in September 2016[1].

Have you ever heard of "Windows 10"? They got less CVE vulnerabilities reported in 2016 than Android, Debian, Ubuntu, Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Mac OS X, The Linux Kernel, iOS, even Chrome and Firefox[2].

If these are not examples of "adequate or even reasonable protection", then you got really unrealistic expectations or you're simply hating Microsoft for the sake of hating them.

As I said, it is not possible to deliver bug-free code, and you learn to live with it or you die hating every software vendor in the world.

Just remember, falling in the "I don't need AV, I don't use Windows" fallacy will bite you, and will bite you hard[3].

[1] https://chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php

[2] https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php?year=2016

[3] https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/the-kernel-org-hack...

Have you heard of System Restore? You know, the utility that was supposed to put things back the way they were should the system ever get messed up? Oh but it doesn't work against malware.

Security is more than being impervious to every conceivable attack. Just being able to restore an infected system would have made their platform "reasonable". But they didn't.

Also, windows defender was YEARS too late. Which was why I specified the 10 year window.

> So because FOSS has bugs it's OK for a multi-billion dollar corporation to have wanton disregard for quality?

That's not what he said. You said you hated Windows because of its vulnerabilities, and he was asking you if you apply that same standard to FOSS, and if not, why not.

I don't think it's healthy to hate Windows or Microsoft, but every reasonable person should at least dislike them with passion for antifeatures, dark patterns and their other stunts, as well as for their lack of respect to customers. Few years ago I had to call Microsoft as a business customer and it was one of the worst companies I ever dealt with. I would never run Windows or Micrapsoft anything in any business setting, even for non critical stuff.

I have a different perspective on this: much of malware these days is state-sponsored. Would you blame the architect who built your house if it fell over in a bombing raid? So why blame the people who built your OS if it falls over due to a discharge of cyberwar materiel? An insurance company wouldn't find the OS-maker at fault, any more than they'd find the architect at fault. (The legal term here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure .)

> these days

My original comment specified a roughly 10-year period, from about '02-'12. Most of the malware then was not state sponsored. And I'm not blaming MS for having a few vulnerabilities. But literally hundreds, perhaps more. Patch Tuesday ? Really ? Their product was so bad they had to dedicate a day of each calendar month to addressing vulnerabilities.

But what's worse, was the response. They had time to patch all these holes, but not to write code that fixed users' systems from the damage that the exploits did. Or to address the underlying vulnerable model that lets these exploits happen. They just played "poke-a-hole/plug-a-hole" for most of a decade. Someone brought up Windows Defender, wasn't released till October 06, and it didnt' work. Everytime I removed spyware from someones machine I used free tools such as MBAM made by third parties who weren't even being paid by MS! Even with all these vulnerabilities, it would have been better if System Restore actually did just that. They should have architected a system that, in the worst case, could restore you back, _including virus removal_. Thats how you take responsibility in that situation.

Instead, they used the situation to further profit, by releasing more versions of windows. Thats a weaker version of racketeering: "oh, version XP has major security bugs...better pay us to upgrade to Vista!... then to 7...then to 8".

If this were any non-software product, there would have been massive class action lawsuits and recalls. And that would send a message to the whole community that you can't harm people and leave them high and dry

What's your point here? I'm pretty sure companies paying for RHEL or SUSE are happier than they ever could be with Windoze

Yeah! Give them back their money! Oh... Wait...

There's insecure code, and then there's a company that will threaten to fire you if you don't run insecure internal code on their corpnet. Hacked-together internal test app running on an alpha version of .NET that was expected to run on my machine 24x7 that (as one example) wrote to %PROGRAM_FILES, requiring that it be run as admin. Told my manager, "I'm not running that, it's a threat to my machine and the corpnet." "Run it or else", I was told. Not that it mattered, I was probably one of only three people in Visual Studio that didn't run their machines as admin.

This was after the Gates and Valentine emails on how MSFT was going to start taking security seriously. The point is not that I had an asshole for a manager, but that even though MSFT said "security", the boots on the ground often took as just another barrier to their greatest that was to be ignored as much as possible, and implemented just enough to shut up the gatekeepers.

It's almost as if the Windows teams think they're still under Ballmer.

This.

I'd like to emphasize the QA part and their using the public as beta testers (absolutely true and totally unacceptable). Microsoft's quality control on everything has been terrible lately, which is saying a lot because their quality control has always been crap.

Good thing they have a great marketing team. They will keep producing cool looking ads and presentations that imitate Apple and hope that their customers will forget every buggy and disastrous launch

I don't find the QA part that terrible, freeloaders are the kind of users that would pirate Windows, so rather than being a nuisance they're volunteering themselves to test the OS.

Although it would had been better if they kept their QA teams, since there are issues that only a QA engineer would be able to find.

Monopoly can be forgiven. What's happening now cannot be forgiven.

Microsoft is more dangerous now, but it seems people just don't care. They use Windows despite having no assurance that Microsoft won't copy their data unbeknownst to them or spy on them in some way they don't realize or install some software they don't want. If this is better, give me 90's Microsoft anytime. At least they were just out for profits and domination then. I don't know what they're after now, but considering the revelations of the past few years and what this "operating system" does, the fact that they're making this information available to dangerous third parties is almost guaranteed.

The gullibility and stupidity of developers (like the author) is simply mind-boggling sometimes.

I don't forgive the sneaky and forced migration to 10 meaning I get family support calls for the first time in ages. Or the hours spent sorting the laptop that's not fully compatible but got upgraded anyway. Last I don't forgive you for not finding a way that 7 can't bloody ruin 10 via chkdsk. Yet more family support.

Just about everyone likes Aero, so they drop it, as it doesn't fit the failed one desktop, every platform cult. At least other flat gui's actually have some design rather than try to emulate Gem and just use 3 colours. Unlike Microsoft, I understand that's subjective.

Mind, I never really forgave the world for adopting cooperative multitasking and the most horrific API and programming model I've encountered and that was 3.1. Scared me back to *nix for the rest of my career. Trust? Not likely I need to reach neutral first.

I did quite like C# though, despite some wtf moments in the docs! :)

With Linux, you could get just what you want or need and it's gratis, courtesy of the community. With Windows, they decide on what you get and encourage you to live with it, even though you cough up lots of dough for it :)

If you'd told me ten years ago that I'd be working for Microsoft today, you'd have made an enemy.

If you'd told me five years ago that I'd be working for Microsoft today, I'd have laughed at you.

I sometimes still marvel that I work at Microsoft today, and don't hate myself for it. In fact - and it's still a little hard to believe - I really like what Microsoft has become, and I'm excited to contribute to it.

I couldn't agree more. When a friend reached out to me about joining him at Microsoft my first response was "thanks but no thanks". He talked me into at least listening to the pitch and it actually worked. Talking with some of the old timers here at Microsoft it sounds like the culture has changed a ton (and is still changing) so hopefully that will continue to trickle down into the products.

Are you saying there is no backstabbing anymore? I left Microsoft in 2012 and it was the worst place on the planet ever (granted, Ballmer was still running the show). But can it change that much especially with all the layoffs they do every year on clock basis?

Yeah, the Balmer way of evaluation has completely disappeared. SWEs are no longer trying to remain outside the bottom 20% just to stay employed. Everything about evaluation is now centered around getting things done, helping others, and learning from others.

Upvotes to both of you from a former "hater".

Just promise me to make telemetry more transparent and make opt-out possible somehow.

And don't spam paying customers, that is tasteless.

I love the new lockscreen though as long as it isn't ads (even if I recognize it is a running bing ad ; ).

When I joined up, most of my acquaintances were flabbergasted. It's been a year, and they still don't quite believe it.

I'm not on the forgive train yet, but with the Apple computer ecosystem (as in things that look and behave like a PC-esque device) becoming increasingly hostile, I'm actually seriously considering going back to Windows.

The deal breaker is having a unix shell. I have worked on a system with a native unix environment for a decade and a half, going back to to the windows shell is not an option.

Thankfully, the Linux Subsystem for windows works pretty well already and with some further iteration I think it could become viable for most of my development needs.

When that happens I don't feel any loyalty to apple and will happily move over.

I'm in the same boat as you. What do you think is still missing in their Linux subsystem? I haven't gotten to play around with it yet, but my list of demands is pretty small:

- tmux works

- vim works

- bash works like on a Mac

Processes don't work quite the same. There's no sysv init or systemd. There's not good user separation within the shell (run all as root) and the file permissions in places where the subsystem meet the PC are weird.

Those were my first impressions. I'm cautiously optimistic about it though, and confident they'll work out the kinks with time. But right now it's still better to be on BSD/Mac if you like a unix-like development environment without running linux.

I'm curious what your use case for those are.

Are you needing to `init 1` or `systemctl isolate rescue.target`?

Or is it perhaps a need to `systemctl status` on services?

I might just not be that experienced with the wide use-cases for these applications, but what are your hypothetical use cases?

Really I just want a way to write simple service scripts and have the OS keep them alive. upstart, sysv init, systemd, whatever works...

I don't like logging into my dev box and then manually starting one-off scripts for all of the services that I like running (docker, dnsmasq, apt-cache, foo.py, etc etc).

Then use the Ubuntu-packaged runit or daemontools; or port s6, perp, daemontools-encore, or nosh.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416376

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/daemontools-family.html

I don't know whether the Debian-packaged nosh will install on Ubuntu as it stands.

* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/debian-binary-packages.html

Your first impressions did not include reading the release notes. (-: The authors made it very clear that it does not "run all as root".

* http://askubuntu.com/a/754951/43344

Last I checked, inotify didn't work and there were lots of cross platform quirks. This becomes rather important once you want to use the WSL for running your dev toolchain (think build tools, dev servers, whatever) but Windows apps for development (Sublime, VS Code, whatever).

On that level, even the Termux app on Android gives you a workable environment. Also the other necessities like git and Node.js.

That's the reason I'm currently working on an Android tablet, though Chrome OS is also promising.

> bash works like on a Mac

It actually works better. Since everything is completely updated. In line with Ubuntu 16.

What do you think is still missing in their Linux subsystem?

A tiling and scriptable window manager.

Pandoc doesn't work, or any threaded Haskell rts application. Not enough ioctl's and other things are supported needless to say.

If the Apple computer ecosystem is becoming hostile, what does that make the Microsoft ecosystem? Apple isn't the one that tried to foist a tablet paradigm on desktop/laptop users. It's not the one whose flagship "PC" is a touchscreen convertible gimmick. In my view, the rMBP is the best "traditional PC" anybody makes. No touchscreen, no detachable or convertible gimmicks. Just a big screen (can I get a 15" surface book?), quad core processor, and the biggest battery anyone has shoved into a sub-5 lb laptop. Also an OS that hasn't changed more than superficially in a decade.

> Apple isn't the one that tried to foist a tablet paradigm on desktop/laptop users

Which they walked back heavily after the overwhelmingly negative reception. A company that makes mistakes isn't a bad thing as long as they listen to their customers and are willing to admit when something isn't working. Would you rather no one ever try anything new?

> In my view, the rMBP is the best "traditional PC" anybody makes. No touchscreen...

Only for the next hour or so.

> It's not the one whose flagship "PC" is a touchscreen convertible gimmick.

If you don't want that one, the OEMs will happily sell you laptops that don't have those things. Dell and HP have actually gotten their act together and are making pretty good ones.. That's what makes it an "ecosystem", something Apple can't really claim. What if you want a 17" MacBook, or one with a gaming GPU? You're SOL.

HP doesn't have anything comparable to an rMBP. Their 15" laptops are either low-end, or x360 convertibles. Also they have tiny batteries (under 60 watt-hours in 15" models).

The XPS15 is the closest rMBP competitor, but even that has a smaller battery, and much worse battery life with high-DPI screen (only moderately worse battery life with 1080p screen).

The closest competitor to the rMBP is the T560. It's more than half a pound heavier with extended battery, has only a 1080p screen, and only a dual-core rather than quad-core processor.

I suggest you do some more research on PC equivalents. From Lenovo, the X1 Carbon is probably closest to an rMBP in terms of target market and price. It's also a pound lighter, has a user replaceable battery, matte screen, no glass parts, better keyboard, NVMe SSD interface, better wifi reception and a power cable that is robust and won't fray. Yes there are also many points in the MBPs favour. We have both macs and PCs in our household and I get tired of Apple fans that constantly claim the MBP is somehow unmatched in design and quality. It isn't. It makes many tradeoffs.

Apologies for the rant

Apple took so long getting Skylake rMBPs out I've looked at pretty much every competitor. They all compromise on key things like screen and battery life.

The X1 Carbon is a 14" laptop (Lenovo doesn't really make a flagship 15" laptop). The battery is not replaceable on the fly, which is a big problem because it's only 50 watt-hours (versus 75 on the 13" rMBP and 100 on the 15" rMBP). The screen is meh (PWM). The keyboard is good, though.

The Thinkpad's vaunted build quality is also mostly a pre-Lenovo thing. I have a T450s through work, and the backlight bleed is atrocious and the keyboard is warped and sticks up near the palm rest.

It's true that the MBP is unique in getting that capacity of battery into a small chassis, but the trade-off is that it's glued in and not user replaceable. The T460 does at least offer battery hotswap at the expense of thinness. The screen situation is unfortunately a lottery, which is also true of Apple machines, though perhaps to a lesser extent. My X1 Carbon Gen4 doesn't have a PWM screen or backlight bleed, I can't fault it.

The only thing the rMBP has going for it is a good display. Go do some research on Dell and HP's small business laptops. They blow the rMBP out of the water wrt to value. The Latitude 5 and 7 series by Dell in particular are fucking awesome.

What about it is awesome? I'm looking at an Inspiron 15 5000. With quad-core CPU, 8GB, and 256GB SSD, it's $1,750! That's $50 cheaper than the equivalent rMBP 15", with worse screen, smaller battery (84 watt-hours versus 100), and no Iris Pro. It's also substantially heavier with the 6-cell.

He's not talking about the crappy consumer-class Inspiron, he's talking about the business-class Latitude laptops. Apples are just cheap, consumer crap compared to those.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Could you point me to the right spot? I thought I better check it out since I just ordered a new MBP, and figured I have time to cancel.

Best 15" model I could find was the latitude 15 5000. 47 WHr batter. 4.6 lbs. Almost twice as thick.

I run Windows on my MBP and MP, and it's a better experience than running Windows anywhere else I've seen. Since I install Windows from MSDN there's no bloat. My son uses it on his MB for gaming, and it's perfectly fine.

It's been said the best Windows laptop is a Macbook and I totally agree with that.

And no escape key anymore.

Setting aside iOS, how is macOS hostile? Admittedly, I'm just a user and not creating software to deliver to customers when I'm on it (professionally, my work runs on Windows and Linux, not macOS). But it doesn't seem to be terribly user hostile to me.

For me personally, it's more the threat of hostility to come that's unsettling.

Apple has gutted formerly excellent programs meant for professionals. I believe the photography and videography fields had controversies. But I'll speak to what I use personally.

Apple had an excellent word processor, Pages. It could be used for print publishing. Then in 2013 they rewrote Pages to sync is with iOS.

In doing so they removed most of the features professional writers needed. Many authors, such as myself, were left stranded.

The old program still runs, but eventually an OS X update will break it.

Increasingly Apple has turned away from its professional user base, and caters to mass needs. This is shortsighted, as the pro users tend to be evangelists, and also the ones that create software. Every developer apple loses to Microsoft hurts its ecosystem.

But, all that said, I find OS X is generally still great. I'm just....uneasy in a way I never was before. And I'm glad Microsoft is now a viable alternative. I never thought I would say that, and that says something about Apple.

Thanks for the reply.

I'd forgotten about, mostly because I don't use them, their applications. I'd used Pages ages ago in grad school, but that's before 2013 so I didn't experience that transition.

I do realize I'm probably a bit of an outlier. I primarily use Safari, Mail.app, and a terminal with tmux and emacs. Scrivener, as well, when I'm in a more creative phase. The handful of other apps I use haven't had any problems (that I've noticed) with recent OS updates.

I will concede that, regarding hardware, they're heading towards a gray area for me. I really like the idea of the MacBook, but dislike the single connector (we'll see what happens today). And the relative stagnation of their hardware is annoying for many. But the 2012 rMBP has lasted quite well for me, I've only recently begun to notice issues with the battery life and I'm pretty sure that's because I forgot to turn off Docker (wanting to understand containers/VMs better, trying to bring my current office's development workflow into the 21st century).

EDIT: Given my relatively low resource use on the laptop, the reason I don't go with Linux is (from another post the other day), I got tired of trying to make things work on laptops. Along with rayiner, the MBP is a really solid and reliable laptop, and I want the Unix-underpinnings of OS X, without the hassle I experienced in Linux. Building a new desktop soon so I'll install linux there, see if things have changed enough for me.

As the quality of 3rd party Mac software has improved, Apple has stepped back their own software products. To me, that makes good sense.

Back when they were struggling with relevance, they had to supply it all. Who else would? They wanted to be the "digital hub," digital hub software wasn't available, so they had to provide it themselves.

That's not the situation anymore. Adobe stuff is great and it runs on Macs. Microsoft stuff is great and it runs on Macs. Google stuff is great and it runs on Macs. Why should Apple try to compete with all them?

I disagree that Apple is turning away from professional users. They still sell great computers for professionals. They're just stepping back from trying to compete in the space of professional application software. That's not hostility, that's focus.

I know some customers really liked the Apple productivity products, and disappointed that they've been scaled back or killed. But I think it's a good move, and I hope Apple continues to focus more resources on improving their OS, developer tools, security, and services.

Here's my hot take. I use a Mac at work, Linux at home, and occasionally boot into Windows 10.

When I upgraded my Macbook Air to Mavericks (10.9), the Wi-fi died. I had to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch. Not good for a computer that doesn't even have an Ethernet port. When I upgraded to Yosemite (10.10), the installation process stalled for three or four days. Why? I don't know, maybe because I had LaTeX installed, that's the best I could surmise. When I upgraded to El Capitan (10.11), a bunch of my software broke. Apps breaking upon OS upgrade is classic Apple, admittedly, but it's not a good look as a third strike after the previous two upgrades. I've been using OS X since 10.1.

In general, I just don't agree with the direction they're taking with the OS. The low contrast and unreadable fonts. The constant nagging from the software updater. The way they're hiding more and more functionality behind the option button. The severe reduction of functionality in previously wonderful apps like Pages. I understand the feelings of instability mentioned elsewhere. The ship does not appear to be on a steady course, Apple is not articulating a clear vision for the future of macOS, and it's hard to get a read on where the OS is going next. Even Microsoft wins here because you can reasonably expect all your apps to continue soldiering on, and you can see how MS is striving toward an overall aesthetic, even if Windows undergoes significant changes from release to release.

And macOS cannot be considered apart from its hardware, because that's Apple's bargain with its customers. The laptops are nice, but everything else sucks. The hardware is ancient. Maybe that will change today, but how long until the next upgrade?

No, sorry, to paraphrase Richard Gere, this is not a cuddly new Microsoft. Though Windows got downgraded from "the literal bane of that part of my existence that involves interacting with computers" to "death by a thousand paper cuts". File I/O is still slow, process spawning is still slow, Windows 10 is a privacy clusterfuck, and there are endless other annoyances. No thank you, I'll avoid all that if possible and stick with Linux.

I explained it to a friend thus. Imagine living in a world everyone drove a Ford Pinto. You could try driving not-a-Pinto; however, people will look at you funny and your boss may fire you. 99% of auto shops only sell Pinto parts and there are some roads you can't go on, which will shred up your tires because they're not Pinto tires. That was the situation in the Windows 9x era.

Later, after millions of complaints about the Pinto's tendency to explode, Ford Motor company finally issues an upgrade option for the Pinto: the Ford Taurus. You are still expected to drive a Taurus, and to use it for everything, including grand touring, drag racing, and pulling heavy loads. Some Taurus drivers assure me that their modern fuel-injected Taurus engine really is more powerful than the Cummins V8 diesel in my Dodge pickup, but I will treat that story with suspicion until I see Tauruses pulling trailers full of lumber or equipment up grades that the Dodge can't handle, and I haven't seen that yet. But the status quo today is, at least, better than a fucking Pinto.

That's where we are today.

Agreed. The Surface Studio looks amazing - I'm not a creative type, so it isn't really designed or intended for me, but boy do I want to play around with one. And the Surface Book also looks phenomenal - when coupled with the Linux subsystem, it could be a machine that does 90% of my daily tasks.

Unfortunately that remaining 10% involves running and debugging sites and apps on iOS, which requires macOS. So I'm still on a Mac for now, but the temptation to get a Hackintosh running inside a VirtualBox VM increases every day...

I'm running hackintosh inside virtualbox on Windows 10. Works well but obviously graphics performance is not great cause it's not officially supported. I only use it to debug sites in safari and mobile safari.

Yeah, I'm more and more tempted to do it. But I do also debug in XCode, and I have a base resistance to relying on a personal hack project in my professional life.

...but, so tempting.

For all the good steps Microsoft have made recently I still hate that I cannot run Windows 10 how I want.

In the latest version, 1607, I can't even disable the lock screen when I resume from sleep ffs. So frustrating.

I don't need to forgive Microsoft. I moved to GNU/Linux (Debian, thank you very much) and never looked back.

All the drama regarding forced updates, stealing user bandwidth, etc. does not affect me personally. But it does prove that once an abuser, always an abuser.

Once the dust settles on .NET, I may take a serious look at it. That doesn't need me to forgive or trust Microsoft, since I can study the source code and do whatever I want with it.

Once I learn how to set up my own reliable email server, I plan to dump GMail, as well.

Edit: typo

Funnily enough, I am a lifelong Microsoft Windows user who only recently switched to Linux because I got fed up with Microsoft's continued W10 bull.

But what about infamous Win10 data collection, forced updates, etc.?

There are ways to block them. I use all of the following Netlimiter, Glasswire, Spybot Anti-Beacon, disable Windows Update service (though it has a habit of turning itself back on) and finally, Du Meter (This is the most important. The network toolbar alerts me when something's downloading without my permission)

It's just ridiculous that you have to jump through so many hoops.

This is the Windows equivalent of the stereotypical Linux over-complicated advice like "oh that's easy, just build from source but set the following compiler flags..."

"Windows is only free if your time is worth nothing"

It is all about choices. As long as you know that alternatives exist, all is fine. But for many people, there only is the Windows world. Or OSX. This is how i don't want it to be for my children.

See...

I have been using Linux since 1999, exclusively since 2001, this includes home and also business. Yes, there are lots of win specific software, but you know, wine got so much better over the years, if really needed i can use VM and as last resort, even reboot to win7.

As my kids been growing up, we have played many games on Linux (WOT Blitz, WarThunder, Minecraft... some natively, some via steam, some via wine steam... playonlinux has been interesting too, and not only for games... and i have been amazed that all this has been possible. This all on a mid range laptop randomly purchased, with full hardware support, touchscreen, sleeping/resuming... you name it.

And my kids are proud to use Linux, knowing there are many people contributing, rather then promoting large company, who, besides other bad stuff, has been known for making fake police reports on stolen software in this country.

So this is a good story, good experience. Certainly possible on any platform, but sometimes good platforms are tainted by bad companies.

I used to always "wince" when I had to use Windows or other Microsoft software. Now, Windows 10 is an absolute dream over previous versions, Office is pretty much second to none, and Microsoft's initiatives into hardware (Halolens) are pretty damn awesome. I'd say the company has made me into a non-hater again.

I actually have had the opposite trajectory. I was rooting for Microsoft in the Windows 7/8 days, but Windows 10 is soooo ugly and soooo compromised in terms of privacy that I refuse to use it.

Funnily enough I had the opposite transition. Sorta. I didn't mind Windows 7 so much, but Windows 10's user hostile behaviour makes me wince every time I have to use it. And I have to use it for work because of Microsoft's own hostile decisions (Skype for Linux can no longer do group video calls? Seriously!?!).

I start a freshly installed Windows 10 instance on a desktop grade i7 with Nvidia 960M and it takes minutes for me to be able to even type in the search bar, ... because Windows decided to commandeer all my disk IO for Windows Updates that I can't disable. At least Windows 7 acquiesced to my wishes.

Skype on Windows shows Ads now.

I think, based on my history, a lot of people would call me a shill, but I still think it's important to stress the company is not perfect. There are still question about the data collection in Windows 10 and the company still does collect payments from Android vendors for the patents it owns.

There's still some elements of the "Evil Empire" left, but overall, from a development and consumer device perspective, they do seem to be taking notes of what's working in the market.

It seems to me like if Microsoft would take a step back on telemetry and cumulative forced updates, they'd have pretty much a home run. But it seems like they're just outright ignoring any feedback on both issues until the issues magically go away or stop talking about it.

I'm honestly willing to give a pass on the forced updates. It's a hard place, as most people will never run updates, and we end up with botnets taking down Dyn. The downside, of course, is the debacle with the anniversary update. I wish they had a better update process..

The telemetry, on the hand, really does need to be a lot more transparent and much easier to opt out of...

I understand it for consumers. If it was Home edition only, fine. The problem is when Microsoft issues a cumulative update that A. fixes a critical vulnerability and B. breaks network printing, as an IT administrator I have to decide whether I want to leave a gaping security hole in our network until Microsoft fixes the printing issue, or push the update and break everyone's workflow until Microsoft fixes the printing issue.

In the past, I'd simply hold the update that breaks network printing, and push the security update.

These days, I always make a distinction between Microsoft, who have good and points, and the Windows division, who I can say nothing good about.

The aforementioned issues aside, Windows 10 is an amazingly good operating system.

On the forced updates, I've certainly felt the annoyance at finding my PC unexpectedly rebooted with no warning. On the other hand, they've been getting hammered hard on security for so long, and probably a big part of the reason why is people delaying or not installing security patches. It's tough to find a good compromise between forcing the entire world to update immedately, no matter what their situation is, and multi-million machine botnets wreaking havoc on the internet.

Whoa, didn't see this coming. During the event yesterday I was tweeting back and forth with some people about what Microsoft's future prospects look like, and someone said they're doomed because they'll never get developers back, specifically citing DHH's "real programmers don't use Windows" rant. At the time I thought it was time to re-examine that rant and maybe see if DHH was wrong, but it looks like the guy himself beat us to the punch.

I was close to forgiving them, but I'm holding onto my grudge because of forced automatic updates.

Are you REALLY SURE you don't want to switch to Edge?

I've felt similarly about Microsoft. I disliked their strategy and their taste for a long time. But I found their Surface Book announcement compelling and so I bought one. It went through some bumps and hiccups, and it still isn't as smooth as I would like, but it gave me the drawing experience I really wanted. I still think a Surface Pro 4 with a cellular modem built in would be killer. So if you're listening Surface team, go talk to the Nokia guys you bought and get the radio/antenna from the Lumia series phones and find some place to stick it inside your tablet please!

On topic of "new Microsoft", has anyone spent decent time with the Linux Subsystem for Windows 10?

I've been slowly putting it through its paces for my (admittedly simple) dev workflows, which mostly involves web development tools like PHP, Ruby, git and node-based toolchains, but so far it has been a pretty good experience..

It's only a couple of years since MS cut off SUA. Well into the supposedly "new" era. So I'm not touching this thing for a while, unless and until I'm convinced they're actually committed to it.

It's my default shell in Cmder. I do occasionally run up against the walls, but overall, I haven't had any issues with it.

I second that. Have mostly been playing with it on some toy projects of mine but works very well. Two main gripes:

1. Filesystem performance is very slow (ie. anything in /mnt), but I know they're working on it

2. I really wish I could get constant updates for WSL without having to opt-in to the Windows Insider Program. There are things I know are already fixed but I don't want to risk the whole OS just to play with an updated BashOnWindows.

I had a few keyboard input issues with vim, and 256 color display problems. My "solution" was to just have Xming on startup, and create a shortcut on my taskbar to launch an xfce4-terminal instead of the default cmd.exe based thing the default Ubuntu Bash program uses.

I've spent a bit of time in it. I can run pretty complex Linux software like Qemu emulating an embedded platform displaying an X window. However, I've had serious problems working with symbolic links.

I think giving how well it works, it's just a matter of continued debugging and refinement.

My Mint VM hasn't been woken up in ~3 months. All thanks to Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.

Related, has anybody figured out how to get GPU support on the sub system? I want to run neutral networks with GPU optimization, but there's not really a good solution for that in windows.

Treat it as a virtual machine and it works fine. Try to interop with windows and it will cause headaches.

I might be willing to forgive (not forget) but not while MS is doubling down with the "telemetry", ignoring privacy, forcing their corporate choices, and in bed with government divisions of ill repute.

The console/terminal/command prompt/whatever is still hot garbage. I recently installed Bash for Windows on my Windows 10 laptop excited that maybe I could use it for dev again. Nope, uses the same terrible console that has been in Windows since they dropped DOS.

If they really want to go after devs this needs to be an "all hands on deck" thing they fix. Stop everything you are doing and focus exclusively on this. Don't try to make incremental improvements to the existing terminal; start from scratch.

Here are some requirements:

1) Copy/paste must just work like it does in all other app. Including selection.

2) Standard menus, not right-click on the window chrome and "Properties".

3) Has to look decent by default. Not 8px fonts. Not 0px padding. Not a scrollbar before there's anything to scroll. Make it look decent.

4) Tabs

That's it! I (and no one else) cares if its embeddable or not, just make a terminal that is decent, like Terminal.app (which I don't use but is fine).

PS: Please do not reply with command prompt wrappers that try to fix these issues. I've seen them all and they aren't good enough (through no fault of their own, they have to work with the command prompt).

> PS: Please do not reply with command prompt wrappers

Are you sure you've seen them all? Even the Linux ones? :) Try Xming (an X server for Windows). You can run just about any terminal emulator you want. I find Terminator to be quite nice.

Their command window annoys the hell out of me as well. How many years did it take for them to get working tab complete by default? Another annoying thing is Notepad. Would it kill them to give it the ability to handle different line endings? It would probably take an intern one day to fix it. Nope, they are an island and screw the rest of the computing world.

It's a console.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/a-cli-is-not-a-dos-prompt.html

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/a-command-interpreter-is-not-a-console....

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/tui-console-and-terminal-paradigms.html

The sad thing is that the Interix subsystem did improve on the console, giving it a far more complete terminal emulation for starters, and Microsoft owns it. The WSL did not build upon this.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11581935

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/interix-terminal-type.html

Around three generations of users only know one kind of computer. These are the people that hate computers.

Because Excel. Because Abort, Retry, or Fail[0]. Because software(license)-limited number of concurrent connections.

Because they delayed the release of features to maximize profit.

The world is in a mess today. I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know if we'd be better or worse off if we'd had machines that were only limited by hardware, not software, for all these years...

But I'll stand my ground, hold my grudge, just in case, thank you very much. Somebody's got to keep an eye on them.

EDIT: Whoops, I forgot the footnote!

0: ARF would be great if there were any practical difference between Abort and Fail... When you pick one or the other, a different errno is sent back to the application. The application then could take a different path... Just like a "Restart" in Common Lisp. However, MS's own flagship applications abstained from such behavior, again missing an opportunity to demonstrate, to teach...

I'm not ready to forgive yet. There are very few places I can buy a computer with Linux preinstalled, and too much Linux-unfriendly hardware, and I still wonder when the UEFI hammer will fall.

I have a windows 10 vm .. it applies updates every week that force me to restart. No thanks.

I have MacBookPro with macOS - it applies updates every week that force me to restart...

And...?

And those updates don't usually hold the computer hostage for half an hour while you're trying to turn it off.

You can turn those off, or ignore them. Either way.

Windows, by default, will kill your machine and reboot it to apply patches, will install them when shutting down, and generally goes out of its way to be as annoying as possible. You can turn this off, but it's a lot harder to disable all the update settings.

how "harder" is it on Windows?

There's several options to disable, whereas on macOS there's basically one.

The other problem is some of the Windows options are pretty buried, that Control Panel is turning into a toxic waste dump.

My Surface Book is by far the nicest piece of hardware I've ever used. It does everything, and is beautiful to boot.

I can let bygones be bygones on the whole paying for Windows when I wasn't buying the machine to run Windows, but I just cannot get over the whole gathering of data they do and the choices they have taken away from Windows 10 Pro. The only version that really can have all of the stuff turned off is the Enterprise edition which I cannot buy. If they got rid of the BS phone home stuff, I would forgive. Until then, its just the same old crud modernized to do it the Advertising way.

> whole paying for Windows when I wasn't buying the machine to run Windows

I can't get past that. Not only did they crush several companies trying to sell better software, but Gates gets to whitewash his reputation by spending the stolen money instead of rotting in a cage.

I can't help but want to be on the opposite side of whatever this guy is talking about. His belief in the objective correctness of his own opinions rivals Stallman's.

That's an extremely subjective, irrational perspective, isn't it?

So DHH basically hates whoever is the successful one at the time, I guess (or two).

Seems like the majority of the rest of the internet as well. Haters gonna hate, for all time.

Easy to do: "power corrupts..." and such.

This is just flat out wrong. Microsoft has improved a lot and is doing some cool stuff but they are still doing horrible shady things too.

Windows 10 installs with very invasive default settings, and updates have re-enabled those invasive settings, requiring users to be aware of that and go in and turn them off again.

I applaud the moves to Open Source and standardization. But they have further to go before I would call them a "puppy".

Microsoft, if you open source Windows plus whatever SDK du jour (Win32, Win64, et al) you want me to code against such that I can build from source where all your telemetry and other "advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, advertisers" nonsense are ripped the F--- out, THEN you'll get juuuust enough dispensation from me that when you die you won't go to hell, just purgatory.

Forgiveness? Dream on.

Linux is by programmers, for programmers, and also for power users who are programmers in the making.

Windows' target audience is average users and these users are their main source of revenue. A while ago, I said in another thread that their open source efforts are a means to an end and nothing else. I also see their recent subsystem for Linux as an halfhearted effort.

I barely use Windows these days, mostly Mac and Linux both at work and at home. I'm interested in the Linux subsystem in Windows 10 but haven't had time to look at it. I'd like to believe that Microsoft is now a cuddly Teddy bear, but the strong arm tactics around Windows 10 updates and the International Harvester attitude about my personal data have been very off putting. Sadly, Apple is getting arrogant about updates as well, spamming me constantly about upgrading my phone to iOS 10. If they would both back off on some of that, I'd be a lot happier.

Having said that, the video I watched yesterday of the Surface Studio presentation was really impressive and I'm sure the content creation people will love it. Apple seems to have decided that they no longer care about that market, one they used to own. I'm saddened by that.

Edit: I especially liked the 3:2 aspect of the Studio screen! 16:9 is not the One True Aspect Ratio!

The vast majority of iOS (popular)apps also have telemetry.

No matter who wrote this post, what it says, or what the people here say in the comments this will always read as viral marketing as if people are paid to praise microsoft.

It's a consequence of the fact I'm now wired to expect it, because these companies have big budgets and actually do spend their money on astroturfing.

I think there's tremendous untapped potential in an easel-like all in one workstation PC. I would love to make a serious stats package that has a round-trip visual editor that generates code. For certain things that are very process oriented, why aren't we making live diagrams of this stuff and letting users edit those with large touchscreens?

(Disclosure: I once worked for a successful company that did this with something as complex as energy scheduling, though it wasn't round trip. (Didn't need to be.) I know that you can build useful, orthogonal, and darn useful diagrams that allow one to do serious work.)

I think their most egregious sin revolves around document formats. Their mendacity in pretending to support Open Standards while doing the exact opposite was serious Dr. Evil shit.

I think what has happened is Microsoft was perceived to be evil because they held what was thought to be a monopoly and people don't like companies being in that position, it makes them feel like they are always being screwed. Then Google and Apple usurped them and people rejoiced, only to soon find out the Apple and Google are just as dodgy and monopolistic as Microsoft was.

Monopoly in itself is bad for consumers. Google and Apple abuse their monopoly in their specific markets not because they are "just as bad" but because they have monopoly just like Microsoft does in it's own market.

And i just had to roll back the GPU driver because MS silently upgraded it, in the process nuking my ability to use a external screen...

"Tim Sweeney claims that Microsoft will remove Win32, destroy Steam"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/now-ti...

Tim Sweeney has said this many times, but it's continually not held up. That same month, Microsoft released an update to make it easier to install UWP apps outside the Store. Steam could distribute UWP apps if they wanted to support it.

And Win32 is going nowhere in the next decade, the entire world runs on it, and it's the reason Microsoft is in business.

Tim Sweeney's comments on Windows 10 should almost be entirely dismissed as FUD. We have more pressing issues (telemetry) to worry about.

It's potentially a risk - after all, there isn't and can't really be an equivalent of Steam on Android or iOS. But at the moment it doesn't seem likely.

Tim Sweeney lives in the past.

Sure the Hardware is amazing but the OS feels way too much like that slimy car salesman...."trust me, it's the best deal out there".

>Besides, the company just isn’t scary any more. Or tone-setting. Or, in many areas of past glory, even relevant.

Ironic, considering the author of this article.

I'd be happier if I could update my laptop and wife's laptop to be encrypted. It's 2016, that should be in every OS be default.

Have you looked into BitLocker?

Right, that's the issue though. It's only available on Pro or higher.

You are right. That's probably something that would be useful to home users as well. That said, the in-place upgrade to Pro is quite easy in Windows since Vista. In Windows 10 you simply buy it from the Store.

Why limit yourself? I have a laptop running Windows. My other laptop simultaneously runs Mac OS and from there I VNC into my linux server.

Know everything.

Microsoft needs to seek absolution for forcing people to windows 10. it may be an unforgivable sin

While I don't believe in Heaven, I do believe that Bill Gates can buy his way there.

It's the same wolf, just got smarter and fancier clothing, old man ...

No way. I have a long memory. I'all resist as long as I can.

Too soon?

How so? They've been releasing a lot of projects as open source over the past few years, and they've been building some pretty cool hardware (Surface, etc). The new CEO does seem like he is pulling things in a better direction than before.

vscode has rapidly replaced all other editors I use (still use intellij for everything programming though), its already good and it has the potential to be great, I'm excited about the .net stuff coming to Linux as I loved C# but have been on Linux as developer for well over a decade and the Surface Book is in strong contention for my next laptop.

Given my opinion of them a decade ago they've gone a long way to fix it. I loved my 360, was the first time I realised Microsoft could do largely zero hassle devices if they wanted.

I loved my 360, was the first time I realised Microsoft could do largely zero hassle devices if they wanted.

Yeah, and then the "new Microsoft" gave us the Xbone (my complaints for which can be found elsewhere on HN), so I don't know that a ten year old console is the best basis for judgement.

Too soon. Among the others let's see how the current embracing of Ubuntu plays out.

Extend then extinguish.

As soon as I see an extension to Ubuntu that works only on a Windows host I'll know that extinguish is on its way. Even Red Hat will suffer because it will mean that at least for somebody there will be some good reason to deploy Linux applications on a Windows host on Azure (or whatever), possibly interfacing other MS products.

>...hoping, jumping, dancing buffoon

Wasn't this too much?

Agreed.

#ForgiveMicrosoft

#ForgiveMicrosft

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