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Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by fortran77 on Saturday September 28, 2019 @10:28PM (#21104628)
I run Windows 10. I'm running it now. It works well, and I don't want to cut my nose off to spite my face by worrying about Satya Nadella seeing my internet searches. I'm not that important that I have to worry about these things.

I tend to run it on the "Happy Path" only make a few changes to keep some notifications from bothering me. And I don't buy machines from vendors that try to "add value" by putting crapware or shovelware on the machine. (I buy Supermicro-based boxes from Thinkmate, and use Surface Book notebooks.)

I write software all day long in Erlang, F#, and CUDA/C++ and have to write software that works with popular film and audio production software (which runs on Windows platforms)

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by GordonS on Sunday September 29, 2019 @09:09AM (#21106825)
Your internet searches are not part of the telemetry - it's nowhere near that invasive [0] (I still believe you should have the option of disabling it though).

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/privacy/configure-w...

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by JMTQp8lwXL on Saturday September 28, 2019 @11:07PM (#21104783)
> I don't want to cut my nose off to spite my face

I have trouble understanding this perspective since it's hard to see what critical functionality Windows provides, that you can't get with Mac OS or Linux. If they wouldn't be materially different experiences, the metaphor doesn't hold water.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by GordonS on Sunday September 29, 2019 @09:25AM (#21106901)
> it's hard to see what critical functionality Windows provides, that you can't get with Mac OS or Linux

With MacOS, your choice of hardware is very limited, and you have to pay way over the odds for it. You also can't run a lot of games on it.

With Linux, the desktop experience is, IMO, not as good as on Windows, and neither is driver support. Things have improved a lot here, but the UX is just not as polished as Windows. I do love Linux though - for servers, I wouldn't use anything else.

I really like Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise (apart from dick moves like this, of course). I can build incredibly powerful desktop or laptop machines, in terms of RAM, CPU and GPU - and everything is more or less guaranteed to "just work", and be stable too. You get excellent multi-monitor and high-DPI support, good accessability features, Hyper-V for running VMs, Sandbox coming soon, WSL for a Linux-like experience - and WSL2 will soon make it even better. And of course your gaming options are much better too.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by fortran77 on Saturday September 28, 2019 @11:36PM (#21104885)
I can't run NVidia on Macs (Ok, some Mac true believer will tell me I can get an PCI-X external cage and run it over thunderbolt with crazy drivers) and I can't run Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Audition, etc, on a Linux machine.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by angry_octet on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:57AM (#21105959)
It's one reason I gave up having a MacBook Pro, the hardware is underwhelming in so many ways.

But my Mac Pro from 2010 still gets nvidia driver updates and cuda support. In the unlikely event someone will pay for a new Mac Pro for me I'll be able to stick a 2080 in it.

You can stick an nvidia card in a PCI-e chassis and it will work on a laptop or Mac mini, but yes it isn't optimal.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by fortran77 on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:49AM (#21115293)
"isn't optimal" is an understatement. It's downright wonky!
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by angry_octet on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @03:57AM (#21123038)
I've had good experiences with Magma PCIe expanders, for linux and macis, though they are firmly in the enterprise space. https://www.onestopsystems.com/pcie-expansion

Ah, the joys of finding quirks in PCIe enumeration when you have PCIe switches and expansion bridges.