Windows is getting disgusting

[eugenenine]

Moving to Linux is not a viable solution for non technical users.

Takes no more technical skill that reinstalling windows.  I've gotten to clean up peoples windows reinstall that didn't know to download the manufacturers chipset drivers so you had 20 minute boot time then finally get the drivers downloaded and installed and it then boots in 2 minutes.

[Zero999]

Linux is fine for those who aren't technical, until it comes to installing something like a printer which isn't supported.

[SeanB]

Linux is fine for those who aren't technical, until it comes to installing something like a printer which isn't supported.

You mean a printer that actually is supported under Win7/8/10, which pretty much does exclude all printers older than around 4 years. Or is it the 300M installer that also includes " for your convenience" all languages under the sun, installers for all models from the first to the latest ( except for your model, which requires another 300M download of course), some ad supported bloatware that has no uninstaller, no EULA, installs before any other screens even show up, and which only serves to use more memory than you have, use more disk space and which communicates with some home server almost every mouse click you make.

Or like when I connected a HP laser to my box, and turned it on, after which it just worked without any other action on my part. I use a driver at work that just talks PCL6, and point it at the printer. Still the same even though the printer has been changed out twice since it was installed, and still works fine, unlike the windows drivers which fall over every so often.

[Lightages]

The problem for many is that there aren't many options but to run Windows of some flavor for many important programs, especially if there is a significant investment in that software. For me I have some significant money tied up in Adobe products, Sony Vegas and other multimedia production from Sony, addons and plugins for the them, Autocad, Reaper, and some other things.

I basically have the choice to dump those investments and use the Linux "alternatives" or keep on with Win7 until I can't anymore. I have tried to do all in Linux that I needed once upon a time but it was impossible. Dependencies would always break before I could get everything working. So the Linux snobs yelled at me for being stooopid for trying to do what I wanted to do, and being stooopid for not knowing how to make everything work, or called me stooopid for trying to use modern hardware. The suggestions were to multiboot a different distro, or multiple installs of the same distro, plus run windows in a virtual machine to get everything working. What a waste of time and what a joke.

I guess I need to try again, but I hate masochism......

[Nepenthes]

Change just for change is never good. Windows 7 is ideal for mankind. The geeks can have 8 and 10.

[eugenenine]

Linux is fine for those who aren't technical, until it comes to installing something like a printer which isn't supported.

Our supported under Windows printer could not print legal size in windows 8/8.1.  Wife has to use my Linux laptop to print her bank statements.

[MT]

We installed W10 (former XP and win 7) on 2 laptops and what a crap pile of spyware it is!And what a drag to get rid off!
So we went back to win7 on one laptop and turned off the spyware , yes MS have manged to add spyware to w7 and w8
in latest servpack and Linux will go into the other laptop!

Win7 will probably be the next XP.

[eugenenine]

. Dependencies would always break before I could get everything working.

I run (and have run to 10 years) Slackware which doesn't do all that fancy dependency checking, you have to figure it out yourself

But really, changing OS will have a learning curve at the start since its different, once you get past it then your good.  I've found that if your going to make the jump from Win to mac or win7 to 8/10 then the learning curve is about the same as going from win to linux so you may as well make the open move and get it done.

[nctnico]

Linux is fine for those who aren't technical, until it comes to installing something like a printer which isn't supported.

Then don't buy that printer because it won't be supported by the next version of Windows and is most likely slowing your PC down because the PC needs to do all the processing. IF the drivers are actually stable. It is almost like watching a miracle when you see how much Linux supports out of the box without needing to go through an installer which also installes a truck load of crapware on your PC. For example: getting photos from my camera over USB was never easier. In the Windows XP days it only worked every now and then.

[justanothercanuck]

i just spent a week trying to fix a win10 install (previously upgraded from 8.x)...  none of the "metro" apps would work, and all the internet fixes didn't seem to help (sfc, dism, some powershell crap).

one thing that bugs me about 8/10 is how they're trying to move all the control panels to metro.  if metro breaks, you're pretty screwed, like i was.

another thing that bugs me is that with UEFI booting, you can't mash F8 and start in safe mode.  you have to boot, then click restart while holding shift.  who the heck thought that was a good idea?

anyways, safe mode and creating new profiles didn't do anything either.  okay, so maybe i'll do an overinstall.  worked for 3.11 through xp...

well, 8/10 don't do overinstalls.  they do "resets".  one uninstalls your apps (but leaves your documents intact), the other one wipes out the entire drive.  again, who thought uninstalling everything was a good idea?  thanks for uninstalling my copy of office, which i didn't save the key for.  i didn't think i needed to, because it was preloaded on the laptop when it was purchased.  nope.  key and install gone.

so yeah, i'm sticking with 7 at home, and i hope to god that my mother doesn't ask me to fix her laptop again any time soon.   

[Lightages]

But really, changing OS will have a learning curve at the start since its different, once you get past it then your good.  I've found that if your going to make the jump from Win to mac or win7 to 8/10 then the learning curve is about the same as going from win to linux so you may as well make the open move and get it done.

For the record, I tried for a whole, a whole year, to run Linux in the form of Fedora. It wasn't like I tried, very hard, to make it work. It was impossible. It was not that I was noob expecting to be happy in 2 hours, no, a whole year. I will try again but I have only some many years left on this Earth and I won't waste it trying to make something work when it isn't possible even if the Linux elite think their shit don't stink and my brain does. What I learned was that Linux is a hobby all in itself and not a tool if you need it for a full desktop environment.

BUT!

I will make it work if the only option is to move to Windows 10!

[nctnico]

The first step is to get a PC with supported hardware. PCs which are offered with Linux pre-installed are a good sign. Next look for a distribution with a good package management and then don't try to break it. Debian is my preferred distribution because it lags a bit behind due to rigorous testing.

[madires]

For the record, I tried for a whole, a whole year, to run Linux in the form of Fedora. It wasn't like I tried, very hard, to make it work. It was impossible. It was not that I was noob expecting to be happy in 2 hours, no, a whole year. I will try again but I have only some many years left on this Earth and I won't waste it trying to make something work when it isn't possible even if the Linux elite think their shit don't stink and my brain does. What I learned was that Linux is a hobby all in itself and not a tool if you need it for a full desktop environment.

The windows way of thinking doesn't work for unixoidal OSs. Most of the frustration comes from the fact that most windows users learned where to click over the years. With the migration to linux their knowledge becomes nearly useless. Do you remember when
MS Office got ribbons? Same story.

[Marco]

Windows 10 finally pushed me to give Linux a real chance for non server use, decided to buy a Dell Chromebook 13 and dual boot Linux on it (great machine, ignoring the hoops you have to jump to install another OS). Really liking it so far, the AA font screw ups you would still run into a couple years ago seem to have finally been hidden (behind the scenes it's a giant mess of course, but as long as I don't have to fix it I don't care). Not everything worked out of the box though, needed to google a bit to get Steam to run on 64 bit xubuntu and to get H.264 support in Firefox (Chromium doesn't have it at all, but with pepper flash it does have better flash support).

ChromeOS isn't bad either for what it is, but exchanging one set of spyware for another wasn't my intention. Definitely competition for Apple for people who just want something to browse the web on and use email ... the Chromebook datamines you, the Macbook mines your wallet.

Soon I'll have my desktop setup to use Windows 10 for gaming and for when I can't avoid it, Linux for everything else.

[Howardlong]

Do you remember when
MS Office got ribbons? Same story.

You can thank Steven Sinofsky for that clusterf--k too.

Let me see, MS Office ribbon bar, Windows 8, uBeam investor... it's not looking great.

Anyone remember Clippy? One guess who was overseeing development of the Office product at that time...

[nctnico]

The ribbon interface is the reason for me to stick with Office 2003. I don't want to relearn a program which does the same as the old one (and knowing Microsoft the new version is probably worse). 

[TerraHertz]

Count me among those who think Microsoft Windows was always disgusting. So was DOS btw.

Microsoft: "Let's put all categories of configuration and state information for everything in the Windows OS, GUI and user applications, all mixed together in one giant central database. But with most of it undocumented. Oh, and we'll break it into arbitrary parts, give them ridiculous names, keep the only current version in memory, make sure there's no easy way to save and restore it as a simple, single compact file, and provide a really crap utility to search/edit/debug it. We'll make the data structures it contains arcane and poorly documented, all the better to hide things (like our deliberate 'look and feel' UI cripples - icon position data, cough.) By obfuscation we'll ensure it always grows ever larger and cruftier over time. Essential linkages will be inscrutible numeric CLSIDs, rather than containing any human-comprehensible descriptive text. The mixing of OS and user-app config data will make your working environment of installed software tools totally uncloneable, thus forcing you to frequently waste hours and days rebuilding it all. The operating system and most applications will critically depend on it, which will make it a central point of failure able to take down a whole machine via the slightest corruption. If that should by unlikely chance ever happen, bwahahaha! Not that we insist you regularly buy a new PC and OS or anything!
 We'll call it The Windows Registry. We originally wanted to call it the Microsoft BOGU (Benign Object for Greater Utility) but Mr Gates vetoed that for some reason."

Could go on for pages listing the unacceptable things in Windows and Microsoft's OS development path concepts, but there's no point. Not going to change anyone's views.

The thing I find most amazing about Windows, is that the great majority of users just go along with it, and from either ignorance or confirmation bias, convince themselves that it's mostly wonderful.  As opposed to recognizing Windows is an evil pile of malformed, deliberately obfuscated, bloated, spying crippleware, for which Microsoft should be destroyed with maximum prejudice.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Is there a way to get W10 to work with unsigned drivers (which doesn't require any dicking around on every reboot) - some initial searching seems to give mixed messages as to whether this is possible.
I have some old hardware that needs it, and it's still not uncommon to get things like eval/demo boards with unsigned drivers.

Can you get W10 to look and feel like W7/XP classic ?

[hendorog]

Moving to Linux is not a viable solution for non technical users.

It's true that windows is meant for non technical users.  That's one of the many reasons I don't work with it.

From experience, Windows is a poor option for non-technical users.

In my experience almost all non-technical Windows users have someone technical helping them out.
If they don't have help then they almost certainly have a broken PC which is also riddled with viruses.
Or they have very simple requirements - and generally an old PC which was setup by someone else years ago and they haven't changed a thing.

If they have simple requirements, then they could use another OS.
The issues they would face in changing to Linux or OSX would be re-learning different applications, nothing to do with the OS.

[MarkF]

I'm sticking with Windows 7 for now.  I have not installed Windows 10 because of PRIVACY and SECURITY concerns.  I'm surprised this issue has not appeared in this thread. 
Watch this video: 

[justanothercanuck]

I'm sticking with Windows 7 for now.  I have not installed Windows 10 because of PRIVACY and SECURITY concerns.  I'm surprised this issue has not appeared in this thread. 

that horse was beaten to death in the summer.  yes we know that gmx/telemetry exists.  think of it what you will.  most home users don't give a toss. 

[rdl]

Congratulations for doing exactly as Microsoft wanted.

[justanothercanuck]

Congratulations for doing exactly as Microsoft wanted.

better than mouthbreathing your displeasure and hatred towards microsoft at every single opportunity.  some of these gmx detractors are borderline delusional. 

[rdl]

Maintain your old electronics freedom and privacy!  If you don't preserve it, it could be lost forever!



Some things in life are more important than others. 

[MarkF]

I'm sticking with Windows 7 for now.  I have not installed Windows 10 because of PRIVACY and SECURITY concerns.  I'm surprised this issue has not appeared in this thread. 

that horse was beaten to death in the summer.  yes we know that gmx/telemetry exists.  think of it what you will.  most home users don't give a toss. 

Best of luck with that!
I prefer NOT to trust Microsoft with my online banking, credit card numbers and passwords.  One would think most home users would be very concerned!!!