Windows is a great example - forced updates, forced ads, forced data-ming and spying, stupid UI changes etc. all make an otherwise decent OS a real pain to use and a must-avoid for the privacy conscious. These are easy to fix for a company like MS, but they do not.
I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible.
"at best(worst?)" this thing is "not nicest", but it's totally reasonable.
you have reasonable control over updates on non-home versions, imo.
I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.
Here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665
This was a huge, huge, huge pain in the butt in a big enterprise. Nothing like a creeping "users can no longer access the internet" spreading across the environment.
I don't think I've intentionally shut down my desktop or laptop (excluding reboots and when leaving for travel) for years. Especially not laptops.
Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task.
Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine.
There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.
... I hear keys on ebay are about $2
My laptop running Windows hangs periodically requiring a hard reset... if I watch Hulu on Chrome. At least twice a week and sometimes multiple times a day.
At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen — now it just hard crashes without any display or debugging information.
Telemetry and forced updates are a slap in the face on top of the quality regressions.
This sounds like back then there were only crashes with a blue screen (and dump), and currently there's only hard crashes without blue screen. Both of them are not true. I.e. there are apparently types crashes for which it hasn't been possible in the past decades to come up with a bluescreen, othiing new there. It is just as likely, maybe even moe so, the difference in your particular case is your hardware/driver. It's of course possible there were effectively changes at the OS level in how hard faults are dealt with, but I wouldn't just assume so.
My testing pointed towards a DRM problem, since it doesn’t happen with other video streaming or with rendering outside the particular Chrome + Hulu combination.
My point is two-fold:
1. Even if the driver crashes, the OS should blue screen (like it used to) rather than just hard freeze the machine.
2. Using an HP laptop with Windows and Chrome to view Hulu is so mainstream it should “just work” — so it’s a sign of industry breakdown it doesn’t.
Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2].
All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around.
[0] https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-d...
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-d...
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-updat...
[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...
[4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...
It didn't even need to connect to the internet.
I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.
Apple is removing frameworks like crazy, forcing apps to update or die. Windows takes backward compatibility extremely seriously.
Edit: typo
The 4th "security update" somehow made that disappear?!
Forced updates are unnecessary and a bad idea, even more so in rolling-release models.
That doesn't explain forced feature updates.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/win...
It really wasn't that long ago that most commercial software still had to support IE8 (released 2009), for example, because that's where the user base was and they didn't upgrade.
Note: I'm not in the US. It seems that Americans tend to complain about this more. I don't know if it was deliberately done or not in that case.
For what it's worth I always enjoyed the "stock" games like pinball, solitaire, freecell and minesweeper. But I liked them tucked away under the clear label of the games sub menu, and without any pressure to use them
Have you seen the WSL2 DirectX support?[0] They're extending it, too!
Microsoft gets mocked for embrace/extend/extinguish, but really, it means just do a better job than the competition. Embrace: "do what others are doing", extend: "do a better job at it, have more features than the competition", extinguish: "sell customers on those features and improvements". How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.
"Differentiate your product."
"Let's build an IP portfolio."
"We don't want to be the dumb pipe."
"Build a moat around the product."
"Don't let yourself be commoditized."
Etc.
All that coded or not so coded business language says the same thing: make it proprietary/uncopyable and make money off of it.
Solaris had a good version, which I used for a time, while I was running a data center full of Sparc equipment. All the user space stuff was happening in Linux-land. Solaris x86 had a nice repo for various packages, but there was always something you wanted that wasn't there. It got really close, though.
If one of the bigs would have gotten serious about packaging up, say, Debian's userland stuff, they could have put a serious dent in Red Hat, and maybe things would have played out differently.
If at all, they would just cherry pick stuff out of them as they were already doing anyway.
Because you've entirely misunderstood what EEE means. It absolutely does NOT mean to "do a better job." That phased was coined SPECIFICALLY because it was how Microsoft either absorbed competitors, or put them out of business. They spent decades doing JUST ENOUGH to persuade people to use their stuff, even when it was NOT as good -- given the advantage of their monopoly position and vertical integration -- in order to starve the competition of oxygen.
Microsoft is a big company. Some things it does will always be trashy - like fighting tooth and nails to keep Linux desktops and truly-open formats out of European public-service procurement. That's still going on, 20 years and 2 CEOs later, and will probably never stop, because screw public interest when there is so much money on the line!
But sure, in some areas they behave better now. They had no choice, after losing a whole generation of developers and seeing their cash-cows (Windows, Office, and AD/Exchange) under siege from SaaS insurgents. I've still to see something where their efforts are not fundamentally tied to their immediate self-interest, though.
Microsoft has done some good things with .NET Core, but they still don't have a very friendly OSS or partner strategy.
AppGet is a pretty good example; there was an existing Open source solution that filled a need, and Microsoft decided to create their own replacement, not bothering to give any credit (until there was an internet ruckus) to the original despite the very striking similarities and relative level of obviousness that they were at bare minimum 'inspired' by the tool; after all, they interviewed him for a role and even warned him the day before it came out... [0]
Octopus is another example. I -hate- TFS Release pipelines. Octopus Deploy was (until they ruined their pricing model) a far superior product overall. You can really tell the way TFS Release pipelines were done, they tried to 'checkbox-copy' Octopus Deploy's features without making it too much like Octopus to be obvious.
But the checkbox-copy strategy is inferior in many ways. In Octo you can have a stage that runs in all environments (but certain steps on/off per env) and configure server groups that way. In TFS Release, You have to have to 'copy' the steps for every stage. It's like their data model is missing a 1-many relationship or two somewhere.
And the impacts in the case of their behavior has a second-order effect; I am curious whether TFS Release eating into Octopus's market share was a factor in their price hikes a couple years ago; in that regard, I can't blame them if that's the case.
[0] - https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22
If your work is such that scaling to bazillions of servers or other artifacts isn’t an issue, Microsoft is a smart choice. If you are building Facebook, it is a dumb choice.
The state of SQL Server's MVCC suppot is arguably enough to preclude use even before we talk about licensing.
I never thought I would miss Oracle until I learned about NOLOCK and the cost of enabling MVCC in SQL Server.
a little early to come to this conclusion, one way or another, I think
I don't think this is some fundamental shift in Microsoft or its values: simply a shift in their market positioning and brand value/identity.
Their products are still proprietary spyware, designed to get as many people locked into the Windows (or now Azure) licensing ecosystem as possible. Even the best parts of VS Code, often cited as one of their best new releases, are either spyware or proprietary. Windows remains a tire fire.
GitHub and NPM are prime examples of this concept that one can turn money into goodwill. I assume money also changed hands for the first-class support that Docker has for windows.
And no, to me Microsoft is actually worse than before as they have turned Windows into a spyware. The forced updates (not just security updates) make it even worse.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...
Maybe they are all wrong. Maybe PHP still sucks just less.
There's still a lot of cruft from who they used to be, but I feel like most people I know echo the sentiment that Satya has been a revolution. Things like them embracing Linux, acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github, contributing to open source projects, and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.