I think the irony of that statement is from Windows 3.1 and on Windows (25-ish years) was already THE defacto PC platform. I was a pretty big MS fanboy for a long time (and make my living with .NET and their developer tools). But MS's quixotic fetishization of their app store to me looks like dousing the legacy (no pun intended) of their platform with gasoline and lighting it on fire.
Edit: format tweak
And I'm no fanboy but boy am I a fan of .NET. So far it seems like that part of MS is well defended from this grossness, I only hope that holds up.
Excuse the rant.
people dont buy apple because of the walled garden or spyware or iphoto bugs that expose your pictures. they buy apple despite all that.
if microsoft can produce better and more innovative hardware, which they already did with the surface line, they could have kept windows xp model of online isolation and not only got the people that want the flashy hardware but also the people that want to actively avoid the online tie-in.
instead they are doing the worst they could. you cant even use oneNote with your surface pen, I kid you not, without login in to a live.com account! and minesweeper is a 100mb app that you have to download from the store, and it have in-app purchases.
Microsoft Jigsaw is perhaps my grandma's favorite thing ever, and the $20 yearly cost for premium (ad-free) is well-worth it to her.
it's not a good thing as they're using the opportunity to infest these programs with ads
Solitaire on Windows now has ads, and don't get me started on the new calculator
Adding ads is definitely an irritation, but my point is, they are funding a supported, maintained product with Solitaire. It's more than just Solitaire now. It currently has five different games, not including features like daily challenges and the like. It gets updated reasonably regularly.
The generally preferred way to quote on HN is to begin the line with a > and wrap the quote with * if desired.
It's an issue that comes up too often that HN needs to fix, but here we are.
The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.
My new laptop with Windows 10 became so slow I also switched to Mint. Couldn't be happier.
I put Fedora on it first, and it was mostly fine but Gnome was too slow for my liking. But then again I was usually taking notes in vim in a terminal, so that probably wouldn't have mattered in real world use.
Life's too short to put up with bureaucratically obstructive licensing schemes.
So they had to find another way to monetize Windows.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/windows-10-s-becomin...
Since Microsoft made money from new computer sales and those are less frequent they have to move to a subscription type system.
To me it's another nail in the coffin of general purpose computing. We've accepted that mobile devices/OSs are not for general purpose computing and expect that they come with a "lifestyle" to hawk, now one of the major general-computing OSs is heading in the same direction.