I want my power button to cut off the power instantly. I want my log off button to be instant. Add any delay and I start pulling cables!!!
I got to go, lock this computer, so I can do a thing! Oh shit, its not locking… fuck… Security says I can’t leave a unlocked console… POWER!
Adding needless friction is terrible! Don’t do it.
At work, when I did desktop support, the number of people who would just hit their power bar when they left every day…
Is that bad for the computer? Because I didn’t even think about this in a corporate environment until your comment. All our employees would be pulling cords or batteries, they all march out at exactly 430.
any unwritten data would be lost, perhaps some file system updates get out of sync, but it shouldn’t be a big problem.
It is very easy to corrupt files doing this.
Bruh
WTF happened to Microsoft? What a fall. Is this a leadership thing?
Turns out you can make more money by reducing usability and user choice in an entrenched product because hardly anyone will baulk and jump ship to a different product.
They were always about screwing over consumers to make money. The only thing that changed is that they’ve become increasingly unsubtle about it.
Their way to screw customers with W2K was very persuasive. Such a clean UI, everything looking so relaxed and, eh, not commercialized. That startup sound. Those wallpapers.
Later I learned that that’s also when they released those Unix services for Windows (may have swapped words), with which you really could have something practical with an X server and POSIX-compatible applications and so on.
And compared to W9x it was very stable.
What is Window 365? Is it a cloud based OS? If Yes, then all High End Machine will become useless?
It’s what Microsoft opted to call their office suite now. So Office365 is now officially Microsoft 365 in an effort to acknowledge that your office work has now completely left their focus and they are only concentrating on themselves
its ‘msoffice as a service’… and it sucks donkey balls. imagine tryin to manipulate a giant dataset in a web version of excel in a browser tab. annoying enough in the binary, impossible in ‘office365-excel’
I mean, even desktop excel isn’t great for that. Doubley so if you have to use dates/times and timezones
Another day, another piece of enshittification by MS, another reason to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds, if you can spare a few minutes.
All that AI can’t pay for itself, I guess.
As much as everyone pushes Linux, it’s not a suitable replacement in a lot of scenarios
What are some of these scenarios?
It is in far more situations that it isn’t
Nothing productive mentioning the situations it can’t do while ignoring the massive amount of situations it can do far better
Bloat vs. Bloat. FIGHT!
No.
This is what happens when they know you won’t leave.
“But muh games…and Linux is too difficult and weird”
Well then you’ve made your choice, didn’t you?
Why is the target of your comment towards people that use Windows?
I am not sure why People on Lemmy feel like if they point something out to people who can’t see the comment is going to get them to change their mind.
I have and use both Linux and Windows. I prefer both for different reasons.
I know I’m talking into the void. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I’m too tired of trying to do that. Just trying to get people to realize they made the choices they have to live with.
I may be spoiled in that I don’t play AAA multiplayer games, but I do play AAA single player and indie single/multiplayer (usually the type where one of the players is also the server, e.g. Terraria).
Been running Linux on my systems for more than a decade, and - especially since Proton/SteamDeck enchantments made their way upstream - I haven’t had any major ssues (except having to wait a while to play RDR2-PC in Ubuntu because of a weird game-specific graphics card driver issue, but even that was fixed in due course).
Fuck Windows, and fuck the assertion that it’s the only way to run games.
Again it might be that I pretty much don’t play competitive online games because if there’s anything that ruins gaming it’s random strangers, but I have had practically no problem playing games over the last ten years.
What about people who needs NURBS tools and Affinity/Adobe class art softwares? Where do they go that corporations decided Windows and Mac are only to be supported? And believe me, plenty of them hates Windoze and I’m one of them.
Dual boot if you’re up for it.
Dual booting kinda sucks. It fragments your workflow and it is pretty disruptive compared to just being able to move to whatever you need to move to.
Develop own software or support indepndent sw development however you can.
If you really need something, think about your personal dependencies and try to build some resilience / backups , one way or another.
Whatever your craft, a pathway towards ownership and control of tools and maintenance should be a traditional part of mastering the craft.
So that you can eventually do things like extend the toolset, or adapt tools to niche circumstances and advance things along.If you don’t have that pathway, then you might end up trapped as an apprentice or journeyperson and will continue to be exploited by those who control the things you depend on.
If there’s no freedom and no way to develop competition in the supply chain, then you probably would benefit from - collective organisations such as trades-guilds, or professional associations or trade-unions to counter the power imbalance, and represent your needs - but they can also get captured/bribed so those probably need a bit of effective democracy / transparency/accountability or something. I’m not going to suggest govt regulation, becasuse that’s super easy to capture and national-election democracy is a weak control, but you might get some progressive govts like some European ones that’d think about doing something suppoting foss projects, maybe.It might not be easy, but you have to look for and support those types of features for the good of your industry.
Corps will eat their industry for a quick $, it’s the workers, tradespeople and masters of the craft and some small businesses who care about the long term. And maybe any enlightened customers if you’re lucky enough to have them.As an example, for physical 3d cad, personally I don’t like freecad much it’s complex and not very intuitive; but it lets me do all the maths I want in python, with my own made up data structures / object model. So i’ll use and support freecad 100% over all the other more user friendly CAD that i’ve seen - it really is the freedom, and not being so dependant.
I’ve held off on saying it until now (I haven’t), but now I’m going to call it (again):
This is the year of the Linux Desktop.
(It feels love someone influential at Microsoft is trying to protect my reputation and force my prediction to come true.)
What does that mean. What does “the year of the Linux desktop” mean, really? And why is it different than last year?
Windows key + L
Try and put an as on my keyboard ya stupid fucks
Careful what you wish for…
Typo and all…
That’s lock, not sign out.
But a little autohotkey could probably take care of this for you.
Win+D, Alt-F4.
In total, I expect this to cost about a minute or two of my life if they never remove the ads. This figure is fairly typical for daily windows users, of which ~400kk are on win11. Microsoft will steal ~1.5*400,000,000 minutes with these ads. Ads that nearly no one will even consider clicking. 600,000,000 minutes=10,000,000 hours=1140 years. Multiple lifetimes in aggregate, all to be thrown away for nothing. I’d like to send a very strongly worded knot tying tutorial to Satya Nadella and Brad Smith.
Now figure out how much that is in lost revenue and write a headline like „Microsoft to lose economy one million gazzillion $“.
Wait, so this is not about the power menu, it’s about the pop up when clicking on your account picture bubble if you’re signed in to a MS account. They aren’t adding a step to logging out of your local Windows user, just to logging out of your Microsoft account if you’re using that as a login for Windows, OneDrive and Office365.
The “Lock” button also has a new home—it now sits in the power menu alongside “Shut down,” “Restart,” and “Sleep” options.
THAT is where the Lock button was? Not gonna lie, I’ve been Windows-L-ing so long I didn’t even know they had moved that to the account bubble.
I’ll be honest, the article is a bit overdramatic. Yeah, they are surfacing your services there to upsell you on the ones you don’t have, but it’s actually not a useless piece of info (currently finding your subscriptions is an ordeal) and none of the functionality is gone. It is true that a lot of UX things around Win11 have gotten worse, though. I’m currently using additional software to replace the taskbar (which will do the Start menu, too, if you want) because the inability to move it to the sides is ridiculous on the OS you’re most likely to pair with an ultrawide monitor.
I’ll be honest, the article is a bit overdramatic. Yeah, they are surfacing your services there to upsell you on the ones you don’t have, but it’s actually not a useless piece of info (currently finding your subscriptions is an ordeal) and none of the functionality is gone.
Look up “boiling a frog”
They count on this exact reaction.
Every time they implement these little bullshit changes, people inevitably go “It’s annoying but it’s not that big a deal.” And then they do more of it a few months later.
The article isn’t being hyperbolic because it’s reacting to the overall trend that this is yet another step forward in. Because the writer and everyone here knows it will get worse and worse over time.
Dark patterns are, by design, slow and incremental so as not to trigger too much pushback at once. People need to start being more aware of it and pushing back on it when they see it.
And yes, that information is probably useful to some people, but that doesn’t in any way justify hiding the options that used to be there.
Do you know the term “trust thermocline”?
Basically it described a problem with the boiling the frog technique. There’s a point for every user at which they’re fed up with the bullshit, lose all trust in you(r company) and are hard to impossible to get back as a customer. Every customer leaving has a little unnoticeable effect on you, but with time there will be so many people that you lost that all your tactics to lock your users in will fail.
Look up “boiling a frog”
Yeeeeah, but this isn’t a dark pattern, though. That’s what I’m saying.
The article really wants it to be, but… well, it’s not. The option to log out remains in the same place as the rest of your account info, and the account info they are surfacing is actually useful and relevant to how much money you’re spending. They are making it easier to subscribe, for sure, but also to cancel, which used to be pretty hidden away.
I get that this fits into a wider pattern for both MS and other major software companies, but if they inch towards the boiled frog at this pace we’re probably fine.
Now, if they ever try (again) to make MS accounts mandatory for Windows or to move Windows to a sub, we can have this conversation. As others said below, when you try to inch people towards dealbreakers you can find yourself losing ground very quickly. Especially if a new comparable alternative surfaces at the same time.
People pay for this?
Usually they just over-pay for their computer because you can’t really buy a system without Windows pre-installed (unless you build it).
I have so many computers that came with Windows installations that I never even booted into.
“Can’t really buy a computer without Windows pre-installed”? Weird, that’s not my experience. The stores allow filtering by “no OS” and you can see quite a lot of options.
Which retail store have you ever walked into that had a PC on display with no OS?
I don’t know if the people walking into a brick-and-mortar for a prebuilt PC are making decisions beyond “what’s available” and “what’s in my budget”.
There are absolutely online stores that do that, but they’re usually gamer-focused, so there’s three issues;
Note: I’m taking about laptops, because it’s all I’ve bought for the last decade or more;
-
The non-gamer focused stores rarely (if ever) have the option (Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft, etc).
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The gamer focused stores usually sell hardware that runs Linux like shit because the hardware needs extremely specific drivers (which isn’t necessarily an issue for Linux, but if it doesn’t exist yet, you’re either building them yourself, or waiting for someone else to do so).
- Note: Most Clevo systems - that are private-labeled by the likes if IBuyPower, OriginPC, etc - run Linux really well. Some of these sellers make custom hardware, or sell other private-label systems, so your milage may vary.
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The gamer focused stores are usually patroned by people who are all in on Windows gaming, because they don’t do much else with the system, so they don’t experience the kinds of annoyances that power users would gripe about (which is why the above point doesn’t compel those sellers to do anything different).
- And before someone corrects me: Gamers are not inherently power users, they just have powerful systems. It used to be that powerful systems were only buildable and maintenable by power users, but that hasn’t been true for years. If all you do is install and click “play”, you aren’t a power user.
As for desktops, I really couldn’t say. Haven’t been paying attention for years. It’s possible that you could buy a system without a hard drive, never mind an OS.
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Ads have evolved into a cancer that is just growing and growing, making everything around them worse.
Ads have always been a cancer.
Not exactly. When the webmaster you knew put a banner in the corner of their site with ads from one and the same source, in one and the same place, not popping up and not bothering you, it really felt fine. I even felt the urge to click that and see where it leads.
Remember also Opera free version with that ad banner.
🤮
The best part is when spammers and ad generators realized how easy it is to use GPT to automate and increased the number of spam bots and ads.
When will VR be a thing in Linux?
The Quest is Android based, which is Linux based, so kinda if you’re cool with two layers of megacorp between you and the kernel.
When Valve decides to.
