I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here. I could see screenshots maybe being slightly helpful, but to having this sort of thing as a video feels like an extreme inconvenience; I'd much rather see all of it at once and be able to visually scan (or even better, ctrl+f) to find specific parts over having to scrub around if I wanted to go back to a previous part or skip ahead. My eyes also don't require any sort of manual timing to pause on something I want to copy.
It's telling that most of the responses to this question center around why the YouTube video creator would want to make a video instead of a simple text description, not what the OP asked: why the user would want to intake the information by way of video.
Says a lot about what is broken, incentive-wise, about the modern Internet.
Definitely there has been a shift towards video content.
But I think there is a discoverability dynamic at play as well. Finding a blog post that isn’t garbage can be harder than finding a decent video on any given topic. This is clearly a feedback loop towards video but I think partly this is because up until now you couldn’t just create a spam video channel with the same ease that you could a spam blog.
How so? People like to learn in various ways, some people like to read, other people like to inspect someone else doing it in real time.
I don't see an issue with there being multiple ways to learn how to do something, whether it be textual, images or video.
For this type of thing having a video running in the background while I punch in the commands makes sense, I can perform the actions at the same time the video does.
Videos get higher rankings in Google's search. Remember those?
Definitely says something about your age though complaining about video versions of anything. Kids today don't even know what Google's search page looks like. They search in YouTube, TikTok type apps first. Since the location bar has also become the search bar while theGoogs pays browsers to be the default search, lots of people are not even aware they are doing a google search.
Also, some people will try things that are technically above their abilities normally. Having a video typing the commands in can be easier for them to replicate as it'll look just like the video. Text only from some webpage won't have those visual clues.
I much prefer text for this stuff too, but at least I can understand why something else is preferred by someone not me. I might be elder, but I'm not obstinate
Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing". I'm not claiming that there can't possibly be a reason that videos might work better for some people, but I don't think you've made a particularly strong case that you understand their mindset rather than judging them under the guise of claiming that I was the one doing that.
> Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing".
Not an argument. It's an explanation. Stop with the antagonism.
No, you're old man yells at clouds with the entire comment. Someone likes something you don't prefer, and want to share that with the internet. That's great, but you have to know that someone will call you out on it.
Some people like blue, some people like red. Some people like audiobooks, some prefer reading actual books. Some people like to go to movie theaters, some prefer to wait for the movie to watch at home. Some people like cilantro.
The internet is a big place. There's room for multiple ways of skinning the cat without preventing any of the other ways.
I don't feel I was insulting at all. If you feel obstinate is an insulting word I really don't know how to respond as anything else will probably feel as an attack on you now. I guess I could have said non-empathetic, but we're not talking about feelings so much as valid reasons someone prefers A over B.
I share your bias, but something to consider is the prevalence of smart phone usage these days, and the fact that reading text on a smart phone can be as awful as trying to watch a video on a desktop when all you want is a quick text summary.
I've always hated the trend of moving towards video as well. But if my desktop was currently in the process of installing the operating system, leaving me without a web browser, and all I have is my phone as a secondary device ... I might actually prefer watching a quick video over trying to read text on a tiny screen and having to pinch zoom and horizontal scroll. Of course this depends a lot on how the text is presented, but in general I think video is easier to absorb on a phone and text is easier to skim / read / zoom / copy-paste on a desktop.
Youtube creators want to cover this, youtube is their chosen path, so video it is.
Not so much about the best way to communicate as much as the creators see it as their best option, for them.
I've seen a lot of tutorials that really just seem to be infotainment / social media news. Often forgetting critical steps and describing why you do a thing incorrectly. It's frustrating.
Exactly this. If I have 100,000 followers on YT for my software related content, why wouldn't I use that platform to post my content? Some people are also visual more visual learners and while straight text is helpful, having a trusted source going screen by screen/prompt by prompt and comparing to their machine is helpful.
So it's both content and communication preferences. HN is a self-selecting group of a certain type, but not everyone on the planet thinks like the average HN dude
Just yesterday there was a post to one of Geerling's pages where he posts the transcript to a video he's made. He could have just made a text blog and not spent the extra effort of making a video, but that's not what he does. Instead, he went the extra step to make the content available in text only. He could have just as easily left it as video only. (yes yes, creating a text only transcript of video in today's world is trivial, but an extra step nonetheless as it still needs to be added to his CMS to make the webpage)
I think non-technical people, who may have literally never seen a commandline, like seeing someone walk through it (and probably explain context along the way). Helps ensure them they are doing the correct things.
I've seen probably too many terminals, but a video that actually demonstrates things (when to press the keys, for how long, what's the expected response from the installer, and so on, and so on) seems super helpful and easy to follow! (Even if it's worse in many regards, like terseness, accessibility for blind people, and so on.)
Agreed. Also people tend to add a lot of context when they're talking through a process. That often gets left out when writing.
I've written docs at work intended for non (or less) technical people and it's a pain in the ass to try and get screenshots of expected inputs/outputs, try to predict every question or misunderstanding and make the writing clear. There has been more than a few times I wished I could just record a video.
As a beginner doing tech things I quite like youtube video. There are various problems with text. It'll say just type this into that but sometimes you don't know what to click to get 'that' to open. Then you find the instructions don't work because they've either skipped over something they think is obvious, or the software version has changed since they wrote it or their setup is different from yours.
At least with a recent video you can see what they click, it's probably up to date and you see all the stuff they do and you can see if it actually works.
I was trying to install jupyter notebook a few months ago and all the how tos failed because macos had updated some nonsense. At least with youtube you can try to find a recent one where they mention that.
TextSniper on Mac and PowerToys OCR on Windows have eased my frustration with rasterized text in 'engagement'-obssessed videos that should have been blog posts.
Its not as helpful, but youtube will give far better discoverability. Facebook isn't mostly the right audience, and everyone else is fractured up among many other social media companies. Not even reddit is a great place anymore for this sort of thing because so many older users and tech enthusiasts have abandoned it.
My guess is some of the better videos will post the text in the description and some folks are very visual and need to be able to reference an image or video.
But that aside I appreciate the compliment (or at least I'm going to take it as a compliment).
you could do screenshots, but my preference would be a video with the text instructions as the description, with timestamp links.
text with images is a pain to scroll, and in video form you have one more channel of info - sound.
the visuals are there to tell you where it is you find the different things, or so you dont go hunting for a button that doesnt actually exist on a gui, but also so you can match the confirmation, and get an idea on if its running at about the right speed
it's easier to monetize a video, and if this information is going to have value and be presented for free there has to be someone giving someone money somewhere.
Suggesting someone can make money off of their efforts that doesn't cost the viewer/reader anything directly is one thing, but to suggest nobody anywhere ever posts anything to the internet without the expectation of monetizing it is just totally ignoring how the internet was started.
no one is talking about the entire internet starting from 1976, we're talking about the tech tips space in 2025 where a vanishingly small percentage of people are acting in a non-monetizable way.
Maybe we can get somebody willing to do a "in a weekend" project scraping websites to just to make that content available on a free website. of course, nobody could afford the hosting fees once all of the bots start scraping your site that you built by scraping other sites.
I don't know why this is being put in this "I guess I'm old" bucket. Its just another form of content and a different way of following something. Perhaps if they put the text commands in the video description you would get the best of both worlds.
I like both, but following along watching someone else is helpful. YouTube tutorials on how to do things are extremely helpful.
If you find the video an inconvenience, just don't use it.
> I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here
It is because "modern" search engines will retrieve only links to SEO spam. The only thing that, somehow, works (50% of the time) is youtube search.
Take it down before Windows is ruined for everyone! Show not the devil's commands! All hail our Lord and Savior, constant surveillance without consent!
People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux. But they don't similarly complain about these ultra obscure, ugly commands. When Microsoft necessitates commands, somehow it's different.
Do people complain about that? Like, life long windows/mac users who aren't interested in linux I guess? I always thought people loved being able to do everything from the command line.
You didn't have to use to do this to your OS when Windows was still good.
It's only the absolute shitfest that Win 10/11 ended up being that you have to conjure 300 arcane powershell commands just to get the OS to resemble a productive environment.
> People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux
They do? How else does one use Linux if not via CLI? You mean those kiddies that like GNOME/KDE? pfffft, they're not "using" Linux. They're just using Linux to run other apps no different than using a ChromeBook
You're not supposed to do this, this is to get around a restriction on installing Windows 11 on certain hardware. If your computer is supported and you install it the way Microsoft wants you to, then you won't be typing any commands anywhere.
Generally curious, I don't see anything about hardware. Isn't this is about making a login that doesn't require you to login to MS's cloud. Also, what HW restriction does Microsoft want? Why do they care?
Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, that's the actual reason a massive number of PCs can't update to it. There's apparently some way you can hack around that and install it. I assumed that's what these videos were about. But from the reddit post it looks like it's talking about both that and the account login issue which I wasn't familiar with.
> including how to install Windows 11 without logging into a Microsoft account and how to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.
That's not really the use-case for this. It's not possible anymore to use Windows with a local account (for a long time), the official UI only lets you login with a Microsoft Account. These commands are not used to install Windows on an unsupported PC, they're being used to create a local-only account.
I for one still got a Windows boot partition next to my Linux, but I refuse to create an account for it. The only way I can install Windows on my supported PC with a local account is by using these commands.
You used to be able to just press a small button. Then you had to disconnect the LAN cable and not connect a WLAN to create a local account. Then you had to open the Commandline and execute a single command. Now we're at the point where you have to execute multiple commands.
If they actually manage to make it impossible to use Windows local-only, that will truly be the nail in the coffin for me. Currently use Windows to play games which aren't supported on Linux, but this will turn into a hate_for_online_forcing > appreciation_for_kernel_level_anticheat_shitgames.
To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff. I can see why google would be concerned about malicious versions of these videos being posted, and being difficult to differentiate quickly from ones with the legitimate instructions.
Or if those malicious videos were posted and reported, then I can see why a fairly dumb AI system would see the similar legitimate ones as the same thing. Probably a particularly bad scenario for automated moderation.
So you'd advocate for github to remove any install script that users wget + curl, and any documentation references that instruct users to wget + curl? That's much worse than a handful of limited commands in which you're modifying your own user account.
I'm guessing that they take down videos that give you instructions that install malicious scripts etc, if they're reported. I don't know for sure, but that seems likely to be against their rules. And I'd guess that most of those would target Windows. Obviously they're not responsible for it, but I'm guessing they don't allow it and would remove it if it's reported.
>To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff
Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this?
I believe you can convince people to hit Alt+F4 for the cheat menu in a video game and they will do it. Actually I think I told people that is how to votekick someone in BF1942 when they are being a dick (me). I believe you can tell people to delete system32 and they will do it. I believe you can tell people to do more damaging things and they will. I still think people should be able to say and do those things.
In the early 2000s a newbie to our forums got computer advice to do something nasty to their BIOS. Months later they came back incandescent with anger. It happens.
I had a friend that would allow her kids to watch YT videos. One day they were watching a video in my backseat as we were driving where I could hear the audio. The person was trying to tell the kids how to get free stuff for some game or other. The instructions provided had my jaw in my lap. This was years ago so I don't remember the exact details, but it was straight up instructions for installing malware.
The point is that it wasn't just possible, they flat out were giving malicious instructions. Not sure why there's resistance when we all know there's shit like this on YT. I'm not asking anyone to remove it or ban it or report it. I'm just retelling the story of the first time I heard something so blatant that my jaw dropped on this not being some random story from the internet. It was just shocking the first time I experienced it. There's nothing to be done other than try to inform others it happens, especially when it's someone/a parent that doesn't know what it means.
I found an Italian website that offers this and other procedures. To automate the modification, it suggests pressing SHIFT+F10 and then using the built-in Windows curl command to download a simple cmd script:
https://www.ilsoftware.it/focus/windows-11-con-account-local...
The cmd file can be run with the no-oobe username option, allowing you to choose the name of the local user account to be created. I hope this is helpful.
Those sort of thing always make me nervous however because it's not easy for the average user to tell if its running any sort of malicious scripts in the process. This one seems to be safe and I'm going to give it a try to see what happens.
still works as well which would be even better because thats local and easier to verify its integrity. that being said I think these are both valid suggestions if they work and I'm going to give them a try.
Yes, before running anything, you need to analyze the source. Still, I trust it: it works well, and as the Italian website indicates, you just need to check the linked .cmd file via the URL shortening to see exactly what it does. This should be done before downloading it with curl and before executing it as a .cmd file.
The no-oobe solution also has the advantage of allowing the bypass of the entire OOBE phase.
Download .iso of LTSC version of Win. Make bootable install disk via Rufus and tick options to create local account during install. Install Win from created bootable device. Done.
I have a microsoft account. I made it for Windows Live to play Halo 2 for Windows Vista back in the day.
Except, then Microsoft adjusted their account infrastructure, and now it's also an Xbox Live account. Then it became also a Windows Messenger account. Then it was required to login to Visual Studio. Then it ate my perfectly working Mojang account. Now I need it to install stuff from the Windows store like the damn Windows debugger you use to analyze BSOD dump files
I do not want my computer preferences saved across machines. I want to set up each computer separately. I do not want cortana. I do not want to connect my local computer to my account.
I gain nothing by using my microsoft account to log in to my local computer.
The singular goal is that I just want to use my damn computer, to do local computer things.
Note: A Microsoft account isn’t required to download free apps from the Store, it works fully without extra prompts on a local account. (I like that it works this way, because it means you can install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows without even once opening Edge.)
Or use Rufus to create the install media, it will ask you what mods you want applied, after installing run win11 debloater, it will ask you what mods you want to apply. Then if you’re a sane person that just doesn’t want to learn to navigate your OS with every update, install openshell.
This is ridiculous! I'm still on Windows 10 Pro without a Microsoft Account. Back then I had to jump some hoops, but it wasn't that bad. Seems like they really doubled down with Windows 11.
defaultUser0 is used by windows for the OOBE if you don't delete it along with the registry keys it will just boot back to the OOBE again. defaultUser0 gets removed by the OOBE after setup leaving your system vulnerable. The administrator account is a built in account that is disabled by default but won't be disabled if you completely bypass the OOBE or don't use the old local account setup which you no longer can do because of microsofts removal of the feature.
A few typos were brought to my attention in my previous comment and as the time frame to edit it has passed I am replying with the required edits so that if anyone does want to attempt this they don't have to wonder what went wrong
I originally had “ net user Prefferedusername/active:yes” but there should have been no space before "net" and I should have put a space before the "/" after prefferedusername.
so the corrected instructions are below. (hopefully without typos this time)
at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10
CMD will open
Type (no quotes) “net user Prefferedusername /add” (replacing Prefferedusername with the user name you wish to use) and press enter.
Next type “net localgroup administrators Prefferedusername /add” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /active:yes” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /expires:never” and press enter.
Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.
Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.
Next type "regedit" and press enter.
This opens registry editor, navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE"
Delete "DefaultAccountAction", "DefaultAccountSAMName", and "DefaultAccountSID"
Right click on "LaunchUserOOBE" and rename it to "SkipMachineOOBE" and make sure the value is set to "1".
Unfortunately, that last 10% of games are AAA competitive multiplayer that account for a massive user base who are still dependent on windows to play them (battlefield 6, fortnite, any of the call of duty games from the last 8 years, league of legends, GTA online, apex legends, rainbow six siege...)
yeah, and mac too, can't run league or valorant. vanguard is their kernel-level anticheat, and windows is like 95% of their market and the difficulty of implementing it on another kernel i guess isn't worth the <5%.
League works on macOS just fine, I played yesterday. Vanguard is buggy (it occasionally quits the client after I finish a game), but the game generally works and has for at least several years.
Why would it be a "bold move"? Linux gaming population is damn near zero, they do not provide a higher profit margin like mac gamers would, and the documented evidence is that supporting Linux users is obnoxious because they are rude and entitled but not actually that much better at providing feedback.
Epic Games bought out rocket league and turned off a native linux build and faced no repercussions. Instead they made plenty of money.
Not sure that's fair, given most Linux gamers look like Windows gamers to the metrics.
That said, devices like the SteamDeck run games on Linux (and that's without considering that every Android game ever is technically running on Linux too).
Let's face it though, PC gaming is already small enough these vs the consoles, that further splitting the marked isn't going to make sense for a lot of companies.
>Not sure that's fair, given most Linux gamers look like Windows gamers to the metrics.
No. All the articles and testimony of game devs abandoning native Linux versions is from well before Proton was a thing, including Epic Games buying Rocket League and preventing you from playing the Native Linux build they had.
It also was not related to anti-cheat or underlying engine limitations or anything. Developers were clear that the problem was the massive lack of uptake mixed with a weirdly entitled community.
Personally I don't think gamers are entitled. Ultimately games are anywhere between 60 - 120 dollars and often barely work on their target platforms. With kernel level anticheat, you're literally being asked to pay them to rootkit your computer with software you cannot audit.
The last 10 years of AAA gaming have been an absolute shit show. The only people who seem to be even trying are Nintendo. Everyone else releases stuff that's buggy as hell and about as fun as a dental cleaning.
It's bold because it's breaking stuff that already works and will continue to work even if you do nothing.
It's one thing to choose not to develop a new game for Linux. It's another to take a game that already runs on Linux and intentionally break it. You're guaranteed to alienate SOME people who are already fans of the game.
I thought the same but let's not pretend Windows is a holy grail for compatibility anymore. Especially when it comes to older games, this facade / image breaks down fast.
I once tried to play Trackmania Nations (not Forever or United Forever, the ESWC one) because that was the first entry of this series I played. I still have all the files from back then so I thought it would be as simple as installing it and running it. Other games such as Trackmania Sunrise came with the nasty SecureROM DRM that will break your current installs, but ESWC was always free to play and without DRM.
Well, after install, I played a lot in my first sitting. A few days later, my Windows install was broken. I used a restore point before installing Trackmania, everything was back to stable. A few weeks later I tried again, same situation, a day or two after install, my Windows would break.
I thought it was a general system instability, maybe some weird configuration and the game only triggers that specific bug. So I did a full clean reinstall. And installed the game a few days later. Who would've thought, my Windows breaks yet again.
What I'm trying to say is: I've been running Fedora on my main PC for 2 years now and the game has been installed via Proton for 1 year. It never broke, it always just worked.
That's cool but I spent the last week trying to get midi music in dosbox under Mint. It's still not working. Midi.
And Wine works until it suddenly doesn't and searching for solution you get stonewalled with modern day equivalent of rtfms or plain old radio silence.
Thats always the worst part of linux for me. Everyone is always so hostile, I have to say though I have had a little success finding help on lemmy but not much.
To add to this Nathan Briggs does reverse engineering to make old games work on modern Windows. Windows 11 has corrected faults in it's APIs that probably should have been fixed but somehow worked with older versions of Windows that gamedevs built around. He often posts the solution and sends it GOG. Often this involves updating a community maintained wrapper around the DirectX APIs that GOG uses.
And much better keyboard control. It can also do interesting things such as run in 1:1 scaling mode (for example, 4K on a 1080p monitor) and then you can use your mouse to zoom in and out (wheel) and Ctrl+drag to pan around.
> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite
>
> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close
This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.
This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
In some places, yes, especially where certain online options are good enough.
Definitely not in financial services, and many offices I could mention. Even for me: Excel is the reason I haven't completely binned MS Office. For the subset of features I use⁰ it is better all round¹ than other things I've tried.
I'll miss it significantly when the last Windows machine that I operate away from DayJob is no more.
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[0] Probably less than that 10%
[1] There are many tasks for which there is something better, but the something is different in each case. Excel is a very good jack-of-all-trades.
If the general public knew how big decisions are done based on some ancient Excel sheet they'd faint.
It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet.
Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited).
...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough.
Anecdote:
A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports.
But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.
Frankly, calc is just as full featured as excel is, it's just different. About the only issue calc has is correctly parsing excel docs is notoriously difficult.
This is a familiarity problem, not a calc problem.
I'm going through a project at the moment where all the data is held in spreadsheets, and every time anyone opens them Excel fucks the numbers to be "scientific notation" despite there being space to display the full number and no way to disable this anti-feature. The amount of times I've had to restore the spreadsheet from a backed up CSV because of data loss is frustrating. I wish I could stop using Excel.
> This is just a formatting/display issue. Excel isn't rounding the number internally.
It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats.
As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption.
One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor.
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[*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.
For scientific calculations with tables of data, I find LibreCalc better than Excel, so in my experience, Excel is the “good enough for simple tasks” tool, but LibreCalccis the tool when you actually do scientific big boy calculations.
The real issue is familiarity and importing, but if you start fresh, LibreCalc is better for me.
There are users (me included) that state the opposite, LibreCalc is better for my needs (complex formulas table driven) and that Excel is a toy for more “scientific” calculations.
Writer is awful too. It will randomly mess up formatting, especially in tables. Also in tables, it will insist to try and parse cell values like Calc would (breaking numbers and dates), even though Writer doesn't even provide a way to run calculations on those numbers anyway.
Word is awful too, it messes up formatting, especially when pasting images. Good luck writing anything longer than couple pages. Hasn't been solved in 20 years. Have stopped using word 2 years ago but I am gonna assume it's still an issue
> If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel
Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered".
Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be.
The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
The problem, as I see it, isn't a feature problem but rather just the fact that everyone in banking and finance is already using excel. You aren't going to see `ods` files passed around.
The only reason this is true is because everyone in finance uses Excel which means that differences in parsing excel docs is consequential. And, in finance, excel docs get shared a lot.
It's not the case that calc is lacking any features which excel has in a finance situation.
The Linux answer is often repeated but unfortunately, some users depend on various Windows software that only runs properly on Windows. E.g. CAD/CAM, Quicken finance, sewing embroidery, etc can't run in a Linux WINE emulator nor QEMU/KVM virtual machine. And avoiding the WINE/KVM incompatibilities by switching to "Linux-native" software such as Gimp often means having less features and/or not having ability to open old files because they use different formats.
Sure, there's the idea that "90% of users just use email and surf the web so they can just get by with a Chromebook" ... true, but there's still a lot of users who can't because they use other productivity software.
For me, there's always some unexpected situation that requires a working Windows computer. Last year, I had to do an unplanned firmware update on a digital audio interface via a USB cable. There was no Linux updater. They had a firmware updater for macOS but it didn't work. Based on the tech support forums, I had to download the firmware updater for Windows platform and that finally worked.
reply to: >What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM?
Example would be software that use hardware USB dongles for DRM. E.g. embroidery software for sewing machines. The passthrough USB emulation to the vm is not invisible enough to fool the software searching for hardware dongles. Another example was Trimble software for LIDAR that depended on DirectX which crashed in a vm.
reply to: >A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases
That is a very techie solution that's not practical for "normies". Dual-boot creates the "2 os file systems" issue instead of having a single unified disk mount. Windows doesn't have a built-in way to read Linux ext4 file system. Linux doesn't have a bulletproof reliable way to read/Write NTFS partition (various tech forums mention data corruption). Unless one goes external with external NAS hardware and store all documents on an SMB mount -- but that also layers on more technical issues and doesn't work for laptops on-the-go being disconnected from the NAS.
Manufacturing and automation is another big one. Think about a water plant that is air-gapped but needs computer automation software to run. These things are everywhere, in every town that has indoor plumbing and sewer. The specialized software that automates these plants only runs on Windows. It relies on industrial hardware and touchscreens that are designed for use in harsh outdoor environments. All of these types of plants rely on high school educated operators that need to understand what's going on at a simple level. Having an OS that in any way relies on Internet access is a non starter. A Linux based system would be removed within a year of operation. You could get it approved maybe if you really worked at it but it would not be accepted in the long run, after the initial startup. There are physical constraints, technical constraints, and human/political constraints that are all working against Linux.
Most of that stuff is probably still running windows 98 or XP. If it's airgapped, and it works, and it controls a million dollar piece of equipment, then management will tell anybody suggesting it be updated to the newest windows version to stfu.
Also, the extent to which windows is needed to accommodate uneducated operators is overstated. A lot of industrial equipment runs other oddball operating systems configured by the manufacturer and machine operators don't need to know the difference because they just know which buttons to press to get the job done.
I work in a lab. Let me give you some ideea of what's happening:
- Some machines use embedded MCUs with no operating systems. I haven't seen one of these in the last 15 years. The last DNA extraction machine we got (a glorified sample shaker with 2 stepper motors) runs Win10! It has no keyboard, no network, and absolutely no ports of any kind (or at least not accessible without dissasembling the machine). A 8051 could do the job and still have memory left for Pong. [1]
- Very old machines run MSDOS and a proprietary software that directly talks to hardware ISA boards via I/O ports - no drivers. That software can't be ported to Windows2000+ because of the same reasons DOS games can't run in Win2000 - the kernel won't allow direct hardware access. Linux doens't allow it either.
- Newer machines run Windows 2000/XP/7/10, many of them offline. Some of them were updated to run Win10 from older versions, with the same app version (just Windows updated).
- Since Win10 can no longer be bought, newer machines run Win11 with permanent internet connection and they are minimally customized - the vendors left all ads, Copilot, Store and the kitchen sink installed. It's atrocious to work with those, but nobody cares. The management that make the decisions to buy the machines never ever touch them or even see them, and they don't take advice or feedback from us (or anyone else but accounting).
After rereading, it sounds like I meant for the two sentences to be related, but I didn't mean it that way. I was referring to the fact of Microsoft trying to force people to connect to the Internet before they can install Windows, or sign in with a Microsoft account in corporate infrastructure scenarios where that makes no sense, and so customers are forced to use Linux instead, but that's a complication being added to their overall system for external reasons.
A Linux-based system would be identical to a Windows-based system as far as operator experience goes. They interact with HMI software and only see the OS underneath when Windows pops up silly notifications and errors.
Windows owns the industrial space for historical reasons, mostly to do with OPC being Windows-only and software for doing maintenance on field devices originally running on DOS. It quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation - everyone wrote their software for Windows because everyone else wrote their software for Windows. SCO owned a decent chunk of the field before that, but we know how that worked out.
We're seeing some change now that OPC is being phased out. Ignition now has feature parity between Linux and Windows (barring OPC, of course). Windows won't go away any time soon (if ever), but you can now have a fully functioning SCADA system with no Windows at all.
For me it's ski race timing Software. Need a USB dongle and timing computer(a proprietary device that logs timestamps, prints and translates pulses offa wire into start and finish events to the PC Software) via USB. There's a lot of moving parts to manage, things like power to the USB, sleep etc. Bricking a ski race where thousands of volunteer, kid and coach hours have been spent in preparation for it is a nightmare. Last season our windows machines were in a Windows update death spiral on race day. The timing operators had no clue how to overcome it.
Yeah this is the way. I'm tented to go this route on my Mac but the licensing module won't work on ARM chips: Short answer: it’s not crazy to run Split Second in a VM—but only if you control the variables. The two biggest risk areas you called out (the USB license dongle and the timer I/O) are real. Here’s the straight path that works reliably, plus what to avoid.
Your go/no-go decision tree
1) If your MacBook Pro is Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3):
Running Split Second in Parallels with Windows 11 ARM is a no-go because the Sentinel/HASP hardware key that Split Second uses is not supported on Windows ARM. Thales (the dongle vendor) is explicit: “Sentinel HASP keys … are not supported” on Windows ARM; LDK works via emulation but not the HASP/HASP-HL USB keys you plug in.
I'm all for Linux, The difficulty of keeping it on the shelf for a year and then running it on race days when it's in full update mode on a crappy mountain Internet connection was a near disaster.
You can feed it the output from Kicad, and if you include the ipc netlist it’ll even generate models. Great for doing a check before manufacturing, especially if the viewer matches what you see in Kicad.
Unfortunately I’ve never gotten it to run in wine.
Agree on all points. Basically, Windows could suck to any degree whatsoever right now, it still has enjoyed an hegemony for decades and the vast majority of the population considers it the default, it's not impossible for this to change, but it's definitely going to take time.
Japanese Windows software mostly don't run, or does it badly, with Wine on Linux. Unfortunately. I've been a full-time Linux user since 1992 and this frustrates me. Some of the software won't even pass the install stage. I'm forced to run this on wife's Windows 10 PC, which has its own set of nightmarish problems.
Japanese software houses develop for one target: Windows. As a rule. They don't really know about anything else, except for the occasional support of Mac from some of them.
I've not really had a problem with Japanese software, but I mostly stick to old games and the like. You do need to make sure you install cjk fonts, and if your system locale isn't Japanese you need to make sure jp locale is enabled then set it before running with `LANG="ja_JP.UTF8"` (or possibly LC_ALL if that fails) but other than that I've not had any major problems.
I've used all the Japanese language and font settings (including your suggestions), and I have fonts installed, and for what barely runs this gets the fonts mostly working. It makes no difference for what doesn't even install. One example is 3D My Home Designer PRO (version 8 which is not the latest, but one I have a license for. From Megasoft, Japan). It's exclusively for Windows.
Another example (which is not licensed, and easier to test for) is Jw_cad https://www.jwcad.net/download.htm which actually installs and runs, it's just that it doesn't run well. Some stuff works, but it's not enough to make it usable.
I've run Japanese windows software under Wine, and with no configuration it was a sea of crashy mojibake. With the right locale configured, it worked fine.
Have you tried Bottles? I helped a friend a few weeks ago getting his game library to work after he migrated to Bazzite and there are a few games from Japanese studios / indie devs. It was mostly setting the locale for a separate bottle configuration and from there they installed and worked.
Installing a Windows VM is not really an option for me for various reasons, but in any case that's just.. running Windows. I don't have a Windows license either so I expect I wouldn't be able to anyway.
Yes, because as you said these applications only run on Windows. How else would you get around it, if not by running some form of Windows? At least this way, the core system (and 90% of general purpose applications) could remain on Linux.
> I don't have a Windows license either so I expect I wouldn't be able to anyway.
You can just use the install unlicensed, or, if your computer came with a Windows license (as most do), you can extract it from the motherboard and use it to activate the VM. Not sure if that's allowed in Microsoft's ToS though.
What's discussed in this subthread is running Windows applications under Wine. When it's running under Windows there's no discussion to begin with.
In any case, I'm not going to try to set up a Windows VM on my Linux computer, I don't have the room or if I had it would be better used for other things. And I just abhor using Windows, whenever I have to use the wife's PC it's hell. For her, too.. she can't find anything after she's saved something, for example.
And I don't have a Windows license, never had, my computers are all bare when new. In any case, it defies the whole purpose of not having to run Windows. Now, with Windows 11, it seems to be even worse. And I have zero idea on how to install Windows from scratch anyway - in my case I would probably even have to install a Japanese version, as is installed on my wife's PC. Well, not going to happen.
Okay, suit yourself, I don't exactly care. Most of the thread was about running Windows applications on Linux, wine is just one means to an end in that regard. I merely suggested another that may work for your specific use case, while still allowing you to retain Linux on root, as I do on my system.
Also, unless you're talking about desktop motherboards that you bought directly from the manufacturer, any laptops you have almost certainly have an embedded OEM Windows license key burned into them from the factory (and that's obviously without getting into any massgrave chicanery).
I suppose the difference in our views is pragmatic versus philosophical. I don't care whether something is running through a translation layer on Linux or technically "on Windows" in a stripped-down VM with telemetry removed, so long as my core system remains Linux and I can minimize my exposure to Windows without any application support hurdles.
Sorry, but could you list any program I'm never thought about japanese software and since I'm interested on japanese culture, I'd would like to know which kind of programs they are
they bring up a valid point: libreoffice is (in their opinion) harder to use and probably lower quality, so reports are harder to write and taking away time from more important things.
in my opinion libre office is absolutely good enough for this use case and thus not taking away significant time from other tasks. furthermore, the austrian armed forces are free to contribute to the project to improve the perceived paint points themselves.
on the other hand microsoft products are closed source and probably upload data to datacenters outside the customers (i.e. in this case, the militaries) sphere of influence. this may include the data (for storage and or AI training) and meta data (for advertising and telemetry).
microsoft may even silently introduce or reactivate (after they've been declined) those options after updates (don't quote me on this, but i think i remember this happening at least once).
microsoft apologists may argue that this is only the case for improperly configured corporate deployments, but as the software is closed source nobody can really be sure and if it's that hard to get right, it's a security problem in itself.
My point was rather that officers should have better things to do than feed the bureaucracy with reports no one will ever read, and so the harder you make it to write reports, the less likely they will do more of them!
Do you mean with the levels filter that Krita has, with the curves filter that Krita has, with the color balance filer that Krita has, with the slope, offset, power filter that Krita has, or with the hue/saturation/luma or red chroma/blue chroma/luma adjustment filter that Krita has?[1]
They are all available as non-destructive filter layers, by the way, and Krita users had access to this way before GIMP 3.0 was released with non-destructive filters.
> Do you mean with the levels filter that Krita has, with the curves filter that Krita has, with the color balance filer that Krita has, with the slope, offset, power filter that Krita has, or with the hue/saturation/luma or red chroma/blue chroma/luma adjustment filter that Krita has?
Honestly, I did not know that these existed in Krita (when I used Krita, I did not find them).
However, I still stubbornly maintain that I answered the question sufficiently, which used the qualifier "with a better UI".
Taking a leaf out of my wife's book "Even when I'm wrong, I'm right!* :-)
Why would anybody think it is a real alternative to upload your photos to website which is running proprietary garbage. Just use Adobe if you are going to do that.
I strongly prefer local software, but as someone coming from Photoshop who now only does the occasional edit (and therefore can't justify the price), I find Photopea to be a good alternative, especially since it closely mimics Photoshop's interface so I don't have to learn a new UI. Also, your images stay local on your computer and aren't uploaded to their servers.
It's developed by a single guy, which I think is very impressive given how much of Photoshop's functionality it has. I just really wish it were open source (and not a web app).
Yeah, right. I've the latest GIMP 3 on both Windows and Linux and an old CS4 Photoshop which I stopped updating years ago because of Adobe's ripoff prices and I continually find myself falling back to Photoshop because it's easier to use than GIMP (I'd prefer to switch to GIMP completely if it were easier to use).
Unfortunately, the authoritarian PIAs that develop GIMP have a rigid and inflexible mindset that stop GIMP becoming the default for millions of Photoshop users and or those who cannot afford Adobe's outrageous prices, and those who can no longer accept its draconian licensing terms.
In short, millions would switch to GIMP on Linux if it worked 'properly'.
I don't know why the Linux community doesn't put more pressure on GIMP's developers to comform. The percentage of Linux desktop users would increase considerably if they would.
Look at it this way: here's just one GIMP issue that turns away Photoshop users: why did GIMP's developers remove the perfectly functioning Fade feature in GIMP?
Yes, I know their stated reason and I also know the workaround but it's a damned nuisance to use.
By removing the Fade feature GIMP's 'high minded' developers have effectively done what mathematical types tried to do with the calculator when they introduced RPN/Reverse Polish Notation in place of the standard way of entering data.
Except for mathematicians, engineers, etc. RPN failed spectacularly—sure it is better but just too hard for mere mortals to grasp.
The bloodymindedness of GIMP's developers are deliberately holding back GIMP's adoption. They could have easily left Fade in place and just added their fancy sophisticated option for their propeller-head brethren to use.
Fixing some of GIMP's problems seems so obvious I sometimes think Adobe has placed a Trojan on GIMP's team to thwart competition.
Afterthought. Contemplating the above post a day later and thinking "yeah, right, that's typical me in hyperbolic mode when annoyed" but on refection would I change it?
No, I wouldn't; because I'm still annoyed and my frustration goes deeper than just GIMP and its developers, my issue is that the problems that plague GIMP also plague much open source software and we need to find solutions.
First, I'm a vehement supporter of FOSS and the need for more choice in the marketplace even if that means having more commercial software to choose from. As I see it, much of the key software (Windows, Android, MS Office, Photoshop, etc.) that monopolizes market now does so because of Big Tech's market domination—not necessarily because it's the best available.
It's the sheer domination of the software ecosystem by Big Tech that's the problem, thus good open source products such as Linux, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc. all struggle to get a mainstream airing irrespective of quality.
It's clear to me there are several important reasons why open source has not achieved a wider penetration amongst more general/less technical users. From that perspective FOSS software suffers from a fundamental and systemic problem which is it's principally developed by people who like developing code for its own sake who then open-source it for free.
Without the monetary incentive one doesn't have the right to demand of them the form software should take. Dictating how software should work and or what features it must have would serve little or no purpose, if they'd disagree they'd either ignore you or just pack up and leave the project.
The problem is obvious, FOSS developers are skilled and it's that skill that directs the way they'll tackle a project—thus the software ends up working their way and with features they reckon it should have—and more often than not this is in direct conflict with the way ordinary nontechnical users want it to work.
Despite my narky comments about GIMP's developers, I understand that in their technical judgment they had good reason why they omitted the Fade feature and I accept they are under no obligation to include a feature that from their perspective is out of place and does not logically dovetail with other features. Given also they're offering their time for free then there's really not much one can object to in the circumstances.
Nevertheless, that FOSS developers first and foremost develop software as they see fit and from their perspective and that that view often clashes with the requirements of nontechnical users poses a serious conundrum for open source software. The upshot clear: if ordinary users see no real advantage and or find it too difficult to convert to FOSS then it won't attract the number of users it deserves.
With commercial software user requirements are often determined by marketing based on user demand and programmers are obliged to program accordingly. When Microsoft says "we're about to start on yet another GUI for the next version of Windows" the choice is stark—knuckle down or leave. Without the monetary incentive, FOSS is at a significant disadvantage.
Let me offer my own perspective here. I am an IT professional and have been for decades. Moreover, I've headed an IT department where help-desk was a key service and from experience I know how difficult it is to get users to adopt new software packages, especially so when the replacement package offers essentially the same features, for example, replacing MSO with LibreOffice often meets with stubborn resistance.
Even I get annoyed when I have to change software and I find the UI and or features are noticeably different to what I'm used to. I'm an Arch user so I'm used to tweaking Linux et al but I deal with hundreds of different packages on Linux, Android, Windows and other setups and it's dead easy to forget the idiosyncrasies of a package that one hasn't worked with for several months. Having to relearn its features and quirks because its so different to what one was working on only moments before is not only time consuming but also a damn nuisance.
So from my perspective standardization is just about everything. Trouble is programmers all to often consider themselves 'artists' and unnecessarily keep reinventing the wheel. Look at the outrageous plethora of Windows GUIs. MS started out well by adopting IBM's well thought out CUA (Common User Access)† then essentially abandoned it for others that were often grossly inferior—think Metro for instance. And what about MSO's 'Ribbon'? The heretic(s) who devised that should have been condemned to time in the stocks. The unmitigated fucking hide of them to force millions of users to waste millions of manhours relearning functions that didn't need to be relearned. What is so outrageous was that after mandating the change to the 'Ribbon' those authoritarian shits at Microsoft could easily have left the old GUI there as a fallback option—but they didn't!
Who paid for those millions of wasted hours? Right, it certainly wasn't Microsoft.
This kind of outrageous and unacceptable behavior is why it's so important that FOSS be easy to convert to and be as compatible with the commercial product as is possible. With its Windows monopoly MS can afford to experiment with GUIs and weather the changes when they fail and still survive unscathed but I'd contend that in this regard FOSS is much more vulnerable.
In this regard we've witnessed a long lineage of failures in converting Windows users to Linux due to compatibility issues, despite the Linux brotherhood praising its simplicity the fact is that Linux is just too different to Windows for millions to make the leap. The problem is further compounded with the myriad of Linux distros available—and I'd venture that most Linux diehards have no idea the fear that that number of distros generates in newbies. FOSS developers should heed the message.
I am firmly convinced that the lack of consistency across FOSS development and its failure to adhere to uniform standards in the many instances where it's possible and logical to be consistent is a major impediment to its widespread adoption.
The other impediment slowing down FOSS adoption harks back to the fact that open source is free and without monetary incentives is that there are no guarantees that a FOSS project won't end up as abandonedware. I've long advocated a halfway revenue-neutral measure where certain FOSS projects only offer the source for free and charge a small nominal amount for binaries with licenses stipulating that one's only allowed to compile the source for one's own use—distribution thereof is prohibited. It seems to me most users would prefer to pay a small nominal amount of say $10 or $20 for the binaries. That way, developers could receive some recompense for their work, then they would have both the incentive to remain with the project and also likely to be more responsive to users' requirements.
I know I'm not alone in coming to these ideas, after I posted the above comment I came across this HN story that addresses very similar issues:
Anyone have a good suggestion for Linux dictation software? My friend wants to switch to Linux but he does all his writing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
How about OpenAIs whisper[0]?
My social science friends tell me it‘s been great for them.
Not sure whether data privacy et all would be an issue of course, but I guess you can just run it locally :)
Okay the fact that Talon Linux use Dragon via Wine successfully is a big vote of confidence. I was reluctant to recommend that to my friend after seeing Wine's status page for Dragon but I'll give it a go!
Thank God all other non-Russian companies not only condemn various atrocities around the globe but even support the affected countries being liberated by developing the high-tech armies of the good guys, right?!
The fact that all of the above is being presented as an exclusively Russian strategy. When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries. The tendency to omit pointing out non-Russian examples almost always indicates endorsement of their actions.
And let me beat you to this that I condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin. Unlike those who believe it is ok to side with one and not the other even if they do the exact same.
If you interact with American businesses, use American technology or pay taxes to any Western government, you're indirectly funding genocide, slavery, wanton environmental destruction and countless other crimes by the US, its allies and corporations.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, none of our hands are clean. We all deal with our complicity in various ways, and draw our lines in the sand where we will, but at the end of the day survival in this world forces us all to be hypocrites.
This is quite a stretch of mental gymnastics from the initial point, drawing a blatantly false equivalency between the consumer and the producer as an at attempt to derail and minimize the latter's direct contribution to the forced unethical consumption. And it's an especially absurd argument since it's impossible to ethically consume or even survive with such owners of the means of production.
And this whole falsely applied narrative is unironically a very frequent laundering tactic of their proponents.
And btw I don't even think most are really willing to accept the accusations of the American companies, as they've been told for centuries that these are the good guys.
You've done the thing where you've basically restated my argument and implicitly agreed with it but for some reason also framed your comment as strident disagreement and accused me of motives I don't have. Like many people here, your emotions seem to have poisoned your intellect. I assume you just skimmed my comment and got triggered?
I'm not drawing an equivalency between consumer and producer, I'm pointing out a relationship which, while unequal, still exists and needs to be acknowledged. I'm not attempting to derail or minimize anything. You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
Yes, it's entirely possible to disagree with the misinterpretation of an otherwise as-objectively-as-possible true sentence.
It seems like you're holding onto your initial position, applying the factually true statement:
no ethical (as in a way of not contributing to others' exploitation) consumption is currently possible
in an twisted manner. Which is also evident from the very last sentence, where you're suggesting only a form of ascetic lifestyle is able to absolve somebody, however one would realize such thing is both impractical and still impossible to do so under the current economic-political landscape. Not to mention that all this suggests that you, maybe unwittingly but still, tie civilization advancement possibility to the existence of an exploitative societal structure.
Instead of talking about the way it's currently shaped to be ran by those who are profit-driven, violently steal resources and contribute to exhaustion of all peoples around the world, you're simplistically reducing it to a matter of entire groups of people, ignoring their standing in the social strata, having to either choose primitivism or accept they're just as bad as their rulers. Even if you've disclaimed that you're not concealing any motives and the responsibility is unequally distributed, your adherence on shifting away from those in charge of the means of production, which is how you've chosen to initiate this very exchange, enables an interpretation of you implicitly defending them, and I believe that's also what anyone with an ounce of critical thinking ability would make of. I would be less critical if you at least suggested organization against the existing way the global socioeconomical system as an alternative, but the appeal to the adherence to an archaic lifestyle suggests this is not something you'd probably approve of. A positive surprise would be taking this for granted and you just condemning those willing to comply all along I suppose?
And throughout the entire history, it has been shown that these are the exact same accusations that have insidiously been made by whoever is directly behind exploitative administrations. They put the blame on those who are always barred from having any say/questioning the way their labor is being used, divide them, deject their protests and prevent overthrowing.
> You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
This whole narrative here really boils down to the Oh you like music? name every song meme.
P.S. I'd advise refraining from appealing to imaginary emotional reactions on behalf of the other party. It usually demonstrates inability to defend a particular view and deflects from meaningful dialogue.
> Outdated ffmpeg, good for dated formats, not good for new stuff
Just how new does the new stuff have to be? I use VLC daily (because even though we have 4x streaming services, when I want to watch 3rd Rock from the Sun, it's not on any of them.
Some of the very new movies are also not on any of the streaming services, so I am left wondering, if I downloaded a movie that was only torrented a few days ago, just how new does the movie have to be to be unsupported by VLC?
Uninstalled vlc ~two years ago, but from what I remember it was missing tons of optimizations with h265 and newer codecs, almost lacking proper av1 and prores support, HDR is terrible. I think it's dated by like 3-4 years.
Haven’t tried mpv but VLC is my go to for weird formats and streaming from random rtsp cameras. Maybe it’s outdated but a couple of years ago when I switched over from libffmpeg to libvlc it was because some cameras on site had weird auth problems with libffmpeg but worked when streamed through VLC. I swapped over and now those cameras work.
VLC always had the ugliest UI of the open source media players. It also renders subtitles in a really ugly way (at least the last time I used it, which is years ago).
I really appreciate VLC for how it can play just about anything, but it's a "player of last resort" for me.
A more difficult but potentially great solution is to run Linux as a the host system and windows in single purpose containers for each game/program that work better in windows. All the anti-user behavior will only have minimal harm if all the container does is to start windows and then start the game, then close when finished. Ads will not have time to be shown, and telemetry only has game data to give. It can take a bit of trickery to get anti-cheat drm to work.
Level1Linux yt channel talks about this setup in details. I think they are using looking glass and kvm. I have considered to try it out since it would reduce my windows footprint and containerize non-work from work.
MPV is a better recommendation than VLC and Although I am a huge open source fan, saying gimp is a good image editor is questionable though.
I have always preferred pinta for normal usage editing and although this might be shunned but idrc, but sometimes photopea can be also good software.
Regarding desktop environmnents, Just try anything you find interesting, KDE,XFCE,Cinnamon etc., you would be shocked by how snappy/minimalist somethings like XFCE are.
I use Softmaker Office on Fedora/KDE but Excel is the one Microsoft application I would pay for a Linux version. Even the Office Web version doesn't come close (though it is still a vast improvement).
I think the main issue for most casual users is the office suite and browser.
LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org unfortunately do not cut it for quirky functionality/aesthetics etc. The most polished alternatives Corel and WPS Office only WPSOffice have a ready deb/rpm installer while also having a collaboration feature inbuilt. Corel seems to have decided to concentrate on a windows only Law vertical , whererthey are admittedly not doing too bad.
Browsers should do most of whats neeed for the rest of the saas apps even the video collab apps like Teams/Zoom have a browser mode.
Latest Office or Microsoft365 is being turned almost into a Saas wrapper for the online app , while having an always on siphon for your data to the MScloud and ADs, so many intrusive ads all overthe place.
If its an older version that works i guess can be usable in a VM , but again this is for your casul office worker/parents etc.The least amount of friction will usually be best for adoption (see how zoom came out on top in the videochat space)
The 90% of games running on Linux does not say how well and what games. Sure I can play the Batman: Arkham Knight perfectly on Linux. However the game is a decade old now. Try playing some titles that came out this year and it going to be very variable, multiplayer titles are often a no go at all due to anti-cheat. You can argue to you are blue in the face about kernel level anti-cheat but at the end of the day if all your mates are playing X, you are just going to suck it up and play X.
There is enough issues running games on Linux that there are specific distros created for running games because everything from the kernel version, X/Wayland, Compositor and the pipewire version can affect immensely how well the game runs.
The overwhelming majority of games that came out this year are from smaller studios and will work perfectly on Linux. It's only the big budget "AAA" games with corporate publishers pandering to shareholders/investment firms which insist on custom DRM and anticheat which are a problem.
The big budget games are often the ones that people are playing. Sure there have been a few big flops as of late, but a huge number of people are playing that require kernel level anti-cheat and DRM that does not work on Linux.
There are also other issues around how well those games work. Some games will work perfectly fine. I am not disputing that. It is a bit of a lottery though e.g. I had annoying sound issues with Hell Divers 2 that was only fixed with an update to pipewire. Performance issues were solved by upgrading to Kernel 6.16.
On Windows I had to do literally nothing for the game to work perfectly (also don't believe some of YouTubers that are complaining HD2, their PCs were actually broken!).
Generally on Windows I have to do very little to get a game to work, outside of extremely old games from the late 90s/early 2000s.
On Linux, the really old games just work, as do virtually all new games with the exception of those very few big budget new releases. If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games. Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
> On Linux, the really old games just work, as do virtually all new games with the exception of those very few big budget new releases.
It really seems like you aren't reading what I said. I accept that old games will often work fine, provided they are on a store like GoG or Steam. Big budget releases are often what people want to play.
> If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games.
It isn't about what I want. It is about what is the reality for the vast majority of people. I would rather everyone play games that work on Linux. Unfortunately many of the people I play games like playing new titles, often they only work well on Windows. There is a social aspect of this that many people on here ignore.
> Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
They don't though. There are always odd issues with games e.g. borderless window doesn't work in a lot of games, because the mouse will get lost. Having that happen mid-match sucks, having fullscreen window has it own draw backs. I won't get into performance and sound issues as I've already explained the issues there.
I get what you're saying, the plurality of gamers want to play the new release AAA stuff. And the majority of movie goers want to see the latest Minions Emoji movie. And the majority of cheese eaters want to eat American cheese or at best Wisconsin cheddar.
These things are mass market slop which are engineered to be bland and predictable to make the most reliable returns for institutional investors. Discerning consumers know better and don't go by what's popular.
I don't think there is anything wrong with liking popular things and tbh this attitude that somehow you are better because you like more niche things is very close to snobbery. I am not saying that is your intention, but it can come off that way.
There are plenty of popular franchises that I've liked in the past. There are plenty of "slop" movies that I enjoy, I really like Mission Impossible movies, Fast and Furious movies. I've also liked some of the Call of Duty games. There is room for both.
For the "huge number of games work on linux" I wonder how valuable that really is to drawing people to linux as PC gaming has a challenge with huge numbers of releases that aren't noteworthy and don't have many players, I'd guess most of them are not doing anything technically novel or quirky (i.e. using a popular engine with minimal changes) so can easily be compatible.
Is there much value there for users or the linux platform? Some definitely, but it's not going to move the dial much compared to if say valve, codeweavers, or someone else could work with EA to get an agreeable solution that lets Battlefield6 work on linux, as an example with a large audience that's locked into windows to play what they want.
What do you mean by "really old"? My experience with games available on Steam has been fine(barring those big-budget ones), but I've had problems in the past setting up games from CD-ROMs that have DRM on them. Proton and Wine still don't play so well with SafeDisc or SecuROM, and traditional Windows workarounds(when applicable) often don't work on Linux.
The publishers almost certainly prefer that you play these "AAA" titles on console, but if you insist, they'll settle for making your Windows as console-like as possible.
I live fine without a console, so I live fine without a Windows gaming PC too. I don't think the AAA chasers have more fun than me when it comes down to it, dealing with these companies seems to be an aggravating affair even if you do everything the way they want.
It isn't that much of an issue gaming on Windows. Yes, I had to do a one time workaround for a local account and run a de-crapifier. But it wasn't that difficult. If it becomes too difficult I will probably drop Windows entirely.
I run into more problems with Linux than I do typically with Windows. I've been using Linux on and off since 2002. I don't particularly mind it, but I also don't pretend it is for everyone.
I am sure it is fine. HellDivers 2 (the game I like to play) needed a lot of messing about with to work well on Linux. It really depends on what game you are playing as to how well it works. Having the odd game that doesn't work is a deal breaker for a lot of people.
Gimp is NOT a good image editor for someone who uses Photoshop professionally. This idiotic claim keeps coming up, year after year, along with suggestions for opensource replacements for InDesign, Illustrator, LightRoom - there really really arent any valid opensource alternatives to most creative software apart from Blender, and Krita for a linited subset of what Photoshop covers. I would have switched to Linux immediately if it wasnt for Adobe
Outlook on the desktop is pretty much in maintenance mode only and Microsoft is already breaking it[0]. As for web version runs on linux just fine so you are in luck.
In general, unless you need advanced Excel features, you can switch to linux.
We use Exchange on-premises, and the web client is really bad.
While email is asynchronous and I can live with not seeing it all the time (I check it occasionally anyway), the calendar feature is a must, and specifically the reminders. This is why I cannot live without Outlook launched, and it reminds me of meetings I would miss otherwise.
Didn't expect onprem since microsoft has super weird requirements on it since v2019 and haven't properly maintained it for years (except now you are also supposed to pay for it monthly), but if you would suffer with the old web version, you may want to look into Evolution+ews which should be able to handle onprem exchange on linux. Unsure if it supports niche features like public folders but the normal stuff should be covered.
And the crazy thing is that while outlook is my life it's also unbelievably bad. Why can't I have the calendar and email client open at the same time? Why don't newly received email addresses appear in the valid auto complete for sending out calendar invites? Why is search practically useless?
I just installed Thunderbird yesterday, and it finally supports my work email flawlessly, and even the calendar works essentially the same as with Outlook.
Can you briefly explain what it is that you like about Outlook? I've had to use it at corporate clients, and I really detest it. The interface seems to suffer from that same ribbon-nonsense that Word suffers from. Its search is poor and slow. It offers very few display customization options. The calendar in particular is horrendous, I can't even seem to select a time block by clicking/dragging the way I've been able to do in Thunderbird for (probably) 2 decades.
Or maybe you're talking about needing Exchange integration? I don't know what the state of that is on Linux these days.
If only. Accessibility on Linux isn't as good as it is on Windows. It's getting better, but there are so few people actually working on it that it will take quite a while to get there. Which results in anyone who uses Linux who needs accessibility to suffer very weird problems like not even being able to install it because the installer is inaccessible in some way, or it flat out breaking depending on hardware or because the distro isn't setting obscure env vars that are documented nowhere except for mailing lists that nobody reads anymore, or weird things like that. It's been improving, but really really slowly, and Wayland didn't help things when they for the longest time refused to even consider the possibility of allowing global keyboard access because "security".
Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case. This is also why as you said, the amount of people working on it is low.
It is really not the limiting factor in Linux desktop adoption. The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
Buy the wrong laptop, and you have to fight with X, wayland and Nvidia graphics like a terminally inclined caveman in danger
Not only is accessibility important in and of itself, but starting with a clean, accessible base implies standardization and interop, and makes things a lot easier to automate and extend.
Things that challenge accessibility plugins challenge any plugins. Steps away from accessibility are always steps towards lock-in.
> The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
But you seem to desire this. Don't buy the wrong laptop if you like lock-in; Apple and MS aren't making their OS compatible with your every hardware whim. Or learn how to reverse-engineer and write drivers.
> Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case.
Spoken like a true techbro. This attitude is so incredibly destructive. Technology is how we mediate our lives, cutting a very large number of citizens out of that is simply wrong, even if 'the numbers just aren't there' (and they are!).
Not putting the focus in accessibility is not the same as cutting those people off. I think I get your point, really, because someone who needs this kind of aid and doesn't get it does definitely feel cut off and usage of everyday devices becomes and everyday battle. We are not going to disagree there.
But surely there can be a point in which there are larger problems than that Linux reached 5% adoption this year in the US:
That's better than what it was. It's also not a whole lot. But you must understand, the more people use Linux, the better it becomes. Even if value accessibility over other matters, increasing the market share surely will increase the amount of people working on accessibility too.
That whole way of thinking isn't appropriate. 5% is an insane number of people, when you are that large these things are no longer optional. The fact that we have an effective tech duopoly is not important at all. If the market were split between 20 5% players they too would have to ensure that their devices are accessible to all comers. The fact that 95% is split between two parties does nothing to change the responsibilities of a 5% player.
>That whole way of thinking isn't appropriate. 5% is an insane number of people, when you are that large these things are no longer optional.
And hardware compatibility issues are? The fact that orders of magnitude more people don't use Linux at all, disabled or not, because of lacking features or usability is optional?
If 5% of people is an insane number of people, surely usability for them all is more important than for a fraction of that? And again, this is not a product sold by a corporation. Leave features behind and adoption goes down, then you get no accessibility features at all. If you want more accessibility features, you want more developers. For that you want more usage.
Hardware compatibility issues are just a distraction in this discussion. You can do both. If all of the hardware compatibility issues would be resolved there would be some other excuse.
The entirety of this discussion has been about what should be prioritised in order to increase Linux adoption. You cannot do everything together all at once, especially with the limited resources of open source.
Since you're such a noble white knight, why don't you code up those accessibility features you think are the most important missing part ? I'll wait.
Did I advocate for lack of accessibility features ? I just pointed out that in this context there are things far higher in the priority list. Especially given the fact that there are accessibility features, just not on par with windows.
Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
> Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
Yes, absolutely. Linux is plenty robust and has lots of hardware that you can use today. The reasons people end up not using it are:
- Microsoft
- Lack of favorite application 'x' (see: Microsoft)
- Difficult to use (unfamiliarity plays a role here)
So yes, accessibility is a key factor, and not just for the people that have challenging bodies.
Well then we simply disagree. I would suggest to look up negative criticism for linux online (e.g. "linux sucks site:reddit.com" etc).
It is flooded by complaints about HW incompatibilities, HW acceleration not working etc. Haven't been able to find complaints about accessibility.
Furthermore, what is the percentage of visually impaired people in the US and what is the percentage of linux desktop users ? The numbers speak for themselves.
Uh... Yes, yes we do. You do realize that adding accessibility features (and I mean actually high quality versions of said features) helps everybody, right? It isn't a low-priority item. To pretend like it is just shows your ignorance.
I think that is the main issue. 90% games is a lot, but is not nearly enough when the most popular multiplayer titles simply do not work due to usage of anti-cheat. For example you cannot play the new Battlefield 6.
As for GIMP, while I understand it can do many things as Photoshop, it is not close in terms of features and the UX is unfortunately terrible.
While I can understand that it's frustrating. Kernel level Anticheat is a abomination in itself and should in no way be supported. It is a security flaw in itself!
It's also unfortunately impossible to have a good competitive multi-player online experience without kernel-level anti-cheat. It's simply too easy to cheat at many of these games in the absence of strict control measures, and even a single cheater can ruin a game session for every other gamer.
No one reached directly for kernel-level anti-cheat. It was the result of an escalation of the sophistication of cheating solutions.
GIMPs UX is wonderful, and Photoshop UX is poison. The problem is that after torturing yourself to learn Photoshop, and sitting in it for 8 hours a day (for many people; I worked in prepress) makes you think that it has been designed rationally rather than simply cobbled together and stuffed with ads. Illustrator, being older, is even worse.
People who work with Photoshop have never worked with any other thing. The way they learned to edit bitmaps was through Photoshop. They can't separate the act and the product in their heads. Thank god for Affinity getting into the mix.
One just has to deal with GIMP as it is, and stop trying to project Photoshop paradigms onto it. People just need to stop thinking of FOSS as the generic, off-brand or ersatz versions that pass or fail due to their degree of imitation of some other product.
IMO, every step GIMP takes towards Photoshop UI is a regression. GIMP's problems have been technical, such as color management and non-destructive editing, and they're gradually falling away.
LibreOffice is ok for reading and making minor changes to existing files but I haven't used Writer or Calc for anything new in years. LaTeX and Gnumeric are my tools of choice.
It's funny to see how Windows and Linux completely switched sides. Linux once being the clumsy one, hard to install, even harder to configure, mediocre UX, running on poor device drivers and requiring hours spent on the internet to solve a problem. Today, replace the "Linux" word with "Windows" in the previous sentence.
I've not seen the claim you're satirising in years. But I am still seeing the satire years after Windows became the third most common user operating system.
The first is Linux.
The only reason Microsoft can afford to treat Windows with such disdain is that desktop operating systems became an afterthought.
they have definitely not completely switched sides. Linux is still clumsy and hard to configure if everything isn't configured for you. Linux has worse UX than Windows has ever had (I'm including windows 8 in that comparison)
Really liking Linux doesn't make Windows worse, and it doesn't make Linux better.
Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it. Do not intervene. Now do that with a dozen different people on a dozen different machines which you do not preselect.
On Windows it is a much smoother experience.
I am making zero statements about any application compatibility or application comparisons between platforms. I am talking only about UX, UI, and installation.
Linux still has so, so very far to go.
And, honestly, there is no operating system which a complete newbie can start using without help in some form. Linux is not some golden child, here.
You like Linux on the desktop, and that's fine. Keep enjoying it. Just be aware that your experiences color your viewpoints, sometimes completely.
I am not a fan of Microsoft, I use Windows about once a month these days, but the UX difference between Linux and Windows is still very large. Very large.
> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it.
What a dumb analogy. My mother can use Windows very well, it doesn't mean she could also install it. The same rule applies to most Windows users. That's why it comes preinstalled, and not with an attached bootable USB stick.
UX of recent Windows versions is crap. The bearish tendency started with 8 and have never recovered, with Windows 11 being the cherry on top of the crap. Telling that as a user of almost every Windows version since 3.11. Microsoft completely changes user interface with every recent version, this is an anti-pattern in UX world. How is that I can smoothly switch between Debian and macOS major updates, and when Windows does the same it is a nightmare? "Oh no, where are the network settings again..."
Yeah, I don’t understand the parent commenter either. Even with my latest laptop, it took days and weeks to make everything work (like audio, my monitors, DPI, VLC/mpv, even networking). And even then I had to turn off some hardware functionality, because it’s so buggy (bye-bye battery life). And this is before introducing Wayland for example…
Also installing is way easier for beginners with Windows. I’m happy that Linux installation now at least reached the level of Windows 98, but I still need to search for things every single time, even when I do it about every other years for several decades now. Just because somebody thought that it’s so important to ask simple users about an implementation detail which almost nobody care about. And this is before bugs… which I encounter quite frequently.
It’s getting better, but by not much. It could be a very stable OS with the right hardware even 20 years ago. That didn’t change, you still need to be very careful if you want a good experience with Linux and a GUI. I had no laptop or PC in the past 30 years on which I could install Linux without serious hiccups if I wanted anything more than terminal. I could almost always make it usable (it was impossible with one laptop), but I always had to give up something, like battery life, game performance, my headset at the time, etc. And of course a ton of time.
That feels like bad luck to me. I've had a Dell, two Asus, and a ThinkPad over the past decade or so, and except for hibernate with the Dell, everything has just worked out out the box with no tinkering.
With 2 ASUS? You seem to be the lucky one, not me. ASUS is quite infamous for more than a decade about its bad Linux support. Basic things can work sometimes well, but you need to be extremely lucky to have one which really completely works as intended, like temperature control.
> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it. Do not intervene. Now do that with a dozen different people on a dozen different machines which you do not preselect.
Have you done this, or is this just a science fiction story? Have you watched a dozen people install Windows on a dozen different machines?
The reason people sorta know Windows is because they've already used it, not because it is good. And if you don't give them something straightforward like MATE or Cinnamon as a Linux desktop, you might as well compare it to new Vista users, not Win11 users.
You don't have to convince me that Gnome is bad. But everything else now pretty much follows the WinXP paradigm that we're all used to.
I think just saying "installing the OS" is a bit of a trap, that's step one, and important step but then you get to all the different subsets of features and software that they use, including not included in the OS or its repos.
When you're looking at consumer usage of a PC for anything that remotely makes sense to do on that platform I think windows has the advantage of decades of a different software ecosystem. Cumulatively there's a huge broad library of software that linux can't touch, or gets partway there but falls short. For example I can tag music files on linux, but it's painful compared to something like Mp3tag (which has been going for about 17 years). Or if I want fan control on my 9 year old intel platform I need to learn about and add a kernel parameter and manually detect sensors before I get started whereas it's straightforward on software available on windows.
Well, the comment I was replying to cited ease of installation, so I did, too.
> Linux shoots itself in the foot just because Windows has two feet
This is exactly the opinion that everyone who is not accustomed to all of the GNOME nonsense gets after using GNOME. And GNOME fans are far too used to things to even hear that it is imperfect.
It's funny how we see these threads every few months, and it's always the same thing (referring to the discussion below this comment as well).
Linux people (myself included) are utterly blind to the rough edges on Linux. Even something like Mint, which is probably the best starting place for someone coming from Windows, can have weird issues depending on your hardware.
On the other hand, Windows users are hilariously misinformed about the state of the Linux Desktop. To hear them talk you'd think we're still back in 1997.
All of that said, for anyone curious, it is 100% worth trying out. Linux has come a LONG way. Mint is great for general usage, Bazzite is a good choice for gaming. Unless you're playing competitive shooters it's basically a guarantee the games you want to play run on Linux. There will be some rough edges and stuff to get use to, but IMO it's worth a try at least.
To be fair to Linux, Windows has many, many rough edges as well. The difficult part for newbies is that those rough edges are _different_. In the long run I feel pretty confident saying that Linux is overall better, and that's because of the customizability. Ultimately, with some experience, one can essentially choose one’s own rough edges :P
On Windows they are mostly off the beaten path. I have a Windows PC setup as my media computer because my wife doesn't want to deal with Linux, and I've never once had an issue with the audio or Bluetooth.
On my Fedora desktop and Arch laptop I have audio/Bluetooth issues at least every couple of weeks.
In addition, my wife needs access to Adobe products, my brother needs access to Office. Those are non-negotiable for them because in both cases it's for work.
I'm a Linux fan, I don't even want to go back to Windows for my personal computer, but Windows is still a smoother experience for the majority of people.
I'd rather suspect it has a lot more to do with 40+ years of application backward compatibility and the ludicrous stack of software available for the platform.
Presumably the it here is Linux? That’s not what I would have said. The terminal makes maintaining your own systems much easier because it’s all text. Opposed to having to mix screen shots and instructions. Which is to say, I don’t imagine people who can’t handle the terminal (and are on Windoz) are doing any maintenance or configuration beyond a few GRRR items they’ve convinced themselves is ultimately intolerable.
From a small business I’d say what keeps the accounting office on Windoz is software (ie. quickbooks, excel). But a close second would be tighter integration of file management and core office apps (ie email). It’s very easy to rename, move, copy, files on windows. You can perform many of these file management tasks inside an app experience (ie saveas dialog box). Apple has the mindset with their suite of Apple productivity apps, Chromebooks are very easy for general users to get their head around. If Linux could roll up a Chromebook environment with a QB clone into an expert system (e.g. no. We don’t need pictures, videos or games folders), I think our firm would consider the switch. It would certainly have the appearance of stability productivity, and simplicity which is always a plus when your job is not maintaining IT systems. (Now we just need to find new outsource IT for troubleshooting)
To me it's sad that Linux never became a good desktop OS, Windows just became worse and worse until it became worse than Linux :(
When I upgraded to 7 I tried Linux and I simply hated that I had to deal with the terminal and install strange third-party programs from strange forums to get anything working. Then I had to upgrade to 11 and I had to run strange terminal programs to install it without without creating a Microsoft account, and everyone recommends using some third-party Windows power tools to fix what Microsoft did to Windows. I could not believe it. IT IS THE SAME THING!
Now I'm using Linux, and I don't like it, but least it isn't spyware.
Fwiw I had to report one of those "free win11 activated" videos as it was having users download and run a script from a suspicious source and handing full domain admin to a 3rd party.
Having once worked with maintaining an ancient 3rd party windows desktop app, I'm surprised you don't have problems with them on recent windows. I guarantee you the developers do. They must be truly heroic maintainers if none of those frustrations bleed through to you.
A time will come when the easiest way to run these beasts is in a docker container running wine, and I don't think it will be long.
Plenty of frustrations pass along to me, but I am sure that the developers maintaining the software are also putting in a massive shift to make it all keep working. These companies are often quite small, or small underfunded teams within larger organisations, and I believe that they are doing a fantastic job working with what they have.
New features are few and far between, but that doesn't mean that they're not doing a good job. The current state of the industry is not a reflection of the developers working on it today, it's a decades long legacy.
I hope you don't mind being a bit curious about this, as a hobby driver.
At what level of motorsports are you working? It sounds like you both semi-regularly work with new teams. And are you working with them as a programmer? I'd be curious to know what kind of applications you're then working on, if so.
I work primarily with GT3 teams across the highest level championships (WEC, IMSA, DTM, GTWC, ALMS), with a variety of manufacturers.
With a small team of software engineers and data scientists, I'm building a cloud based motorsports data analysis platform which eliminates the friction involved in handling motorsports data and the differences between different manufacturers' software systems, and quickly gives drivers & coaches insights on how to improve their driving. So this involves getting into the weeds of a lot of this legacy software.
There are a few teams I work more closely with where I've set up their entire trackside network/tech stack, although nowadays I'm more focused on the software. Over the years I've done a bit of everything at the track, up to and including physically laying cables in a bare garage or setting up the systems on the car, although I don't do anything related to vehicle dynamics.
If the software is as ancient as you say, then surely you should be able to get away with installing an old copy of Win7 or even older? When you say "weird networking" do you imply internet as well? If it's all offline and only locally networked I see no reason why you need to run a modern version of windows.
Considering I can find plenty of nonstandard Windows 11 install guides on youtube I don't think this guys video was taken down for that reason. Most likely hit with automated moderating and he probably said "kill" in the video while giving instructions. That could trigger the violence filter and now he gets tons of more views from idiots thinking Microsoft and Google are working together to protect Win11 from a supposed massive wave of people going around the sign in requirement. Or whatever other grievence they have with Windows.
I wiped Win11 from my Ideapad and installed Ubuntu. I love Gnome & it's the closest it'll get to MacOS (am a Mac user mainly). Win11 was absolutely wild though - around every corner was some ad for Office365 or Copilot or some other shit product. You don't own Windows (anymore) - you borrow it.
1. Needs to fix keybindings, including setting readline shortcuts across all gui textfields. May be effectively impossible with so many gui toolkits floating around.
2. Needs a gui to manage configuration of startup items, login items.
3. Portable application distribution rather than futzing with installing a third party package source (may be effectively impossible for gui apps).
4. Cleaner systemd configuration tooling and especially documentation, even if it can't be expressed via a gui.
5. Cleaner process management.
6. Cleaner user management via GUI.
The look and feel mostly doesn't matter tbh; you'll just end up with something that looks like macos but still mostly functions like windows but without consistent keybindings or behavior or system management.
As a lifelong Mac user, I'm mildly tempted to do something like this in SteamOS, but with limited real estate: two panels feels like potentially wasting pixels, and the bottom edge is probably easier to reach on a touchscreen gaming handheld. I'll do some tweaking, but the ultimate UX has to feel right on this device, not just familiar to what I use elsewhere. Plus, I mostly use Desktop Mode for Chrome, which doesn't really use the menu bar.
To install Windows 11 with a local user and/or to install it without the TPM 2.0 requirement, what I found easiest was using Rufus to prepare a flash drive with the Windows 11 ISO. Rufus asks if you want to create a local user and what the user name is. It also asks if you want to skip some of the Windows 11 requirements. Then when you install Windows 11 using the flash drive it just works.
The main issue is how opaque the system is, though that may also be a feature to limit people’s abilities in figuring out how to bypass various restrictions. No one should have to risk the existence of their channel and livelihood to some unknown automated algorithm. Although the reddit post only cites videos from one person running into this issue, the first video link has comments referencing someone else so I found a video from that other person as an additional data point.
I imagine youtube has the same automated system comply with eu, but the videos linked in the reddit post mention how quickly the appeals were denied, so accessing and contesting decisions alone doesn’t fix the automated system problem.
Oddly enough, I had the simplest experience of installing Windows 11 25H2 on a new ThinkPad just recently. Apparently the Windows ISO doesn't have the WiFi drivers for that specific machine out of the box, so during setup when it couldn't find an internet connection, it simply offered to create a local account.
So I would assume, if there is a way you can temporarily disable networking (e.g. in BIOS), then that would be the easiest way to avoid creating a Microsoft account.
I wonder if that is something new in 25H2 then. My computer also does not have working network drivers out of the box and when I installed 24H2, it just gave me a screen to install the network driver from a flash drive. There was no way to skip or continue without it.
They have been taking down a lot of YouTube videos with Bob Dylan botlegs in the recent days, so maybe the platform is becoming more restrictive with everything, not just Windows 11 installs
The Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 will be released on Friday. If it's material in that timeframe, it's probably a Sony/Columbia DMCA issue or from google music file matching songs that are (soon to be) officially released.
90% of software does run on Linux, but if the software you really care about/need for your job/need for your hobby doesn't, then it might as well be 0%. You are going to use Windows then.
In some cases, you might be able to find (or write) an alternative program (or modify an existing one to do what is needed). This is not always so easy, but sometimes it can be done, and it can sometimes be done better than the Windows version. (It is what I did with the one Windows program I did want to run on Linux.)
The writing has been on the wall for years. Die hard windows users have been telling me that the increasingly esoteric incantations needed to install Windows without submitting to giving Microsoft your identity are a deliberate and officially supported feature which they can rely on even as the common proles are herded onto Microsoft's plantation. I wonder if any still really believe it. The best time to jump ship is now.
Does anyone have links to "how-to's" for Linux in the enterprise? Password/MFA management, central app management, the equivalent of group policy, device management, etc.? IME, these are the areas in the enterprise where Windows "wins" with the IT teams, but it's been a long time since I've been close to the rollout side of the house. TIA
There isn't really a polished and comprehensive singular thing to accomplish this the same way you would with Active Directory in Windows world. Then again, AD is really not a polished thing either its more of a duct-taped stack of crap.
Mirroring "the unix way" it is often a collection of single-purpose tools composed together to achieve the desired goal. Samba is quite powerful these days, it does more than just SMB sharing. FreeIPA is another software tool that I believe is more common in Red Hat deployments.
It's as if the web as we known it has outgrown it's usefulness to individual people beyond interacting with companies and government.
Time for something new. No idea what, but we need a way for people to share with people... That's what made usenet, then the web so awesome. Both were mostly wrecked by the same commercialization.
In my bright-eyed geeky youth, I kept thinking that clever technology was usually enough to solve problems.
Nowadays, I feel many problems are emergent from economic and legal structures, and a new software project is often just temporarily treating a symptom.
It won't "cannibalize" the PC market share. But I would argue that the overall market share is irrelevant. Most people don't even use Adblock/UBlock for Web browsing, so they don't even know what's best for them, and therefore are likely to just go for the cheapest option that gets the job done. Apple won't win them over, because that's not how Apple operates.
Another huge segment is people who just use whatever their work provides.
Laptop users who 1. care enough, 2. have the means, and 3. have the inclination to even get a personal laptop are a solid minority. Which coincidentally is how Microsoft gets away with the disaster that Windows 11 is. They have about _no_ user-customers left.
I know plenty of PC-hardliners that have switched from Windows to a Mac in recent years. And exactly nobody who has switched in the opposite direction.
I'm also pretty sure that most people who have personal laptops keep them around for 5+ years before upgrading. I myself had a 2015 15" MacBook Pro that lasted me until 2022 when Ventura support was cut off. I only upgraded it in 2023 when Apple launched Advanced Data Protection, which I was very keen to use, and had to make a choice between logging out of iCloud or buying a new MacBook. So seeing that the 2015 model had indeed reached it's useful life for me, I got myself a M2 Max 16", which I also fully expect will last me 7+ years.
So as long as IT procurement in most companies will keep buying whatever cheap PC laptops they can by weight, PC market share is safe, and Microsoft is doing the best they can to keep it that way. Apple can only compete for users who have the will and the choice. And the $699 MacBook will quite likely capture a few of them.
Additionally - I have a PC too. All it does is it runs videogames. In fact I use my personal PC a lot more often than I use my personal MacBook.
> And exactly nobody who has switched in the opposite direction.
This might be an issue with your optics. I personally know at least 4 people who left MacOS for Linux in the past decade, 5 if you include myself. 2 of those people aren't even programmers, they're just sick and tired of macOS turning into Windows.
The $699 Macbook will not capture any users that missed out on the M1 Macbook Air. It just won't. We already saw Apple try pushing the whole 12" Macbook vs 13" Air shtick, not only did it fail commercially but it gave people a terrible impression of the ecosystem. I cannot imagine any world in which "quite a few" people switch from Windows to a Fischer Price operating system.
This is probably youtuber drama about some random youtube algorithm led takedown and likely nothing to do with Microsoft or the actual content of the video that got taken down
There isn't presently a good solution to this. I think regulations like that will probably have downstream effects, kicking the can down the road.
Google is already bad enough at government collusion, divulging data, as are other infrastructure providers.
Best-case is gutting Alphabet and breaking it up to the effect of decentralization of its pieces.
I think if anything regulating the current instruments would just harden their social/political position which furthers their interests more than anything.
Regulations will just make it easier for the powerful incumbents to control what content the platforms are allowed to host.
Deregulation is the solution here- get rid of DMCA and all the other laws that are used to bankrupt any competitor to YouTube, so that instead of a single video hosting site, we have tens, hundreds or thousands.
The dream of the early web was that everything would be resistant to censorship and centralized control because it was a true network of many independent hosts, globally distributed, independent from the whims of any government. Then we let a few billionaire copyright holders and authoritarians who want to control what is published and seen gradually strangle the open web and replace it with a handful of corporate sites that can be controlled.
We regulate many privately owned utilities. They aren’t allowed to just deny you power or water based on your politics or pressure from another corporation or whatever.
My understanding was that you can install Windows 11 Pro, and tell it that you want to join a domain and in that case you're prompted to create a local account. That generally seems like the easiest option, even if the $45 price difference seems a little much.
I think the challenge with 10 IoT LTSC isn't going to be the OS itself, but the software running on it. Lots of software uses chromium embedded, and in the case of win7 the day that extended support (+3 years) ended CEF also dropped support and required features only found on more recent windows releases, then as other software updated their CEF dependency they also dropped win7 support. It might not be a major thing, but there is a slow erosion that goes beyond whether the OS gets patches. If nothing else, if it's a machine that uses software that goes online it's a notice that you should investigate moving to something else eventually.
Win10 IoT LTSC does not cover all use cases though.
When it comes to gaming, for example Windows Mixed Reality is not included and cannot be installed afterwards (but then again, Microsoft dropped it from Windows 11 too, so no loss there).
Only way to keep it is staying with consumer Windows 10 or use 3rd party software like Oasis.
Problem with 10 LTSC is the fact that it's based on 21H2, and there definitely isn't going to be a feature update for it, now that 11 LTSC is out. Some games already require 22H2.
If you practice good operational security and maintain a decent anti virus and fire wall you will probably be fine. I know people who still run Windows 7 to this day with no trouble because they are vigilant of what they are doing.
This isn't to say it's a good idea but that it can be done.
If you plan on running win 10 anyway Ask Leo has a video called "how to keep using windows 10 safely after support ends" with some solid advice
While you're at it, you might as well downgrade to Win7. No jokes aside, if all the software you want runs on it, it is fine. Just no security update etc.
I would suggest just switching to Linux and using a VM for things that NEED to be Windows. Games that run kernel level Anti-Cheat won't run, but tbh nothing I would suggest installing anyway.
The big two that spring to mind are online games and Adobe softwares. I don't think a VM can usually meet the performance needed for either.
I do wish more artists would take a chance on open source softwares, but most of the ones I know are still insistent that nothing can ever come close to Adobe. But that's a rant for another time.
Games run pretty great on Linux, but if you do want a VM, passing through a graphics card to that VM via vfio provides 95%+ the performance of native.
Virtual reality headsets with dual 4K screens running at 75Hz+ perform well on a Windows VM done that way. A normal flatscreen game is going to be just fine.
I stayed on Win7 until December 2023, until there was some exploit that was attackable by just viewing an image, so just browsing the web would've made it vulnerable (I believe in the WebP format).
Although it seems there are people still Frankensteining Win7, and even patching DLLs to make the newest browsers/apps still run on it.
Famously MS Teams was really screwed up, but I had to use it for work..
The problem is not the lack of patches. The problem is with websites refusing service based on client's version from the user-agent or breaking by using cutting edge features without a polyfill.
I tried different AIs to make the scripts to automate installs in DosBox-X as long as you have a product key and ISO or other media.
Most interesting to me was the different quirks between OSeS. NT was the most tricky in getting to work on DosBox-X and syncing up internet, IIRC. But overall a very fun project. Brings back nostalgia of 3.5" disks and seeing those install screen. Very cool times in the 90s ha! :)
The number of Linux fanboys coming out of the woodwork to complain about Windows (and to provide anecdotes about Windows which are clearly exaggerated) is very high.
Please read the Linux Advocacy HOW-TO.
Shitting on Windows and MacOS does not make you look authoritative, honest, or credible. It makes you look like you have a very strong opinion and shut off from anything that does not conform to your opinion.
no, of course not. I swear to God, reading comprehension among Linux fans falls lower and lower every year.
shitting on them makes anything you say about a competing operating system appear like fully biased opinion, rather than fact. if you want people who you have not already captured to listen to you, you must do your best to appear unbiased. shitting on anything is 100% bias. and if you have opinions like that, how can someone you're trying to win over trust that the positive things you're saying about this other thing aren't also 100% opinion?
Stick to the facts if you want to ever hope to do anything other than make Linux fans appear like they are rabid dogs who attack anything they don't like on sight.
You can do that if you want, I don't care. But I don't go to rabid dogs for their opinions when it comes to choosing things, and no one else does either.
You say things like this to get a mob going, and I want you to admit that. you all shit on things you don't like because you want to feel heard by others who also shit on those same things. but people who aren't like that come here and they read this stuff, too. And you're shitting on them in the process.
I wonder if they supported piracy as well in those videos, or something breaking their EULA or something. People always come out swinging, fuck corpos, etc, but oftentimes there is something shady going on as well, either consciously, or unconsciously.
Windows 11 is definitely not in my future so I do not care about this, but it's the same crap as when they removed downvotes due to Disney and Biden's Whitehouse getting ratioed to hell. YouTube/Google is not your friend and does not care about you. As long as you understand that, you should not be surprised as you always expect things like this.
The videos being taken down here are about how to avoid: Windows requiring a Microsoft account to install, and Windows only being installable on compatable hardware.
AFAIK an apple account isn't strictly required, but a lot of MacOS won't be functional without one.
How is a Macbook better than Windows in these senses?
You can use mac, ipad and iphone without apple account at all.
You can use app store without logging to icloud.
You can install apps without app store.
There is no nagging to use icloud after initial setup.
There is no spyware and adware integrated into standard apps or OS itself.
Apple does not sell user data.
"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."
At the very least, there is a little bit of spyware integrated into the OS.
The later Intel Macs with T1/T2 chip also come with a number of caveats on Linux. Don't expect those to work out of the box with standard Linux distros.
I would rather be subjected to fingernail torture than deal with the productivity implosion that is using macOS. It isn't meant for users who do more than stare at webpages. And the workaround apps to give it more productivity such as actually useful taskbars are buggy as hell fighting Apple's trash.
I am a die-hard Linux guy and I have to use Windows for certain things. One of those is multiplayer games. I am never buying a Mac. I've owned 4 macs over the last 20 years and I've regretted every purchase.
I've only ever used windows. Recently got a mac mini so I could compile for iOS. I'm debating embracing the entire Apple ecosystem given I use iPhone. Not a huge fan of iCloud's pricing though. Curious what issues you ran into with your macs/Apple experience?
I had the following problems. Note my hardware was ageing at the time and was about 5 years old.
I know a quality apple specialist that did the work.
- Glue'd in batteries on Laptops. I had a Mac Pro with a glue'd in battery. I could have done it myself, however I ended up opting to get someone who knows what they are doing to replace it. Labour and battery replacement cost me about £250.
- Official charger made the power lines toast. Another £250 to get it repaired.
- iOS Safari browser sometimes stops videos / audio when the screen locks or you switch apps. It is really annoying. Doesn't happen on Graphene OS or Android.
- iCloud is kinda required if you use an iPhone even though I don't use it for backups.
- Upgrades just aren't possible. Every single on of my laptops I have, I have upgraded ram, disk and even processor on some of the older models I have. I changed an intel Mac Mini drive to an SSD, it was a fiddly to say the least. On other SFF machines it is often a 5 minute job.
- MacOS is kinda just weird. While it is a Unix, it does everything it can to hide it. As someone that used both Linux/BSD. MacOS feels like running a weird Linux distro. Brew was kinda weird after coming from Linux world. I would have just preferred to run Linux.
- The online account stuff with Apple is somehow worse than Microsoft.
These days I buy refurb Business Laptop from Dell or Lenovo. Literally 10% of the price, Linux almost always works and if breaks, I can buy another one cheap for the same price as repairing an Apple machine. I get it, they are not as nice but for me they work fine and are much cheaper.
For me it was the keyboard shortcuts and mouse behavior differences. That plus the homebrew weirdness trying to emulate Linux package management. I decided to just use Linux.
Ultimately, Linux is a development environment for Linux, and by extension the most developer friendly OS imo.
I’ve gotten used to the mouse behavior and keyboard shortcuts.
One thing that drives me nuts about Linux is that application support generally isn’t as good as Mac. For example, there is no Claude Desktop app for Linux nor an Apple Music desktop app. If you need those, you’re using somebody’s hacked together project that half works, a web version with limited features, or paying for a third party app.
One thing I do not understand about HN and other online tech communities is how much they hype up linux as some paragon of usability and ease of use, when it's just obviously not the case.
"You don't need windows for gaming, 90% of games work on linux!" -- except the 10% that DON'T are all of the new, massive titles that people want to play. It's like saying "90% of the gears in the car work fine, just not 1st gear".
"There are 0 driver problems" -- obviously not true as some hardware only ships with windows hardware. Yes it's true your new network card or mouse won't have issues, but a lot of hardware simply doesn't have support, and a lot might be supported if you spend enough time fanagling.
"it's just as easy use as windows or mac" -- until you need to change one of many settings that hasn't been included in a control panel, because linux users have been more than happy to drop to config files and cli usages to tweak things (i.e. lots of stuff left out of system GUIs)
I don't know why people do this. Especially in communities that are technical (and thus tend to be "technically correct" about things), why people essentially lying (by omission, if nothing else) about Linux?
> the 10% that DON'T are all of the new, massive titles
That's not true? Arc Raiders, arguably the most-hyped game of 2025, is day-one compatible with Linux devices. I played the Server Slam free weekend on my NixOS machine, clearly not all of the new massive titles are broken.
You can't abuse hyperbole like this while accusing other people of lying.
I was with you until "essentially lying." That's not fair. You can disagree - but calling people liars who express good faith beliefs is uncalled for. Many people genuinely believe that Linux is the better desktop OS.
But yeah, I run Windows as my daily-driver for pretty much the reasons you give.
OK, they aren't lying. They're just saying untruthful things to support their cause.
Linux is not a 100% replacement for Windows, and the reverse is equally true. LibreOffice is not MS Office except for being open-source. Your pocket tool is not functionally equivalent to a full toolbox. A turducken is not a pheasant. Etc.
For those who care at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10
CMD will open
Type (no quotes) “net user Prefferedusername /add” (replacing Prefferedusername with the user name you wish to use) and press enter.
Next type “net localgroup administrators Prefferedusername /add” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /active:yes” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /expires:never” and press enter.
Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.
Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.
Next type "regedit" and press enter.
This opens registry editor, navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE"
Delete "DefaultAccountAction", "DefaultAccountSAMName", and "DefaultAccountSID"
Right click on "LaunchUserOOBE" and rename it to "SkipMachineOOBE" and make sure the value is set to "1".
Close registry editor and type "shutdown /r /t 0"
I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here. I could see screenshots maybe being slightly helpful, but to having this sort of thing as a video feels like an extreme inconvenience; I'd much rather see all of it at once and be able to visually scan (or even better, ctrl+f) to find specific parts over having to scrub around if I wanted to go back to a previous part or skip ahead. My eyes also don't require any sort of manual timing to pause on something I want to copy.
It's telling that most of the responses to this question center around why the YouTube video creator would want to make a video instead of a simple text description, not what the OP asked: why the user would want to intake the information by way of video.
Says a lot about what is broken, incentive-wise, about the modern Internet.
I think it says more about most people not wanting to bother to read.
Modern social media has only succeeded by moving away from text, and meeting the masses where they already are. They mostly don't want to read.
Definitely there has been a shift towards video content.
But I think there is a discoverability dynamic at play as well. Finding a blog post that isn’t garbage can be harder than finding a decent video on any given topic. This is clearly a feedback loop towards video but I think partly this is because up until now you couldn’t just create a spam video channel with the same ease that you could a spam blog.
How so? People like to learn in various ways, some people like to read, other people like to inspect someone else doing it in real time.
I don't see an issue with there being multiple ways to learn how to do something, whether it be textual, images or video.
For this type of thing having a video running in the background while I punch in the commands makes sense, I can perform the actions at the same time the video does.
Videos get higher rankings in Google's search. Remember those?
Definitely says something about your age though complaining about video versions of anything. Kids today don't even know what Google's search page looks like. They search in YouTube, TikTok type apps first. Since the location bar has also become the search bar while theGoogs pays browsers to be the default search, lots of people are not even aware they are doing a google search.
Also, some people will try things that are technically above their abilities normally. Having a video typing the commands in can be easier for them to replicate as it'll look just like the video. Text only from some webpage won't have those visual clues.
I much prefer text for this stuff too, but at least I can understand why something else is preferred by someone not me. I might be elder, but I'm not obstinate
Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing". I'm not claiming that there can't possibly be a reason that videos might work better for some people, but I don't think you've made a particularly strong case that you understand their mindset rather than judging them under the guise of claiming that I was the one doing that.
> Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing".
Not an argument. It's an explanation. Stop with the antagonism.
No, you're old man yells at clouds with the entire comment. Someone likes something you don't prefer, and want to share that with the internet. That's great, but you have to know that someone will call you out on it.
Some people like blue, some people like red. Some people like audiobooks, some prefer reading actual books. Some people like to go to movie theaters, some prefer to wait for the movie to watch at home. Some people like cilantro.
The internet is a big place. There's room for multiple ways of skinning the cat without preventing any of the other ways.
Video format is objectively lower bandwidth (information-density-wise) than text regardless of age.
That assumes that how young people use the internet is inherently better than how we use it.
I can get the same information only without the ads and parasocial relationships with content creators. Not making anyone money!
This was a good comment until it suddenly became bizarrely insulting in the last paragraph.
I don't feel I was insulting at all. If you feel obstinate is an insulting word I really don't know how to respond as anything else will probably feel as an attack on you now. I guess I could have said non-empathetic, but we're not talking about feelings so much as valid reasons someone prefers A over B.
I share your bias, but something to consider is the prevalence of smart phone usage these days, and the fact that reading text on a smart phone can be as awful as trying to watch a video on a desktop when all you want is a quick text summary.
I've always hated the trend of moving towards video as well. But if my desktop was currently in the process of installing the operating system, leaving me without a web browser, and all I have is my phone as a secondary device ... I might actually prefer watching a quick video over trying to read text on a tiny screen and having to pinch zoom and horizontal scroll. Of course this depends a lot on how the text is presented, but in general I think video is easier to absorb on a phone and text is easier to skim / read / zoom / copy-paste on a desktop.
Reading a brief article on a smartphone is far less tedious than having to squint at details in a miniscule video.
If you can't read normal text on a phone screen, consider corrective lenses.
Youtube creators want to cover this, youtube is their chosen path, so video it is.
Not so much about the best way to communicate as much as the creators see it as their best option, for them.
I've seen a lot of tutorials that really just seem to be infotainment / social media news. Often forgetting critical steps and describing why you do a thing incorrectly. It's frustrating.
Exactly this. If I have 100,000 followers on YT for my software related content, why wouldn't I use that platform to post my content? Some people are also visual more visual learners and while straight text is helpful, having a trusted source going screen by screen/prompt by prompt and comparing to their machine is helpful.
So it's both content and communication preferences. HN is a self-selecting group of a certain type, but not everyone on the planet thinks like the average HN dude
Just yesterday there was a post to one of Geerling's pages where he posts the transcript to a video he's made. He could have just made a text blog and not spent the extra effort of making a video, but that's not what he does. Instead, he went the extra step to make the content available in text only. He could have just as easily left it as video only. (yes yes, creating a text only transcript of video in today's world is trivial, but an extra step nonetheless as it still needs to be added to his CMS to make the webpage)
I think non-technical people, who may have literally never seen a commandline, like seeing someone walk through it (and probably explain context along the way). Helps ensure them they are doing the correct things.
I've seen probably too many terminals, but a video that actually demonstrates things (when to press the keys, for how long, what's the expected response from the installer, and so on, and so on) seems super helpful and easy to follow! (Even if it's worse in many regards, like terseness, accessibility for blind people, and so on.)
Agreed. Also people tend to add a lot of context when they're talking through a process. That often gets left out when writing.
I've written docs at work intended for non (or less) technical people and it's a pain in the ass to try and get screenshots of expected inputs/outputs, try to predict every question or misunderstanding and make the writing clear. There has been more than a few times I wished I could just record a video.
> I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here
For the creator: videos can be monetized trivially
For the search: YouTube results are often highlighted top of the page on Google search results.
As a beginner doing tech things I quite like youtube video. There are various problems with text. It'll say just type this into that but sometimes you don't know what to click to get 'that' to open. Then you find the instructions don't work because they've either skipped over something they think is obvious, or the software version has changed since they wrote it or their setup is different from yours.
At least with a recent video you can see what they click, it's probably up to date and you see all the stuff they do and you can see if it actually works.
I was trying to install jupyter notebook a few months ago and all the how tos failed because macos had updated some nonsense. At least with youtube you can try to find a recent one where they mention that.
TextSniper on Mac and PowerToys OCR on Windows have eased my frustration with rasterized text in 'engagement'-obssessed videos that should have been blog posts.
Its not as helpful, but youtube will give far better discoverability. Facebook isn't mostly the right audience, and everyone else is fractured up among many other social media companies. Not even reddit is a great place anymore for this sort of thing because so many older users and tech enthusiasts have abandoned it.
My guess is some of the better videos will post the text in the description and some folks are very visual and need to be able to reference an image or video.
But that aside I appreciate the compliment (or at least I'm going to take it as a compliment).
you could do screenshots, but my preference would be a video with the text instructions as the description, with timestamp links.
text with images is a pain to scroll, and in video form you have one more channel of info - sound.
the visuals are there to tell you where it is you find the different things, or so you dont go hunting for a button that doesnt actually exist on a gui, but also so you can match the confirmation, and get an idea on if its running at about the right speed
it's easier to monetize a video, and if this information is going to have value and be presented for free there has to be someone giving someone money somewhere.
Suggesting someone can make money off of their efforts that doesn't cost the viewer/reader anything directly is one thing, but to suggest nobody anywhere ever posts anything to the internet without the expectation of monetizing it is just totally ignoring how the internet was started.
no one is talking about the entire internet starting from 1976, we're talking about the tech tips space in 2025 where a vanishingly small percentage of people are acting in a non-monetizable way.
Maybe we can get somebody willing to do a "in a weekend" project scraping websites to just to make that content available on a free website. of course, nobody could afford the hosting fees once all of the bots start scraping your site that you built by scraping other sites.
> I guess I'm out and out of touch
I don't know why this is being put in this "I guess I'm old" bucket. Its just another form of content and a different way of following something. Perhaps if they put the text commands in the video description you would get the best of both worlds.
I like both, but following along watching someone else is helpful. YouTube tutorials on how to do things are extremely helpful.
If you find the video an inconvenience, just don't use it.
> I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here
It is because "modern" search engines will retrieve only links to SEO spam. The only thing that, somehow, works (50% of the time) is youtube search.
Enshitification.
> I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here.
Because a bucketload of people only interact with the Internet using a device with a tiny-ass screen and super-shitty keyboard.
So, what you are actually asking is "Why the hell are people using phones to look this shit up instead of a laptop?"
Which, to be fair, is a valid question.
Take it down before Windows is ruined for everyone! Show not the devil's commands! All hail our Lord and Savior, constant surveillance without consent!
There's that Microsoft UX we know and love!
People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux. But they don't similarly complain about these ultra obscure, ugly commands. When Microsoft necessitates commands, somehow it's different.
Do people complain about that? Like, life long windows/mac users who aren't interested in linux I guess? I always thought people loved being able to do everything from the command line.
I learned bash and then needed to use powershell once later down the road; that was.. that was bad.
Not bad for me, was actually great for me because now I just main Linux; but powershell, while I get it... don't do that to people.
You didn't have to use to do this to your OS when Windows was still good.
It's only the absolute shitfest that Win 10/11 ended up being that you have to conjure 300 arcane powershell commands just to get the OS to resemble a productive environment.
I think every single Windows release has necessitated some registry hacks to bring back useful features from the previous version
Yes, but more and more every version.
Especially true since they ended the service pack model. Continuous updates and hostile feature pushing is absolute cancer.
> People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux
They do? How else does one use Linux if not via CLI? You mean those kiddies that like GNOME/KDE? pfffft, they're not "using" Linux. They're just using Linux to run other apps no different than using a ChromeBook
Unless you are somehow manually issuing syscalls, you aren't "using" Linux either. I guess you mostly use GNU/Linux.
... Or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.
Or GNU / Systemd / Linux
hmmm, news to me.
i thought i used Linux all these years, but i guess i dont.
You're not supposed to do this, this is to get around a restriction on installing Windows 11 on certain hardware. If your computer is supported and you install it the way Microsoft wants you to, then you won't be typing any commands anywhere.
Generally curious, I don't see anything about hardware. Isn't this is about making a login that doesn't require you to login to MS's cloud. Also, what HW restriction does Microsoft want? Why do they care?
Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, that's the actual reason a massive number of PCs can't update to it. There's apparently some way you can hack around that and install it. I assumed that's what these videos were about. But from the reddit post it looks like it's talking about both that and the account login issue which I wasn't familiar with.
> including how to install Windows 11 without logging into a Microsoft account and how to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.
Yes this is about a local login, it has nothing to do with hardware.
> You're not supposed to do this,
Clearly. You're not supposed to own your computer, you're supposed to be a docile loyal rentoid.
> If your computer is supported
That's not really the use-case for this. It's not possible anymore to use Windows with a local account (for a long time), the official UI only lets you login with a Microsoft Account. These commands are not used to install Windows on an unsupported PC, they're being used to create a local-only account.
I for one still got a Windows boot partition next to my Linux, but I refuse to create an account for it. The only way I can install Windows on my supported PC with a local account is by using these commands.
You used to be able to just press a small button. Then you had to disconnect the LAN cable and not connect a WLAN to create a local account. Then you had to open the Commandline and execute a single command. Now we're at the point where you have to execute multiple commands.
If they actually manage to make it impossible to use Windows local-only, that will truly be the nail in the coffin for me. Currently use Windows to play games which aren't supported on Linux, but this will turn into a hate_for_online_forcing > appreciation_for_kernel_level_anticheat_shitgames.
"Linux is too hard for people"
Modifying Windows is something I've been doing for decades. Yes it is infinitely easier than learning a new OS.
Doing a thing that you already know is definitely easier than learning a new thing that’s for sure.
To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff. I can see why google would be concerned about malicious versions of these videos being posted, and being difficult to differentiate quickly from ones with the legitimate instructions.
Or if those malicious videos were posted and reported, then I can see why a fairly dumb AI system would see the similar legitimate ones as the same thing. Probably a particularly bad scenario for automated moderation.
Then maybe Microsoft should add a "Use local account" checkbox to the installation screen.
So you'd advocate for github to remove any install script that users wget + curl, and any documentation references that instruct users to wget + curl? That's much worse than a handful of limited commands in which you're modifying your own user account.
Google is here to protect Microsoft OS users? Where do we draw the line on what Google (owner of Youtube) is responsible for.
I'm guessing that they take down videos that give you instructions that install malicious scripts etc, if they're reported. I don't know for sure, but that seems likely to be against their rules. And I'd guess that most of those would target Windows. Obviously they're not responsible for it, but I'm guessing they don't allow it and would remove it if it's reported.
What you're describing applies to just about every programming tutorial out there.
It is easier to understand what a command does, than to derive how it is called from first principles.
>To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff
Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this?
I believe you can convince people to hit Alt+F4 for the cheat menu in a video game and they will do it. Actually I think I told people that is how to votekick someone in BF1942 when they are being a dick (me). I believe you can tell people to delete system32 and they will do it. I believe you can tell people to do more damaging things and they will. I still think people should be able to say and do those things.
In the early 2000s a newbie to our forums got computer advice to do something nasty to their BIOS. Months later they came back incandescent with anger. It happens.
And? Is your answer to “some people gave malicious advice on the internet” _really_ to outlaw giving _any_ advice on the internet?
No?
The poster upthread asserted it doesn't happen; I'm saying it does. I didn't propose a solution, and your proposal is clearly not acceptable.
[flagged]
I had a friend that would allow her kids to watch YT videos. One day they were watching a video in my backseat as we were driving where I could hear the audio. The person was trying to tell the kids how to get free stuff for some game or other. The instructions provided had my jaw in my lap. This was years ago so I don't remember the exact details, but it was straight up instructions for installing malware.
What's your point? It's surely not that giving instructions should be banned because it's possible to give malicious instructions, is it?
The point is that it wasn't just possible, they flat out were giving malicious instructions. Not sure why there's resistance when we all know there's shit like this on YT. I'm not asking anyone to remove it or ban it or report it. I'm just retelling the story of the first time I heard something so blatant that my jaw dropped on this not being some random story from the internet. It was just shocking the first time I experienced it. There's nothing to be done other than try to inform others it happens, especially when it's someone/a parent that doesn't know what it means.
And this actually makes sure that the folder in `C:\Users\<username>` matches your username and does not become `firstname000` like Microsoft does.
So setting up windows is just like what I studied for that redhat cert now.
Do people actually do this instead of just switching to linux?
I thought Windows was the "user friendly" choice
I found an Italian website that offers this and other procedures. To automate the modification, it suggests pressing SHIFT+F10 and then using the built-in Windows curl command to download a simple cmd script: https://www.ilsoftware.it/focus/windows-11-con-account-local... The cmd file can be run with the no-oobe username option, allowing you to choose the name of the local user account to be created. I hope this is helpful.
Nice find.
Those sort of thing always make me nervous however because it's not easy for the average user to tell if its running any sort of malicious scripts in the process. This one seems to be safe and I'm going to give it a try to see what happens.
The article also suggests that
"reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1"
still works as well which would be even better because thats local and easier to verify its integrity. that being said I think these are both valid suggestions if they work and I'm going to give them a try.
Yes, before running anything, you need to analyze the source. Still, I trust it: it works well, and as the Italian website indicates, you just need to check the linked .cmd file via the URL shortening to see exactly what it does. This should be done before downloading it with curl and before executing it as a .cmd file. The no-oobe solution also has the advantage of allowing the bypass of the entire OOBE phase.
Too complex.
Download .iso of LTSC version of Win. Make bootable install disk via Rufus and tick options to create local account during install. Install Win from created bootable device. Done.
What is the singular goal of doing all that? Avoid online-only accounts?
I have a microsoft account. I made it for Windows Live to play Halo 2 for Windows Vista back in the day.
Except, then Microsoft adjusted their account infrastructure, and now it's also an Xbox Live account. Then it became also a Windows Messenger account. Then it was required to login to Visual Studio. Then it ate my perfectly working Mojang account. Now I need it to install stuff from the Windows store like the damn Windows debugger you use to analyze BSOD dump files
I do not want my computer preferences saved across machines. I want to set up each computer separately. I do not want cortana. I do not want to connect my local computer to my account.
I gain nothing by using my microsoft account to log in to my local computer.
The singular goal is that I just want to use my damn computer, to do local computer things.
Note: A Microsoft account isn’t required to download free apps from the Store, it works fully without extra prompts on a local account. (I like that it works this way, because it means you can install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows without even once opening Edge.)
Microsoft has also implemented a package manager since a few years ago, winget, so now you can
Has Microsoft removed the option to disable Microsoft Accounts via the Group Policy Editor?
It's not available in Home editions.
Or use Rufus to create the install media, it will ask you what mods you want applied, after installing run win11 debloater, it will ask you what mods you want to apply. Then if you’re a sane person that just doesn’t want to learn to navigate your OS with every update, install openshell.
This is ridiculous! I'm still on Windows 10 Pro without a Microsoft Account. Back then I had to jump some hoops, but it wasn't that bad. Seems like they really doubled down with Windows 11.
> Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.
> Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.
Why do we have to delete them?
defaultUser0 is used by windows for the OOBE if you don't delete it along with the registry keys it will just boot back to the OOBE again. defaultUser0 gets removed by the OOBE after setup leaving your system vulnerable. The administrator account is a built in account that is disabled by default but won't be disabled if you completely bypass the OOBE or don't use the old local account setup which you no longer can do because of microsofts removal of the feature.
Why not use with Administrator enabled but with a password and at highest UAC setting so that you'd still get a modal?
LAN Manager legacy still hanging around after 40+(?) years
Good guide, thanks!
präferiert (dt.) is often pronounced praefferiert in my head, too, but it is always written with only one f, in german and in english.
Or just install Fedora Kinoite and don't look back.
Upvoting before it gets deleted /sarcasm
Windows will never succeed on the desktop if it relies on arcane CLI configuration...
Not all heroes wear capes. You are a local hero
Hey thanks, I needed a little boost today. You have been my little ray of light in a sea of darkness.
What does this accomplish?
It lets you use your computer without requiring a Microsoft account.
gets you a local account
A few typos were brought to my attention in my previous comment and as the time frame to edit it has passed I am replying with the required edits so that if anyone does want to attempt this they don't have to wonder what went wrong
I originally had “ net user Prefferedusername/active:yes” but there should have been no space before "net" and I should have put a space before the "/" after prefferedusername.
so the corrected instructions are below. (hopefully without typos this time)
at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10
CMD will open
Type (no quotes) “net user Prefferedusername /add” (replacing Prefferedusername with the user name you wish to use) and press enter.
Next type “net localgroup administrators Prefferedusername /add” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /active:yes” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /expires:never” and press enter.
Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.
Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.
Next type "regedit" and press enter.
This opens registry editor, navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE"
Delete "DefaultAccountAction", "DefaultAccountSAMName", and "DefaultAccountSID"
Right click on "LaunchUserOOBE" and rename it to "SkipMachineOOBE" and make sure the value is set to "1".
Close registry editor and type "shutdown /r /t 0"
[dead]
The solution is to run Linux. KDE is a good desktop environment: https://kde.org/
90% of Windows games run on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736925
LibreOffice is an okay office suite (good enough for my purposes): https://www.libreoffice.org/
GIMP is a good image editor: https://www.gimp.org/
VLC is a good media player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Unfortunately, that last 10% of games are AAA competitive multiplayer that account for a massive user base who are still dependent on windows to play them (battlefield 6, fortnite, any of the call of duty games from the last 8 years, league of legends, GTA online, apex legends, rainbow six siege...)
Weird, I used to play LoL on linux all the time a few years back. I assume something changed
yeah they introduced vanguard anticheat on all riot games which isn't supported on linux.
Woah so Riot broke League on Linux? I guess they probably did the math but that seems like a bold move.
yeah, and mac too, can't run league or valorant. vanguard is their kernel-level anticheat, and windows is like 95% of their market and the difficulty of implementing it on another kernel i guess isn't worth the <5%.
League works on macOS just fine, I played yesterday. Vanguard is buggy (it occasionally quits the client after I finish a game), but the game generally works and has for at least several years.
Why would it be a "bold move"? Linux gaming population is damn near zero, they do not provide a higher profit margin like mac gamers would, and the documented evidence is that supporting Linux users is obnoxious because they are rude and entitled but not actually that much better at providing feedback.
Epic Games bought out rocket league and turned off a native linux build and faced no repercussions. Instead they made plenty of money.
That's the bar.
Not sure that's fair, given most Linux gamers look like Windows gamers to the metrics.
That said, devices like the SteamDeck run games on Linux (and that's without considering that every Android game ever is technically running on Linux too).
Let's face it though, PC gaming is already small enough these vs the consoles, that further splitting the marked isn't going to make sense for a lot of companies.
>Not sure that's fair, given most Linux gamers look like Windows gamers to the metrics.
No. All the articles and testimony of game devs abandoning native Linux versions is from well before Proton was a thing, including Epic Games buying Rocket League and preventing you from playing the Native Linux build they had.
It also was not related to anti-cheat or underlying engine limitations or anything. Developers were clear that the problem was the massive lack of uptake mixed with a weirdly entitled community.
Personally I don't think gamers are entitled. Ultimately games are anywhere between 60 - 120 dollars and often barely work on their target platforms. With kernel level anticheat, you're literally being asked to pay them to rootkit your computer with software you cannot audit.
The last 10 years of AAA gaming have been an absolute shit show. The only people who seem to be even trying are Nintendo. Everyone else releases stuff that's buggy as hell and about as fun as a dental cleaning.
It's bold because it's breaking stuff that already works and will continue to work even if you do nothing.
It's one thing to choose not to develop a new game for Linux. It's another to take a game that already runs on Linux and intentionally break it. You're guaranteed to alienate SOME people who are already fans of the game.
And in the Linux community, "run" apparently has a slightly different meaning than what ordinary people are used to.
I thought the same but let's not pretend Windows is a holy grail for compatibility anymore. Especially when it comes to older games, this facade / image breaks down fast.
I once tried to play Trackmania Nations (not Forever or United Forever, the ESWC one) because that was the first entry of this series I played. I still have all the files from back then so I thought it would be as simple as installing it and running it. Other games such as Trackmania Sunrise came with the nasty SecureROM DRM that will break your current installs, but ESWC was always free to play and without DRM.
Well, after install, I played a lot in my first sitting. A few days later, my Windows install was broken. I used a restore point before installing Trackmania, everything was back to stable. A few weeks later I tried again, same situation, a day or two after install, my Windows would break.
I thought it was a general system instability, maybe some weird configuration and the game only triggers that specific bug. So I did a full clean reinstall. And installed the game a few days later. Who would've thought, my Windows breaks yet again.
What I'm trying to say is: I've been running Fedora on my main PC for 2 years now and the game has been installed via Proton for 1 year. It never broke, it always just worked.
That's cool but I spent the last week trying to get midi music in dosbox under Mint. It's still not working. Midi. And Wine works until it suddenly doesn't and searching for solution you get stonewalled with modern day equivalent of rtfms or plain old radio silence.
Thats always the worst part of linux for me. Everyone is always so hostile, I have to say though I have had a little success finding help on lemmy but not much.
To add to this Nathan Briggs does reverse engineering to make old games work on modern Windows. Windows 11 has corrected faults in it's APIs that probably should have been fixed but somehow worked with older versions of Windows that gamedevs built around. He often posts the solution and sends it GOG. Often this involves updating a community maintained wrapper around the DirectX APIs that GOG uses.
I think you will really like this content.
https://www.youtube.com/@nathanbaggs
I think he means he likes his .exe's, I too like a good exe or msi.
Steamdeck is doing very good things for linux gaming
Another great media player for those who prefer minimalist UI: https://mpv.io/. Includes yt-dlp integration and a much nicer terminal interface.
And much better keyboard control. It can also do interesting things such as run in 1:1 scaling mode (for example, 4K on a 1080p monitor) and then you can use your mouse to zoom in and out (wheel) and Ctrl+drag to pan around.
VLC walked so MPV could run.
I like the CLI / scriptability of MPV so much better than VLC. Absolutely fantastic.
> LibreOffice is an okay office suite
writer, perhaps. calc, not even close - google sheets is unfortunately better in almost every way, and google sheets aren't great either.
> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite > > writer, perhaps. calc, not even close
This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.
This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
There's an old anecdote that everyone uses only 10% of Excel's features
...but everyone uses a different 10%.
Something that's useless to you might be a dealbreaker to someone else.
I doubt that holds up personally
I would guess reliance on excel is declining
> I would guess reliance on excel is declining
In some places, yes, especially where certain online options are good enough.
Definitely not in financial services, and many offices I could mention. Even for me: Excel is the reason I haven't completely binned MS Office. For the subset of features I use⁰ it is better all round¹ than other things I've tried.
I'll miss it significantly when the last Windows machine that I operate away from DayJob is no more.
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[0] Probably less than that 10%
[1] There are many tasks for which there is something better, but the something is different in each case. Excel is a very good jack-of-all-trades.
If the general public knew how big decisions are done based on some ancient Excel sheet they'd faint.
It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet.
Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited).
...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough.
Anecdote:
A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports.
But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.
Excel spreadsheets built 30 years ago likely pin people to excel
Nah it just got promoted as the database for PowerBI. /s
Eh, I've seen the excel wizards at work.
Frankly, calc is just as full featured as excel is, it's just different. About the only issue calc has is correctly parsing excel docs is notoriously difficult.
This is a familiarity problem, not a calc problem.
Calc is far better than Excel.
CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.
Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.
Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.
Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...
> CSV import in Excel sucks
I'm going through a project at the moment where all the data is held in spreadsheets, and every time anyone opens them Excel fucks the numbers to be "scientific notation" despite there being space to display the full number and no way to disable this anti-feature. The amount of times I've had to restore the spreadsheet from a backed up CSV because of data loss is frustrating. I wish I could stop using Excel.
This is just a formatting/display issue. Excel isn't rounding the number internally.
It sounds like the problem in this case is that you don't know how to use basic Excel features.
> This is just a formatting/display issue. Excel isn't rounding the number internally.
It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats.
As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption.
One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor.
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[*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
Unfortunately you are wrong.
You just are mixing up two different problems I've listed into one problem and then made the arrogant assumption that I don't know how to use Excel.
Excel has definitely truncated numbers.
From 2023:
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/21/23926585/microsoft-excel...
Also it drops leading zeros which is annoying when a column is zip codes and it should be imported as string and not number
I agree excel gives ways around these and maybe that's considered basic knowledge but it definitely has poor data-mangling defaults
Export them as an ODBC datastore.
Calc struggles to be bug-compatible and stupidity-compatible with Excel by converting numbers to dates.
> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite
> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close
For what I see 99% of people do in excel (make a table, then sort it and draw some charts), calc would support all their uses just fine.
For those using it for actual accounting/financial stuff with equations in the cells, and custom macros, etc ... then no, calc won't be sufficient.
For scientific calculations with tables of data, I find LibreCalc better than Excel, so in my experience, Excel is the “good enough for simple tasks” tool, but LibreCalccis the tool when you actually do scientific big boy calculations.
The real issue is familiarity and importing, but if you start fresh, LibreCalc is better for me.
There are users (me included) that state the opposite, LibreCalc is better for my needs (complex formulas table driven) and that Excel is a toy for more “scientific” calculations.
LibreOffice Calc works well and does the job for what most people needs, I don't see any issue recommending it.
Writer is awful too. It will randomly mess up formatting, especially in tables. Also in tables, it will insist to try and parse cell values like Calc would (breaking numbers and dates), even though Writer doesn't even provide a way to run calculations on those numbers anyway.
It does support calculation: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide...
Word is awful too, it messes up formatting, especially when pasting images. Good luck writing anything longer than couple pages. Hasn't been solved in 20 years. Have stopped using word 2 years ago but I am gonna assume it's still an issue
Section breaks keep the formatting changes from affecting the previous/following content so you can place and format images as you wish.
I’d blame this behavior on Office OpenXML becoming the standard in 2007, legendary for generating unnecessary nested tags.
If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel. But otherwise Libre office calc is perfectly fine.
> If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel
Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered".
Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be.
The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
The problem, as I see it, isn't a feature problem but rather just the fact that everyone in banking and finance is already using excel. You aren't going to see `ods` files passed around.
I would agree with this.
If your bank is exporting and importing csvs, the problem is on the software stack side.
Both xlsx can be exported and imported. It is just harder
The only reason this is true is because everyone in finance uses Excel which means that differences in parsing excel docs is consequential. And, in finance, excel docs get shared a lot.
It's not the case that calc is lacking any features which excel has in a finance situation.
windows - if you need kernel anticheats, excel or CAD
mac - if you need battery
I've come to the conclusion that anyone trying to use a spreadsheet in a way that requires excel, probably shouldn't.
Any task that warrants a complex spreadsheet can be done better in a Python notebook using pandas or polars IMO
I've used calc every day for years. It works well.
google sheets sucks too.
excel runs the world, and I mean that unironically.
>The solution is to run Linux.
The Linux answer is often repeated but unfortunately, some users depend on various Windows software that only runs properly on Windows. E.g. CAD/CAM, Quicken finance, sewing embroidery, etc can't run in a Linux WINE emulator nor QEMU/KVM virtual machine. And avoiding the WINE/KVM incompatibilities by switching to "Linux-native" software such as Gimp often means having less features and/or not having ability to open old files because they use different formats.
Sure, there's the idea that "90% of users just use email and surf the web so they can just get by with a Chromebook" ... true, but there's still a lot of users who can't because they use other productivity software.
For me, there's always some unexpected situation that requires a working Windows computer. Last year, I had to do an unplanned firmware update on a digital audio interface via a USB cable. There was no Linux updater. They had a firmware updater for macOS but it didn't work. Based on the tech support forums, I had to download the firmware updater for Windows platform and that finally worked.
reply to: >What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM?
Example would be software that use hardware USB dongles for DRM. E.g. embroidery software for sewing machines. The passthrough USB emulation to the vm is not invisible enough to fool the software searching for hardware dongles. Another example was Trimble software for LIDAR that depended on DirectX which crashed in a vm.
reply to: >A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases
That is a very techie solution that's not practical for "normies". Dual-boot creates the "2 os file systems" issue instead of having a single unified disk mount. Windows doesn't have a built-in way to read Linux ext4 file system. Linux doesn't have a bulletproof reliable way to read/Write NTFS partition (various tech forums mention data corruption). Unless one goes external with external NAS hardware and store all documents on an SMB mount -- but that also layers on more technical issues and doesn't work for laptops on-the-go being disconnected from the NAS.
Manufacturing and automation is another big one. Think about a water plant that is air-gapped but needs computer automation software to run. These things are everywhere, in every town that has indoor plumbing and sewer. The specialized software that automates these plants only runs on Windows. It relies on industrial hardware and touchscreens that are designed for use in harsh outdoor environments. All of these types of plants rely on high school educated operators that need to understand what's going on at a simple level. Having an OS that in any way relies on Internet access is a non starter. A Linux based system would be removed within a year of operation. You could get it approved maybe if you really worked at it but it would not be accepted in the long run, after the initial startup. There are physical constraints, technical constraints, and human/political constraints that are all working against Linux.
Most of that stuff is probably still running windows 98 or XP. If it's airgapped, and it works, and it controls a million dollar piece of equipment, then management will tell anybody suggesting it be updated to the newest windows version to stfu.
Also, the extent to which windows is needed to accommodate uneducated operators is overstated. A lot of industrial equipment runs other oddball operating systems configured by the manufacturer and machine operators don't need to know the difference because they just know which buttons to press to get the job done.
I work in a lab. Let me give you some ideea of what's happening:
- Some machines use embedded MCUs with no operating systems. I haven't seen one of these in the last 15 years. The last DNA extraction machine we got (a glorified sample shaker with 2 stepper motors) runs Win10! It has no keyboard, no network, and absolutely no ports of any kind (or at least not accessible without dissasembling the machine). A 8051 could do the job and still have memory left for Pong. [1]
- Very old machines run MSDOS and a proprietary software that directly talks to hardware ISA boards via I/O ports - no drivers. That software can't be ported to Windows2000+ because of the same reasons DOS games can't run in Win2000 - the kernel won't allow direct hardware access. Linux doens't allow it either.
- Newer machines run Windows 2000/XP/7/10, many of them offline. Some of them were updated to run Win10 from older versions, with the same app version (just Windows updated).
- Since Win10 can no longer be bought, newer machines run Win11 with permanent internet connection and they are minimally customized - the vendors left all ads, Copilot, Store and the kitchen sink installed. It's atrocious to work with those, but nobody cares. The management that make the decisions to buy the machines never ever touch them or even see them, and they don't take advice or feedback from us (or anyone else but accounting).
[1] https://gentechbio.com/en/producto/panamax-48/
Can you explain why you think Linux needs the internet any more than windows does?
Are you perhaps not aware of the millions of embedded Linux installations that never see the internet?
After rereading, it sounds like I meant for the two sentences to be related, but I didn't mean it that way. I was referring to the fact of Microsoft trying to force people to connect to the Internet before they can install Windows, or sign in with a Microsoft account in corporate infrastructure scenarios where that makes no sense, and so customers are forced to use Linux instead, but that's a complication being added to their overall system for external reasons.
A Linux-based system would be identical to a Windows-based system as far as operator experience goes. They interact with HMI software and only see the OS underneath when Windows pops up silly notifications and errors.
Windows owns the industrial space for historical reasons, mostly to do with OPC being Windows-only and software for doing maintenance on field devices originally running on DOS. It quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation - everyone wrote their software for Windows because everyone else wrote their software for Windows. SCO owned a decent chunk of the field before that, but we know how that worked out.
We're seeing some change now that OPC is being phased out. Ignition now has feature parity between Linux and Windows (barring OPC, of course). Windows won't go away any time soon (if ever), but you can now have a fully functioning SCADA system with no Windows at all.
What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM? Without going to extra effort the environment should be indistinguishable for the application.
For me it's ski race timing Software. Need a USB dongle and timing computer(a proprietary device that logs timestamps, prints and translates pulses offa wire into start and finish events to the PC Software) via USB. There's a lot of moving parts to manage, things like power to the USB, sleep etc. Bricking a ski race where thousands of volunteer, kid and coach hours have been spent in preparation for it is a nightmare. Last season our windows machines were in a Windows update death spiral on race day. The timing operators had no clue how to overcome it.
USB passthrough is trivial, as is PCIe passthrough which would let you pass the entire USB controller.
Yeah this is the way. I'm tented to go this route on my Mac but the licensing module won't work on ARM chips: Short answer: it’s not crazy to run Split Second in a VM—but only if you control the variables. The two biggest risk areas you called out (the USB license dongle and the timer I/O) are real. Here’s the straight path that works reliably, plus what to avoid.
Your go/no-go decision tree
1) If your MacBook Pro is Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3): Running Split Second in Parallels with Windows 11 ARM is a no-go because the Sentinel/HASP hardware key that Split Second uses is not supported on Windows ARM. Thales (the dongle vendor) is explicit: “Sentinel HASP keys … are not supported” on Windows ARM; LDK works via emulation but not the HASP/HASP-HL USB keys you plug in.
i 100% get what you mean, it's still funny to me that you indirectly use a Windows update death spiral as an argument against using Linux :D
I'm all for Linux, The difficulty of keeping it on the shelf for a year and then running it on race days when it's in full update mode on a crappy mountain Internet connection was a near disaster.
I really wish this 3D Gerber viewer worked: https://www.zofzpcb.com/
You can feed it the output from Kicad, and if you include the ipc netlist it’ll even generate models. Great for doing a check before manufacturing, especially if the viewer matches what you see in Kicad.
Unfortunately I’ve never gotten it to run in wine.
Have you tried PCI passthrough of a USB bus? Worked for me with a device that didn't work with regular USB passthrough.
Agree on all points. Basically, Windows could suck to any degree whatsoever right now, it still has enjoyed an hegemony for decades and the vast majority of the population considers it the default, it's not impossible for this to change, but it's definitely going to take time.
A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases
Rufis can make windows on-the-go installs too for this purpose.
Japanese Windows software mostly don't run, or does it badly, with Wine on Linux. Unfortunately. I've been a full-time Linux user since 1992 and this frustrates me. Some of the software won't even pass the install stage. I'm forced to run this on wife's Windows 10 PC, which has its own set of nightmarish problems. Japanese software houses develop for one target: Windows. As a rule. They don't really know about anything else, except for the occasional support of Mac from some of them.
I've not really had a problem with Japanese software, but I mostly stick to old games and the like. You do need to make sure you install cjk fonts, and if your system locale isn't Japanese you need to make sure jp locale is enabled then set it before running with `LANG="ja_JP.UTF8"` (or possibly LC_ALL if that fails) but other than that I've not had any major problems.
What kind of software isn't working?
I've used all the Japanese language and font settings (including your suggestions), and I have fonts installed, and for what barely runs this gets the fonts mostly working. It makes no difference for what doesn't even install. One example is 3D My Home Designer PRO (version 8 which is not the latest, but one I have a license for. From Megasoft, Japan). It's exclusively for Windows.
Another example (which is not licensed, and easier to test for) is Jw_cad https://www.jwcad.net/download.htm which actually installs and runs, it's just that it doesn't run well. Some stuff works, but it's not enough to make it usable.
I've run Japanese windows software under Wine, and with no configuration it was a sea of crashy mojibake. With the right locale configured, it worked fine.
Have you tried Bottles? I helped a friend a few weeks ago getting his game library to work after he migrated to Bazzite and there are a few games from Japanese studios / indie devs. It was mostly setting the locale for a separate bottle configuration and from there they installed and worked.
Well.. I don't know anything about games, I don't run them. I'm not aware of Bottles, yet.
If it's a one-off program, have you tried Winboat or running it in a Windows VM?
Installing a Windows VM is not really an option for me for various reasons, but in any case that's just.. running Windows. I don't have a Windows license either so I expect I wouldn't be able to anyway.
>but in any case that's just.. running Windows.
Yes, because as you said these applications only run on Windows. How else would you get around it, if not by running some form of Windows? At least this way, the core system (and 90% of general purpose applications) could remain on Linux.
> I don't have a Windows license either so I expect I wouldn't be able to anyway.
You can just use the install unlicensed, or, if your computer came with a Windows license (as most do), you can extract it from the motherboard and use it to activate the VM. Not sure if that's allowed in Microsoft's ToS though.
What's discussed in this subthread is running Windows applications under Wine. When it's running under Windows there's no discussion to begin with.
In any case, I'm not going to try to set up a Windows VM on my Linux computer, I don't have the room or if I had it would be better used for other things. And I just abhor using Windows, whenever I have to use the wife's PC it's hell. For her, too.. she can't find anything after she's saved something, for example. And I don't have a Windows license, never had, my computers are all bare when new. In any case, it defies the whole purpose of not having to run Windows. Now, with Windows 11, it seems to be even worse. And I have zero idea on how to install Windows from scratch anyway - in my case I would probably even have to install a Japanese version, as is installed on my wife's PC. Well, not going to happen.
Okay, suit yourself, I don't exactly care. Most of the thread was about running Windows applications on Linux, wine is just one means to an end in that regard. I merely suggested another that may work for your specific use case, while still allowing you to retain Linux on root, as I do on my system.
Also, unless you're talking about desktop motherboards that you bought directly from the manufacturer, any laptops you have almost certainly have an embedded OEM Windows license key burned into them from the factory (and that's obviously without getting into any massgrave chicanery).
I suppose the difference in our views is pragmatic versus philosophical. I don't care whether something is running through a translation layer on Linux or technically "on Windows" in a stripped-down VM with telemetry removed, so long as my core system remains Linux and I can minimize my exposure to Windows without any application support hurdles.
Sorry, but could you list any program I'm never thought about japanese software and since I'm interested on japanese culture, I'd would like to know which kind of programs they are
;) ;) ;)
Austria armed forces use Libre Office: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Austria-s-armed-forces-switch-t...
[flagged]
is it really that hard to write a report in LibreOffice instead of word? is that more that we can ask of our military top brass?
Don't fall for the whataboutism trap.
neither my answer nor ops point is whataboutism.
they bring up a valid point: libreoffice is (in their opinion) harder to use and probably lower quality, so reports are harder to write and taking away time from more important things.
in my opinion libre office is absolutely good enough for this use case and thus not taking away significant time from other tasks. furthermore, the austrian armed forces are free to contribute to the project to improve the perceived paint points themselves.
on the other hand microsoft products are closed source and probably upload data to datacenters outside the customers (i.e. in this case, the militaries) sphere of influence. this may include the data (for storage and or AI training) and meta data (for advertising and telemetry).
microsoft may even silently introduce or reactivate (after they've been declined) those options after updates (don't quote me on this, but i think i remember this happening at least once).
microsoft apologists may argue that this is only the case for improperly configured corporate deployments, but as the software is closed source nobody can really be sure and if it's that hard to get right, it's a security problem in itself.
> arder to use and probably lower quality, so reports are harder to write and taking away time from more important things.
They almost certainly have templates for their reporting, so its just adding text, figs, and tables. And lower quality how?
My point was rather that officers should have better things to do than feed the bureaucracy with reports no one will ever read, and so the harder you make it to write reports, the less likely they will do more of them!
I assure you there are far, far more inefficient things they are doing than using OpenOffice.
I would recommend Krita over GIMP.
Aren't they're used for slightly different things though? GIMP for image manipulation and Krita for digital drawing?
(Krita is pretty awesome though, it's up there with Blender for me)
Inkscape is also great and sits closer to Krita.
What do you want to do in GIMP that Krita can't do with a better UI?
Skew transform and other transforms.
GIMP also has an excellent print interface. Krita doesn't have one at all.
> Skew transform and other transforms.
Krita has them both destructively, and non-destructively as transform layers. What is it you're missing?
I think I might've got confused with Inkscape. I remember GIMP handles transforms very well.
> What do you want to do in GIMP that Krita can't do with a better UI?
Adjust levels in photos.
Do you mean with the levels filter that Krita has, with the curves filter that Krita has, with the color balance filer that Krita has, with the slope, offset, power filter that Krita has, or with the hue/saturation/luma or red chroma/blue chroma/luma adjustment filter that Krita has?[1]
They are all available as non-destructive filter layers, by the way, and Krita users had access to this way before GIMP 3.0 was released with non-destructive filters.
[1] https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht...
> Do you mean with the levels filter that Krita has, with the curves filter that Krita has, with the color balance filer that Krita has, with the slope, offset, power filter that Krita has, or with the hue/saturation/luma or red chroma/blue chroma/luma adjustment filter that Krita has?
Honestly, I did not know that these existed in Krita (when I used Krita, I did not find them).
However, I still stubbornly maintain that I answered the question sufficiently, which used the qualifier "with a better UI".
Taking a leaf out of my wife's book "Even when I'm wrong, I'm right!* :-)
(Yeah yeah, I know I was wrong)
Does Krita let you change those black n white icons to something with some colour?
or https://photopea.com
Honourable mention: https://jspaint.app
or https://pixieditor.net/
[dead]
Why would anybody think it is a real alternative to upload your photos to website which is running proprietary garbage. Just use Adobe if you are going to do that.
The first feature paragraph on the Photopea landing page:
> There are no uploads. Photopea runs on your device, using your CPU and your GPU. All files open instantly, and never leave your device.
I strongly prefer local software, but as someone coming from Photoshop who now only does the occasional edit (and therefore can't justify the price), I find Photopea to be a good alternative, especially since it closely mimics Photoshop's interface so I don't have to learn a new UI. Also, your images stay local on your computer and aren't uploaded to their servers.
It's developed by a single guy, which I think is very impressive given how much of Photoshop's functionality it has. I just really wish it were open source (and not a web app).
> GIMP is a good image editor: https://www.gimp.org/
Modern GIMP doesn't have the features that Photoshop 6.0 had 25 years ago, and GIMP had a 5 year head-start on it.
Yeah, right. I've the latest GIMP 3 on both Windows and Linux and an old CS4 Photoshop which I stopped updating years ago because of Adobe's ripoff prices and I continually find myself falling back to Photoshop because it's easier to use than GIMP (I'd prefer to switch to GIMP completely if it were easier to use).
Unfortunately, the authoritarian PIAs that develop GIMP have a rigid and inflexible mindset that stop GIMP becoming the default for millions of Photoshop users and or those who cannot afford Adobe's outrageous prices, and those who can no longer accept its draconian licensing terms.
In short, millions would switch to GIMP on Linux if it worked 'properly'.
I don't know why the Linux community doesn't put more pressure on GIMP's developers to comform. The percentage of Linux desktop users would increase considerably if they would.
Look at it this way: here's just one GIMP issue that turns away Photoshop users: why did GIMP's developers remove the perfectly functioning Fade feature in GIMP?
Yes, I know their stated reason and I also know the workaround but it's a damned nuisance to use.
By removing the Fade feature GIMP's 'high minded' developers have effectively done what mathematical types tried to do with the calculator when they introduced RPN/Reverse Polish Notation in place of the standard way of entering data.
Except for mathematicians, engineers, etc. RPN failed spectacularly—sure it is better but just too hard for mere mortals to grasp.
The bloodymindedness of GIMP's developers are deliberately holding back GIMP's adoption. They could have easily left Fade in place and just added their fancy sophisticated option for their propeller-head brethren to use.
Fixing some of GIMP's problems seems so obvious I sometimes think Adobe has placed a Trojan on GIMP's team to thwart competition.
Afterthought. Contemplating the above post a day later and thinking "yeah, right, that's typical me in hyperbolic mode when annoyed" but on refection would I change it?
No, I wouldn't; because I'm still annoyed and my frustration goes deeper than just GIMP and its developers, my issue is that the problems that plague GIMP also plague much open source software and we need to find solutions.
First, I'm a vehement supporter of FOSS and the need for more choice in the marketplace even if that means having more commercial software to choose from. As I see it, much of the key software (Windows, Android, MS Office, Photoshop, etc.) that monopolizes market now does so because of Big Tech's market domination—not necessarily because it's the best available.
It's the sheer domination of the software ecosystem by Big Tech that's the problem, thus good open source products such as Linux, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc. all struggle to get a mainstream airing irrespective of quality.
It's clear to me there are several important reasons why open source has not achieved a wider penetration amongst more general/less technical users. From that perspective FOSS software suffers from a fundamental and systemic problem which is it's principally developed by people who like developing code for its own sake who then open-source it for free.
Without the monetary incentive one doesn't have the right to demand of them the form software should take. Dictating how software should work and or what features it must have would serve little or no purpose, if they'd disagree they'd either ignore you or just pack up and leave the project.
The problem is obvious, FOSS developers are skilled and it's that skill that directs the way they'll tackle a project—thus the software ends up working their way and with features they reckon it should have—and more often than not this is in direct conflict with the way ordinary nontechnical users want it to work.
Despite my narky comments about GIMP's developers, I understand that in their technical judgment they had good reason why they omitted the Fade feature and I accept they are under no obligation to include a feature that from their perspective is out of place and does not logically dovetail with other features. Given also they're offering their time for free then there's really not much one can object to in the circumstances.
Nevertheless, that FOSS developers first and foremost develop software as they see fit and from their perspective and that that view often clashes with the requirements of nontechnical users poses a serious conundrum for open source software. The upshot clear: if ordinary users see no real advantage and or find it too difficult to convert to FOSS then it won't attract the number of users it deserves.
With commercial software user requirements are often determined by marketing based on user demand and programmers are obliged to program accordingly. When Microsoft says "we're about to start on yet another GUI for the next version of Windows" the choice is stark—knuckle down or leave. Without the monetary incentive, FOSS is at a significant disadvantage.
Let me offer my own perspective here. I am an IT professional and have been for decades. Moreover, I've headed an IT department where help-desk was a key service and from experience I know how difficult it is to get users to adopt new software packages, especially so when the replacement package offers essentially the same features, for example, replacing MSO with LibreOffice often meets with stubborn resistance.
Even I get annoyed when I have to change software and I find the UI and or features are noticeably different to what I'm used to. I'm an Arch user so I'm used to tweaking Linux et al but I deal with hundreds of different packages on Linux, Android, Windows and other setups and it's dead easy to forget the idiosyncrasies of a package that one hasn't worked with for several months. Having to relearn its features and quirks because its so different to what one was working on only moments before is not only time consuming but also a damn nuisance.
So from my perspective standardization is just about everything. Trouble is programmers all to often consider themselves 'artists' and unnecessarily keep reinventing the wheel. Look at the outrageous plethora of Windows GUIs. MS started out well by adopting IBM's well thought out CUA (Common User Access)† then essentially abandoned it for others that were often grossly inferior—think Metro for instance. And what about MSO's 'Ribbon'? The heretic(s) who devised that should have been condemned to time in the stocks. The unmitigated fucking hide of them to force millions of users to waste millions of manhours relearning functions that didn't need to be relearned. What is so outrageous was that after mandating the change to the 'Ribbon' those authoritarian shits at Microsoft could easily have left the old GUI there as a fallback option—but they didn't!
Who paid for those millions of wasted hours? Right, it certainly wasn't Microsoft.
This kind of outrageous and unacceptable behavior is why it's so important that FOSS be easy to convert to and be as compatible with the commercial product as is possible. With its Windows monopoly MS can afford to experiment with GUIs and weather the changes when they fail and still survive unscathed but I'd contend that in this regard FOSS is much more vulnerable.
In this regard we've witnessed a long lineage of failures in converting Windows users to Linux due to compatibility issues, despite the Linux brotherhood praising its simplicity the fact is that Linux is just too different to Windows for millions to make the leap. The problem is further compounded with the myriad of Linux distros available—and I'd venture that most Linux diehards have no idea the fear that that number of distros generates in newbies. FOSS developers should heed the message.
I am firmly convinced that the lack of consistency across FOSS development and its failure to adhere to uniform standards in the many instances where it's possible and logical to be consistent is a major impediment to its widespread adoption.
The other impediment slowing down FOSS adoption harks back to the fact that open source is free and without monetary incentives is that there are no guarantees that a FOSS project won't end up as abandonedware. I've long advocated a halfway revenue-neutral measure where certain FOSS projects only offer the source for free and charge a small nominal amount for binaries with licenses stipulating that one's only allowed to compile the source for one's own use—distribution thereof is prohibited. It seems to me most users would prefer to pay a small nominal amount of say $10 or $20 for the binaries. That way, developers could receive some recompense for their work, then they would have both the incentive to remain with the project and also likely to be more responsive to users' requirements.
I know I'm not alone in coming to these ideas, after I posted the above comment I came across this HN story that addresses very similar issues:
"Free software scares normal people" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45760878
I'd urge you to read it.
___
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Anyone have a good suggestion for Linux dictation software? My friend wants to switch to Linux but he does all his writing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
How about OpenAIs whisper[0]? My social science friends tell me it‘s been great for them. Not sure whether data privacy et all would be an issue of course, but I guess you can just run it locally :)
[0]https://github.com/openai/whisper
Dragon is an app, whisper is a model with a CLI that takes .wav files. Totally different user experience.
you can run whisper locally on your machine.
If you run gnome then I made this: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8238/gnome-speech2tex...
Dragon in Wine. A lot of the Talon users do it that way.
Okay the fact that Talon Linux use Dragon via Wine successfully is a big vote of confidence. I was reluctant to recommend that to my friend after seeing Wine's status page for Dragon but I'll give it a go!
Onlyoffice is also not a bad alternative. (docx,xlsx etc)
If you trust Russian developers
Should I trust American developers?
Isn’t that up to you?
Because there're no russian developers almost everywhere?
There's a difference between having Russian devs and being made by a Russian company that supports war.
OnlyOffice is made by a Russian company that doesn't condemn war of aggression that Russia wages against Ukraine.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7zlf2/onlyoffi...
Remember that when the ICC issued a warrant for Netanyahu, Microsoft blocked Karim Khan's e-mail account: <https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/whe...>
Yes. Another good reason to decouple from American tech giants.
Did you boycott all the American companies that didn't condemn the war of aggression against Iraq?
Is it Americans who actively rape, kill and destroy Ukrainians right now?
No.
Thank God all other non-Russian companies not only condemn various atrocities around the globe but even support the affected countries being liberated by developing the high-tech armies of the good guys, right?!
* Company is Russian
* Doesn't condemn war (understandable in their position)
* Has dev team in Russia
* Pays taxes to Russia, which directly fuel war
* Does not support UAF or donate to Ukraine (also understandable)
* Keeps selling their software in Russia, which might have links to military and administration
Am I missing something here?
> Am I missing something here?
The fact that all of the above is being presented as an exclusively Russian strategy. When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries. The tendency to omit pointing out non-Russian examples almost always indicates endorsement of their actions.
And let me beat you to this that I condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin. Unlike those who believe it is ok to side with one and not the other even if they do the exact same.
> The fact that all of the above is being presented as an exclusively Russian strategy.
Where did I ever present those as exclusively Russian strategy?
> When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries.
So?
If you interact with American businesses, use American technology or pay taxes to any Western government, you're indirectly funding genocide, slavery, wanton environmental destruction and countless other crimes by the US, its allies and corporations.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, none of our hands are clean. We all deal with our complicity in various ways, and draw our lines in the sand where we will, but at the end of the day survival in this world forces us all to be hypocrites.
This is quite a stretch of mental gymnastics from the initial point, drawing a blatantly false equivalency between the consumer and the producer as an at attempt to derail and minimize the latter's direct contribution to the forced unethical consumption. And it's an especially absurd argument since it's impossible to ethically consume or even survive with such owners of the means of production.
And this whole falsely applied narrative is unironically a very frequent laundering tactic of their proponents.
And btw I don't even think most are really willing to accept the accusations of the American companies, as they've been told for centuries that these are the good guys.
You've done the thing where you've basically restated my argument and implicitly agreed with it but for some reason also framed your comment as strident disagreement and accused me of motives I don't have. Like many people here, your emotions seem to have poisoned your intellect. I assume you just skimmed my comment and got triggered?
I'm not drawing an equivalency between consumer and producer, I'm pointing out a relationship which, while unequal, still exists and needs to be acknowledged. I'm not attempting to derail or minimize anything. You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
Yes, it's entirely possible to disagree with the misinterpretation of an otherwise as-objectively-as-possible true sentence.
It seems like you're holding onto your initial position, applying the factually true statement:
in an twisted manner. Which is also evident from the very last sentence, where you're suggesting only a form of ascetic lifestyle is able to absolve somebody, however one would realize such thing is both impractical and still impossible to do so under the current economic-political landscape. Not to mention that all this suggests that you, maybe unwittingly but still, tie civilization advancement possibility to the existence of an exploitative societal structure.Instead of talking about the way it's currently shaped to be ran by those who are profit-driven, violently steal resources and contribute to exhaustion of all peoples around the world, you're simplistically reducing it to a matter of entire groups of people, ignoring their standing in the social strata, having to either choose primitivism or accept they're just as bad as their rulers. Even if you've disclaimed that you're not concealing any motives and the responsibility is unequally distributed, your adherence on shifting away from those in charge of the means of production, which is how you've chosen to initiate this very exchange, enables an interpretation of you implicitly defending them, and I believe that's also what anyone with an ounce of critical thinking ability would make of. I would be less critical if you at least suggested organization against the existing way the global socioeconomical system as an alternative, but the appeal to the adherence to an archaic lifestyle suggests this is not something you'd probably approve of. A positive surprise would be taking this for granted and you just condemning those willing to comply all along I suppose?
And throughout the entire history, it has been shown that these are the exact same accusations that have insidiously been made by whoever is directly behind exploitative administrations. They put the blame on those who are always barred from having any say/questioning the way their labor is being used, divide them, deject their protests and prevent overthrowing.
> You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
This whole narrative here really boils down to the Oh you like music? name every song meme.
P.S. I'd advise refraining from appealing to imaginary emotional reactions on behalf of the other party. It usually demonstrates inability to defend a particular view and deflects from meaningful dialogue.
Do other Russian developers also work for a company sanctioned by the EU?
VLC is a GREAT media player
Outdated ffmpeg, good for dated formats, not good for new stuff
Players like mpv are way better unless you want to use nightly build of v4
mpv is my choice by a wide margin, but I still recommend VLC to most people because it has the sort of GUI more people are comfortable with.
GUI still looks and feels like WinAmp (slap llama, etc.) in both all of the good and bad ways
VLC also streams media to other clients, which most players don't do.
Not on Android yet though.
> Outdated ffmpeg, good for dated formats, not good for new stuff
Just how new does the new stuff have to be? I use VLC daily (because even though we have 4x streaming services, when I want to watch 3rd Rock from the Sun, it's not on any of them.
Some of the very new movies are also not on any of the streaming services, so I am left wondering, if I downloaded a movie that was only torrented a few days ago, just how new does the movie have to be to be unsupported by VLC?
Uninstalled vlc ~two years ago, but from what I remember it was missing tons of optimizations with h265 and newer codecs, almost lacking proper av1 and prores support, HDR is terrible. I think it's dated by like 3-4 years.
Haven’t tried mpv but VLC is my go to for weird formats and streaming from random rtsp cameras. Maybe it’s outdated but a couple of years ago when I switched over from libffmpeg to libvlc it was because some cameras on site had weird auth problems with libffmpeg but worked when streamed through VLC. I swapped over and now those cameras work.
What exactly is the new stuff?
VLC always had the ugliest UI of the open source media players. It also renders subtitles in a really ugly way (at least the last time I used it, which is years ago).
I really appreciate VLC for how it can play just about anything, but it's a "player of last resort" for me.
That's fair, but also for me UI on a video player is rather immaterial, given that it goes away when i'm actually using the thing.
Just made the jump to CachyOS on my gaming PC this week. It’s been great so far.
A more difficult but potentially great solution is to run Linux as a the host system and windows in single purpose containers for each game/program that work better in windows. All the anti-user behavior will only have minimal harm if all the container does is to start windows and then start the game, then close when finished. Ads will not have time to be shown, and telemetry only has game data to give. It can take a bit of trickery to get anti-cheat drm to work.
What would you use for that? Does docker work or is there a better solution, more oriented towards gaming?
Level1Linux yt channel talks about this setup in details. I think they are using looking glass and kvm. I have considered to try it out since it would reduce my windows footprint and containerize non-work from work.
MPV is a better recommendation than VLC and Although I am a huge open source fan, saying gimp is a good image editor is questionable though.
I have always preferred pinta for normal usage editing and although this might be shunned but idrc, but sometimes photopea can be also good software.
Regarding desktop environmnents, Just try anything you find interesting, KDE,XFCE,Cinnamon etc., you would be shocked by how snappy/minimalist somethings like XFCE are.
Personally I am on hyprland in cachy os.
I use Softmaker Office on Fedora/KDE but Excel is the one Microsoft application I would pay for a Linux version. Even the Office Web version doesn't come close (though it is still a vast improvement).
Just my 2 cents: I recently switch from GIMP to Krita, also very good and I find it more intuitive.
And VLC is a superb media player, I use it on all platforms for like 10 years, nothing even compares to it.
VLC doesn't have gapless playback sadly.
I think the main issue for most casual users is the office suite and browser. LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org unfortunately do not cut it for quirky functionality/aesthetics etc. The most polished alternatives Corel and WPS Office only WPSOffice have a ready deb/rpm installer while also having a collaboration feature inbuilt. Corel seems to have decided to concentrate on a windows only Law vertical , whererthey are admittedly not doing too bad. Browsers should do most of whats neeed for the rest of the saas apps even the video collab apps like Teams/Zoom have a browser mode.
cant Office be run in a VM?
Latest Office or Microsoft365 is being turned almost into a Saas wrapper for the online app , while having an always on siphon for your data to the MScloud and ADs, so many intrusive ads all overthe place. If its an older version that works i guess can be usable in a VM , but again this is for your casul office worker/parents etc.The least amount of friction will usually be best for adoption (see how zoom came out on top in the videochat space)
[0] https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/microsoft-office-365-declared...
I run two partitions: one for gaming (windows) and one for everything else (linux)
> The solution is to run Linux.
that is never the solution. that is the workaround. workarounds are not solutions.
correct, the solution is to fully switch and use the native software there not wine
The 90% of games running on Linux does not say how well and what games. Sure I can play the Batman: Arkham Knight perfectly on Linux. However the game is a decade old now. Try playing some titles that came out this year and it going to be very variable, multiplayer titles are often a no go at all due to anti-cheat. You can argue to you are blue in the face about kernel level anti-cheat but at the end of the day if all your mates are playing X, you are just going to suck it up and play X.
There is enough issues running games on Linux that there are specific distros created for running games because everything from the kernel version, X/Wayland, Compositor and the pipewire version can affect immensely how well the game runs.
The overwhelming majority of games that came out this year are from smaller studios and will work perfectly on Linux. It's only the big budget "AAA" games with corporate publishers pandering to shareholders/investment firms which insist on custom DRM and anticheat which are a problem.
The big budget games are often the ones that people are playing. Sure there have been a few big flops as of late, but a huge number of people are playing that require kernel level anti-cheat and DRM that does not work on Linux.
There are also other issues around how well those games work. Some games will work perfectly fine. I am not disputing that. It is a bit of a lottery though e.g. I had annoying sound issues with Hell Divers 2 that was only fixed with an update to pipewire. Performance issues were solved by upgrading to Kernel 6.16.
On Windows I had to do literally nothing for the game to work perfectly (also don't believe some of YouTubers that are complaining HD2, their PCs were actually broken!).
Generally on Windows I have to do very little to get a game to work, outside of extremely old games from the late 90s/early 2000s.
On Linux, the really old games just work, as do virtually all new games with the exception of those very few big budget new releases. If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games. Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
> On Linux, the really old games just work, as do virtually all new games with the exception of those very few big budget new releases.
It really seems like you aren't reading what I said. I accept that old games will often work fine, provided they are on a store like GoG or Steam. Big budget releases are often what people want to play.
> If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games.
It isn't about what I want. It is about what is the reality for the vast majority of people. I would rather everyone play games that work on Linux. Unfortunately many of the people I play games like playing new titles, often they only work well on Windows. There is a social aspect of this that many people on here ignore.
> Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
They don't though. There are always odd issues with games e.g. borderless window doesn't work in a lot of games, because the mouse will get lost. Having that happen mid-match sucks, having fullscreen window has it own draw backs. I won't get into performance and sound issues as I've already explained the issues there.
I get what you're saying, the plurality of gamers want to play the new release AAA stuff. And the majority of movie goers want to see the latest Minions Emoji movie. And the majority of cheese eaters want to eat American cheese or at best Wisconsin cheddar.
These things are mass market slop which are engineered to be bland and predictable to make the most reliable returns for institutional investors. Discerning consumers know better and don't go by what's popular.
I don't think there is anything wrong with liking popular things and tbh this attitude that somehow you are better because you like more niche things is very close to snobbery. I am not saying that is your intention, but it can come off that way.
There are plenty of popular franchises that I've liked in the past. There are plenty of "slop" movies that I enjoy, I really like Mission Impossible movies, Fast and Furious movies. I've also liked some of the Call of Duty games. There is room for both.
For the "huge number of games work on linux" I wonder how valuable that really is to drawing people to linux as PC gaming has a challenge with huge numbers of releases that aren't noteworthy and don't have many players, I'd guess most of them are not doing anything technically novel or quirky (i.e. using a popular engine with minimal changes) so can easily be compatible.
Is there much value there for users or the linux platform? Some definitely, but it's not going to move the dial much compared to if say valve, codeweavers, or someone else could work with EA to get an agreeable solution that lets Battlefield6 work on linux, as an example with a large audience that's locked into windows to play what they want.
What do you mean by "really old"? My experience with games available on Steam has been fine(barring those big-budget ones), but I've had problems in the past setting up games from CD-ROMs that have DRM on them. Proton and Wine still don't play so well with SafeDisc or SecuROM, and traditional Windows workarounds(when applicable) often don't work on Linux.
The publishers almost certainly prefer that you play these "AAA" titles on console, but if you insist, they'll settle for making your Windows as console-like as possible.
I live fine without a console, so I live fine without a Windows gaming PC too. I don't think the AAA chasers have more fun than me when it comes down to it, dealing with these companies seems to be an aggravating affair even if you do everything the way they want.
It isn't that much of an issue gaming on Windows. Yes, I had to do a one time workaround for a local account and run a de-crapifier. But it wasn't that difficult. If it becomes too difficult I will probably drop Windows entirely.
I run into more problems with Linux than I do typically with Windows. I've been using Linux on and off since 2002. I don't particularly mind it, but I also don't pretend it is for everyone.
This situation only exist because Microsoft would allow kernel level anti-cheat in the first place, which is a moronic feat wrt security.
Online competitive games with anti-cheat are the problematic ones in general.
If you play single player games with no or limited online features you'll be fine in 99% of the cases (number pulled from my ass).
Expedition 33 is a GOTY contender this year and it’s been working great for me on Linux
I am sure it is fine. HellDivers 2 (the game I like to play) needed a lot of messing about with to work well on Linux. It really depends on what game you are playing as to how well it works. Having the odd game that doesn't work is a deal breaker for a lot of people.
Gimp is NOT a good image editor for someone who uses Photoshop professionally. This idiotic claim keeps coming up, year after year, along with suggestions for opensource replacements for InDesign, Illustrator, LightRoom - there really really arent any valid opensource alternatives to most creative software apart from Blender, and Krita for a linited subset of what Photoshop covers. I would have switched to Linux immediately if it wasnt for Adobe
That may be true but, as you've not given any reason, it will come up again next time.
> VLC is a good media player
VLC is a broken mess and has always been a broken mess.
I've never had a VLC problem in decades of using it.
How fresh and original! Someone making a joke in a thread about Windows, suggesting that everyone abandon Windows for Linux.
Well, I am certainly chuckling now. That is a joke I have never heard before, but I get it! How witty you are.
Tee hee.
Outlook is what is keeping me away from Linux Desktop.
Outlook on the desktop is pretty much in maintenance mode only and Microsoft is already breaking it[0]. As for web version runs on linux just fine so you are in luck.
In general, unless you need advanced Excel features, you can switch to linux.
[0] e.g. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-cant-help-break-window... and couple others
We use Exchange on-premises, and the web client is really bad.
While email is asynchronous and I can live with not seeing it all the time (I check it occasionally anyway), the calendar feature is a must, and specifically the reminders. This is why I cannot live without Outlook launched, and it reminds me of meetings I would miss otherwise.
Didn't expect onprem since microsoft has super weird requirements on it since v2019 and haven't properly maintained it for years (except now you are also supposed to pay for it monthly), but if you would suffer with the old web version, you may want to look into Evolution+ews which should be able to handle onprem exchange on linux. Unsure if it supports niche features like public folders but the normal stuff should be covered.
And the crazy thing is that while outlook is my life it's also unbelievably bad. Why can't I have the calendar and email client open at the same time? Why don't newly received email addresses appear in the valid auto complete for sending out calendar invites? Why is search practically useless?
Have you tried Thunderbird recently? It's had quite a lift.
No I have not, for many many years. The calendar is the key feature for me - I will give it a try then
I just installed Thunderbird yesterday, and it finally supports my work email flawlessly, and even the calendar works essentially the same as with Outlook.
Are you connected to an Exchange server?
We use 365. It says it supports on-prem Exchange as well, but I haven't tried that.
Can you briefly explain what it is that you like about Outlook? I've had to use it at corporate clients, and I really detest it. The interface seems to suffer from that same ribbon-nonsense that Word suffers from. Its search is poor and slow. It offers very few display customization options. The calendar in particular is horrendous, I can't even seem to select a time block by clicking/dragging the way I've been able to do in Thunderbird for (probably) 2 decades.
Or maybe you're talking about needing Exchange integration? I don't know what the state of that is on Linux these days.
Two reasons: integration with Exchange and a need for the calendar to be always on (as opposed to email). I need it to inform me of meetings.
The integration to Exchange is key as well, I need to have access to rooms, PSTs etc.
Evolution is a good MUA/calendar/contacts/notes app.
I see it has a connector to MS Exchange. Have you maybe used it and have some feedback?
I use Evolution daily for decades, but have never used Exchange before, so not sure about the connector.
Outlook in its recent versions is (barely) functionally just the repackaged web version.
It is the poster child for enshittification.
If only. Accessibility on Linux isn't as good as it is on Windows. It's getting better, but there are so few people actually working on it that it will take quite a while to get there. Which results in anyone who uses Linux who needs accessibility to suffer very weird problems like not even being able to install it because the installer is inaccessible in some way, or it flat out breaking depending on hardware or because the distro isn't setting obscure env vars that are documented nowhere except for mailing lists that nobody reads anymore, or weird things like that. It's been improving, but really really slowly, and Wayland didn't help things when they for the longest time refused to even consider the possibility of allowing global keyboard access because "security".
Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case. This is also why as you said, the amount of people working on it is low.
It is really not the limiting factor in Linux desktop adoption. The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
Buy the wrong laptop, and you have to fight with X, wayland and Nvidia graphics like a terminally inclined caveman in danger
Not only is accessibility important in and of itself, but starting with a clean, accessible base implies standardization and interop, and makes things a lot easier to automate and extend.
Things that challenge accessibility plugins challenge any plugins. Steps away from accessibility are always steps towards lock-in.
> The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
But you seem to desire this. Don't buy the wrong laptop if you like lock-in; Apple and MS aren't making their OS compatible with your every hardware whim. Or learn how to reverse-engineer and write drivers.
> Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case.
Spoken like a true techbro. This attitude is so incredibly destructive. Technology is how we mediate our lives, cutting a very large number of citizens out of that is simply wrong, even if 'the numbers just aren't there' (and they are!).
Not putting the focus in accessibility is not the same as cutting those people off. I think I get your point, really, because someone who needs this kind of aid and doesn't get it does definitely feel cut off and usage of everyday devices becomes and everyday battle. We are not going to disagree there.
But surely there can be a point in which there are larger problems than that Linux reached 5% adoption this year in the US:
https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...
That's better than what it was. It's also not a whole lot. But you must understand, the more people use Linux, the better it becomes. Even if value accessibility over other matters, increasing the market share surely will increase the amount of people working on accessibility too.
That whole way of thinking isn't appropriate. 5% is an insane number of people, when you are that large these things are no longer optional. The fact that we have an effective tech duopoly is not important at all. If the market were split between 20 5% players they too would have to ensure that their devices are accessible to all comers. The fact that 95% is split between two parties does nothing to change the responsibilities of a 5% player.
>That whole way of thinking isn't appropriate. 5% is an insane number of people, when you are that large these things are no longer optional.
And hardware compatibility issues are? The fact that orders of magnitude more people don't use Linux at all, disabled or not, because of lacking features or usability is optional?
If 5% of people is an insane number of people, surely usability for them all is more important than for a fraction of that? And again, this is not a product sold by a corporation. Leave features behind and adoption goes down, then you get no accessibility features at all. If you want more accessibility features, you want more developers. For that you want more usage.
Hardware compatibility issues are just a distraction in this discussion. You can do both. If all of the hardware compatibility issues would be resolved there would be some other excuse.
The entirety of this discussion has been about what should be prioritised in order to increase Linux adoption. You cannot do everything together all at once, especially with the limited resources of open source.
Since you're such a noble white knight, why don't you code up those accessibility features you think are the most important missing part ? I'll wait.
AI will soon fill this gap, hopefully.
Anyway, I think the CLI approach of Linux is way more accessible than the more GUI oriented approach of Windows/MacOS.
I really would like to not depend on AI to resolve accessibility problems in Linux. That seems like a really, really bad idea.
I have nothing to do with tech bros.
Did I advocate for lack of accessibility features ? I just pointed out that in this context there are things far higher in the priority list. Especially given the fact that there are accessibility features, just not on par with windows.
Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
> Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
Yes, absolutely. Linux is plenty robust and has lots of hardware that you can use today. The reasons people end up not using it are:
- Microsoft
- Lack of favorite application 'x' (see: Microsoft)
- Difficult to use (unfamiliarity plays a role here)
So yes, accessibility is a key factor, and not just for the people that have challenging bodies.
Well then we simply disagree. I would suggest to look up negative criticism for linux online (e.g. "linux sucks site:reddit.com" etc).
It is flooded by complaints about HW incompatibilities, HW acceleration not working etc. Haven't been able to find complaints about accessibility.
Furthermore, what is the percentage of visually impaired people in the US and what is the percentage of linux desktop users ? The numbers speak for themselves.
Uh... Yes, yes we do. You do realize that adding accessibility features (and I mean actually high quality versions of said features) helps everybody, right? It isn't a low-priority item. To pretend like it is just shows your ignorance.
Ah, I have been called ignorant by a "computer science graduate". My life is complete.
I was writing assembly before you were alive buddy ;)
I think that is the main issue. 90% games is a lot, but is not nearly enough when the most popular multiplayer titles simply do not work due to usage of anti-cheat. For example you cannot play the new Battlefield 6.
As for GIMP, while I understand it can do many things as Photoshop, it is not close in terms of features and the UX is unfortunately terrible.
While I can understand that it's frustrating. Kernel level Anticheat is a abomination in itself and should in no way be supported. It is a security flaw in itself!
Read this: https://gist.github.com/stdNullPtr/2998eacb71ae925515360410a...
It's also unfortunately impossible to have a good competitive multi-player online experience without kernel-level anti-cheat. It's simply too easy to cheat at many of these games in the absence of strict control measures, and even a single cheater can ruin a game session for every other gamer.
No one reached directly for kernel-level anti-cheat. It was the result of an escalation of the sophistication of cheating solutions.
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That is completely irrelevant. Users want the game.
GIMPs UX is wonderful, and Photoshop UX is poison. The problem is that after torturing yourself to learn Photoshop, and sitting in it for 8 hours a day (for many people; I worked in prepress) makes you think that it has been designed rationally rather than simply cobbled together and stuffed with ads. Illustrator, being older, is even worse.
People who work with Photoshop have never worked with any other thing. The way they learned to edit bitmaps was through Photoshop. They can't separate the act and the product in their heads. Thank god for Affinity getting into the mix.
One just has to deal with GIMP as it is, and stop trying to project Photoshop paradigms onto it. People just need to stop thinking of FOSS as the generic, off-brand or ersatz versions that pass or fail due to their degree of imitation of some other product.
IMO, every step GIMP takes towards Photoshop UI is a regression. GIMP's problems have been technical, such as color management and non-destructive editing, and they're gradually falling away.
GIMP can't compete even with the version of Photoshop from 2000.
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LibreOffice is ok for reading and making minor changes to existing files but I haven't used Writer or Calc for anything new in years. LaTeX and Gnumeric are my tools of choice.
It's funny to see how Windows and Linux completely switched sides. Linux once being the clumsy one, hard to install, even harder to configure, mediocre UX, running on poor device drivers and requiring hours spent on the internet to solve a problem. Today, replace the "Linux" word with "Windows" in the previous sentence.
If that really was the case, then this would finally be the year of the Linux Desktop(tm).
Every year is the YOLD!
I've not seen the claim you're satirising in years. But I am still seeing the satire years after Windows became the third most common user operating system.
The first is Linux.
The only reason Microsoft can afford to treat Windows with such disdain is that desktop operating systems became an afterthought.
The first is Android.
2025 is it!
It honestly is, Linux is great on desktop. However, most people have laptops now which are a mixed bag.
they have definitely not completely switched sides. Linux is still clumsy and hard to configure if everything isn't configured for you. Linux has worse UX than Windows has ever had (I'm including windows 8 in that comparison)
Really liking Linux doesn't make Windows worse, and it doesn't make Linux better.
Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it. Do not intervene. Now do that with a dozen different people on a dozen different machines which you do not preselect.
On Windows it is a much smoother experience.
I am making zero statements about any application compatibility or application comparisons between platforms. I am talking only about UX, UI, and installation.
Linux still has so, so very far to go.
And, honestly, there is no operating system which a complete newbie can start using without help in some form. Linux is not some golden child, here.
You like Linux on the desktop, and that's fine. Keep enjoying it. Just be aware that your experiences color your viewpoints, sometimes completely.
I am not a fan of Microsoft, I use Windows about once a month these days, but the UX difference between Linux and Windows is still very large. Very large.
> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it.
What a dumb analogy. My mother can use Windows very well, it doesn't mean she could also install it. The same rule applies to most Windows users. That's why it comes preinstalled, and not with an attached bootable USB stick.
UX of recent Windows versions is crap. The bearish tendency started with 8 and have never recovered, with Windows 11 being the cherry on top of the crap. Telling that as a user of almost every Windows version since 3.11. Microsoft completely changes user interface with every recent version, this is an anti-pattern in UX world. How is that I can smoothly switch between Debian and macOS major updates, and when Windows does the same it is a nightmare? "Oh no, where are the network settings again..."
Yeah, I don’t understand the parent commenter either. Even with my latest laptop, it took days and weeks to make everything work (like audio, my monitors, DPI, VLC/mpv, even networking). And even then I had to turn off some hardware functionality, because it’s so buggy (bye-bye battery life). And this is before introducing Wayland for example…
Also installing is way easier for beginners with Windows. I’m happy that Linux installation now at least reached the level of Windows 98, but I still need to search for things every single time, even when I do it about every other years for several decades now. Just because somebody thought that it’s so important to ask simple users about an implementation detail which almost nobody care about. And this is before bugs… which I encounter quite frequently.
It’s getting better, but by not much. It could be a very stable OS with the right hardware even 20 years ago. That didn’t change, you still need to be very careful if you want a good experience with Linux and a GUI. I had no laptop or PC in the past 30 years on which I could install Linux without serious hiccups if I wanted anything more than terminal. I could almost always make it usable (it was impossible with one laptop), but I always had to give up something, like battery life, game performance, my headset at the time, etc. And of course a ton of time.
That feels like bad luck to me. I've had a Dell, two Asus, and a ThinkPad over the past decade or so, and except for hibernate with the Dell, everything has just worked out out the box with no tinkering.
With 2 ASUS? You seem to be the lucky one, not me. ASUS is quite infamous for more than a decade about its bad Linux support. Basic things can work sometimes well, but you need to be extremely lucky to have one which really completely works as intended, like temperature control.
> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it. Do not intervene. Now do that with a dozen different people on a dozen different machines which you do not preselect.
Have you done this, or is this just a science fiction story? Have you watched a dozen people install Windows on a dozen different machines?
The reason people sorta know Windows is because they've already used it, not because it is good. And if you don't give them something straightforward like MATE or Cinnamon as a Linux desktop, you might as well compare it to new Vista users, not Win11 users.
You don't have to convince me that Gnome is bad. But everything else now pretty much follows the WinXP paradigm that we're all used to.
I think just saying "installing the OS" is a bit of a trap, that's step one, and important step but then you get to all the different subsets of features and software that they use, including not included in the OS or its repos.
When you're looking at consumer usage of a PC for anything that remotely makes sense to do on that platform I think windows has the advantage of decades of a different software ecosystem. Cumulatively there's a huge broad library of software that linux can't touch, or gets partway there but falls short. For example I can tag music files on linux, but it's painful compared to something like Mp3tag (which has been going for about 17 years). Or if I want fan control on my 9 year old intel platform I need to learn about and add a kernel parameter and manually detect sensors before I get started whereas it's straightforward on software available on windows.
I wouldn't compare the installation process since most people can't install Windows, but Linux does have an astounding gap in basic usability.
Every time I see a gnome app without a menubar I can't help but feel like Linux shoots itself in the foot just because Windows has two feet.
Well, the comment I was replying to cited ease of installation, so I did, too.
> Linux shoots itself in the foot just because Windows has two feet
This is exactly the opinion that everyone who is not accustomed to all of the GNOME nonsense gets after using GNOME. And GNOME fans are far too used to things to even hear that it is imperfect.
It's funny how we see these threads every few months, and it's always the same thing (referring to the discussion below this comment as well).
Linux people (myself included) are utterly blind to the rough edges on Linux. Even something like Mint, which is probably the best starting place for someone coming from Windows, can have weird issues depending on your hardware.
On the other hand, Windows users are hilariously misinformed about the state of the Linux Desktop. To hear them talk you'd think we're still back in 1997.
All of that said, for anyone curious, it is 100% worth trying out. Linux has come a LONG way. Mint is great for general usage, Bazzite is a good choice for gaming. Unless you're playing competitive shooters it's basically a guarantee the games you want to play run on Linux. There will be some rough edges and stuff to get use to, but IMO it's worth a try at least.
To be fair to Linux, Windows has many, many rough edges as well. The difficult part for newbies is that those rough edges are _different_. In the long run I feel pretty confident saying that Linux is overall better, and that's because of the customizability. Ultimately, with some experience, one can essentially choose one’s own rough edges :P
The problem is where the rough edges are at.
On Windows they are mostly off the beaten path. I have a Windows PC setup as my media computer because my wife doesn't want to deal with Linux, and I've never once had an issue with the audio or Bluetooth.
On my Fedora desktop and Arch laptop I have audio/Bluetooth issues at least every couple of weeks.
In addition, my wife needs access to Adobe products, my brother needs access to Office. Those are non-negotiable for them because in both cases it's for work.
I'm a Linux fan, I don't even want to go back to Windows for my personal computer, but Windows is still a smoother experience for the majority of people.
If find that if it doesn't work out of the box, you're still in for a very clumsy time in Linux land.
Installing windows has been harder than Linux for at least 15 years. Windows just came pre-installed for most people.
Convention and the terminal holds it back. A terminal looks like the 1970s but feels like the future
I'd rather suspect it has a lot more to do with 40+ years of application backward compatibility and the ludicrous stack of software available for the platform.
> “terminal holds it back”
Presumably the it here is Linux? That’s not what I would have said. The terminal makes maintaining your own systems much easier because it’s all text. Opposed to having to mix screen shots and instructions. Which is to say, I don’t imagine people who can’t handle the terminal (and are on Windoz) are doing any maintenance or configuration beyond a few GRRR items they’ve convinced themselves is ultimately intolerable.
From a small business I’d say what keeps the accounting office on Windoz is software (ie. quickbooks, excel). But a close second would be tighter integration of file management and core office apps (ie email). It’s very easy to rename, move, copy, files on windows. You can perform many of these file management tasks inside an app experience (ie saveas dialog box). Apple has the mindset with their suite of Apple productivity apps, Chromebooks are very easy for general users to get their head around. If Linux could roll up a Chromebook environment with a QB clone into an expert system (e.g. no. We don’t need pictures, videos or games folders), I think our firm would consider the switch. It would certainly have the appearance of stability productivity, and simplicity which is always a plus when your job is not maintaining IT systems. (Now we just need to find new outsource IT for troubleshooting)
To me it's sad that Linux never became a good desktop OS, Windows just became worse and worse until it became worse than Linux :(
When I upgraded to 7 I tried Linux and I simply hated that I had to deal with the terminal and install strange third-party programs from strange forums to get anything working. Then I had to upgrade to 11 and I had to run strange terminal programs to install it without without creating a Microsoft account, and everyone recommends using some third-party Windows power tools to fix what Microsoft did to Windows. I could not believe it. IT IS THE SAME THING!
Now I'm using Linux, and I don't like it, but least it isn't spyware.
> When I upgraded to 7 I tried Linux
Most Linux distros have come a long way in the last decade and a half. Windows is worse, yes, but Linux is also better.
Fwiw I had to report one of those "free win11 activated" videos as it was having users download and run a script from a suspicious source and handing full domain admin to a 3rd party.
In my domain (motorsports), almost all software is ancient 3rd party stuff only available as windows desktop apps.
I’ve tried emulators but performance is abysmal for these apps. There are also all sorts of weird networking things that don’t work.
And generally when you work with a new team which has a different tech stack, there just isn’t time within the context of a race weekend to faff.
I’m unfortunately locked in.
Having once worked with maintaining an ancient 3rd party windows desktop app, I'm surprised you don't have problems with them on recent windows. I guarantee you the developers do. They must be truly heroic maintainers if none of those frustrations bleed through to you.
A time will come when the easiest way to run these beasts is in a docker container running wine, and I don't think it will be long.
Plenty of frustrations pass along to me, but I am sure that the developers maintaining the software are also putting in a massive shift to make it all keep working. These companies are often quite small, or small underfunded teams within larger organisations, and I believe that they are doing a fantastic job working with what they have.
New features are few and far between, but that doesn't mean that they're not doing a good job. The current state of the industry is not a reflection of the developers working on it today, it's a decades long legacy.
You don't have to tell me, I've been there :) I still think Linux-based containerization is the way to go for these apps in the future.
I hope you don't mind being a bit curious about this, as a hobby driver.
At what level of motorsports are you working? It sounds like you both semi-regularly work with new teams. And are you working with them as a programmer? I'd be curious to know what kind of applications you're then working on, if so.
I work primarily with GT3 teams across the highest level championships (WEC, IMSA, DTM, GTWC, ALMS), with a variety of manufacturers.
With a small team of software engineers and data scientists, I'm building a cloud based motorsports data analysis platform which eliminates the friction involved in handling motorsports data and the differences between different manufacturers' software systems, and quickly gives drivers & coaches insights on how to improve their driving. So this involves getting into the weeds of a lot of this legacy software.
There are a few teams I work more closely with where I've set up their entire trackside network/tech stack, although nowadays I'm more focused on the software. Over the years I've done a bit of everything at the track, up to and including physically laying cables in a bare garage or setting up the systems on the car, although I don't do anything related to vehicle dynamics.
If the software is as ancient as you say, then surely you should be able to get away with installing an old copy of Win7 or even older? When you say "weird networking" do you imply internet as well? If it's all offline and only locally networked I see no reason why you need to run a modern version of windows.
Yes, I could probably run Win7
Would this help you?
https://reactos.org/
This is an open source reimplementation of winxp. I think they can even run drivers made for windows now.
Try Omarchy with Windows VM: https://learn.omacom.io/2/the-omarchy-manual/100/windows-vm
Thank you. I haven't tried this. I'll look into it.
It’s just arch with an opinionated hyprland setup and some glue, which is fine as far as it goes but don’t expect miracles.
Not knocking it I’m sure it has value to developers who want a more turnkey setup for common dev setups.
Youtube also took down videos for Adobe a few months ago and HN deleted posts/comments about it: https://tech.yahoo.com/cybersecurity/articles/google-adobe-a...
Considering I can find plenty of nonstandard Windows 11 install guides on youtube I don't think this guys video was taken down for that reason. Most likely hit with automated moderating and he probably said "kill" in the video while giving instructions. That could trigger the violence filter and now he gets tons of more views from idiots thinking Microsoft and Google are working together to protect Win11 from a supposed massive wave of people going around the sign in requirement. Or whatever other grievence they have with Windows.
Exactly, such a lot of pearl-clutching going on in this HN thread, its just a random algorithm-led youtube takedown
Your computer is not yours citizen. Stop your disobedience.
I wiped Win11 from my Ideapad and installed Ubuntu. I love Gnome & it's the closest it'll get to MacOS (am a Mac user mainly). Win11 was absolutely wild though - around every corner was some ad for Office365 or Copilot or some other shit product. You don't own Windows (anymore) - you borrow it.
Guide for setting up KDE like macOS (or you can install a macOS theme):
https://www.howtogeek.com/heres-how-i-made-linux-feel-more-l...
Obviously missing things:
1. Needs to fix keybindings, including setting readline shortcuts across all gui textfields. May be effectively impossible with so many gui toolkits floating around. 2. Needs a gui to manage configuration of startup items, login items. 3. Portable application distribution rather than futzing with installing a third party package source (may be effectively impossible for gui apps). 4. Cleaner systemd configuration tooling and especially documentation, even if it can't be expressed via a gui. 5. Cleaner process management. 6. Cleaner user management via GUI.
The look and feel mostly doesn't matter tbh; you'll just end up with something that looks like macos but still mostly functions like windows but without consistent keybindings or behavior or system management.
1. You can configure the keyboard shortcuts in KDE. Or use something like Toshy: https://github.com/RedBearAK/Toshy
2. KDE Autostart
3. KDE Discover. Supports flatpak for example: https://flathub.org/en
4. SysD Manager (https://github.com/plrigaux/sysd-manager). Can be installed from Flathub. SystemdGenie is another one.
5. KDE Plasma System Monitor
6. KDE User Manager
As a lifelong Mac user, I'm mildly tempted to do something like this in SteamOS, but with limited real estate: two panels feels like potentially wasting pixels, and the bottom edge is probably easier to reach on a touchscreen gaming handheld. I'll do some tweaking, but the ultimate UX has to feel right on this device, not just familiar to what I use elsewhere. Plus, I mostly use Desktop Mode for Chrome, which doesn't really use the menu bar.
But I appreciate the share!
To install Windows 11 with a local user and/or to install it without the TPM 2.0 requirement, what I found easiest was using Rufus to prepare a flash drive with the Windows 11 ISO. Rufus asks if you want to create a local user and what the user name is. It also asks if you want to skip some of the Windows 11 requirements. Then when you install Windows 11 using the flash drive it just works.
Like a drug addict. Finding out unsupported ways to get a standard dose of Windooze, despite it now being more toxic.
Be sure that it's not connected to the internet while installing. Otherwise it will install updates and turn it into a normal install.
The main issue is how opaque the system is, though that may also be a feature to limit people’s abilities in figuring out how to bypass various restrictions. No one should have to risk the existence of their channel and livelihood to some unknown automated algorithm. Although the reddit post only cites videos from one person running into this issue, the first video link has comments referencing someone else so I found a video from that other person as an additional data point.
https://youtu.be/vQ-RXzzU9u0
At least in eu, one should be able to access and contest the decisions made to remove your content, I don't know if this is the same outside eu
I imagine youtube has the same automated system comply with eu, but the videos linked in the reddit post mention how quickly the appeals were denied, so accessing and contesting decisions alone doesn’t fix the automated system problem.
Oddly enough, I had the simplest experience of installing Windows 11 25H2 on a new ThinkPad just recently. Apparently the Windows ISO doesn't have the WiFi drivers for that specific machine out of the box, so during setup when it couldn't find an internet connection, it simply offered to create a local account.
So I would assume, if there is a way you can temporarily disable networking (e.g. in BIOS), then that would be the easiest way to avoid creating a Microsoft account.
I wonder if that is something new in 25H2 then. My computer also does not have working network drivers out of the box and when I installed 24H2, it just gave me a screen to install the network driver from a flash drive. There was no way to skip or continue without it.
They already have the local account button, they just need to consistently expose it, even if a machine has a working internet connection.
They have been taking down a lot of YouTube videos with Bob Dylan botlegs in the recent days, so maybe the platform is becoming more restrictive with everything, not just Windows 11 installs
The Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 will be released on Friday. If it's material in that timeframe, it's probably a Sony/Columbia DMCA issue or from google music file matching songs that are (soon to be) officially released.
Yeah, no, they've been taking down a lot of material that's not included in tthe new bootleg series.
It’s possible AI moderation called the Windows videos unsafe. Next might be routine car maintenance.
The times they are a-changin'
Oh no, all the 10 minute videos that should be 10 bullet points in plain text?
Plus ads?
I'm not supposed to interact with non-Premium members but, yeah, I forgot about those :)
A game is fun. Software that prevents you from doing what you want with it is neither of those things.
90% of software does run on Linux, but if the software you really care about/need for your job/need for your hobby doesn't, then it might as well be 0%. You are going to use Windows then.
In some cases, you might be able to find (or write) an alternative program (or modify an existing one to do what is needed). This is not always so easy, but sometimes it can be done, and it can sometimes be done better than the Windows version. (It is what I did with the one Windows program I did want to run on Linux.)
We need a Linux Subsystem for Windows
if only WSL existed ...
Step 1: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/ Set up an unattend script how you want it to install Windows 11 Education, the only sane build of W11 with most AI shit turned off.
Step 2: Install W11 with the autounattend.xml.
Step 3: Powershell as admin -> irm https://get.activated.win | iex
Stallman was right.
The writing has been on the wall for years. Die hard windows users have been telling me that the increasingly esoteric incantations needed to install Windows without submitting to giving Microsoft your identity are a deliberate and officially supported feature which they can rely on even as the common proles are herded onto Microsoft's plantation. I wonder if any still really believe it. The best time to jump ship is now.
Thank you Microsoft for your efforts towards making year of the Linux desktop a thing
Set your sights on GitHub, VSCode and npm.
Does anyone have links to "how-to's" for Linux in the enterprise? Password/MFA management, central app management, the equivalent of group policy, device management, etc.? IME, these are the areas in the enterprise where Windows "wins" with the IT teams, but it's been a long time since I've been close to the rollout side of the house. TIA
There isn't really a polished and comprehensive singular thing to accomplish this the same way you would with Active Directory in Windows world. Then again, AD is really not a polished thing either its more of a duct-taped stack of crap.
Mirroring "the unix way" it is often a collection of single-purpose tools composed together to achieve the desired goal. Samba is quite powerful these days, it does more than just SMB sharing. FreeIPA is another software tool that I believe is more common in Red Hat deployments.
Closest is probably RedHat Satellite: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite
It's as if the web as we known it has outgrown it's usefulness to individual people beyond interacting with companies and government.
Time for something new. No idea what, but we need a way for people to share with people... That's what made usenet, then the web so awesome. Both were mostly wrecked by the same commercialization.
In my bright-eyed geeky youth, I kept thinking that clever technology was usually enough to solve problems.
Nowadays, I feel many problems are emergent from economic and legal structures, and a new software project is often just temporarily treating a symptom.
> Time for something new
How should that look like and what could one make differently?
What we currently have could easily used to share with people (like it was years ago). Nothing really changed but people use it differntly now...
I like to think ActivityPub is a good candidate.
When the $699 MacBook launches, oh boy it's going to sell well.
People say this every time. There were people on HN who thought the M1 Macbook Air would permanently cannibalize PC market share, and basically nothing happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...
It won't "cannibalize" the PC market share. But I would argue that the overall market share is irrelevant. Most people don't even use Adblock/UBlock for Web browsing, so they don't even know what's best for them, and therefore are likely to just go for the cheapest option that gets the job done. Apple won't win them over, because that's not how Apple operates.
Another huge segment is people who just use whatever their work provides.
Laptop users who 1. care enough, 2. have the means, and 3. have the inclination to even get a personal laptop are a solid minority. Which coincidentally is how Microsoft gets away with the disaster that Windows 11 is. They have about _no_ user-customers left.
I know plenty of PC-hardliners that have switched from Windows to a Mac in recent years. And exactly nobody who has switched in the opposite direction.
I'm also pretty sure that most people who have personal laptops keep them around for 5+ years before upgrading. I myself had a 2015 15" MacBook Pro that lasted me until 2022 when Ventura support was cut off. I only upgraded it in 2023 when Apple launched Advanced Data Protection, which I was very keen to use, and had to make a choice between logging out of iCloud or buying a new MacBook. So seeing that the 2015 model had indeed reached it's useful life for me, I got myself a M2 Max 16", which I also fully expect will last me 7+ years.
So as long as IT procurement in most companies will keep buying whatever cheap PC laptops they can by weight, PC market share is safe, and Microsoft is doing the best they can to keep it that way. Apple can only compete for users who have the will and the choice. And the $699 MacBook will quite likely capture a few of them.
Additionally - I have a PC too. All it does is it runs videogames. In fact I use my personal PC a lot more often than I use my personal MacBook.
> And exactly nobody who has switched in the opposite direction.
This might be an issue with your optics. I personally know at least 4 people who left MacOS for Linux in the past decade, 5 if you include myself. 2 of those people aren't even programmers, they're just sick and tired of macOS turning into Windows.
The $699 Macbook will not capture any users that missed out on the M1 Macbook Air. It just won't. We already saw Apple try pushing the whole 12" Macbook vs 13" Air shtick, not only did it fail commercially but it gave people a terrible impression of the ecosystem. I cannot imagine any world in which "quite a few" people switch from Windows to a Fischer Price operating system.
This is probably youtuber drama about some random youtube algorithm led takedown and likely nothing to do with Microsoft or the actual content of the video that got taken down
it literally is this. Nothing to do with Microsoft, it's youtube relying on AI to take down videos now
Seems very plausible. Still, you wonder why it got flagged.
possible confusion with pirating software i guess
OK, I really hope they were downloaded and will spread on other platforms like vimeo, dailymotion and especially The Internet Archive?
YouTube and other large platforms should be regulated like public utilities. Otherwise the abuse will continue.
There isn't presently a good solution to this. I think regulations like that will probably have downstream effects, kicking the can down the road.
Google is already bad enough at government collusion, divulging data, as are other infrastructure providers.
Best-case is gutting Alphabet and breaking it up to the effect of decentralization of its pieces.
I think if anything regulating the current instruments would just harden their social/political position which furthers their interests more than anything.
Regulations will just make it easier for the powerful incumbents to control what content the platforms are allowed to host.
Deregulation is the solution here- get rid of DMCA and all the other laws that are used to bankrupt any competitor to YouTube, so that instead of a single video hosting site, we have tens, hundreds or thousands.
The dream of the early web was that everything would be resistant to censorship and centralized control because it was a true network of many independent hosts, globally distributed, independent from the whims of any government. Then we let a few billionaire copyright holders and authoritarians who want to control what is published and seen gradually strangle the open web and replace it with a handful of corporate sites that can be controlled.
Regulation helps the people against the power. The power will already get it's way without regulation.
> YouTube and other large platforms should be regulated like public utilities
But they are in private hands, aren't they ? Welcome to capitalism my friend. And don't forget to vote on the next election.
We regulate many privately owned utilities. They aren’t allowed to just deny you power or water based on your politics or pressure from another corporation or whatever.
My understanding was that you can install Windows 11 Pro, and tell it that you want to join a domain and in that case you're prompted to create a local account. That generally seems like the easiest option, even if the $45 price difference seems a little much.
How viable is it to stay in Win10?
IoT LTSC is updated until 2032 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
I use it since 2021 on my gaming PC. Zero problems, it’s a trimmed down Win 10 with most of the bloatware removed
Win 11 has a similar trimmed down LTSC version
Just install it, MS doesn’t care about piracy
I think the challenge with 10 IoT LTSC isn't going to be the OS itself, but the software running on it. Lots of software uses chromium embedded, and in the case of win7 the day that extended support (+3 years) ended CEF also dropped support and required features only found on more recent windows releases, then as other software updated their CEF dependency they also dropped win7 support. It might not be a major thing, but there is a slow erosion that goes beyond whether the OS gets patches. If nothing else, if it's a machine that uses software that goes online it's a notice that you should investigate moving to something else eventually.
Win10 IoT LTSC does not cover all use cases though.
When it comes to gaming, for example Windows Mixed Reality is not included and cannot be installed afterwards (but then again, Microsoft dropped it from Windows 11 too, so no loss there).
Only way to keep it is staying with consumer Windows 10 or use 3rd party software like Oasis.
Problem with 10 LTSC is the fact that it's based on 21H2, and there definitely isn't going to be a feature update for it, now that 11 LTSC is out. Some games already require 22H2.
If you are in the EU (or European economic area or something), you get another year. Not for free: You need to register an account, or pay ~31 eur.
Presumably even if you pay you still need to log in with an account so they can verify the update licence is actually bound to your account?
If you practice good operational security and maintain a decent anti virus and fire wall you will probably be fine. I know people who still run Windows 7 to this day with no trouble because they are vigilant of what they are doing.
This isn't to say it's a good idea but that it can be done.
If you plan on running win 10 anyway Ask Leo has a video called "how to keep using windows 10 safely after support ends" with some solid advice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpAIOcYPYgo&list=TLPQMjkxMDI...
You can buy extended security updates for Windows 10:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended...
In Europe it's free although you have to log in with a Microsoft account for... reasons.
to prove you're from Europe probably - right?
Indeed, yes.
While you're at it, you might as well downgrade to Win7. No jokes aside, if all the software you want runs on it, it is fine. Just no security update etc.
I would suggest just switching to Linux and using a VM for things that NEED to be Windows. Games that run kernel level Anti-Cheat won't run, but tbh nothing I would suggest installing anyway.
> VM for things that NEED to be windows.
The big two that spring to mind are online games and Adobe softwares. I don't think a VM can usually meet the performance needed for either.
I do wish more artists would take a chance on open source softwares, but most of the ones I know are still insistent that nothing can ever come close to Adobe. But that's a rant for another time.
Games run pretty great on Linux, but if you do want a VM, passing through a graphics card to that VM via vfio provides 95%+ the performance of native.
Virtual reality headsets with dual 4K screens running at 75Hz+ perform well on a Windows VM done that way. A normal flatscreen game is going to be just fine.
I stayed on Win7 until December 2023, until there was some exploit that was attackable by just viewing an image, so just browsing the web would've made it vulnerable (I believe in the WebP format).
Although it seems there are people still Frankensteining Win7, and even patching DLLs to make the newest browsers/apps still run on it.
Famously MS Teams was really screwed up, but I had to use it for work..
Browsers are the problem.
Firefox outright refuses to install on older Windows versions for a couple of years now. Very lazy and negligent move on Mozilla's part.
If you were as resource-constrained as Mozilla is, you'd drop support for unsupported platforms anyway.
According to this they still support windows 7 through extended support channel: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-users-windows-7...
Chrome dropped support two years ago or so.
"Firefox version 115 is the last supported Firefox version for users of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1."
That's a version from over 2 years ago.
ESR version doesn't mean it has never received changes for 2 years.
The problem is not the lack of patches. The problem is with websites refusing service based on client's version from the user-agent or breaking by using cutting edge features without a polyfill.
I made some videos of installing Windows 95, 98 and NT on DosBox-X on macOS ARM: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RBMSW1B6hKk
And a GitHub repo: https://github.com/BrowserBox/windows-dosbox-x
I tried different AIs to make the scripts to automate installs in DosBox-X as long as you have a product key and ISO or other media.
Most interesting to me was the different quirks between OSeS. NT was the most tricky in getting to work on DosBox-X and syncing up internet, IIRC. But overall a very fun project. Brings back nostalgia of 3.5" disks and seeing those install screen. Very cool times in the 90s ha! :)
The number of Linux fanboys coming out of the woodwork to complain about Windows (and to provide anecdotes about Windows which are clearly exaggerated) is very high.
Please read the Linux Advocacy HOW-TO.
Shitting on Windows and MacOS does not make you look authoritative, honest, or credible. It makes you look like you have a very strong opinion and shut off from anything that does not conform to your opinion.
Windows and macOS will happily do everything they can to take your money and keep you in their ecosystem but shitting on them is a crime ?
no, of course not. I swear to God, reading comprehension among Linux fans falls lower and lower every year.
shitting on them makes anything you say about a competing operating system appear like fully biased opinion, rather than fact. if you want people who you have not already captured to listen to you, you must do your best to appear unbiased. shitting on anything is 100% bias. and if you have opinions like that, how can someone you're trying to win over trust that the positive things you're saying about this other thing aren't also 100% opinion?
Stick to the facts if you want to ever hope to do anything other than make Linux fans appear like they are rabid dogs who attack anything they don't like on sight.
You can do that if you want, I don't care. But I don't go to rabid dogs for their opinions when it comes to choosing things, and no one else does either.
You say things like this to get a mob going, and I want you to admit that. you all shit on things you don't like because you want to feel heard by others who also shit on those same things. but people who aren't like that come here and they read this stuff, too. And you're shitting on them in the process.
You're using reason to argue with a fanatic.
Let them go; they're on a roll.
This is actually a good thing. Competitive Windows is a thing and these people are ruining it for the rest of us.
A bit late eh? That genie left the bottle quite some time ago. And there are still other methods available.
The parody of Techno-feudalism
use bottles.org to run windows apps on Linux. All games run on Linux with it.
Correct url is https://usebottles.com/
Is Windows 10 LTSC a thing still?
I wonder if they supported piracy as well in those videos, or something breaking their EULA or something. People always come out swinging, fuck corpos, etc, but oftentimes there is something shady going on as well, either consciously, or unconsciously.
Windows 11 is definitely not in my future so I do not care about this, but it's the same crap as when they removed downvotes due to Disney and Biden's Whitehouse getting ratioed to hell. YouTube/Google is not your friend and does not care about you. As long as you understand that, you should not be surprised as you always expect things like this.
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The best time to buy a MacBook Air (or Pro) or a Mac mini! Much less BS and you take it out of the box and use it within 5 minutes.
The videos being taken down here are about how to avoid: Windows requiring a Microsoft account to install, and Windows only being installable on compatable hardware.
AFAIK an apple account isn't strictly required, but a lot of MacOS won't be functional without one.
How is a Macbook better than Windows in these senses?
You can use mac, ipad and iphone without apple account at all. You can use app store without logging to icloud. You can install apps without app store. There is no nagging to use icloud after initial setup. There is no spyware and adware integrated into standard apps or OS itself. Apple does not sell user data.
> There is no spyware and adware integrated into standard apps or OS itself.
Are you sure? Senator Ron Wyden claimed that the US uses the Push Notification system for surveillance, and Apple never denied it: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
At the very least, there is a little bit of spyware integrated into the OS.>You can use app store without logging to icloud.
You can't download anything from the App Store without signing into it. For that, an Apple ID is required.
Exactly, with the caveat I'm buying very cheap pre-M1 Mac to put Linux on it. Works well.
it might work well today for m1/m2 but the writting is on the wall for linux in newer macs.
asahi development slowed down and is getting further away as apple releases new malcs yearly.
i don't think this is a good bet for those who want to use linux.
The later Intel Macs with T1/T2 chip also come with a number of caveats on Linux. Don't expect those to work out of the box with standard Linux distros.
The problem with this is Tahoe.
The better solution is to buy an x86 laptop and install Linux instead. All of these empires are just milking us.
I use all three platforms regrettably.
I would rather be subjected to fingernail torture than deal with the productivity implosion that is using macOS. It isn't meant for users who do more than stare at webpages. And the workaround apps to give it more productivity such as actually useful taskbars are buggy as hell fighting Apple's trash.
Linux or Windows or bust.
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Why bother? Run Linux or get a Mac.
I am a die-hard Linux guy and I have to use Windows for certain things. One of those is multiplayer games. I am never buying a Mac. I've owned 4 macs over the last 20 years and I've regretted every purchase.
I've only ever used windows. Recently got a mac mini so I could compile for iOS. I'm debating embracing the entire Apple ecosystem given I use iPhone. Not a huge fan of iCloud's pricing though. Curious what issues you ran into with your macs/Apple experience?
I had the following problems. Note my hardware was ageing at the time and was about 5 years old. I know a quality apple specialist that did the work.
- Glue'd in batteries on Laptops. I had a Mac Pro with a glue'd in battery. I could have done it myself, however I ended up opting to get someone who knows what they are doing to replace it. Labour and battery replacement cost me about £250.
- Official charger made the power lines toast. Another £250 to get it repaired.
- iOS Safari browser sometimes stops videos / audio when the screen locks or you switch apps. It is really annoying. Doesn't happen on Graphene OS or Android.
- iCloud is kinda required if you use an iPhone even though I don't use it for backups.
- Upgrades just aren't possible. Every single on of my laptops I have, I have upgraded ram, disk and even processor on some of the older models I have. I changed an intel Mac Mini drive to an SSD, it was a fiddly to say the least. On other SFF machines it is often a 5 minute job.
- MacOS is kinda just weird. While it is a Unix, it does everything it can to hide it. As someone that used both Linux/BSD. MacOS feels like running a weird Linux distro. Brew was kinda weird after coming from Linux world. I would have just preferred to run Linux.
- The online account stuff with Apple is somehow worse than Microsoft.
These days I buy refurb Business Laptop from Dell or Lenovo. Literally 10% of the price, Linux almost always works and if breaks, I can buy another one cheap for the same price as repairing an Apple machine. I get it, they are not as nice but for me they work fine and are much cheaper.
For me it was the keyboard shortcuts and mouse behavior differences. That plus the homebrew weirdness trying to emulate Linux package management. I decided to just use Linux.
Ultimately, Linux is a development environment for Linux, and by extension the most developer friendly OS imo.
I’ve gotten used to the mouse behavior and keyboard shortcuts.
One thing that drives me nuts about Linux is that application support generally isn’t as good as Mac. For example, there is no Claude Desktop app for Linux nor an Apple Music desktop app. If you need those, you’re using somebody’s hacked together project that half works, a web version with limited features, or paying for a third party app.
Some motherboards only support firmware updates applied from Windows. In 2025, which is just crazy to me.
Mac is not an option.
I'd rather install Win 11 on my laptop than buy another Apple computer. Did so once and it was the worst experience I ever had. Never again.
Is this year of the Linux yet?
One thing I do not understand about HN and other online tech communities is how much they hype up linux as some paragon of usability and ease of use, when it's just obviously not the case.
"You don't need windows for gaming, 90% of games work on linux!" -- except the 10% that DON'T are all of the new, massive titles that people want to play. It's like saying "90% of the gears in the car work fine, just not 1st gear".
"There are 0 driver problems" -- obviously not true as some hardware only ships with windows hardware. Yes it's true your new network card or mouse won't have issues, but a lot of hardware simply doesn't have support, and a lot might be supported if you spend enough time fanagling.
"it's just as easy use as windows or mac" -- until you need to change one of many settings that hasn't been included in a control panel, because linux users have been more than happy to drop to config files and cli usages to tweak things (i.e. lots of stuff left out of system GUIs)
I don't know why people do this. Especially in communities that are technical (and thus tend to be "technically correct" about things), why people essentially lying (by omission, if nothing else) about Linux?
> the 10% that DON'T are all of the new, massive titles
That's not true? Arc Raiders, arguably the most-hyped game of 2025, is day-one compatible with Linux devices. I played the Server Slam free weekend on my NixOS machine, clearly not all of the new massive titles are broken.
You can't abuse hyperbole like this while accusing other people of lying.
I was with you until "essentially lying." That's not fair. You can disagree - but calling people liars who express good faith beliefs is uncalled for. Many people genuinely believe that Linux is the better desktop OS.
But yeah, I run Windows as my daily-driver for pretty much the reasons you give.
OK, they aren't lying. They're just saying untruthful things to support their cause.
Linux is not a 100% replacement for Windows, and the reverse is equally true. LibreOffice is not MS Office except for being open-source. Your pocket tool is not functionally equivalent to a full toolbox. A turducken is not a pheasant. Etc.