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Comment by mdifrgechd | Hacker News Reader

I'm buying a new computer. Currently I have only ubuntu linux machines and was just saying to someone that I would actually consider trying windows and WSL because it would let me use the linux tools I want alongside MS office, and it might be interesting to play with windows versions of things. The reason I wont actually do it though is because I'm sure that windows will be filled with commercially oriented intrusions and annoyances that I don't see in linux. I admit I am hypersensitive to that kind of thing, but getting reminders and popups from the task bar etc destroys my concentration. Maybe there is a way to shut all that down but I always felt like windows was bothering me about stuff a lot more than linux ever does.

Solve that and I may be a convert.

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I use Windows 10 with Classic Start Menu. I see no adverts. I do see some notifications, almost all of which are useful. Probably you should try things first, before jumping to conclusions - I find Windows 10 a pretty good experience, and yes, I have also been using Linux for about 30 years.

So do I .. however recently Windows has been causing Classic Start Menu upgrade commands to fail - Classic still seems to work, but I don't know for how long.

I think this is a trend of MS breaking the tools we use to get some control back over Windows, because they've broken some of my others recently also, such as Windows defender flagging Spybot S&D's immunization as a hosts hijack. And of course there's no easy way to work around that, pressing ignore didn't work it produce the same result as quarantine .. I'm so angry at MS for all the shit they push, but there's just not a better alternative they closely walk the line of costs/benefits .. which is why I fear that as their position on the desktop strengthens with things like wide WSL adoption, we will see more of their anti-features and domineering breakages of the tools people write to resist them.

> Probably you should try things first, before jumping to conclusions

I don't need to smoke crack to know that I don't want anything to do with it.

> Solve that and I may be a convert.

As a Linux desktop user, I've only ever been able to tolerate LTSC releases of Windows 10, and those still have telemetry features. They also lag behind Windows 10 releases so that things like WSL2 are still unsupported.

I tried running Windows as my daily driver because I was somewhat sold on WSL and WSL 2, however using non-LTSC releases of Windows is a frustrating experience, and there were too many incompatibilities between enterprise Windows and the desktop/development environment I was trying to use it as.

My solution is to have an LTSC virtual machine set up so that I can dip into Windows when I need to, and just use a sane Linux environment as the host OS.

i booted into my windows machine the other day, and when it finally came up, it was full of crap: my start bar had a bing ad for a halloween quiz, 3 different versions of candy crush, half my settings reset, etc... compared to my daily (linux and macos) it sure felt like i had little control over the machine, it was a microsoft ad platform first and place to get actual work done second

I solve it. Here's my setup:

- don't use online account, but offline (local) one

- use WPD to uncheck absolutely everything related to windows telemetry / sending info. I keep only updates and those set to manual.

- and can't stress this enough - get a PiHole, either on RPi or re-purpose a crappy old laptop. This one is also good for your smartcrap you usually get to your spouse/kids

WPD?

probably Windows Privacy Dashboard.

https://wpd.app/

Yup, that one. Thought is well known by now. 1st tool to download after a fresh install, even before I download Total Commander.

How do you know it's safe? I cringe at giving admin rights to a .exe downloaded from the net.

Time. Since was released none report it as "bad". I'm using it for over an year now and I found out about it here on HN.

You don't / can't know it's safe. It's not open source, and it has no good reason not to be open source.

And the "Created and mainteined by" links to maintainers' Steam profile... I'm sorry and I'm sure this is my biased view but gamers usually make very questionable choice on security stuff even they have 0 malicious intent.

In addition to that all that, I once caught Windows Defender submitting places.sqlite out of my Firefox profile directory so I'd recommend you turn off "automatic sample submission" in Windows Defender if WPD doesn't already do that.

It does.

The fact that you have to do any of that in the first place, is reason enough to not use windows at all.

Not sure why you are downvoted. Having to use a linux computer on top of your windows computer to make it useable is completely unacceptable.

Definitely agree, a Mac you get Mac OS, Ubuntu you get Ubuntu, Windows you get some Frankenstein of the OS, Mcafee, Dell, and various other companies applications all stitched together.

Those parts are easily removed by doing a vanilla install the first thing you do. Windows (esp 10) still had some built-in things you don't get away from though. And also all the dialogues from self-updating software and plugins.

It is possible to disable or uninstall all the user-hostile components like Windows Update, telemetry, and the app store, but it takes some effort and manual registry editing.

The bigger problem, though, is all the legacy that's holding it back in the name of backwards compatibility. The WinAPI is older than myself. You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never understand why exactly is it done this way. Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally. I've never used anything that came before OS X, but I did read a lot that it was terrible and unstable, just like Windows at the time. Except modern macOS is stable and robust, while Windows still feels extremely fragile and unreliable after all these years.

Yes, I understand that Microsoft is hellbent that modern Windows versions need to be able to run 25-year-old binaries unmodified. But they could've achieved the exact same thing by putting genuine Windows 95 into a VM and seamlessly integrating it with the desktop.

Seems they should even be able to piggyback off what they've already put in place for WSL.

> You can still run Windows 95 programs on your new Windows 10 PC. While useful to some, I'll never understand why exactly is it done this way.

Because they make a lot of money on enterprise customers. The only way to convince them to upgrade is to guarantee the new OS version won't break their legacy software. But even on consumer market, in the 90s and 2000s it was important old videogames work on new versions of Windows, or otherwise people would not upgrade.

This comes from before the days of web applications and everything as a Service. Software vendors had to work hard to get people to pay them again.

So... why upgrade in the first place then, to solve what? Something I learned as a software developer is that if a piece of code is working properly, the best thing you can do is to leave it alone.

Exactly! And that's what both the corporate executives and your parents are thinking!

So Microsoft has always had to work hard to convince people to upgrade. New features were the natural way of doing that. But not maintaining backward compatibility, in a world where almost all software was an one-time purchase, would be a deal breaker. Why upgrade if it's going to cost $20M to make our ERP suite compatible with the new Windows? Why upgrade if all the software I spent $1000 on over the past few years will no longer work? Hence backwards compatibility with existing software was a top priority (to the point that Windows has a lot of fixes to badly coded third-party software built in).

> Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally.

Hand on heart, do you really feel OS X/macOS is improving much?

Honestly, beyond around 10.9, it's been pretty pointless from the end user perspective. Technically, they rewrote the window server to use Metal instead of OpenGL in 10.13 and that did bring performance improvements (and surfaced many bugs in the nvidia driver that they fixed in 10.14 which I'm currently on), but there were no noticeable improvements to anything since. 10.15 aka catalina just brings more restrictions on what you can run. 11.0 aka big sur is a pointless UI redesign.

Apparently, when they run out of technical things to improve and stupid code signing policies to enforce, they redesign the UI because it's a law that if you're making a popular OS it absolutely has to have a major update once a year, no matter what.

Well, macOS 10.15 has a user-space network stack. 11.0 can run on ARM as well on x86. So there are a bunch of things going on under the hood

CoW filesystem, stronger sandboxing, user-mode drivers (that can be emulated on ARM!), fully 64-bit, ARM support - yeah I do

Legacy support and continued backwards compatibility is one of the biggest strengths of Windows. I can still run weird games I made 15-20 years ago without issue. As a regular users of both MacOS and Windows, I don't agree that MacOS feels more stable, recently it's felt less stable than Windows, but obviously that's anecdotal and depends on usage.

I don't see the problem with GP's suggestion. Couldn't you still run your 15-20 year old games if Windows 10 shipped with a Windows XP VM that integrated seamlessly with the Desktop?

It's possible that performance would be an issue with some use cases, startup times, etc. Eventually this will probably be a reality, in the same way you can't run DOS binaries without an emulator or VM

it would let me use the linux tools I want alongside MS office

I used to go this route. I used WABI (Windows Application Binary Interface) on Solaris in the 1990s, sort of like a very early WINE. However as time has gone on, I found that the Linux Office Suites (LibreOffice, more recently) have become more and more sufficient for my needs.

I realised recently that I haven't really booted Windows itself more than half a dozen times over the last few years. I got my first Windows 10 a month or two ago with a new laptop. I then proceeded to squeeze it down to under 100 gig on a 1 terabyte hard drive. On my main desktop, Windows 8 is relegated to a mere 50 gig out of 12 terabytes of storage.

I have used Windows 7 on VirtualBox more often for running my HP Scanner's MultiFeed software, just because I can. Though normally, I just run a single-sheet scan most of the time under Linux.

In summary, Windows could completely disappear and it would not affect me adversely at all.

But Windows lets you do things no Linux distro really can - use modern, state-of-the-art interface technologies like multitouch, pens, and dials. A Surface with WSL is about the ideal setup, with the best of both worlds.

Also, the author of this article seems ignorant of the fact that Windows' kernel internals are one of its strongest features - Cutler's NT Kernel incorporated many things he learned from building VMS, and while the shell and outer parts of Windows have often left a lot to desire, the NT (not DOS/Win9X) kernel is and always has been excellent. I don't see Windows evolving to run on a Linux kernel - that would be only viable with vast improvements/changes to the Linux kernel.

> Also, the author of this article seems ignorant of the fact that Windows' kernel internals are one of its strongest features ...

I would not be surprised at all if he's ignorant of Windows' kernel internals or, really, much else about Windows.

> [...] ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

In fact, this article likely would have gained little attention were it written by anyone else.

Hopefully you’ve disabled Ubuntus motd service on your machines.

https://mobile.twitter.com/lelff/status/1210619413885575168

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662088

Those instructions don't strike at the root. What you should do is remove the motd entries in /etc/pam.d/login and /etc/pam.d/sshd

I tried to use WSL to run a cron job, but that wasn't supported as of 2019. I wasn't able to figure out how to schedule and run arbitrary Python code on Windows.

> windows will be filled with commercially oriented intrusions and annoyances

And how!

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