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Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

(www.tomshardware.com)
1725 points taubek | 7 comments | 27 Mar 23 05:20 UTC | HN request time: 1.35s | source | bottom
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PrimeMcFly ◴[27 Mar 23 06:33 UTC] No.35323525[source]▶
I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn't it's job. Maybe, as an option or optional add-on, but not the way MS does it.

I use 10 now, as locked down and 'fixed' as I was able to make it (custom ISO via NTLite with a bunch of crap removed and some fixes steamrolled in), but really I look forward to ditching it altogether - which is a shame. For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).

The telemetry, changing things for the sake of changing things and forced crap constantly being added is enough. I'm so in love with awesomewm at this point, and the fact that I can customize and program every part of my UI, allowing me to have something absolutely perfect and tailor made.

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jgaa ◴[27 Mar 23 10:10 UTC] No.35324818[source]▶
> I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS.

Then, how is Microsoft supposed to properly track your interests and sell that information to their "partners"?

It's been a long time since Microsoft made an operating system. What they make today is basically a spyware-platform where you can run applications if you are really disciplined and persistent. I don't understand how people keep up with it.

I've used Linux on my desktops and laptops for decades now.

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ftl64 ◴[27 Mar 23 11:19 UTC] No.35325246[source]▶
It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot have taken so many hours of troubleshooting that could've been spent doing something actually productive.

Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.

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naremu ◴[27 Mar 23 13:01 UTC] No.35326135[source]▶
It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches.

In fact unless I was new and heavily tinkering with my distro, linux has easily be the more "stable". All my problems were...definitely me problems.

At the end of the day, they're both OSes running on a jaw droppingly wide variety of hardware, but whenever I look up a problem I have on linux, I find an answer that makes sense.

Meanwhile, the brand new, mainstream hardware I bought for gaming with windows forcibly sold to me with it, spent a year not being able to play audio properly while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had nothing to do with them.

Also, waking my computer from sleep occasionally just crashes my entire system, or even booting it up will cause it to crash or bootloop a few times. It's genuinely amazing what "paid development" gets you from monopolists.

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1. prox ◴[27 Mar 23 15:47 UTC] No.35328190[source]▶
That’s all very well, but my end of the day take is that if you want more Windows/Mac adopters, you need zero friction. So often you get these handwavey (snobby?) attitudes of “why don’t you just insert hard to do thing for average user” and in the meantime nobody is the wiser.

Also not saying that things aren’t getting better, but it’s a snail’s pace.

Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win from any competition.

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2. anonymouskimmer ◴[27 Mar 23 16:35 UTC] No.35328806[source]▶
> Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win from any competition.

It wins because it's less friction, not zero friction. There's a reason, other than old applications, that there are still Windows 7 installations. Many people don't want to upgrade their Windows until they upgrade their hardware because it's a hassle getting the interface back to the way you want it.

Anecdotally I'm not a programmer and I switched to Ubuntu when I bought this laptop in 2013, with about 3 or 4 years of dual booting for software purposes before I stayed on Ubuntu. I'll switch away from Ubuntu to a more user friendly distribution with my next computer because it's pushing features I really don't like, and deleting features I really do like. My wife is also not a programmer and with the upgrade to Windows 10 we had to do a bunch of searching and tinkering to make the user interface satisfactory. She's avoiding Windows 11 for as long as possible.

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3. WeylandYutani ◴[27 Mar 23 17:54 UTC] No.35329936[source]▶
I was having a conversation with my mother today about changing her bank. She ultimately decided against it because she doesn't want to change her bank account number.

People are creatures of habit. Microsoft learned this when they removed the start button in 8.

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4. thomastjeffery ◴[27 Mar 23 18:21 UTC] No.35330273[source]▶
The difference isn't even less friction. It's more familiar friction.

Here's the most crucial point: windows has the most thoroughly documented friction. If you ever have a problem, chances are 1,000 or more other people have had that problem, or a closely related one, and 1 or 2 of them even wrote about it somewhere. Life is way harder than it needs to be, but you are not even remotely alone.

Apple takes the opposite approach: walls instead of friction. If you can't figure it out, it's because you computer can't do it. That implies your computer shouldn't be able to do it. You would be surprised at how comfortable people are with this conclusion. It doesn't get them what they want, but it saves them time and energy by providing early and confident rejection.

Linux maximizes the ability to manage friction. There is always a way to actually resolve it with constructive effort. That's an unfamiliar strategy, and it requires some level of education that the average user refuses to accommodate, even if it will definitely save them time and effort.

5. lostlogin ◴[27 Mar 23 18:23 UTC] No.35330299{3}[source]▶
Cellphone number portability was forced on that industry here in NZ, I wish bank account portability could be made a thing.
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6. willi59549879 ◴[28 Mar 23 13:24 UTC] No.35340668{4}[source]▶
Part of the IBAN is the bank branch. So for that it won't work. The other banking numbers are bank specific anyway.
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7. lostlogin ◴[28 Mar 23 20:20 UTC] No.35347251{5}[source]▶
It is, but that’s a little meaningless when I haven’t been to a bank in maybe 20 years. I see stories here about banking infrastructure and suspect it might be very hard to get changes made.