- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
You must log in or register to comment.
How does this work nowadays when you buy a PC from a store?
Does it come with Windows already installed?
And if so, with what account?Installed yes, but the OOBE that runs (assuming the OEM didn’t fuck it up) is more or less the same as a retail install: you have to add the account, untick the 300 ‘yes, please spy on me’ boxes, and tell it that you do not want office 14 times.
Remember clippy on word 2000? That was annoying.
Are they trying to kill windows on purpose?
I wouldn’t say that, more just abusing a monopoly.
I don’t know what is going on at Microsoft. I’m starting to think that they are trying to pivot to a completely different business model. In addition to this Windows 11 crap and XBox seemingly being given up on, they appear to be losing their embedded market as well. In the past, if you saw any screen in an industrial setting, there’s a good chance that there was the embedded Windows version behind that screen. Lately, all the new products are moving over to Linux.
What advantage embedded windows gave to a manufacturer for it to be worth paying license fee for? I kinda feel this part is difficult for Microsoft to compete at
It was because developers historically were familiar with Windows and would just default to making a Windows product. You want a POS interface? Your developer is probably going to hand you a .exe and not a .deb. Then your next move is to tell the hardware division to put that .exe into production systems, at which it is too late for the hardware division to argue you just chose the more expensive option without thinking.
This is changing, particularly as many platforms make it trivial to compile for different OSes.
They are, and have said they are.
Subscriptions are the wave of the future.
Yeah, they probably want to kill it and switch people over to a cloud service with a monthly subscription.
They have done that for years, and every time there is an army of geeks and gamers who look for registry hacks or PowerShell scripts to install Windows anyway. If even those geeks do not want to spend 5 minutes looking for doc on how to install Ubuntu (which is a billion times easier to use than Windows), you can be sure Windows will never die.
The sad thing is they know the large majority of users will comply. Most people put familiarity and convenience above their own privacy and general well-being.
Games. Most of the games I play don’t play well with Linux.
I keep a Linux laptop for banking that only connects via ethernet cord while I’m banking. Which is nice, I don’t worry about key loggers now.
What games do you play? I’ve been gaming exclusively on Linux since Windows 7 went EoS, and especially since the Steam Deck came out, I’ve had very few problems. That said I don’t play competitive stuff, which is what tends to have anti-cheat rootkits.
Yeah. Gaming isn’t the issue for a long time. Productivity is. Rantmode
Proper CAD for Linux? Nonexistent, even worse, some manufacturers intentionally make sure you can’t use a VM either until you massively pay extra.(Looking at you Dassault) FreeCAD is a shitshow (and that is entirely the communities fault) and no professional competitor has shown any incentive - even though there is a increasing market for Linux in some professional capacities. And the current projects to get bottles/wine/etc. to work are maintained by a single guy (bless him) who tried to do it for multiple systems at once and seems to have given up mostly.
Graphic design? While the situation is a little bit better,it’s still a shitshow. No, GIMP and Inkscape are not sufficient replacements for Adobe or even Affinity. They are “good enough” for most things,but they are not nearly ready for production use in any professional capacity.
Office? Yeah. Sadly equally bad. I really really really hate Microsoft and Office. But: They are inherently good at what they do. Not because people get used to it - but because they work. I used LibreOffice since back when it was still StarOffice. (And have used Lotus before that) But we as the open source community still rather fight about ribbons (even though they became the standard everywhere) than get LibreCalc halfway production ready or make proper collaborative working possible. Or get a proper fucking search into thunderbird.
And this is the problem: OSS is so damn up its own ass, that it does not see the bigger picture. We can fight about the kernel allowing Rust, having Ribbons, which is the proper workbench in FreeCAD or about packet managers, distro flavours,etc. In the end what will happen is that the other side will be alienated, excuse themselves from further contributions and, and this is even worse, a lot of possible future contributors will also not contribute. And wow, someone was right and can think he (and it’s almost always a he) thinks he knows the only truth.
While the actual truth is held by the others. The ones that don’t even are bothered by the whole fucking discussing because they make the money, they influence millions and they are the ones setting de facto standards. And yes, that will mean we will need to adapt.
Including adapting market standards. When 95% of the world does a thing “that way”, it’s simply preposterous to claim “your way” is the right way, even it’s for historical reasons. (Easy example: CTRL C / CTRL V)
Same goes for adapting software. If 10% of the development power of Libre Office,GIMP, etc. would have been used to further Wine/Proton to get people to be able to use their industrial standard software we would have seen much much much larger adoption rates,both professionally and for private users.
Because that is literally what happened in gaming. Once Valve basically put massive efforts into allowing Windows games to be played on Linux - and not into developing native Linux games all of a sudden Linux gaming went ahead. Because it is a advantage for your game to work natively and well on a steam deck.
This is even more relevant for production software. If a CEO/CIO has reached a point where his main production software runs on Linux and he has deployed Linux in his company his next software contract for other software will go towards the company who runs better in their environment.
Rant out
(Nothing personal,mate, I just spent the last two days to get fucking CAD to work on Fedora…)
Blender at least has gotten to the point where an indie flick made with it actually won some Oscars and other big awards, so that pretty much put it on the map as a viable Maya or 3DSMax alternative, so there’s that.
Do you play exclusively esports games or something? It’s rare I encounter a title that doesn’t work just fine on Linux. It seems I barely need to tweak any settings anymore.
I do play eSports games
Once valve drops better nvidia support into the kernel, and steamos starts coming pre-loaded on laptops and pre-built desktops it’s over for their consumer division.
There’s nothing special about SteamOS. Linux has been available as an option from several manufacturers for years.
What we need to see is a major studio pushing for Linux like valve has been doing.
Imagine if call of duty or fortnite had a Linux promotion to have a penguin hat. That would help
Call of duty is a Microsoft game now.
There kind of is though. I’m not here to argue it’s enough to unseat windows but it is markedly different
From a technical standpoint it’s just another linux distro with some nice tweaks for gaming but from a human perspective it has brand recognition, familiarity, a known company behind it. Those things do really matter for adoption. No idea if that’d be anywhere near enough, I’m not inclined to make predictions, but it does have explicit advantages over consumers hearing they can get a laptop with Ubuntu or fedora on it
Yeah I agree. I just don’t wanna see more apps made exclusively for SteamOS and winderp. So I feel it’s important to highlight it’s just another Linux distro.
https://youtu.be/5KYQRk_SIB8 this is what pulled my attention to the matter.
That’s very fair! I was concerned by that video too, though I would point out that if I remember right, the games in that video don’t work on non-steamdeck devices including if you install steamos on a laptop or desktop
What we need to see is a major studio pushing for Linux like valve has been doing.
That’s it. That’s literally what makes it special. You, me, and half the fediverse probably aren’t going to use steam os unless maybe we buy a steam deck.
The fact that there’s a multi-billion dollar company throwing money at both it and proton is what makes steam os special. Its what’s going to give Linux a unified brand name that every machine can put on their case badge.
Normal people and the companies that sell them computers need that unified brand name. Why on gods green earth, I don’t fucking know, but I know that they do. Its how you get them to use shit.
No it’s not, multiplayer games with anticheat that hard-locks you into Windows and productivity software with DRM that hard-locks you into Windows is still a thing, if that were to stop being a thing, then Windows’ dominance on the desktop might finally be threatened, but until then, sadly, no.
The fact that Facebook still exists is proof of this.
Also, I will not be surprised if they audaciously disable Win 10 Home edition for security purposes once end of life is reached.
They already said they are going to charge $30/year for patches. They want recurring revenue from ads in 11 or from you paying yearly for 10.
I’ve still got a windows XP computer that I fire up once in a while for the LOLs. it continues to remind me that support ended in 2014, but it keeps working.
I also have a Windows 8.1 tablet that continues to work, and receive Windows Defender updates.
They won’t disable anything, stop spreading FUD, that’s Microsoft’s job.
companies do things like this when they feel they have the power in the business/customer relationship and there’s no regulations to stop them.
Why the fuck is a Microsoft account so important to Windows that running it without one is considered a “loophole”?
My guess is that’s it’s easier to neatly package your data up for when they go to sell it.
They want to make money off of services, every service they offer requires a Microsoft account to purchase and use. Everyone that they force to make an account during setup is one step closer to paying for a Microsoft service.
There are obviously tradeoffs (less sales of these versions of windows and some users pushed away from Windows altogether among others), but the motivation is clear.
Because we need your data silly 😊
because microsoft is shifting focus from selling you a product, to selling you as a product
And they need a unique account to track every single click and thing you do on your PC, and the web, and everywhere else to facilitate doing that with greater control and ease.
Its literally what, and for the same reason, google has done for the past decade+
Steam OS 3.8 … Any moment now 😁
Let’s install Windows 10 for protest
Or linux.
I do have Linux installed to all my PCs in my house. Now I need a Windows that doesn’t require MS account ;)
I really hope the whole shift away from American products will convince more software and game developers to provide native support for Linux. I am approaching the fence.
One or all of em.
I have heard about identity provider software on Linux for self hosting.
Is that a possibility for family members’ win11 accounts too, when they run into that problem in the future? Or is a M$ account the only way then?
Yet another reason to not use windows 11.
We no longer own our products. We just pay to use it until they decide you can no longer use their service. What happens if they mysteriously shut down your account without warning?
That is what happened to a guy and he had to get court involved and then he found out his account was flagged for CP by their algorithm because he had a video of his 19 year old ex. False bans do happen. I couldn’t find that story again sadly to share.
Also, make sure you always have back up turned off or have one drive not installed on your phone. If you’re a parent, be careful what photos you take of your children because if those get backed up to cloud, their AI will kill your account because it can’t tell between CP and normal family photos.
I actually want to own our products than make accounts to use.
Nothing’s stopping you from nuking your Windows install and installing some Linux distro though, at least on a normal PC. Surface products tend to be more locked to Windows though. I haven’t ran Windows as a main OS in years and don’t plan on going back, and Windows has gotten so user-hostile lately that I don’t even trust it enough to dual-boot it anymore, LTSC included.
(so far LTSC has dodged most of MS’ worst atrocities but it’s only a matter of time before that version starts getting compromised in some way too, so I don’t trust Windows outside of a VM, period, anymore, at least if I virtualize it, whatever stunts it may pull are isolated to that VM and won’t affect the host generally)
We no longer own our products.
This is a popular saying but its not as clear cut. You have choice. You can own the products you use or buy. So why don’t you?
Yes, the software we used yesterday is no longer a one time purchase today. However, you still own the software you bought yesterday and you have choice to buy new software which you will own or you can subscribe to a service providing the updated version of the new software. Example:
I can still use a purchased copy of Adobe Lightoom from 2010.
I can buy a new license for Affinity Photo today and use it forever.
I can pay to use Lightroom as a service.Imo, the only price you pay is the trek you take into unfamiliarity brought on by using new software.
This happens on the Google side of the fence as well - this article immediately came to mind.
I’m glad I started self hosting so I still have a “cloud” convenience while still owning all my data and being the sole person responsible for it.
Ah sweet vindication for getting my gaming PC and daily driver laptop on Linux
“Sucking off Bill Gates is bad, but Linux doesn’t support video games”
Bill Gates doesn’t run Microsoft anymore. He’s not the CEO and largely not responsible for the change in their business model.
Also, I game on Linux more than I do on windows (though I do have a partition in my drive to run windows for games I couldn’t get working on steam OS/ Bazzite. It’s literally 4 games out of over 100.
I switched to Ubuntu a few months ago, and all my Steam games work just fine. Never looking back.
I’m so glad I finally ditched that shit for good
I just deleted my old Mocrosoft account. Forgot I had it until recently.
They give me more and more reasons to stay on W10 until I give up games and move to Linux permanently.
I’ll miss my TCMD scripting, though. But besides that and gaming, most of what I do nowadays is cross-platform.
Why would you give up games to move to Linux? Been enjoying Cyberpunk and Guild Wars lately, and many games before that the last year. Honestly, at this point I don’t even check if games work with Linux, I just assume they do unless proven otherwise.
Check out Proton DB. Gives reports on how well things run. Anything Gold or higher is going to be a non-concern to play.
Same here.
Game performance on Linux isn’t always the best. So I’ll keep a Win10 around.
Are Linux ports of games so hard to do? Genuine question. I am not a games dev.
Are Linux ports of games so hard to do? Genuine question. I am not a games dev.
My personal opinion is that Windows is an easier target because all Windows machines are consistent in their underlying interface with the user’s hardware. Same idea with MacOS. You know what display manager and graphics library to target, and what packaging format to target.
Then, there’s Linux, which can be one of any number of distributions with varying software stacks, packaging formats, etc. It’s not that Linux gaming is radically difficult to support, it’s just much less standardized. This makes it a lot more work for a much smaller demographic. The Vulkan graphics API has made some of the software issues much less of a problem, but you still have to contend with things like different display managers and stuff like packaging differences between distributions.
Makes sense. Would packaging like Flatpak or AppImage be an option? Or just make sure it runs with Wine? Probably all not that straightforward.
I think the problem with packaging isn’t so much that there aren’t good options. Some people don’t like Flatpak. Some people don’t like snaps. Maybe AppImage would be a good option. But these are all choices that can potentially fragment the target demographic even further, which reduces the value returned for the time invested in supporting it. Just my opinion, certainly not an expert.
Wine is a great solution for windows-only things. The great thing about gaming, though, is that many of them are using languages like C++ which have full support on Linux systems natively. If you then have your graphics running through Vulkan, that also works across platforms. So, in my opinion, Wine shouldn’t be something we continue to need for gaming. Not saying Wine won’t be used or won’t continue to be useful for gaming, just that it doesn’t have to be the primary path to support Linux.
What games keep you on Windows? Besides a few anticheat-enabled ones which choose not to support it, basically everything works fine. I game (and work in gamedev!) 100% on Linux.
Over like half of the games I play with friends just do not work Linux because of anti-cheat. I hate it. I also can’t use it for work or studies since I need access to a good CAD that just works. These 2 things and a proper Adrenaline software from AMD is all I need to fully switch to Linux. I do have a dual-boot Windows/Linux PC at home, but honestly, I can barely use Linux most of the time.
Ouch, that sucks yeah. Guess I got lucky with the games my friends like to play. Only one is I guess Valorant, but I don’t engage with that one anyways. Guess you’re stuck on the dual boot until devs of these games start ticking the Proton support box :P
My vr driving Sim rig just works in windows, the most I’ve ever had to do is map my shifter in game. Steamvr, hardware drivers, the actual games, it all just works without doing anything. Plug and play. I’m sure I can get it all working in Linux, eventually. I was(trying to) gaming on Ubuntu 10.04 with wine. I was first batch steamdeck and the amount of progress with gaming I’ve seen thanks to valve and proton means I’ll be coming back. But I’m just waiting for steamOS to be open release. But I am a KDE head so honestly I’ll end up whatever distro that does proton and KDE by the end of this year.
Install bazzite. Done.
Come on in, the water is fine. The latest version of Ubuntu is like 24, so things have changed a lot, and for the better.
Get yourself a Kubuntu image, and give it a try.
