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Comment by usernam | Hacker News Reader

Windows has become essentially malware for most of it's users. The sad part is that most of them don't actually care or cannot change easily because of existing software.

But I do hope Microsoft improves WSFL to the point that I can say: just write for linux instead, you get windows support for free [and this is already partly true].

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I find it a hard sell to say that any — and every — user should learn every platform of choice they use well enough to be able to modify it.

In fact, I might say it is our duty as developers to make sure the default version of our program is good enough that almost no user should have to change it.

And I believe Windows accomplished that, at some point. Then some asshole decided to add ads to it all, just to squeeze a few more cents out of the users.

>> In fact, I might say it is our duty as developers to make sure the default version of our program is good enough that almost no user should have to change it.

Well said. I couldn't agree more. That's also why I think "plug in architectures" which were all the rage a while back are stupid. If a plugin becomes quite popular that is an indication of a shortcoming of the software that should have been addressed by the developers. Unfortunately user privacy and security often require defaults that make certain things harder or impossible so defaults are set to make everything just work. I'm increasingly convinced that forcing people to enable features is better than giving them the option to turn them off when they get too frustrated.

> Windows has become essentially malware for most of it's users

That's a major exaggeration. The home suite's ads are more like tooltips than actual ads and they only appear once on a new install; every paid OS has similar things. Chrome OS, OSX and Windows. Ubuntu has sponsored search. Most people I know like Windows 10, it's largely a small group of people that are in love with Windows 7, are die hard Apple fans or Linux diehards that refuse to adopt 10 and most of them are scared of telemetry data being collected (which as a privacy "concern" has largely been disproven by Thurrott and others.) That being said, I hope Microsoft changes course and gets rid of most of these items. I actually find the one time reminder to use Edge and the plug OneDrive vastly less annoying (and more inline with their competition) and intrusive than having to disable "promoted apps." Anyhow, calling it "malware" is utter nonsense.

> That's a major exaggeration.

It's an opinion shared by many. Including myself.

Personally, for my gaming box I've moved back to Win 7. When 7 completely runs out of support, hopefully I've lost interest in the Windows only games.

Everything else either runs OSX (desktop), or various BSD.

Maybe you forgot the tracking part? Or the inability of the user to customize the update behavior?

This is malware. And you're paying for it, which is mind-boggling.

Edit: you might think I'm a zealot about this, but I actually started my dev career on Windows 9x back in the day, with Visual Studio no less. When windows introduced online activation, and Visual Studio (2005?) followed suit, I started to look around.

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