My OS does not phone home.
It contacts package mirrors when I ask it to and only when I ask it to.
It contacts NTP servers because I specifically enabled that.
That's it. By contrast Windows is a black box of nonsense.
The copy I have running in a VM has the marketing name "Cortana" process running even though I specifically chose "no" at install.
I enabled a data limit the other day and played some games. The game used 30MB and the combined OS used >60MB doing who knows what despite the fact it tells me updates are not downloaded on metered connections.
Sorry, no, there is no excuse for this. If it's not opt in, it's malware. If it's opt in defaulted to yes and with no clear benefit to the user, it's malware.
Obviously most people are fine with telemetry.
Apple charges WAY more for its OS than Microsoft does for Windows 10 Home Edition. Don’t want adds? Buy the Pro version.
This “apples are better than oranges” indignation about Windows 10 is getting old. Don’t like it? Fine. Let other people enjoy things they like.
Personally this is probably the process by which I become a luddite. You can pry my free OS from my cold dead hands.
For now, the server market is enough to keep general purpose computing going. In twenty years, who knows?
My friends and family who are not power users don't know enough to even understand what malware is or means. They likely never will, just as they don't understand all of the ingredients in their food.
This doesn't make it OK.
We're moving from sofware you run without any interference to subscription and surveillance models, and that's not because users want that, that's not "what they like", they don't have an easy way to get what they do like while also being treated ethically.
The whole “Windows telemetry bad” meme is mostly just an excuse for a flame war.
I guess you could say companies are obviously afraid of offering the choice, of offering the same product with and without telemetry, clearly labeled.
> The whole “Windows telemetry bad” meme is mostly just an excuse for a flame war.
Why are you putting such mocking words into my mouth? I'm not saying "Windows telemetry bad", I'm saying what I'm saying.
I would think differently if I saw the same amount of criticism towards other products which commit similar if not worse “offenses”. MacOS does a comparable amount of telemetry. Ubuntu does telemetry (albeit presumably less).
If telemetry as done by OS providers is an offense, then half the tech industry is built on top of even more severe privacy offenses. Can you imagine any serious digital product NOT doing what is essentially telemetry? Imagine online ad companies NOT spying on you? I mean, if it offends you, then sure, voice your discontents. But if a collective in aggregate constantly criticizes minor offenses by one player but lets other players off the leash for way more, it’s not about privacy, sorry.
Also, I don’t agree that people are ignorant. Most of media coverage about Windows 10 revolved around its telemetry. It’s asked when you install it. It’s in the settings. I mean, if you don’t care about it after that then you don’t care.
Personally, I think telemetry is OK. So I’m not bothered, as long as it’s not outright spying. I’m also OK with paying more for Windows 10 Pro to not have the stupid ads.
But does it advertise to you by default? This seems not comparable at all. Pretty much every browser will want you to set it as default (and at least the option to stop the nagging is usually front and center).
Maybe this is just me, but advertising by default in something as basic as a start screen seems very user hostile....
But anyway, I figure the app store is a place I go to get apps, and if the app store chooses to offered paid placement in that list, at least that's sort of relevant. My start area... is a place I go to use basic functionality of the machine. There is no implication that I want to install anything, or buy anything.
Has Apple ever installed a third-party app on your system? macOS is a batteries-included OS, I think most people consider the wide variety of first-party apps to be a feature not a bug. And if you want a specific app, type its name into Spotlight and you don't even have to hunt and peck through all the icons.
2. Advertising is communication about a product or service. A product is not advertising in itself, logic doesn't work like that.
It's also worth differentiating what one gets: free, quality apps with a decent privacy policy vs. pay to win games in Windows.
You're trying a too hard to excuse customer-hostile behavior and it's embarrassing.
That was rude. I’m telling it like I see it. Did I offend your favorite OS or corporation or something like that? Why get personal with me??
1. OS updates had not been done through settings for a long, long time. However updates to Apples preinstalled applications are done through the App Store... Anyway, if it was OK for Apple to do through their store for 10-15 years, then it should be fine for Microsoft to do something comparable now. Right?
2. There are no ads in the Windows start menu according to your definition either then because Candy Crush simply exists as an icon there. As a matter fact I just setup a new Windows laptop last night and I didn’t see one ad. Just some preinstalled apps.
Are you sure that you know what you’re talking about?
You honestly don't think those are ads? It's Microsoft pushing "install this!" icons for third-party apps from the store in your face in a non-related UI place in the OS, that you have not chosen to install. There is no other proper name for that than an ad. The apps are not even remotely related to Windows as a product and you don't have to even go to the store to see them- they are in a standard OS menu.
To be fair- I don't (as much) mind some Microsoft products being treated this way (OneDrive, Skype), because I would expect the creator of the OS to push their own stuff.
There is zero comparison to the MacOS App Store (where obviously there would be ads for apps... because it's a store... for apps.) If Apple started putting Candy Crush, Racing Games, and Spotify in my Dock on a new install- I would have just as much a problem with that.
You honestly don't think those are ads? It's Microsoft pushing "install this!" icons for third-party apps from the store in your face in a non-related UI place in the OS, that you have not chosen to install. There is no other proper name for that than an ad.
"Around 2014, over 93 million people were playing Candy Crush Saga[..] Five years after its release on mobile, the Candy Crush Saga series has received over 2.7 billion downloads, and the game has been one of the highest-grossing and most-played mobile apps in that time frame." - Wikipedia
Is there no way to explain this as "giving an easy way to find Candy Crush to the millions of paying customers who want that"? Isn't HN always on about "build things people want"?
A significant amount of people view games like Candy Crush as crapware and those so-called icons as ads. There are articles from multiple reputable publications discussing how to turn off start menu ads. Some Microsoft-developed Windows 10 apps also have ads and yes there's guidelines available on how to get rid of them.
It seems that many MS customers have spoken, and they think MS's approach to ads sucks. And we will continue to complain about that, even if those ads don't match your strange definition of what an as is or should be.
Anyway, as others have pointed out to you… Many many many people enjoy candy crush. Look it up pal :-)
Nothing, absolutely nothing that you’ve said to me has changed my view. Apple also puts crapware that I don’t want on my Mac and others in this thread have agreed with me. The fact that you don’t think it’s crapware has zero bearing on this conversation.
I mean, it’s not the price of materials that dominate Apple’s pricing. And you actually have to pay money to people developing the OS. So no, it’s not free.
Microsoft bundles all sorts of software with their OS that can be installed separately for free, does that mean they're actually not free because development is funded through other product sales? A lot of their services have a free tier, are those services not free because there's a paid tier?
Apple's inflated hardware price certainly includes room for funding their OS development, but that doesn't mean the OS isn't free. Windows sales also likely go toward funding things other than OS development, but that doesn't mean that all of their products aren't free if you're running them on Windows.
MacOS is a premium product. Windows 10 Home edition is obviously not. You mention yourself in another comment that you estimate the cost of it to be around $40.
HN collectively throwing a fit because Windows 10 Home doesn’t fit their needs is silly, because they are not the target audience.
IF you intend to compare macOS with Windows, you need to compare same market segments, i.e. macOS and Windows 10 Pro.
Forcing ads through the OS os is also very aggressive and rude, because there's no way to turn them off.
[1]: Original blog post: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/how-to-osx-try-safari-promotion....
[2]: Archival link, for future-proofing: https://web.archive.org/web/20190814011835/https://www.ctrl....
It's funny to speak in absolutes. Plenty of operating systems don't phone home regularly, just not ones popular with consumers.
MS shouldn't do phone home, OSX shouldn't do it, and I'm pretty sure my work CentOS doesn't do it. This should be the default, and you should have to opt in, preferably for some period, for it to happen.
For ads, this should be disabled by default, and the user should be compensated in some way for receiving ads on an OS they paid for. Also, these and Candy Crush seem to be re-enabled after some updates.
When you buy a Mac Book you usually dish out around 1500 USD at the very least, where the cost of materials is at best 1/3 of that. You mostly pay for the design, the OS and the privilege.
You can get a PC with Windows 10 Home Edition for 400 USD or so. The implied price point for the OS is way lower.
The economic decision here (re ads) is to be able to make some money on the mass low-end market, while still being able to develop a decent OS.
Case in point: Microsoft Surface Book, which runs at about 2000 USD and is a product comparable to Apple’s has no ads.
Also, a $400 laptop is hardly comparable to a $1500 Apple laptop. I've had one of those, and the hardware really sucks, and stuff starts breaking within a year. It may have the same CPU, but the rest of the components are really crappy. If you want an closer comparison, compare high end laptops with the Apple laptops (Lenovo X- series, Dell XPS series, etc), which run at a much more similar price. If they're lower, it's because they have more competition than Apple does (Apple doesn't license its OS to competitors, so if you want their OS, you must buy their hardware).
There's OSes beyond Windows and OSX.
Microsoft adds more telemetry in PowerShell 3: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/new-telemetry-in-p...
And there is an opt out. Guess they do believe users should have a choice.
Section three, "How to opt out".
I guess the same way again.
A lot of it for good reasons, but the churn is very much there, unlike for windows.
In principle, the feature set that Windows 10 ships could be useful. I don't find it appealing personally, but if it works well for you then that's great.
The issue that I have had is that every version of Windows I have used (from XP up to 10) has had serious reliability and performance problems.
As a specific example, it seems that the one Windows machine that I keep around to play games on needs a complete re-install every 6-12 months, usually because Windows tries to update and bricks itself so badly that even "Windows Recovery" cannot salvage the install. This is a relatively nice machine (Haswell i5, 24GB DDR3), and I tend to stay on the happy path of just running the vanilla install plus Steam and a small number of games (never any programming, web browsing, etc.).
In cases where I've had to use Windows for work, I've found that most of the built in programs lag and take a long amount of time to respond to keyboard or mouse inputs (in the specific cases I'm thinking of, this was on top-of-the line Dell Precision notebooks at the time). Most of my code seemed to run subjectively much slower natively on Windows than it did in a Linux VM running on the same machine.
I'm not trying to be a power user of Windows, as I generally try to avoid using it as much as I can due to the bad experiences I've had in the past. I'm not doing any crazy registry editing or anything like that. Just pretty basic development work and gaming over the years. In that time, I've never had a Windows install where the features reliably worked, and the install remained stable for any period of time.
This is all anecdotal of course. It's possible I've just be incredibly unlucky, or that I've had a string of a half dozen machines that have hardware that's somehow broken in a way that only affects Windows.
So what I'm wondering is: all you people who keep chiming in on these types of posts claiming that Windows works well for your use case -- what are you doing? What's the secret to having it actually function reliably? I've not been able to replicate any such success.
Laptop support is definitely hit-or-miss, though it's come a long way in the last few years.
But once it works, it generally stays working.
Maybe that's because I'm better at using Linux now, or maybe that's because I have better hardware now. My point, however, is that Linux has its share of problems, especially if you do release upgrades. There's a reason LTS versions exist, and I haven't had anything break when staying on an LTS branch.
That being said, I've had fewer people since switching to Linux. On Windows, if something breaks, it's a royal pain to find the fix most of the time. Sometimes it's a bad driver, other times software needs to be reinstalled, and still other times a system file got corrupted and I need to figure out how to replace it. I've never had those types of problems on Linux, just configuration issues for hardware that isn't well supported anyway (can be solved by being a little picky about hardware).
The difference is expectations. When I pay for Windows, I expect it to work since the hardware all claims to have Windows support. I don't have the same luxury with Linux, so I expect problems. Maybe Microsoft needs a grade for hardware to determine how well it should work, idk, but having issues with "supported" hardware is really frustrating.
My main desktop has been upgraded from Windows 7, WIndows 8, 8.1, and now Windows 10. I've never have to re-install in all that time. It's stable and fast. No update issues.
This is really the norm. And I'm not particularly easy on Windows -- I have tons of development tools, games, customizations. I've changed hardware.
Again anecdotally; most of my friend group (professional developers and CS students) who run Windows seem to constantly complain about performance issues and bugs (UI issues, not sleeping correctly on laptops, etc.). I don't think anyone has ever said "hey guys, come check out this slick new feature" or really anything positive at all about it.
> No update issues.
<insert anecdote about Windows 10 updates interrupting activity X and taking Y hours>
Which has happened to me. And seemingly many others on the 'net.
> Whatever you're doing, it's not typical.
That's what I'm trying to figure out. I was under the impression that running Steam games (on my personal machine) or Eclipse (in my professional Windows experience) were more or less the happy path for the use cases of gaming and development respectively.
And if you start looking around, you'll notice that people complain about Mac OS stability and Linux stability all the time too. It's pretty hard to gauge reality this way.
When someone's describing a completely untypical break scenario on a Linux desktop thread, it not being typical is dismissed by Windows users as not a valid response.
Funny how that works.
I also have a macbook pro now and it's confusing to me still, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Either way windows 10 is more than adequate, as far as stability goes it's great, I can't say for sure about performance but looks fine to me. Or maybe I just won the win10 lottery or something, "it just works" for me. Either way it doesn't feel like there should be a better or worse OS, they just have somewhat different flows and each has their upsides and downsides.
I have a Linux desktop and a laptop (Linux preinstalled) and resume from sleep works about 50% of the time (usually GPU driver crashed during resume).
I've run normal updates that have broken the boot, or cause X to stop starting up. I get more nervous running updates on Linux than Windows.
At work a guy changed the password on his LUKS volume and it hosed his entire encrypted partition and he lost all his days.
Linux is very easy to break and very hard to fix.
Windows is definitely more reliable as a daily driver than Linux, in my experience.
Funny enough as a Linux admin I feel the opposite. In Windows I'm using EventViewer and Procmon to try to dig through bullshit UIs to try to find events. Hell, lots of times Windows components and applications themselves are schizophrenic about how they log. Either zero logging, way too much logging, non-standard logging, or some other bullshit. Let me grep a text file or use a bpftrace instead!
> Windows is definitely more reliable as a daily driver than Linux, in my experience.
I support ~50 Linux desktops (you read that right) that are in use 24/7/365 and almost never have to intervene. If I do usually it's because of a change elsewhere that requires updates to a package (looking at you freerdp) or the Kernel needs to be updated. It's not out of the ordinary to see up times of months with no intervention required.
On the other hand I am touching the other ~40 W10 laptops multiple times a week.
We use computers to achieve goals. What they run tends to be, more often than not, merely circumstantial.
Linux users: "It's a conspiracy!"
If it's pushed by your employer, you aren't "conspiring" in any normal use of the word. And even if they are "working together" to respond to anti-microsoft posts, ... what are you suggesting they are conspiring to achieve?
I replied elsewhere in this comment thread that Win10 is the first Windows version that I found usable.
I don't game. So, I probably don't stress the os the same way you do.
I run Eclipse, an Eclipse-based tool called Anypoint Studio, Netbeans, PyCharm, various developer tools like Git, Toad, etc. Also, I run various MS-based tools due to employer mandate. Overall, it's a pretty vanilla setup but it's all that I need to write software for my employer.
We don't run VM's or containers of any kind.
My main problem with Windows in the past has been BSoD happening in the middle of testing software, wiping out my entire setup. Win10 hasn't done it even once to me. So, I'm happy with it.
A blog post from late 2018, which references things like an October 2018 Windows update, counts very much as a modern experience with Windows. I don't think it's fair to try to smear the author in that way.
> This is an experimental feature
> When using this feature, you might experience significant Oracle VM VirtualBox performance degradation on some host systems.
Hyper-V is over ten years old. If it hasn't killed VirtualBox in that time, Microsoft offering a convenient Ubuntu VM is not going to be the death knell, trapping people who don't want to use Hyper-V in a nightmare situation of "having a removable Linux VM".
> The freedoms of Linux (such as not having a boot loader assume it's the only OS on the disk) will be forgotten
I've never noticed this as a complaint about developers using macOS for its Unix underpinnings, that they and Apple are not giving sufficient weight to the importance of a Linux bootloader.
There is advertising in the launcher (can't remember what windows calls it but the start menu). There are popups on the desktop from Microsoft that I haven't been able to stop. (Something about "Teams" and it's tied to having installed MS Office).
I had to be sure I bought the Pro version, there are a lot of skus that don't include full disk encryption built in. Setting up bitlocker is not nearly as easy as setting up full disk encryption on Apple or Linux. I don't really consider that an optional feature so I don't understand why it's considered some kind of premium thing.
Did you see in the linked article what it takes to turn off telemetry? Are you saying that this is not longer necessary and now it can be done in an easy, convenient way?
It took me a while to clean up all the garbage apps MS bundle into it.
The things that I see listed in the link are current and real.
I had to have IT reimage a Win 10 Enterprise machine because Cortana had somehow gotten so screwed up (how? I turn it off) that my Start Menu stopped returning results and I couldn't launch anything by typing.
On another Enterprise machine, my Start Menu periodically starts coming up black and then disappears. I have to force kill the Cortana process to get it working again.
When I switch from corp to outside networking, DNS and routes often stop working correctly and I have to run a magic dance of network reset commands to get things going again, unless I want to reboot. Which I don't.
A few months ago I started up a batch job to run overnight on a Win 10 Pro box. A Windows Update dialog popped up saying it was going to reboot my machine. I clicked the button to reschedule it for the next day. An hour later I passed by the machine and saw it rebooting and applying updates. (After that user hostile experience I switched the machine to Mint and haven't looked back. It ain't perfect, but it's much better, and I actually feel like I own the OS now.)
To stop the telemetry I have to use a Pihole-like setup, which is great ... until I take my laptop somewhere else.
Let's talk maintenance. When something goes wrong, Windows can be brutally complex to troubleshoot. That's why when you start having non-obvious problems with a Windows machine, most IT's knee-jerk answer is to reimage. And that's not even irrational. It's a rational response to the difficulty of diagnosing problems occurring in a complex black box. It ain't worth the time, so just wipe the thing. In contrast, I've never had to reinstall a production Linux machine due to misbehavior -- troubleshooting has always solved the problem.
And force installing Candy Crush?! https://www.howtogeek.com/342871/hey-microsoft-stop-installi... No no no no. Microsoft's treatment of their OS users can feel so exploitive.
For me I place high value on feeling like I own my OS, and that includes requiring a modicum of stability and troubleshooting ease. For my sample size of however many Win10 machines I've dealt with over the years, that bar has not been cleared.
The DNS/route not working issue was run up through IT, who checked Group Policy and found nothing they could see that would interfere with it. Not to say they're right, but if they're wrong, maybe it should be easier to use...
We have been promised this since (at least) Longhorn. It's never materialised. I don't see it in my W10 machine (it reports the latest feature update as v1809 2019-06C).
In fact I just tried going to C: and searching for the word "journal". I am greeted with the familiar crawling green progress bar and "Working on it..." which has been there now for a full three minutes without showing me a single result. I'll cancel the search now.
There is so much else that is beyond broken. Layers upon layers of UX to peel back when you try to change something. Start in W10-styled "PC Settings"->"Accounts", end up in WinXP styled lusrmgr.msc to accomplish what I want.
Every time they add a feature, it doesn't get integrated with the old ones, so the old ones just live alongside. It's bloat upon bloat on the back of a snail riding a tortoise.
The MS corporate experience is just as bad. We have multiple coexisting Sharepoint versions, because the porting of workflows from the old one was too much work and too expensive, as they were not internally compatible. The other day, my colleague was trying to open a PowerPoint from a Sharepoint workspace, and was met with the error message
"(Dogfood only) An unexpected error has occured."
Then there is OneDrive, where you can also create shared folders, but they are not the same as Sharepoint. Except if you access them through Explorer, where they look the same. Except that in OneDrive you can create a folder in the root and it syncs, but if you do the same in the Sharepoint it just makes a local folder on your machine without any feesback. If you want to share a OneDrive folder with someone in another org, 95% of the time it fails. For obscure reasons, frequently that the two orgs' sign-on methods clash.
For communication there is Yammer, and Teams, and Skype4Business, and Skype, none of which can cooperate. Oh, and apparently one more called Kaizala. Oh, and there is chat inside all Office documents, which is separate. And if you reply to people's comments in documents, they get email notifications for those. Sometimes you need to use the web app to make teleconferencing work. Other times the web app fails.
You can assign yourself or others tasks in Teams, or in Outlook, or in Planner, or in ToDo, or in a separate Tasks app. None of those work together.
If Douglas Adams were still alive, he'd be paying Microsoft for inspiration for new material.
Also the little things like taking my laptop, plug it into a monitor and Skype is silenced. Popups about blurry fonts. Files that cannot be deleted because they are busy. Slow performance when manipulating many files.
There is no soul, or perhaps that is Conway's law...
There are some nice improvements since then too, but also a lot of user-hostile functionality. It doesn't seem wort the trade off to me.
Sure, maybe the control panel was "consistent" in 2000 but it was always user-hostile. The settings app, when finished, will be much better for users. And if they keep the Control Panel around for power-users -- all the better.
I appreciate that Microsoft is doing good software engineering here; they aren't trying to replace everything at once but instead moving things over and releasing it to users early and often. This is the right approach. And yes, maybe it will be 5 years before it's consistent and polished but at least it will get there.
For iOS, I would grant that.
One last point is that OS X is partially Open Source (at least Darwin is) even if in actuality, nobody really cares about it (like building something on top of Darwin).
In the end, neither of MS or Apple is my preferred choice anyway. I much prefer an OS I roughly understand (at least to some degree) each pieces and on wihch I could generally troubleshoot things (Linux, *BSD), even if I do acknowledge I'm far from your typical user being a "dev/sysadmin/devops/whatever it's called these days".
> What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.
See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/12/14/biculturalism.
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Why do I pay around €80 of the sales price for a license and still have to deal with all this intrusive upselling and ads?
It isn't really Windows' fault that my work computer has an i5-8500 six core processor coupled with a single DIMM of 8 GB and a $20 hard disk. I won't blame Windows for that. I won't blame Windows for Symantec Endpoint Protection that just has to check every single file just as I need to do npm install. My manager is sympathetic but we are powerless.
I want to say something good about Windows as well: as far as I can see, there is no memory leak in Windows. Windows 10 is pretty solid.
I still think there are two very low hanging fruits:
1. Prohibit OEM partners from shipping Windows 10-based PCs booting from a mechanical hard disk (yes even "SSHD"). Vendors can add a mechanical hard disk but may not boot from it.
2. By default, no automatic reboot without manual consent especially for consumers.
Long term, look very hard into what kind of update requires a reboot and why. Be willing to break compatibility where required.
Going from Win XP at home to OS X, I found it astounding that my PowerBook could go months without a reboot. Likewise, my MBP astounds me daily that I can't remember when I last rebooted.
My employer's Win10 laptop is like that as well: I don't think about rebooting it anymore.
MS is on a good trajectory, finally, with its os.
Haven't we already learned the underlying issue with the moniker of "free" from the likes of Facebook and Google?
The complaints seem to come from heavily technical folks that think LTSB branches are reasonable things for normal people to run. I wouldn't want to run one on my own machine.
Remember when Windows Server 2012 didn't have a start menu button, but instead a pixel? I hope someone was fired for that blunder.
Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WSL2 and the other developer-focused improvements in tow, most of these are a shitlist of nitpicks, than things you'll run into every day. I switched from macOS about two years back, and couldn't see myself going the other way anymore ever again. But, that said, I can see why people want to stay there! That's the beauty of choice.
These types of posts are based on historical grudges, rather than modern experiences with Windows. Sure, there's going to be annoying things to change out of the box, but every machine, with any OS, has that.