For a company that used to understand that its success depended on developer mindshare, Microsoft has done a really remarkable job over the last 15 years turning Windows into a platform that seems laser-focused on the goal of making developers want to use almost anything else.

   WGA consists of two components:

   an installable component called WGA Notifications
   that hooks into Winlogon and validates the
   Windows license upon each logon and an ActiveX
   control that checks the validity of the Windows
   license when downloading certain updates

However, I think this ongoing check only started with Windows XP SP3. I have a Windows XP SP2 installation in a VM. I don't allow Internet access at all for it, I copy anything I need to a shared directory. It has stayed activated for quite some time without complaining and without needing the Internet for anything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advantage

Unless you're normal, ie not wearing tinfoil hat.

Can anyone here who owned a legit copy of Windows actually say that this happened to them, or to someone they knew?

First time, I had an HP laptop with Windows XP Pro OEM in 2006. All worked fine, but one day out of the blue it told me that my copy of Windows wasn't genuine. I don't know what caused it & reinstalling Windows over the top from DVD didn't fix it. I seem to recall Windows then kept shutting down after 2 hours, so backing up my data before a reformat was extremely difficult. Once I reformatted & did a clean reinstall, it worked again.

The second time, I had a MS BizSpark membership via the Association Of Software Professionals, and was testing my software in Windows 7 VMs. 8 months later, my Windows 7 claimed it was non-genuine. I enquired with Microsoft, and they said my business shouldn't have been eligible for BizSpark because it was more than 3 years old, so they'd cancelled the BizSpark membership & blacklisted my Windows keys without notifying me. I would've preferred if MS verified my eligibility upfront.

I switched to Apple as a result. I know, it's another proprietary OS and tied to one hardware vendor, but at least in 9 years it has never locked me out of my data or my machine.

I can almost say. I had a genuine Windows 7 license in 2011 that I used for gaming. When I'd turn on the machine, it'd give the scary "this copy may not be legitimate" message at boot. When I'd enter the product key, it wouldn't work. I could push through that message, but every 10 or so minutes I'd get a pop-up screen I couldn't ignore that said "this copy may not be legitimate" and I'd have to enter my key that should work that doesn't, or hit "ignore for 10 minutes."

So, Microsoft didn't remotely deactivate it, but they, through their error, inconvenienced me such that I got rid of something that was a $300 value (it was Win7 ultimate, 32 and 64 bit licenses. I got it for free by hosting a Windows 7 launch party. So it's the most genuine Windows you can get.)

I'm a case study of "DRM provides no advantage for legitimate users, and occasionally inconveniences them." Of course I'm just an anecdote, but you asked!

If Microsoft is disabling a legitimately purchased copy of windows - or accessing it without the authorization of the owner - that could be a violation of the CFAA (or other laws; ask a lawyer).

Trying to say the customer somehow authorized all of this by throwing a contract of adhesion at the customer after the purchase has been made is almost certainly not binding, and is explicitly illegal in some jurisdictions. It's patently not a contract as it lacks all of the required elements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Because there's a way to communicate the point without casting aspersions on the commenter.

Yep. Just recently my windows 8.1 installation deactivated itself and I had to call in an talk to a person to get it reactivated.

In my case I needed libapr, and as far as I can tell there is no installer for it, so I wound up just saying "drop a compiled copy of libapr into this location in the source tree" into the build instructions since I did not want to redistribute it with my source.

So yes, I dearly wish for something like a working pkgconfig on Windows.

I would argue that it is a good thing to not rely on /usr/lib or /usr/include even on Unix. It is a pain for when a dev who is jumping on the team specially when the dependencies are not documented. The make-dependency error-install-make cycle is very annoying.

I use qemu/kvm, with OVMF for the firmware to get around some VGA problems, and pass a discrete card to the guest while using the integrated intel graphics for the host. It requires CPU and motherboard support, but those aren't too uncommon on newer hardware.

To be clear, I don't think very many people are likely to have to deal with this as a security problem. I just think its appropriate to be aware of the power/danger inherent in the seemingly benign nature of GPU/PCI passthrough.

[1] = "you can use PCI passthrough to assign a PCI device (NIC, disk controller, HBA, USB controller, firewire controller, soundcard, etc) to a virtual machine guest, giving it full and direct access to the PCI device" (http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/XenPCIpassthrough) [2] Sorry, I can't find a link.

my setup passes through a discrete PCI-Express graphics card to Windows running under KVM, and the card is restricted to address space allocated to the VM using the motherboard's IOMMU.

Xen documentation explicitly states how to determine whether you have IOMMU on your hardware.[2] The hardware listed here [3], while out of date, conspicuously notes, for example, that "Core i7...most "K" versions don't support VT-d", which, according to Intel [4], means that the i7-4770K, for example, does not support IOMMU (VT-d). This tells me that if you are concerned about this issue, then you must check your hardware, even if it is new hardware.

[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU

[2] = http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough#How_can_...

[3] = http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/VTdHowTo

[4] the i7-4770K probably lacks IOMMU because it would negatively affect performance on a CPU that is sold as a near top-of-the-line CPU for gaming, which generally excludes most virtualization use cases.

edit: formatting

That'd be pretty good

[1] = http://ark.intel.com/products/75123/Intel-Core-i7-4770K-Proc...

"VT-d Pass-Through is a technique to give a domU exclusive access to a PCI function using the IOMMU provided by VT-d. It is primarily targeted at HVM (fully virtualised) guests because PV (paravirtualized) pass-through does not require VT-d (altough it may be utilized too)."[1]

[1] = http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/VTd_HowTo

Had to roll back to windows for the host to make the VMs work nicely. A bummer, considering moving away from Windows takes that first step and I now have to stick around for longer. Perhaps next year...

But as you have said, it's not as straighforward as I'd like. I haven't tried it yet but it's nice seeing others having success.

Are there any up to date guides and best practices for this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/2z2y7h/gpu_pa... is another fairly concise guide (a little out of date though).

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162768 is the main point of discussion for it - too much to read through entirely, but the top posts include a lot of info, and it contains a lot of valuable information on quirks for specific hardware if you search. Some of the stuff is outdated though (eg the kernel includes a lot of the patches now), and it's targetted at Arch, but most instructions should apply to any distro.

Another key point is, you need VT-d/IOMMU support on your motherboard and CPU, which isn't universal (only in the last few generations of intel CPUs, with some excptions that don't support it. And motherboard support can vary between OEMs). Check https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aryg5nO-kBebdFo... to see if others have had any luck with your hardware, or before making any purchases.

This could work with two nvidia based cards ? And when the VM isn't On, the host could use the main GPU ?

Someone share more info about this!

You can't switch a GPU between host and VM without rebooting, you have to assign one GPU to the VM through kernel boot options, which will hide it from the host.

A lot of people also just use a dedicated (Nvidia/AMD) GPU for the windows VM for gaming and heavy duty things, and only use their onboard Intel GPU for the linux host, which is sufficient for normal usage if you're doing all your gaming through the VM anyway.

See my post above for some links with more info.

I recently switched from OSX to Linux on the new Dell XPS 13 and I'm not sure if I should stay with my current dual boot setup, use a VM or get rid of window completely and invest time in learning Gimp and Scribus as alternatives.

I can't comment about Photoshop or Illustrator as I have no experience using those programs, though I do a fair bit of work with PCB CAD tools: OrCAD, EAGLE. I haven't ran into any major issues thus far. Media playback works fine btw; mpv does not report any skipped frames when playing 1080p webm files downloaded from Youtube with youtube-dl.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2z0evz/gpu_pa...

http://vfio.blogspot.fr/2015/05/vfio-gpu-how-to-series-part-...

Or search for "windows vm gpu passthrough" on your favorite search engine, there may be more.

This is all I remember now :)

For a decent dev tool under Linux - what about MonoDevelop? VSCode looks ok, but I haven't tried the Linux version, but apparently you can do C# development in it.

I'm not really up to speed with C# dev these days, last job I had which required C# was 2009, and since then I really haven't done much serious development in it (It's 95% Delphi professionally, and Python for my own stuff)

Edit: I wanted to re-iterate, I absolutely love Python Tools for Visual Studio. Those guys have created (what I have found to be) the highest quality python development tool I have experienced. The downside is it requires Visual Studio. If they can take what they have added to VS, and re-produce that in VSCode.... Wow, I would be very happy.

As for the IDE Intellij IDEA rocks and has a community edition.

That's the one single reason why I keep Windows 8.1 on my HD. Over the last 3 years I've used Windows for maybe 13-14 hours in total. Fortunately, more and more games come out on Linux, too. And some games run pretty good in Wine. Fallout 3, for example, runs faster on Linux (with higher settings) than it does on Windows. Even though I updated everything, disabled pretty much anything that could run in the background and don't have much installed.

I can't even imagine how Windows can still be the preferred OS for gaming nowadays. Using Windows is a pain in the butt, and so is playing games on it. The whole OS by default wastes precious resources those games could use, and it gets worse with every new version. On Linux I'm the only person who tells the OS how and when to waste the resources.

I actually like the other way around. I don't like the font rendering on Linux... not even in Firefox.

Gentoo partially solves this by having eselect fontconfig.

Now as far as disabling certain (installed) fonts or switching rendering methods, specifying particular rendering methods for particular fonts, or specifying replacements for fonts you don't have installed or don't want to use -- those things do require editing XML dotfiles. But as far as I know, they can't be done at all on Windows (at the user or system-wide level; I think applications can do them for themselves).

While I agree that it is better than the font rendering in Windows[1], I suggest that the font rendering is "different", and opinions will vary considerably about which is better.

You may be interested to know that there are patches to the font handling libraries (fontconfig, freetype, cairo) that used to be known as "infinality"[3], but are now maintained by bohoomil[4]. With these patches, you can actually select (with environment variables) various rendering options, including emulation of ClearType and several other rendering styles, including a customizable FIR filter and detailed control of the hinting.

Warning: Messing with fontconfig is far more complicated than it looks. Use these patches at your own risk! That said, I do like the results[5].

[1] The modern ClearType rendering, not the pixel-snapping, over-hinted[2] stuff used previously

[2] http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...

[3] http://www.infinality.net/blog/

[4] https://github.com/bohoomil/fontconfig-ultimate

[5] http://i.imgur.com/wMWmNKt.png

I could have followed that statement if it was ... to IntelliJ/Java.

Wine can be a pain to use, if you're not comfortable enough with linux. But know that it's possible. I had the game running fine, only with some minor annoyances (like a very long loading time). But it was years ago, you might find a more recent version of Wine which runs the game smoothly, almost out of the box.

I just wanted to encourage you. Keep learning linux, keep toying with Wine, and you'll be able to play this game (and others) ;)

[1] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

Edit : I realized you were probably referring to the newest SW Battlefront... My bad. Well, it still applies somewhat : Wine will be able, eventually, someday, to run this upcoming SW Battlefront.

In particular Toyota car ads in the music app.

I did like the UI improvements, the notifications system etc, that switching between new/old apps didn't feel jarring anymore.

I think the kicker was the github project calle dunfuck windows 10 or whatever it was, where you ran a bunch of batch scripts to remove/kill off the monitoring services, and I just didn't want to have to worry about that.

Also the fact that on my other machines, the nagging to upgrade to windows 10 is constant, I had to go find/remove some random windows update patch from June/July to get rid of gwx.exe.

edit: lastly, the licensing terms of the operating system itself, IANAL, and I couldn't tell what rights I had to the o/s in the future.

Did you pay for Windows 10?

It was just one distribution of many (Ubuntu), just one version of it in fact (Unity Ubuntu, Xubuntu or Kubuntu or whatever is Gnome Ubuntu called didn't include it) and it was not only possible (unlike in Windows 8 and 10) but also rather easy to remove.

The music app comes with the O/S, and is the default registered music player, for all intents are purposes, it's part of the O/S, and it's ability to inject ads into the start screen (as well as the Games widget, and Store widget doing the same thing) are just more of that.

I am guessing you are talking about free apps on the store. Do you think that paying for an OS give you rights over third parties apps?

It's not like MS is paying each developer on the store each time you download a free app. How would that be sustainable?

> In particular Toyota car ads in the music app.

Which music app? Xbox music and Groove Music don't include ads.

I have a big partition with my user data on a NTFS partition that I shared across Windows 8.1 and Kubuntu 15.04 without any issue. The only problem that I could have is that if I unplug the computer on Windows, I need to reboot on Windows to mark it-self as safe, so Linux can mount it again without any warning message.

[0]http://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/

Impressively, it is still under active development.

"Double Commander" is a very complete open source re-implementation in QT, and they are targeting all 3 major platforms with it. There are a few quirks that will be noticeable for anyone that's nimble with Total Commander, but the keybindings and even the menus are just about the same, and if that's what's keeping you on Windows -- the benefit of the linux ecosystem will greatly outweigh those small nuisances.

[0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

http://www.krusader.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krusader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10010395

I don't see how people can use that and tout it as superior to anything, even Linux. I can understand the use of a macbook, but I'll never understand why people use OS X.

Much more decent.

I can leave that window open and it doesnt steal focus. But how stupid is that to sell such a version anyway. First i need to install xp, and then i need to install win7 over it. Why? That was when i realised i need to get out of this.

Somehow i heard Linux Mint would be easy for people that are sick of windows. Installed like a breeze. I had to move out. Like if you don't live with your parents anymore. Windows = Dad. Macos = Mom. Don't misunderstand - both are nice, and so i am nice to people that use these systems, while nonetheless probing sometimes wether they don't have any desire to live on their own a bit more. Most of them somehow appreciate my tales of freedom, but at the same time feel they can't deal with their life without Mom washing their clothes and Dad telling them when they should be home. Often this goes hand in hand with a severe adobe or visual studio addiction - they make the most perservant drugs - and are often a necessity for survival, which is a shame. I reserve a warm place in my heart for those people and think well of them. But that aside - now i had my own shitty apartment and needed to do everything for myself. First it was hard and i needed Wine. I totally wrecked it two times. But freedom. No more eula accept clicking without having read it was enough for me to continue.

I now can change the scrollbar gfx of the whole system by editing a dead simple png file. Nobody cares. I can install, backup, delete and setup anything like i want, without permission from anybody. I also don't get shouted at every imaginable occasion that 'Hey, you! Did you know you are using Linux(tm)(r)(c) <accept> <ok>' - instead, the system is able to shut up about itself and to get out of the way as much as i want it to get. That is so much beyond priceless - and this translates into a quality of life that is only comparable with having your own garden near the house you've built yourself while tasting your own brewed beer with best friends in the sunshine of a late summer afternoon.

And everything linux is searchable on the internet, which runs on it. I keep in mind to also care about the people that made this possible, in humankinds brightest collaborative effort so far. They all shall be remembered, their names encarved in granite, and i acknowledge their immense contribution to humankind. Kudos to them that made this possible, including all other free operating systems contributors, from all the GNU, BSD, Plan9, riscOS, templeOS and others.

So, from 2011 to now, i experienced about 5 distros, and currently have settled on manjaro with xfce. The next time i might try real archlinux as a main system maybe? The hardware support is amazing actually. I plug stuff in, it instantly gets recognised and usable without any further ado.

I had an Ipad for a short time, i wanted to wipe it to factory settings and upload some pdfs to read - how foolish of me. First it needed a superspecial cable. Then, this Ipad could not be acessed as a simple usb storage device. Wtf. Who built this and why? Finally after the factory reset it did not boot anymore and demanded i connect it with a windows or mac that had itunes installed. Haha. No. But it also makes me sad that such electronic things exist which demand such utter nonsense from me that i won't fulfil for them.

I have, to make this clear, no bad feelings for anybody that earns money to live by working for microsoft - may they live well. Then i am sometimes remembered by force of what a wierd microsoft business corporate world system this 'windows' is oozing out of every corner, when i _have_ to use it for work in special situations, and it feels totally backwards to use it. It's like entering a room where tv is on and the people in it all obsessively want a deeply involved discussion with me about the running show. Well, thats my story with this..