I had to jump ship to Linux full time when Microsoft pushed some update somehow that made it impossible for me to boot my Windows 7 install anymore. (any attempt would cause the motherboard to perform a soft-reset)

Out of all the gripes I hear with Linux, most of them are problems I myself never ran into. Clipboard works fine for nearly everything except GTK based things. Qt based programs are completely fine.

There's also plenty of games I play that I could barely get running properly under Windows 7 no matter what steps I took, where as in Wine, it just works with no strings attached. It's almost like the Wine developers do a better job than Microsoft at running these things. Some of these are even GOG released games.

If you can't put up with how most distros package themselves then go with something that gives you a bare bones terminal only system and go from there. If you start from scratch like that then you wont have to worry about wrestling with a pre-packaged desktop environment that you yourself didn't setup and configure from the ground up to behave like you expect one to behave.

schmatzler wrote:

On Windows I can just drag a window to the edge of my screen and it will be resized to 50% of its size. Or I drag it to the corners and it takes up 25% of the whole screen. That's really easy and convenient.

Keyboard-centric folks can also use Win+Left, Win+Right and Win+Up shortcuts to pin-to-left/right/maximize. It is really nice and works across multiple monitors beautifully. BTW, the pin to corner is new to Win10 (maybe Win8.1 also? not sure) Win7 only had the pin to half/maximize. Vista has nothing built-in, but AeroSnap program can be used.

bfcastello wrote:

Apparently you're probably (I am talking this based on your posts solely) a bit too lazy to search for free applications.

That's the other thing about people. They are very comfortable with their primary environment, but typically don't have the will to become as proficient with their secondary environment, so they end up with the feeling that it simply does not have what they need and so they like it less. Kinda like your repeated claims about Win10 auto-updates, which you say are the thing that bothers you most about the OS. How much time did you really invest into finding a way to turn them off?

imi wrote:

huh? I think quite the opposite is true, especially the less knowledgeable and casual users are almost always welcoming new interfaces and designs because to them everything new is automatically better, especially if it looks "fancy", they don't really care about usability and function because they don't use their devices for complex tasks anyways, and usually also don't care about things like system settings or customization at all.

It depends on how "less knowledgeable" you want to go. This may be true about users that are so "casual" and clueless that they actually haven't mastered any task, and every time they use their computer they are basically re-learning the whole thing, or they really only know how to point-and-click icons on the desktop (like, move the browser icon somewhere else and they panic because "the internet is gone"). However, these users typically don't care at all about how things look and how shiny they are. All they need is the icon to "the internet", to "my documents" and maybe one or two other programs to be big and visible. Everything else is meaningless to them as they just don't see it.

The demographics that is most upset about major UI changes are those that are advanced enough to tinker with their PC and change settings but not advanced enough to know the OS "invariants", like the keyboard shortcuts or commands to launch control panel aspects directly. These change very rarely, if at all, and when they do, things are typically only added. Almost nothing is ever removed.

Understand that the primary way of growth for these companies is make money by selling products to new users, not to make things easier for the old ones. So the UI designers try to make it more welcoming to someone who is just now starting to use the program for the first time, not someone who has used it for 20 years and gotten very proficient at the previous way of doing things.

SirNickity wrote:

I really adore Linux, but as a desktop, it's pretty hopeless.

XFCE is rock solid and afaict is pretty much the same as it ever was. It all depends on the users preferences.
And like the 16th century native americans they fall for glistering and shiny trinkets, instead of opting for
stability.

If you take the debian stable with xfce, its hard to go wrong, especially for shopping and banking purposes. 😁

Akuma wrote:

XFCE is rock solid and afaict is pretty much the same as it ever was. It all depends on the users preferences. And like the 16th […]
Show full quote

SirNickity wrote:

I really adore Linux, but as a desktop, it's pretty hopeless.

XFCE is rock solid and afaict is pretty much the same as it ever was. It all depends on the users preferences.
And like the 16th century native americans they fall for glistering and shiny trinkets, instead of opting for
stability.

If you take the debian stable with xfce, its hard to go wrong, especially for shopping and banking purposes. 😁

I was used to the LXDE classic gui but lately after using LxQT I almost prefer this and find it a good old style but still modern looking interface.
I don't care about all those heavier gui/distro with too many apps I'll never use.
Back in the Win7 days, I already was thinking that GUIs was becoming too much heavy on the hardware and I preferred the Starter version the netbooks had. Not to mention the later newer version of the o.s.
At the end Windows XP SP3 was my last preferred MS o.s. if I'd to choose. Stable, fast, compatible but still old style.
But nowdays Linux offers so much community support and updates for the average home everyday PC that beside games I will use its lightest distro until I'll see some completely new old-style logic more oriented on optimization, offline usage, stability etc..

Akuma wrote:

XFCE is rock solid and afaict is pretty much the same as it ever was. It all depends on the users preferences. And like the 16th […]
Show full quote

SirNickity wrote:

I really adore Linux, but as a desktop, it's pretty hopeless.

XFCE is rock solid and afaict is pretty much the same as it ever was. It all depends on the users preferences.
And like the 16th century native americans they fall for glistering and shiny trinkets, instead of opting for
stability.

If you take the debian stable with xfce, its hard to go wrong, especially for shopping and banking purposes. 😁

XFCE may be good, but man, it is very slow for my rPI3.

Planning to get my mac to run win 10 on bootcamp for some games. I’d rather go for win 7, but in the end I’d have to update at some point, I guess. I now have to figure out how to use the real partition with Virtualbox (I’d go with VMWare but I want a free solution) when I am not gaming and if there are some implications? Currently I have a Win 10 VM on VMWare Fusion, but I find it quite slow. I need to take out the key I am using on my VM for this.

There was mention of a program(s) that would tweak win10 so that undesired functions would be removed, would you remind them again?
I did a test and my win7pro key did activate 10pro so I am looking into tweaks now 😀
Thanks!

Came across a program called "Destroy Windows 10 Spying". Is that what you mean?

I also read about a Windows 10 Enterprise "LTSB/LTSC" edition, with lots of bloat excluded from the start.

bfcastello wrote:

XFCE may be good, but man, it is very slow for my rPI3.

Not here! Keep compositing off.

keropi wrote:

There was mention of a program(s) that would tweak win10 so that undesired functions would be removed

Winareo Tweaker is all you need.

The good thing about that program is that you can always go back and revert your changes. Various other "anti spy" programs make their changes permanent and that can be problematic in the long run.

SirNickity wrote:

I really adore Linux, but as a desktop, it's pretty hopeless. The WM guys seem hell-bent on erasing the whole board and starting over every time they get almost feature-complete.

Sweet Jesus, yes. This is imho one of the main reasons why Linux has such an insignificant marketshare on the desktop.

KDE3 was perfectly fine-tuned and then the devs decided in their infinite wisdom that it is now obsolete, only to replace it with software that was unfinished. Same happened with the transition from Gnome2 to Gnome3. Its not just limited to window managers, though - I still remember the PulseAudio debacle. Suddenly, pure ALSA audio drivers were not good enough anymore (because some people used crappy hardware without hardware volume mixers) - so it was replaced with PulseAudio - a horrible, bugridden software that still needed years to be useable.

The mentality in OSS often seems to be "Oh well, my fun programming exercise has finished now, lets do something new!" - maintaining software doesnt seem to be a priority for a lot of devs.

Im pretty happy that KDE3 lives on through the Trinity project, though. That is a blazingly fast window manager, only using a few megabytes of memory.

schmatzler wrote:

The mentality in OSS often seems to be "Oh well, my fun programming exercise has finished now, lets do something new!" - maintaining software doesnt seem to be a priority for a lot of devs.

Windows is the exact opposite: many legacy APIs linger around for decades, so a lot of software continues to work without any maintenance, leading many developers into a false sense of security that OSes and APIs never change, and you never have to maintain older code.
When Microsoft finally does kill off an old API, the gap between the now-ancient code and knowledge of active developers (the people who actually understood the old APIs and designed and implemented the actual code have probably gone on to greener pastures years ago) is so great that it's virtually impossible to update the code to the new API.

When I started little over a year ago, I encountered a situation exactly like that: code was still running DirectX 9 and DirectShow. Sure, it works, but firstly, you're missing out on all the cool new stuff that DirectX 10/11/12 and Media Foundation can do. Secondly, because DirectX 9 is slowly fading out of active use, writing/optimizing drivers for DX9 is no longer a priority. On newer devices, DX11 drivers will be faster/more mature.

So at my job interview, they told me about DX9 and such, and that there has been an unfinished attempt to move to DX11 by my predecessor. They asked if that should be picked up again. I answered: "You should have done that 10 years ago. DX9 dates back to 2002! Even DX11 has been around since 2009, and DX12 has been out since 2015."

So first thing I did was to get the existing DX11 code into a working state. Then I implemented Media Foundation video encoding and decoding, and currently we are getting more performance and are using various features that would not have been possible without DX11+MF.
One particularly cool feature is that DX11 doesn't require a window or desktop at all. So you can execute code directly from a service. This allows us to execute DX11 code from an IIS webserver, and send an MP4 stream directly to your browser. Makes for all sorts of interesting cloud-based solutions that were never possible before.

Moral of the story: you need to find a happy medium between using old and 'reliable' code/APIs and keeping up with developments.
I think what Windows does is not necessarily bad in itself... It holds on to old APIs for TOO long. But application developers should be more like the linux people: update your code every now and them to make use of new features.
If you just ignore new APIs again and again, eventually you'll be too far behind (like my predecessor who didn't write the DX9 code, and wasn't familiar with DX11 either, so he couldn't make the transition. Whoever wrote the code has been gone for so long that I couldn't even track it down, because that part of the code's history had been lost during one of the various transitions to new version control systems).

schmatzler wrote:

keropi wrote:

There was mention of a program(s) that would tweak win10 so that undesired functions would be removed

Winareo Tweaker is all you need.

The good thing about that program is that you can always go back and revert your changes. Various other "anti spy" programs make their changes permanent and that can be problematic in the long run.

I came across a youtube video by codegopher where he tried to disable the Windows 10 cortana process, and prevent it from restarting, as shown in the task monitor process listing. He did some simple things like I would have done myself and it seemed to work, but then the Windows 10 start menu did no longer work, it showed itself like greyed out. So somehow Start menu functionality is tied up with cortana?

The context is that I will probably have to install Windows 10 at the office at some point, on all workstations. At my home I don't see much future for Windows 10.

To disable Cortana you're better off disabling via group policy or manual regedit instead of trying to use dism or deleting files. IIRC, Cortana doesn't exist in LTSB.

Thanks,
Of course a deleted cortana sounds a lot better then a disabled cortana. And "doesn't exist in LTSB" sounds best of all. Will see how it goes.

Maybe it is better to to focus on the human side instead of trying to change Windows 10? Like getting a therapist for Anger Issues that is on call 24/7 😉 Maybe just drop computer hobbies and go all out on gardening.
🤣

gerwin wrote:

I came across a youtube video by codegopher where he tried to disable the Windows 10 cortana process, and prevent it from restarting, as shown in the task monitor process listing. He did some simple things like I would have done myself and it seemed to work, but then the Windows 10 start menu did no longer work, it showed itself like greyed out. So somehow Start menu functionality is tied up with cortana?

Why do you insist on learning the tricks of the trade through videos made by clueless people that try convoluted idiotic approaches instead of documented solutions to disable things completely with a single registry key?
https://www.howtogeek.com/265027/how-to-disab … -in-windows-10/

I don't insist on anything, just starting somewhere. Worked with windows 10 about 8 hours of my life so far. The few (6) posts I made in this topic have plenty question marks "?".

Admitted that I indirectly ended up at that video by the search term "Windows 10 Sucks". Which is totally biased. 🤣 But I am free to do so on my saturday evening.
Anyways, don't have to spread my personal annoyance too much. I better go back to what is it called: Lurking.

My experience with Windows (every Windows version) is that there is lots of good documentation online, official and unofficial. Typically searching for the specific thing you are trying to solve will yield good results. Something like "Win10 Disable Cortana".

And maybe it's my own bias talking, but I found that most of the useful info comes in text form. Instructional videos, at least 50% of the time, seem to be about the presenters trying to show you how "kewl" and knowledgeable they are, and maybe get you to subscribe and follow so they can make money off ads, and less about helping you with the solution. 😉

Good luck.

Thanks,
I agree that text form information is usually of much better value, and stick to that generally. Also reading is faster. But video seems like a good way to show the dynamics of a User Interface, like from Windows or Linux. I avoid the usual clickbait 'recommended' videos.

gerwin wrote:

Maybe just drop computer hobbies and go all out on gardening.
🤣

It would be interesting to discuss also on why o.s., softwares, everything in the tech world, has changed this way and someway let you no choice to adapt yourself to it if you want to stay "updated" as everyone thinks they must be.
The whole evolution from technology as was an eventually useful closed box you payed for to become nowdays something almost "free" but that you -must- have and use it and in the only way designed to, basically a lifetime service.
The more the tech advance, the less I stay updated and thinking of it more from a philosophical point of view than a passion.

386SX wrote:

The whole evolution from technology as was an eventually useful closed box you payed for to become nowdays something almost "free" but that you -must- have and use it and in the only way designed to, basically a lifetime service.

It's all about information control. The open IBM PC platform was a fluke of history. In the film Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs (for it is he) rants about making a stand against IBM - he's talking about the Big Blue of mainframes and terminals. It's what we're going back to, just without an IBM logo.