This stuff affects the user experience too. I’ve been able to daily drive Linux at work for a few weeks now. Restarting and booting into windows, after being used to Linux on the same hardware, makes windows feel like the slow, cobbled together OS that you can get for free.
I mean, we’re a Microsoft 365 company like many others, but even things like Teams and Outlook feel more responsive in Firefox in Linux than in the native apps on windows. Even video conferencing works great.
This difference isn’t exactly new to me, and I’ve used Unix or Linux sporadically over the past couple decades. However, using it as my main work OS has really highlighted the differences. Hell, even the multi-monitor support is better!
And this is with Mint Cinnamon installed, not some cutting edge or lean & fast distro.
For people who say you should read the contract before agreeing to it. What about the hundreds of thousands? No, millions of people buying new windows laptops every year. Are they presented with any kind of agreement? I don't think so.
They are. It is a huge problem that companies are allowed to do clickwrap bullshit with no human-comprehensible summary. But people are agreeing to this stuff.
I keep flip-flopping between Kate and pycharm community. I prefer Kate's LSP access, but pycharm's management of multiple projects is great.
I wish I could easily set up Kate so it would open random text documents in a separate session from my session that's running a certain project. And I wish it were aware of whether a session is running on the same activity. (In fact what I'd really like is per-activity Kate sessions).
Trouble is, I'm not good enough at C++ to make a merge request for those features.
Tbh, it just fits my workflow better. I would find myself editing stuff in nano more so than something like vscode because navigation in a file browser gets a little clunky for me. So it seemed fitting to learn neovim. I find the features more of a nuisance than a benefit at this stage and I want to properly understand how to use the underlying technologies these programs extract away.
I typically know exactly what I'm looking for and if I need more help I could check something out like fuzzy find. Those search boxes on file browsers are hit and miss for me, especially with Dot files. I store my scripts in a folder called .scripts and I reference them alot while building my apps.
Actually most my apps start out as scripts because prototyping is easier when you don't initially worry about UI or optimization and focus on the core functionality.
From my experience Windows have this system program called "CompatTelRunner.exe" that run silently in the background maybe once a month it's send data to M$ and using a lot of CPU power while collecting data, now with Al being pushed to windows who knows what it could be doing in the background without user knowledge
Upgrade to Enterprise
(upgrading to enterprise will also remove ads in settings)
in gpo editor:
Set updates to Manual
set the telemetry level to "Security" in group policy (iirc can also be called "Compliance"). This only works on Enterprise.
opt out of Microsoft accounts. This will force account creation to skip right to local accounts as if MS accounts were never a thing. This only works on Enterprise/Pro.
Has what you said been proven and documented anywhere? All I can find is threads of people claiming things, but no actual (investigative) journalism that covers these parts.
Toggling on data collection without informing the user would mean billions of dollars worth of fines in Europe, so I doubt that happens regularly. Still, I don't mind being proven wrong if you got the proof to back it up
Toggling on data collection without informing the user would mean billions of dollars worth of fines in Europe, so I doubt that happens regularly.
More like a few thousand euros symbolic fine and an angry letter saying "don't be an ass again pls our infrastructure depends on you" after years of blatant abuses and anti-consumer practices, followed by an ambiguous law (with positive effects affecting only european users) they will definitely not manage to circumvent withing the next week and a half. Not this time 🤡.
The problem here is the fact that most people just do not give a fuck about this; that's why there's no coverage in the (mainstream) media, why the only people who cares end up just leaving windows and why this kind of options are usually opt-out and they can actually afford to silently re-enable them cuz who's gonna check anyways? Random people ranting on meme communities about my fancy malware?
You seem to forget what kind of fines the EU hands out. specifically against Microsoft in 2004 the EU fined then 500 million. And then another few 100 million.
Has it been proven to happen on Windows 11? Not that I can point to specifically. 11 hasn't been in general use long enough to see a real pattern of behavior.
I was a mixed Windows and Linux user through the full life cycle of the Cortana implementation. The number of times they changed or moved Cortana related settings through the years was just ridiculous. It finally came down to having to manually change registry settings to keep it from scanning your files and messing with basic local search, and even if you did that you had to make sure the registry values were still set after version updates because they would get unset without warning.
I have no trust left for Microsoft, only suspicion.
My windows install enjoys rebooting itself unexpectedly a lot. There is no chance I ever checked a box that said "update then reboot my computer at some time in the future"
No it doesn't, at least not if the update isn't already a month overdue
But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.
I've done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it's a EU special feature (wouldn't be the first), but at least here they won't change back silently.
And this update outside active hours will have a good chance to "fix" your privacy settings again. Without you noticing. One basically needs a tool that confirms that your privacy settings are still active. And then wait how long it takes Microsoft to declare that tool as "malware".
I find it hilarious that Linux users STILL continue to hate on Windows Update when memes like this exist.
In my experience, Linux wants to update itself far more frequently than Windows (which is really generally no more than once a month these days), and it DOESN'T EVEN OFFER THE OPTION of automatically postponing it to a more convenient time. Yes, you can always say "not now", but then it'll just keep bugging you again until you say yes.
Ironically, at this point, updates on Linux are basically everything that Windows used to get made fun of in the past (for good reason!), but while the situation has actually improved on Windows, on Linux it's only become worse as distributions grow and updates become even more frequent.
That's certainly true, and there may even be advantages to this because security issues might get fixed more quickly, but it doesn't change the fact that the annoyance factor is at least as high as that of Windows used to be, and there is no convenient option to have it taken care of automatically, say, at shutdown.
Instead of making fun of Windows, it would serve Linux far better to actually address this issue, even if that means copying what Microsoft did here.
I don’t know how much this varies by distro, but I find the updates completely non intrusive. I think in Fedora I’ve seen one or two “critical updates are available” or “version N+1 is available” popups, but they aren’t intrusive and don’t get in the way. I’m not sure if I’ve seen a popup in Mint or not. Most of the time I notice there’s an update available because there’s a notification in the system tray or equivalent.
And I’m not even here to bash how Windows does it. I haven’t had many issues with my windows machines because I’ll check for updates and/or install available ones right away. Either that or I don’t use the machine for a while (working as a server) and it may or may not restart itself at night sometimes.
I still prefer the Linux way, which is kind of a win-win in my eyes because you get control over updates and reboots AND your system isn’t as much of a target in the first place so updates aren’t usually time critical.
Windows 11 just shows a little icon in the notification tray and won't really bother you otherwise until you click on it. I think by default it will try to install the pending updates on shutdown, but when you click on the icon you can choose to either postpone it or do it immediately.
Meanwhile, Ubuntu always interrupts you with a popup which yes, you can click "Not now" on if you want to deal with it later, but then it'll just pop up again some other time. And the only other option is to just let it do its thing (but at least it can run unobtrusively in the background and only requires a restart if there's a kernel update).
