2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc.

3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software without toolbars and spyware.

4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey (4).

I am now a full time linux user but this was the least painful way to get my PC running before that. I'm sure things have changed or improved since, but this really worked for me 2 years ago.. hope this helps someone.

(1) https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

(2) https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager-windows-10

(3) https://www.ninite.com

(4) https://chocolatey.org/

I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on.

Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal + MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.

That's the neat part, you don't! Windows loves to revert those settings after every major update, even if you dig into the registry and scheduler and change the settings at the source. It is one of my biggest gripes.

One way I dramatically reduce the amount of random reboots is I have a thing that looks like a USB flash drive but it has a few switches on the side - one of them, when activated, randomly moves the mouse every 1-5 minutes (there is also a hardware wheel knob that lets you customize the duration). It was meant to be a practical joke thing - slip it onto the back of a friends PC and drive them nuts, but it works great at tricking Windows to think the computer is being actively used. It doesn't stop all reboots caused by Windows updates, but it dramatically reduces them.

I also use it to keep my work PC awake when attending online meetings, or especially when I'm presenting. We have mandatory screen saver timeouts and for some reason I can't convince the IT overlords to tweak group policy to allow non-admins the ability to enable presentation mode. Oh well. At least they haven't resorted to only allowing whitelisted USB devices to run so my little joke USB fob still does its thing. I got it from Think Geek in their heyday but there are tons of similar devices on Amazon.

Eventually I realized it hated me and wanted me to fail in life, or perhaps click on all the crappy games or whatever it insisted on installing from time to time.

I don't love everything about macOS, but it's the least bad option and to my mind and for my needs, it's not even close.

This has worked flawlessly for almost two years and multiple Windows feature updates.

0: https://lazyadmin.nl/it/how-to-stop-automatic-restart-win-10...

You’re not safe from reboots even if you’re actively using the machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHafyiDTR0

I like it far more than Ninite and it is a good way to find some open source software that you may not have heard about or used before, quickly install the programs, and keep them up to date with only a few clicks.

Perhaps I should spend more time figuring this out. Meh.

> Some services … share your WLAN access data with your facebook contacts

Is that true? There’s no citation but seems a lot more flagrant a violation than I’d expected from Windows.

Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled, trustd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, imagent, indentyservicesd, com.apple.sbd, studentd, airportd, configd, parsecd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.geod.xpc, avconferenced, rapportd, trustd, remindd, helpd, syspolicyd

Long list right.... that's from the previous 3 hours.

Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them. I wouldn’t make such assumptions about whatever you use the service or not. If you don’t use a service, it typically will have very little traffic if any at all.

Like I said this was all from the last 3 hours and I haven't used any of those services listed. It's also missing the point a bit, I'm not bandwidth poor on a 3G connection trying to save my datacap.

I don't want apple turning my laptop into a thinclient for their cloud systems. I don't want telemetry and meta data going to them every ~30 seconds (the little snitch icon flashes a red X every time something is blocked, it's on a per minute basis).

Of all those services I use calendarsync. I miss having airdrop a little bit but everything else I don't need.

Also, the way you've phrased some of those, especially the notarisation

> getting updated security signatures

is a bit disingenuous when there's a massive privacy implication in that it allows apple to know every single application I run on my computer.

Most Apple users wouldn't agree to that if you stuck it in their face and the fact that it breaks the OS in subtle ways is a user hostile position to argue from. Hence why I'm giving up my Apple addicition.

AKA phoning-home to Apple what apps you launch in realtime, in an unencrypted manner visible to your ISP/hotel/government too.

It also connects to all of that crap even if you have LS off, analytics off, iCloud/FaceTime/iMessage/AppStore off, et c.

Press F8 and your serial number gets transmitted to Apple.

IP Addresses: 2600:1402:e::b833:965b

  2600:1402:e::b833:9661

  2600:1402:e::b833:9669

  2600:1402:e::b833:966a

  + 17  more

Protocol: TCP

Connected: no

Connects: 0 allowed, 7,359 denied

First Activity: 2/11/21, 22:20

Last Activity: 5h 29m ago

Yea sorry, sneak's right, it's still going port 80.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491 (bottom)

What data is actually going over OCSP? I thought it was only ever checking for revocation and not actually sending app data, and I believe only ever happens when you want to take an app out of quarantine versus every app launch. You can always disable gatekeeper if you so please.

OCSP over unencrypted http has not yet been replaced. I believe that the constellation of apps (identified by proxy by their developer IDs which are transmitted) can in a lot of cases uniquely identify a system, given a sufficient number of apps installed/used.

How so?

What happened to the good old days of "ask for user consent before phoning home"?

I mean, Apple is miles ahead of Windows in that regard, but your average Linux or BSD setup won't phone home outside of repository downloads unless requested.

The only happy medium I would consider to your approach is that if MacOS had two set up routes, one defaulting as a power user turning everything off and then initiating things are you want and another as a general user. Maybe that would solve it (though would be a heavy lift I am sure).

I have tried giving permission and at the end of the day, it's just not worth the time. For me, Little Snitch is great as a reporting tool but it's just too much work as a firewall.

[0]https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

It’s far worse than just annoying: if people have to give permission to a bunch of things they don’t understand, they will absolutely give permission to something they shouldn’t.

You want the user to make a few decisions as possible, and every single one should be an actual decision: where the user knows what the options are, has an actual stake, and might legitimately choose either option depending on their preferences and circumstance.

The more times they have to click “yes” without thinking, the more susceptible to malware they become.

I understand the point, though. Going to just about any major website you will be pummeled with prompts to allow for a dozen different domains just to view one page, and it doesn't really give any indication of what those are used for. They have a what seems to be infinitesimally small list of connections that they do recognize and explain their use, but ultimately it's pretty useless for the vast majority of prompts.

I'd like there to be a better way to deal with this, but I'm not really sure what the solution to it would look like. You can download blocklists and just silently allow other connections, but I don't think that's significantly better than just using a hosts file.

The most useful thing Little Snitch does is alert me when individual applications try to phone home. For browsing the web it feels more like a chore.

How many times have you been asked to approve a download? How many of those times have you said "no"?

If the answer is "hundreds" and "zero," what's the point? If the answer "hundreds" and "ten just in the past week," then that's exactly the point, and it serves a valuable purpose.

I agree broadly with your point that prompt fatigue or decision fatigue is problematic and should be avoided when possible. I think this is a problem in particular with Little Snitch even, which doesn't do enough to provide. However, the point of Little Snitch is to allow someone to monitor and control the traffic at a granular level and the consequence of providing that utility is the frequent prompts whenever you're visiting a new site. To Obdev's credit, silent mode exists and you can set it to deny or allow all traffic without a prompt (and evaluate the traffic at your leisure).

Is there any way to turn all this stuff off?

All of the things in your list are just apps that can be removed with one click. My partner’s PC comes pre-installed with masses of hidden spyware. I know the kneejerk reaction is to bash Apple for everything - but the two are totally not comparable.

I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?

There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered.

I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update.

The most recent, this week they released an update and now their airport service listens on port 5000 making a conflict with running a dev flask service locally.

"Mess with shit" was what drove me to Linux by around 2015. It seemed like every major MacOS upgrade torched my Eclipse-based Java dev environment, generally requiring a reinstall.

I’ve flip flopped for years, (I was using freebsd more than 20 years ago, genuinely ran Solaris 10 with my own build of kde4 on a hp probook, etc) but last time I tried to use Linux for work I got defeated by a conference suite projector at a client and it cost us a big contract. The happy path (for me anyway) is doing all actual dev work on Linux vms and using macOS as your browser/im/terminal client — which it’s great at.

And it works with those stupid little projector dongles at clients when you’re trying to pitch them 6 figures of consulting ;)

It takes about one time of "this didn't work and it's your fault for using Linux" in a business context to break one of using Desktop Linux (or BSD, et c.), I think. I doubt similar stories are uncommon. I've got one, certainly.

At least if MacOS or Windows breaks, you're not the asshole. And it doesn't hurt that they in fact do break less often (well, Win10 with its abrupt, unexpected, and slow forced updates was a real problem for a while, but otherwise)

Funny how framing something that's true (allowing apple software to bypass firewalls) is seen as a controversy. See previous discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816

If it has a firewall of any kind, I've never noticed nor interacted with it. I've also never installed a third party firewall.

Some popular third party solutions that are actually useful are Little Snitch [0], LuLu [1], and AdGuard [2].

[0] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

[1] https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html

[2] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

If you'd like an application-level firewall, you can check out Lulu or Little Snitch. Back when Little Snitch still(?) installed kernel extensions, it was found to be quite insecure—there were talks at DEFCON about it. Lulu is a lesser-known alternative.

I’d rather see humans themselves as our value store and motivate, teach, and mentor each other to do the logistics work to that end.

Letting banks gamble with our deposits when we’re all in the habit of doing these things daily anyway seems like pointless extra steps.

I think people are more willing to be a stable mesh network of agents for each other than history full of feudal warlords will let us believe, we don’t need to prop up ephemeral tent poles. That’s just old story.

Bonobo tribes have been observed killing alphas and then developing social harmony. Not saying we should behead billionaires, but austerity for elites would be a figurative death.

Restarting really is a big deal for me as my workspace consists of several dozen open windows, some of them I have to login, navigate to a particular place, etc... also you lose your train of thought. It has gotten that bad for me, that I have to take screenshots before restarting every time, so I don't lose track of where I was.

I understand not everybody has my same use case but for me it truly is a PITA.

Of course, the alternative is to just click on "Install Later" every 8 hours for the rest of your life, and then the one time you miss that button for a few pixels and click on "Install Now" everything gets closed and obliterated in an instant. But yeah, at least now I have the latest version of Safari which I haven't used in 10 years.

Huh? I think I restart my Mac for updates perhaps quarterly, and I can't recall it ever being forced.

In my timeline, Apple users have to deal with this -> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

If i disable apple updates on a macbook, it will show the notification but will never update without my permission, good luck doing that on windows.

The ability to disable automatic updates goes back far more years than I can remember - possibly even a decade.

And Apple's built-in apps aren't harmful, they're just unnecessary. In the early 2000s, my parents got me a Mac that came with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. :-)

And my new Mac has things like (can't remember exactly) 'musiccreationd'.

These count as 'startup items' to me.

I guess I’m not really seeing what I’m supposed to be outraged about, here. Modifying the stuff in the dock on OSX isn’t difficult or unintuitive at all? Just grab the stuff you don’t want on there and drag it out, and grab the stuff you do want on there and drag it in? It’s just using the standard desktop metaphor and interface, and you’re in no danger of breaking fragile uninstall scripts like you would be if you manually removed a program’s entry from the start menu on Windows. It really isn’t comparable at all.

Same thing with Windows too.

Loaded down with crap.

What businesses want Xbox companion and xbox game bar running on all their work computers - seriously -> if you are on Microsoft search for xbox on your work computer.

Does Candy Crush Saga still come on the business pro ISO installs? That used to make the office laugh - who is paying $200/machine to get candy crush saga pre-installed.

In fact, the trick was they also had a separate app called app updater that would reload these things even if you uninstalled Candy Crush.

Too funny! The only way to get candy crush to go away was to uninstall it, then uninstall app updater - though people didn't date do that biz side because they didn't know what else app updater supported.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/candy-...

It's free, easy to use & comes with Windows.

Microsoft could & should also just load that as a stand alone tool like the snipping tool. But they haven't, so I encourage Xbox Game bar.

The last time I looked at Windows computers at Best Buy a year ago, anything mid-level and below was almost unusable because McAfee was using all the CPU.

I bought a Windows laptop (wanted to game with a modern-ish GPU). Step 1 was uninstall McAfee, and turn on Windows Defender for some modicum of protection. There are error popups for software I haven't installed when it boots. My parents have a new Windows computer which was showing popups advertising an extended warranty when I visited this weekend.

A fresh install of Win10 from the Microsoft ISO is very different from the typical factory configuration found on new hardware.

Installation and updates took about 30 minutes.

Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done.

Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process.

He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using Google Classroom so all he really needs is a browser and a webcam/mic.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619

I'm in the US, but yes whenever I select the image to download I do pick the N version.

All the windows computers at the computer shop ship with bloated 3rd party crap. Except the apple computers. It’s also not Google’s fault that most android vendors don’t support old devices for long. Or Linux’s fault that hardware vendors make linux drivers an afterthought.

As a consumer, I don’t care why any of this happens. I just want the things I buy to work properly.

I should definitely have the option to turn this crap off if I want to - without needing a 3rd party program like little snitch to do so.

Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.

Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.

Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, and iMovie are pre-installed. I don't use these apps and they are easy to uninstall, but they definitely came pre-loaded.

It might have some aesthetic value, but it's not necessarily nicer, just different and more trendy. Which quickly wears off.

Wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be that?

Seriously, I am using Windows 11 since official release and I am getting to a point where things are just the way I like them. I was lucky enough to have a machine that just met the TPM/processor requirements cutoff.

There are a few annoyances: I would like to use the dashboard/widgets for weather, etc but they force their newsfeed on you.

MacOS updates are fairly slow, though, so I don't know if it's a clear win. But I also don't think anything has gotten significantly worse in recent years; there have always been good parts & bad parts.

Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just magically appearing in my apps without me ever having to install anything and I press print and it prints. That's user friendliness to me. At least for my workflows (mostly web browsing, software dev and office stuff), there is vastly less fiddling and head scratching to keep things working on Ubuntu.

I would say in some instances driver support is actually better, I had this old logitech wireless keyboard and mouse lying around which worked quite well, unfortunately they came with this older version of unifying receiver which the current version of their official software refused to recognize (on windows, no official linux support). I was having trouble finding a older version of the software too. Somehow I ended up trying to use Solarr [1] (which is made for Linux) and it worked first try.

[1] https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar

My personal Windows laptop has never had a single one of those problems. It has been faultless from day 1 without a single issue.

Back up your documents and do a fresh install. It'll take you an hour and you'll regain stability.

Jack is apparently needed to get Bluetooth to emit audio reliably... but I would not put much trust in that since it didn't fix Bluetooth not working.

That said, as long as they're willing to be hacky: bluetooth audio worked reasonably well for me _until_ I got a headset with its own dongle. At that point the original bluetooth dongle stopped pairing reliably with the speakers I was using. That prompted me to switch to pipewire and it's been rock solid since. You might suggest to IT that they experiment with pipewire (since it's the new hotness, they may actually take you up on it.)

I remember feeling like it was a full time job - always some issue or inconvenience. Struggled with basic multimedia stuff and of course the biggest issue, almost no apps.

You could say the real issue is not Ubuntu itself but the ecosystem.

I was attempting to edit videos. I plug in an external hard drive with my footage, and... nothing. Well, not nothing. It's there in Devices & Printers. It's able to be ejected safely. Troubleshooter has no problems.

But nothing in Explorer or any other obvious place you'd think. Panicking, I plugged the same drive into Chrome OS. Literally three seconds later I was browsing my footage.

That's the point I got up from my desk and said, "I'm done." I'm so over Windows.

They spend how much time and effort shoving a Linux environment into things when they apparently can't even support widely-used filesystems. The fact my external drive is mountable by both Chrome OS (where the code for mounting is open source) and macOS (a closed-source OS used by a minority of the populace) but not Windows is an utter joke. I shouldn't have to spend all this time trying to access my files in 2021. This is something that should Just Work.

This was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had several minor and major annoyances with Microsoft's treatment of Windows ever since Windows 8, and none of them have gotten better.

- WTF is "3D Objects" and why does it always bubble up from the pits of hell even when I delete it? Microsoft is very opinionated about the User folder in general, while I think they should be as hands-off as possible. Stop adding folders I didn't ask for and stop resurrecting them after they're deleted. Why is this so hard?

- Ditto the last point for OneDrive.

- Windows 11-specific, but adding ads to the taskbar? In a paid OS that the OEMs are already footing the bill for and bundling whatever extra crapware they want? https://betanews.com/2021/09/04/microsoft-crowbars-ads-into-...

- Obscuring local account creation to a ridiculous degree in Windows 10 (you need to literally disable Wi-Fi or unplug Ethernet to even see the option) has gotten even WORSE in Windows 11. Now you can't even set up a local account at all unless you shell out extra for Windows 11 Pro! They've learned nothing from the Xbox One always-online debacle, and honestly looking back, this should have been the dealbreaker. But I thought, "hey, I don't create accounts that often, this is something I can live with." No longer.

- The amount of analytics and data-gathering in Windows is the worst it's ever been, and worse than any comparable OS. "You can turn it off though." Well, maybe. Until Windows Update decides it knows better and turns it back on.

- This is purely aesthetic, but Windows 8 and 10 looked utterly horrible if you did anything more than look at the desktop and open the Start Menu. Clashing styles and UX edicts from decades of past releases, in very visible places. It gives the impression Microsoft just doesn't give a shit. And don't tell me "it's too hard to update everything in time for release." It's not everything, and Microsoft is a big boy with lots of money and developers. They decided they just don't care.

And today, I read this:

"Microsoft to Block Windows 11 Browser Workarounds" https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/259208/windows-1...

It's not getting better or even staying the same. Microsoft is actively making Windows worse for their own ends. Thankfully I have the choice and ability to install an alternative, but my heart goes out to those with no choice. It's Orwellian.

Windows 12 could require all users to get punched in the face to log in and most people would say, "Yeah, it sucks but it's better than spending $1,800 on a Mac. Plus my video games..."

General web browsing type tasks are solid, text editing/note taking works. Videos and audio (including Spotify) work. Steam and games generally work (even most windows games through Proton).

What else does ones daughter need for school? She’s not video editing or creating music (two use cases where you may need windows or OSX; art is more or less covered through blender/Inkscape/krita)

Mint or Manjaro are easy to install and setup and come with good defaults that should be pretty easy to navigate for someone new to Linux.

In my experience, kids do these things all the time for school projects.

EDIT: (I don't mean this in a mean way, just to say that people who care a lot about being able to play specific games probably still won't be satisfied without a Windows box).

Would you say it’d satisfy for twitch shooters?

Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.

50% of them, but 2 of the 5 broken games are known to be buggy in general (New Worlds anyway, PUBG was years ago, no idea how it fares nowadays so maybe I'm wrong) so dunno how much of that is Proton's fault. The two gold ones seem hit or miss: many people report they work, but some people have issues.

Still, a lot of AAA games work perfectly (eg Sekiro) and many games I play even have native Linux versions (Crusader Kings 3 being the main one, I'm hoping with the steam deck more devs will release Linux versions but maybe that's too optimistic) and most of the indie games I play work well, so for me, I've been pretty happy and haven't looked back.