Good point - as Mel Brooks said, "It's good to be the king!" In my last job, I was IT; I dread going to some place where they force Windows upon me!

I work at a very corporate place with forced windows laptops. There are zero systems in the company we can sit down at and log into, except our laptops. The OS version is updated, and upgraded, automatically, even including major versions. I was just force upgraded to windows 10 and lost support for my programming environment. I had to recreate it in a new toolset because the one I have a thousand hours in is no longer supported. (It would work, it's just not supported - I cannot install it, but it would work fine if I could).

One arm of my company allows macs. This one does not, period. We have a 0% non windows 10 user base. We can have temporary admin access for 12 hours if we will out a report, but everything we do is recorded. It doesnt work if we're on wifi or battery. We are not allowed to install browser extensions, even if we are developing against the web.

My last job let everyone have admin/root. I had everything I ever wanted. My workflow was glorious. I was so comfortable. I was able to work 3 to 4 times faster on average, i.e. my yearly output was probably 3 to 4 times more productive. I invented new things, scratched my itches, and felt like the king of the world.

But this job will let me retire.

Our laptops are all Windows based and I've moved all of my development to VMs that I have admin rights over. I don't think I'd ever go back at this point regardless of what my desktop OS was.

It really helps with new developer onboarding as well. You can just provide them with a handful of VMs instead of spending time configuring a new machine with all of the dev tools your team uses.

I work in the public sector and our sysadmins have actually made a game out of tricking people into updating to Windows 10 (and allowing them to take back admin rights in the process). Like offering Office 2016 upgrades, but only if you upgrade to Windows 10 too.

I understand it’s much easier for them to manage things this way, but they’re not going to have the results they want by going about it this way. When my Windows 10 “upgrade” comes, I’ll just be dedicating one of my monitors to my own Arch (maybe Qubes) box where I can actually get shit done. I’m a C# dev too, which makes even less sense, but requesting permission to install simple dev tools is not going to happen. Life is too short for this nonsense.

What's your opposition to Windows 10 if you're already running Windows?

We're running Windows 7 and I'm begging to get into the pilot for Windows 10. As time passes more and more things break in Windows 7 and it becomes less useful. Most of Intels drivers are garbage and their Bluetooth stack is next to useless.

I'm running VMs ontop of my Windows 7 install for all development work. Anything that's Windows based is either a 10 or 2016.

I guess I should have noted that I do all my C# dev work in Windows 7 and run Arch VMs for everything else. My Windows 10 setup won’t be much different, but I just don’t trust Windows 10 and won’t be running my VMs on it.

I haven’t followed up on whether this “feature” made it into an actual Windows 10 update, but I remember reading about keylogging to the cloud as a way to pre-load your start menu with things that might be relevant to what you’re doing. Maybe it’s just being a developer and knowing what this kind of casual abstraction can cause, but I’m not okay with the philosophy that gets it into a test release of Windows 10. Microsoft is doing cool stuff these days but they still haven’t won me over.

I'm not aware of any keylogging to the cloud "feature". That sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory dreamed up by the people who hate Windows 10 and or Microsoft.

Windows 10 has the same frequently used app feature as Windows 7, which you can didable. You can optionally allow Microsoft to gather data about onscreen keyboard usage to improve suggestions, like Google Gboard on Android. Cortana's searches are obviously cloud based, but can be disabled. And Windows 10 offers suggested apps and features in like 3 different places in the OS, which can also be disabled. Maybe someone dreamed up a fantastic spyware feature based on all of those things.

I hear what you're saying, but none of it makes me feel better about using Windows 10. It's not high-quality HN discussion, though here's a Reddit thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/31rxsv/disable_k...

You've told me three things that I can disable in Windows 10. Why is this stuff enabled by default in the first place? How do you know this is everything I need to disable to address these concerns? Or better, why isn't user consent requested before any serious "diagnostic tracking" like this? The answer, I think, is that it's too complicated for the average user. Once this "diagnostic tool" is effectively hidden from the user, and enabled on all devices, the tool either has to be monitored regularly (to make sure more features aren't auto-enabled like these were) or eliminated completely. I've spent too much of my life "monitoring" closed-source software to give much consideration to that option, at this point.

During installation/setup you have the option to disable a lot, unfortunately in an enterprise environment that isn't always something the user gets to see. Fortunately most of the crap is disabled or not present in the enterprise version of Windows 10.

It's on by default so that users will interact with it and try it out. This is pretty standard practice on every major OS or application you use today. New features are enabled by default and the user gets to figure out how to disable them if they don't like it.

Case in point, the latest update to Gmail on Android enables a feature of opening URLs in a Chrome Frame inside Gmail instead of using your browser. This is great for Google, not so much for the user. I got screwed over because of this feature because a nonce token I received was consumed by the Chrome Frame which promptly crashed.

Windows 10's suggestions and prompts are about on par with MacOS High Sierra's. If you're questioning that statement, try not setting up iCloud some time then come back to me.

It's a trust issue. I think it's a major leap to auto-enable new features without letting the users know what's going on, but people don't seem to have a problem with it these days as long as it doesn't raise any red flags in their mind or on social media. If we're auto-enabling stuff like this, don't users stop asking the questions? And is that consent?

That's not even going into who is making these decisions, the corporations who only stand to profit from you enabling these features. They will roll it back if there is enough public outcry, but burying the option in the system settings is one way to avoid mass public outcry. Convenient, isn't it.

Sure another major corporation is doing this with their products, but that doesn't make it right. None of this is an acceptable reason to continue sneaking it into their products. Plus the data collected has a potential for even more profit, which is where I just peace out and use an OS I trust. Why in the world would I give Windows 10 the benefit of the doubt?

There's definitely value in a lot of the data collected and there's also mass confusion about what's being collected and what collection can be disabled or can't as the case may be.

I'm not trying to justify data collection and I think that certain kinds of telemetry data are perfectly acceptable to be collected. The reason I bring up comparisons to other OSes is that often opponents to Windows 10 mention switching to other OSes which aren't necessarily any better.

With regards to trust in privacy and security, I can't say that I trust Microsoft any less than others. As an enterprise software and services provider, they are in a position where their products must meet certain standards in order to be adopted. The fact that they still are implies there's at least a certain level of trust held in them, unless you're the type of person who feels all companies are in on it.

Speaking of in terms of trusting in long term commitment and support, I would say I have greater trust in Microsoft than just about anyone else. They have the best track record when it comes to not outright abandoning products. You can argue that opensource software will always be supportable, that doesn't mean that it will be supported.

That's a good point about open source software not always being supported. I guess it's no coincidence that the large organizations where I've worked were all .NET shops, but all the Linux boxes ran Red Hat Enterprise. And the biggest complaint I've heard about about Microsoft not supporting old products was a discussion about Windows Server 2003 (In 2016...).

I don't think that "all companies are in on it" necessarily, but there's a reason for that kind of loyalty to customers and it's not because it feels good. I'm not going to knock Microsoft too much because while I do feel like they're off the mark in some areas, they're improving their developer support a lot recently so I'm excited to follow what happens. But I don't think it's a coincidence that they're rapidly increasing developer support either (we sat through the app-less wonder of Windows Mobile for quite a while). They are also of course a publicly-traded company, at the mercy of profit-demanding shareholders.

I would like to see a world where the people who use the products have an equal opportunity to contribute and improve it. Not someone behind a wall squeezing money out of pockets, or throwing candy at developers so they'll make their platform more appealing for them. Or at least as appealing as the other guys', else they go under. I'm hanging onto an ideology, I know.

Like digitalsushi said, this .NET job will let me retire but it still sucks. It could suck a lot worse though.

> I would like to see a world where the people who use the products have an equal opportunity to contribute and improve it. Not someone behind a wall squeezing money out of pockets, or throwing candy at developers so they'll make their platform more appealing for them. Or at least as appealing as the other guys', else they go under. I'm hanging onto an ideology, I know.

I would to and I also recognize that sometimes the community doesn't always push something in the right direction. Sometimes it takes a dictator to make things happen. Sometimes there's so many desperate projects that need to work in concert but can't or won't because of political reasons.

One of the advantages of a major corporation at the helm is that they can force a vision upon everyone under them and on the industry as a whole. That strength however is a great weakness or detriment to the industry if the person driving the boat has ideas that aren't in the communitie's best interest.

Sounds pretty common!

About Qubes: I was just playing with it a couple of weeks ago. It's interesting, and I'd consider using it except for one thing. When you're running a browser, the cursor doesn't change when hovering over a link. I know it sounds nitpicky, but I kind of want/need that. I did some digging around and didn't get any solution. Are you OK with that, or did you find a workaround?

I used Qubes for a few years and don’t remember running into that, but I’ve used Vim keybinding extensions in the browser for a while and may not have noticed. It’s that way in all browsers for you?

I'm pretty sure it happened in both Firefox and Chrome. It seems to be a common complaint, but I couldn't find a fix (and didn't really look too hard).

Honest question: Why did you take the job? I've heard such horror stories from previous companies of current coworkers as well, but they didn't suffer as much as non-developers. I myself make it a point to ask in job interviews whether I will be able to install and administrate my OS of choice.

It was foisted on me, but I created a group in our approved software policy with just me in it, added Virtualbox to the group and managed to get the change request signed off! I use Ubuntu now for everything but MS Office and the dreaded ERP client.

good lord. I would've gone the hyper-v route, that comes with Windows 10 pro, doesn't it? (another linux only user here, so idk). Should perform better than Virtualbox too

I found out the hard way that Hyper-V prevents other virtualization software from running, notably including the x86 Android emulator.

There's another gotcha here too: if your deployment uses Windows 10 Credential Guard and/or Device Guard, the Hyper-V hypervisor is installed even though Windows reports the Hyper-V role as not installed, and you will not be able to run other virtualization solutions.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3204980/virtualizat...

https://exoticbaryon.anset.org/2017/09/18/when-virtualbox-wo...

My guess is virtualization software is mutually exclusive. On Linux, I can't run VirtualBox and KVM at the same time: if I want to run one, I have to unload the kernel modules belonging to the other.

Actually, it’s virtualization hardware that is exclusive.

Microsoft pulled an old trick out of their sleeve and implemented a feature, Device Guard, that requires virtualization. And of course it blocks other uses of the virtualization hardware, except, surprise surprise, their own virtualization solution.

D-, does not play well with others.

If your company requires Device Guard you can only use software based virtualization or Hyper-V.

Yes. Other virtualization solutions in Windows (virtualbox) run in it userland, hyper-v actually boots up below your windows system and makes your desktop os a virtual machine. Other VM run side by side your desktop os. The limitation being going turtles all the way down isn't supported by CPUs. Making the waters even more complicated is that some software moved from virtual box to hyper-v (docker for windows)

This is not true, the NT kernel itself is the hypervisor.

both of you are correct:

on init, the Hyper-V driver hijacks the running Windows instance, schedules it as the 'root partition', and runs it like just another VM.

unlike 'child partitions', the root partition still has non-virtualized drivers, which run unimpeded by privileged instruction traps.

when a child partition (guest VM) is started, it's scheduled as a peer to the root. its Virtual Processors (VPs) run alongside the root partition's VPs.

when the child partition traps into the hypervisor, or uses one of the enlightened drivers, the hypervisor dispatches a bus request to the root partition, which handles the IRQ using a Virtual Service Provider implemented by the host Windows kernel.

so the hypervisor is kind of a bridge between the host Windows and the child VMs, but the host Windows actually runs as a sort of privileged VM itself, just one with full hardware access and scheduling priority.

* I work for MS, but not on any of these things.

Thank you for elegantly explaining what my quick riff did not.

Hyper-V uses a type 1 hypervisor, which sits below the NT kernel. You might be thinking about the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which does sit on top of the NT kernel.

Disclosure: work at Microsoft on the Hyper-V team.

This is what makes Docker for Windows useless to me.

Hyper-V sucks on the Desktop. Too many features missing to allow good integration between Windows host and Linux. (Like Clipboard sharing, shared folders etc.)

In my experience it's tolerable if you know how to wrangle Cygwin/X and Samba and treat the Linux guest like a remote machine that just happens to be on a phenomenally fast network. But it definitely does suck by comparison to something like VMWare or Virtualbox with proper integration support.

> I would've gone the hyper-v route, that comes with Windows 10 pro, doesn't it?

There's 2 huge things missing from the Hyper-V integration client (LIS) when running Linux with a GUI in a VM which makes it a non-starter:

1) There is no cut and paste between Windows and a Linux Hyper-V VM.

2) There is no way to resize a Linux Hyper-V VM window. The most you can do is to set it at boot time and the max size is 1920x1080.

Kind of a pity since Hyper-V itself works very well.

You're absolutely right. Hyper-V has historically focused on server use cases and not on the desktop experience. This has led to all sorts of rough edges on Windows desktop. That said, this is starting to change [1], and I'm optimistic we'll make more progress in this space moving forward.

Disclosure: work for Microsoft on the Hyper-V team.

[1] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/11/1...

Still on windows 7 at work, so doesn't help. Ubuntu runs beautifully under Virtualbox, but this is not true of all Linux distro's. I have had problems with Mint for instance.

In fact Ubuntu is so good in Virtualbox that I even get away with running HN's hated Electron apps in the VM!

Obviously somebody in those corporations chose it.

Running a large fleet of non-Windows computers means writing your own software to manage them, just like Google had to do [0]. Not every business wants to do that.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2013/11/27/how-google-manages-over-40000...

Assuming a Linux fleet you can use config management tools just as easily for desktops as servers.

Part of this though is because software was historically built for windows in a way that it isn't anymore. Even at tech companies, where the majority of employees are using macbooks, you'll often see people in the finance department using windows machines.

I imagine as the growth of SaaS continues we will see less of this, especially because it's much easier for the IT department to manage one type of computer where macs tend to have a higher build quality than most windows based machines.

I'm working now to move my Win 8 install to a VM then I can format this damn machine an install a real OS. All I need Windows for really is Skype and MS Teams.

Foisted is a very apt term