Hacker News Reader

Comment by eutropia | Hacker News Reader

I had to spend several days manually ripping out huge chunks of Win10 to get something resembling the usability of XP. That included removing all of the updating utilities, hosts-file blocking of microsoft servers, removal of most of the preinstalled apps, as well as disabling and deleting all of the scheduled tasks which try to re-install and re-enable those settings.

All this trouble so I can play modern PC games... Next system upgrade cycle I think I'll be moving to linux.

View on HN

1998: I'd never connect a Windows box directly to the Internet. Hackers might break my computer.

2018: I'd never connect a Windows box directly to the Internet. Microsoft might break my computer.

Microsoft figured out it's easier to employ all the hackers rather than fight them.

Oh man I get just a glimpse of what the Windows team has to deal with when applying patches it's absolutely insane. Never in my life have I had to worry that yum update was going to trash my system.

But when it does, it rm -rf /

Steam support for linux is really going places. I mostly play indie games and older games (so nothing too resource intensive) and Steam's custom wine distribution has been handling them really well. I think I might wipe my windows partition in the next month or so.

I keep hoping I'll run into someone that's played around with that. If you're at the point where you can use their software and expect a random game to work more often than not, that's a massive leap forward for Linux on the desktop!

I've been playing doom 2016 using steam's wine offering, proton I think it's called. There currently aren't a lot of games the steam client beta supports, but it at least was painless to install and run. Hopefully they'll continue to support wine going forward, and start working with publishers to get more big budget games working.

Blizzard has officially stated they won't boot you (permanently, apparently there are occasional false positives) for using other wine offerings. I've been tempted to try to install Overwatch using Lutris as well (productivity be damned!).

I'm lucky in that I tend to prefer indie games, which are more likely to support steamos, but I'm certainly feeling optimistic about gaming on linux. I've found that I need to boot into my win7 partition less and less in the last year for games reasons.

Skyrim is working well too. Crysis (first in the series) doesn't load though. :(

i recommend https://boxstarter.org/ and something like https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 for dealing with installing win10

source: configured windows10 manually once, decided i'd like to never experience that particular circle of hell again

I hadn't heard of Boxstarter before. Thank you for introducing me to this.

hosts-file blocking of microsoft servers

I don't think that works, I'm pretty sure the networking stack bypasses the hosts file for Microsoft sites because it's a potential vulnerability.

Why do you believe that?

Malware could overwrite the hosts file

He's right. it started back with XP https://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/431032/30/0/threaded

So that's why I had so many extra things to firewall in glasswire!

Other than using classic shell, I pretty much like the W10 toolbar. The harder learning curve is I still have many years of searching for X, when the UX is now in Y for a given setting. It's arguably in a better place now, just hard to re-learn.

As to linux gaming, a lot of effort has been made with Steam, another walled garden, but a nicer one. I just wish some of the UI/UX in linux would solidify a bit. I've been running elementary with some tweaks on my spare, but still not enough for my main desktop.

Valve did put Proton (their wine layer) on GitHub. Some stuff is making it outside the walls :)

There’s a reddit sub dedicated to powershell scripts which automate this. The name escapes me but the hope does not

This one, perhaps? https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

If you're going to keep a Windows box around at all, it sounds like LTSB would probably work better than vanilla W10.

The bad news is that LTSB is only available for enterprise customers.

The good news is that if Microsoft refuses to let me buy it as an individual, then I have no moral/ethical qualms with not buying it per se.

Is it any better if you get the Enterprise version?

My employer uses Windows Enterprise and it also had Candy Crush and other crapware preinstalled. IIRC one of my coworkers wrote a script to remove the bundled applications.

How are these machines HIPAA compliant when your OS vendor can push random software to them?

Vendors aren't considered threats under HIPPA which, tbf, is pretty rational because if you don't trust the entity that wrote the software or made your hardware you've got much bigger problems.

HIPAA

So what you're saying is we've got much bigger problems.

I trust the system I bought to not be evil as far as anything remotely everyday goes. I don't teudt their softwsre/updates.

Microsoft's behavior here and Canonical's behavior shipping search tied into Amazon tracking show that this is not a pretty rational stance.

Employer was supposed to be using Windows deployment tools to create custom enterprise images... But I'm stuck in the same boat. The maintenance overhead is too much for a small business. I am very upset that the default enterprise image is full of crap-ware, and the only alternative was LTSB with no support for Edge or Windows Store.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com