Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

I’ve experienced the same. In fact, I recently tried migrating to Ubuntu. The user experience is a lot better than it once was, but it’s still not great. For instance, if I want to see what the temperature outside is on gnome, I need to install a weather app. There are several, and amongst them, the Ubuntu software installer says they’re not verifiable because a 3rd party developed them. Ok, fine, I just want the one most people are using, because I assume that is the one that is best maintained and has the best features. I’m not sure which one that is. Oh well, install the first one after a brief search to determine which is considered most “native” to gnome and Ubuntu. After installation, I don’t see the weather on my top bar. I open the weather app, look around the settings, but there’s no option to see the weather displayed on the bar. I give up. Later, my machine seems to be stuttering a bit (64 GB RAM, AMD 5970, RTX 3060), so I reboot and it’s back to normal. I try to play a game, and get an error stating that Vulkan isn’t installed (it is). I reboot instead of fiddling with it to find the root cause, and it’s working again.

I don’t have to do this stuff with Windows. It just works. I don’t mean to downplay the efforts Ubuntu developers have gone to in order to get it to its current usability. It’s pretty good, it just has a bit more maturing to do before I can make the permanent jump. A while back, I read that Ubuntu was hiring a product manager for the desktop, or maybe gaming? Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope they’re able to make strides on the experience.

The issue with the taskbar, is there are a couple different implemetation APIs, your shell probably only supports gnome out of the box. I don't recall the name, but there's an extension that will add support for the KDE api for taskbar extensions. I'm running Budgie, with a relatively customized setup, and that was a long while ago, so not as immediately familiar with all that I did.

Will likely switch back to PopOS when the next LTS comes out though.

I think KDE would serve users coming from Windows much better. You'd have much better experience out of the box. I have used Ubuntu, Fedor, and Arch Linux with gnome-shell and have rigorously kept my extensions for a few years up and working but eventually got tiered of them breaking with every gnome update and desktop crashing every few days. I switched to tiling windows managers since then such as i3/sway for work and to KDE for personal use (for example with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

> For instance, if I want to see what the temperature outside is on gnome,

In the amount of time you took to do that, you could have opened a browser and typed weather.com to see the weather.

I think this is the grandparent OP's point: Showing you news or showing you the weather is not the job of an operating system. The operating system is there to manage system memory, the filesystem, networking, security and permissions, drive peripherals and accessories, maybe provide a desktop environment.

That said, I would expect my operating system's vendor to also ship high quality applications that I can optionally install after I install my operating system. Ubuntu should have a weather application, or at least a strong opinion about which third party one is the best and that new users should use. So, you're not wrong. The whole "search through 40,000 half-assed weather applications and hope user reviews are accurate" situation is also bad.

I've never understood the obsession of "weather" apps with some people.

Heck, if a linux user wants to know the weather, all they have to do is lok at their windows. (might have to go up the stairs though :-)

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I run W11 - and it SUCKS... one weird thing was I have my webcam covered in tape 100% of the time. Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

it only happened once - but WTF - and I havent seen it since, and I couldnt find anything on google about it. WTF is that?

> I run W11 - and it SUCKS... one weird thing was I have my webcam covered in tape 100% of the time. Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

When I run Windows these days, I assume every single part of it is compromised, either by scummy third party software running in the background or by Microsoft's scummy software running in the background. This includes cameras, microphones, any radio, the networking stack, any drives (local or network) the machine can so much as ping, everything. I have a special vlan prison I put my Windows machines in because I treat them like the hostile attackers they are.

Say what you will about Apple's "walled gardens" but every time a frustrated 3rd party developer complains online that they can't do X, Y, or Z on Macs because of permissions or security, I get a little more comforted that my Mac's software is not constantly attacking me.

Looking out my window doesn’t tell me how hot is actually is. It certainly won’t tell me how hot it will be in 2 hours or when the sun will set. :)

>I reboot instead of fiddling with it to find the root cause, and it’s working again. I don’t have to do this stuff with Windows.

Thanks, I needed that laugh this morning.

As a data point with tape, depending upon the type you might need more than 1 later.

Saying that because I've used black electrical tape for years, including over the camera lens of my iPhone SE.

But it turns out the iPhone SE can take pictures right through that (at least in daylight), and they're not terrible quality.

Showed a friend photography inclined friend and he was as surprised as I was. eg very

>Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

I'm guessing that was probably Windows Hello attempting to use your camera for face recognition.

Just upgraded to Windows 11 (for its HDR features) and weather is now part of the "Widgets" bombarding me with ads and poor news sources. I genuinely tried to customize my "feed" but it's all junk -no reputable sources whatsoever- and I didn't find a way to remove them.

So the only sane course of action was to disable widgets altogether while I still can. And now I don't have the weather anymore.

And likewise cold. And humidity. And how it might change in eight hours.

You can run the Weather app stand-alone & pin it to your Taskbar or Start Menu:

    Windows Key > weather

Why shouldn't Ubuntu take the next step and pre-install the weather application if that's what Ubuntu thinks most of its users will want?

> Here was a creepy popup I got one day - it slid down from directly top-center of screen and gave me a notification asking my to uncover my webcam.

"Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - "1984", Orwell.

Does the news you get depend on who you are?

You gotta open the window to find out how hot it is. After noon, stand facing West and see how many hand-widths between the horizon and the sun… each hand-width is an hour until sunset. Source: Boy Scouts

When you say "black electrical tape" do you mean from, say, Harbor Freight, or from 3M? Since the 3M stuff blocks UV fairly well, i can't really see light getting through it, although i'd have to find some to test.

years and years ago we'd buy a roll of film, pull it out in the sun, and then get it developed but not printed. You could use that as an IR-passthrough filter on a camera lens - this is if my memory isn't faulty.

at the extreme risk of being put on a list, what is the standard boyscout hand-width?

Because even if Ubuntu knows that, users often want conflicting things.

User A may want a weather app preinstalled; user B may not want their computer knowing their location. User A and user B might even be the same person.

And that's assuming Ubuntu knows it, which let's be real, Ubuntu isn't great at knowing what its users want.

And all of that is assuming it's even true that most people do want a weather app.

Sounds like they don't want to turn Ubuntu into what the Windows users above are complaining about.

It shouldn't be preinstalled, but it should be easy to find professionally reviewed applications for the most common user application categories. Android's Google Play Store has "editor's choice" for example. If Ubuntu is trying to be THE desktop linux, this is something they should be doing.

I have too many Monty Python jokes in mind for HN's taste

Given that the Boy Scouts of America kicked off the modern scouting movement in 1910, the answer to African or European, is American.

Ubuntu is literally just a collection of thousands of individual packages. It’s not a cohesive whole developed in the same repository like Windows.

Windows is a completely unified OS where there is a huge repo that can build the whole OS from source.

That makes Ubuntu extremely customizable. You can swap out the window manager, or just remove it, use a KDE file manager instead of gnome, do whatever the hell you want. That comes at a cost.

Windows is just Windows. You can’t replace the desktop (you used to be able to swap the shell), or file manager or task manger or installer system. That makes things integrated and easy to use. That comes at a cost also.

For me, I use Ubuntu with i3 for work, Windows for gaming and personal stuff, and macOS because i have old work laptops that are MacBooks.

They all have their pros and cons. Having all three means I always have the right tool for the job available.

Good question. I don't remember, though it was probably cheap stuff rather than good quality.

My office does not have windows (the hole in the wall, not the OS). Also, I usually don't want to know the weather right now, but in the next couple of hours or rest of day. It's not a obsession, it's a handy piece of information which is nice when I'm able to check it at a glance and not have to open some app/website.

That depends on the age of the boy scout, of course. But so does arm length.

Keep the window open for real-time updates streaming in (during wet season)