The very latest MS Windows 10 update (last weeks) is down right deceptive in its Edge pimping.
After reboot I had a notification message "Make your Computer Faster".
I wouldn't touch one of them with a 40 foot pole on the open web but this was an official MS message in notifications so I figured it was worth a look as it might be some general advice about official new MS tools for tweaking, booting faster, cleaning dead files, newest iteration of the usual stuff.
It immediately launched into an MS Edge installation that had to be killed via process explorer. no dialog about "do you want to?" etc.
> but this was an official MS message in notifications so I figured it was worth a look
What infuriates me the most is that this is aimed at nudging those who don’t know better. With older family members, a savvy relative or workshop can help them set up a functional environment, to pay bills, check Facebook etc.
Previously, I’ve advised to ignore messaging from web sites, but official OS notifications are important - like updates. Now, they can update the OS, click next/accept/ok and they end up with a different browser/bookmarks/ui and that be enough to take away their ability to do their errands.
So my mom, for instance, can no longer be self-sufficient. I have to tell her “oh that one is important” or “no this is just Microsoft trying to sell you stuff you don’t need/will be worse”. They’ve tricked her into the Edge default several times, because every update is an opportunity for MS to prey on her with full screen Microsoft-branded marketing posing as security/performance improvements.
I went through the whole "install Linux on Grandma's old desktop" thing a while ago, totally convinced it was a valid alternative, but there were too many bumps in the road. Linux isn't there yet to allow average users to upgrade major distribution versions. There's been architecture differences (32-bit packages disappearing or no longer being supported), broken packages because it was third-party and not upgraded for the latest release or unsupported, Xorg vs Wayland nonsense, etc. Trying to explain why Zoom doesn't work because it's not requesting a Wayland portal and they need to switch to Xorg but then HiDPI breaks is the type of user experience we're dealing with. That was not fun to debug over a phone during COVID.
Chromebooks are fine, but you need to trust Google. Macs are mostly okay if you're willing to eat the expense, because there's a limited amount of nonsense in the OS and a wide network of Apple Stores for support.
Hm. Personally my mother has been a happy Ubuntu user for over a decade, even going through the installer and upgrades herself.
The only customisation has been to switch to MATE desktop every time, which she finds more familiar. That might also imply sticking with Xorg? Overall though her experience has been good. But perhaps your grandmother uses a wider variety of apps. For her, it's mostly about videos (she does use the ISO automount feature in MATE and CD ripping), some document editing, a web browser, and video conferencing.
The last support call was about plugging in a projector. Turns out the projector was not turned on, and once it was on, it autodetected just fine. I then mentioned mirrored mode and monitor positioning, and that was about it.
Ubuntu is offering 5 years of LTS maintenance on 22.04, and if in 5 years she needs help with the upgrade, I don't feel that's a huge imposition, but she may well manage it on her own just fine.
> Linux isn't there yet to allow average users to upgrade major distribution versions.
I hate to say it, but ... don’t? Go the full managed-workstation route, put an LTS on there, and hope you’ll have a chance to do a version upgrade sometime in the coming years. I usually dislike the idea of using an LTS on a personal machine, but here, when the person using the computer isn’t the one maintaining it, it feels appropriate.
I agree it should be better, but it doesn’t feel like a grandma problem, it feels like a smart-and-willing-but-not-savvy problem. (Not that grandmas can’t be in the latter category, it just doesn’t sound like that’s what you’re describing.)
> Linux isn't there yet to allow average users to upgrade major distribution versions.
Which distro was this? The major-version-upgrade flow is very different for different distros.
IMO it would be difficult to make upgrading between major versions much easier than Fedora Silverblue — literally 3 clicks. (If you want to try it out, now is a convenient time to install Silverblue 38, because 39 is due out next week.)
I had a super old laptop that I installed Ubuntu Mate and gave it to my mom who needed a laptop for simple web browsing/email/YouTube. My mom is totally illiterate when it comes to computers btw.
Worked like a charm for a few years until the laptop finally stopped working for good.
I think Mint would have beem even better. Hell, I use Mint myself. Best OS available by any metrics I can think of. I like it so much that I now donate some yearly 20 bucks to the project. Using it for free feels almost like a steal.
Same here, installed Ubuntu Mate on six super cheap Windows laptops for a psychology practice. All they needed was Firefox to access webmail and Firefox ESR for their cloud electronic medical records system (yep, using Silverlight in 2020).
I heard not a peep for tech support for years. One time someone thought she forgot her password, but it turned out she just had someone else’s computer.
Eventually the practice made enough money to get everyone on MacBooks, which honestly has given me more trouble (especially around all the system-level permissions for webcam and mic access seemingly resetting on random updates).
Never underestimate how many users just basically need a mobile kiosk instead of an actual computer.
My grandmother bought a laptop a while back and decided she instead wanted a tablet. So she gave the laptop to me and I blew out the Win 8 install with Linux Mint and gave it to my mother who still runs it to this day. She has no idea its Linux because the cinnamon DE is Windows-like enough that she has no issue navigating to programs like Firefox. She only browses the web on it so I just setup auto updates and left it alone. She does not use social media, banking, or anything with an account really. She isn't computer savvy so Linux + FF is a low maintenance win.
Don't take me wrong, but it certainly sounds that your mom needs some Linux in her life. Pick a stable distro, set things up once, leave them be. For basic stuff like web browsing Linux is stable, reliable and won't do any surprises for you.
She has Ubuntu for a long time and it was really good. I forgot why I left Windows in the new machine, but I think she’s dependent on Zoom at least, maybe a couple of other apps. I may give Ubuntu or Mint another go when I’m visiting next time.
In either case, it’s insane that it’s come to the point where Linux is recommended on the basis of UX for non-savvy people. I wish vendors has these options and support, but people who don’t have a savvy friend or family member will probably never even have a chance to consider it.
Where are all the people telling us about the _new microsoft_ which loves open source now?
It's a huge company, don't anthropomorphize it. It hasn't changed, it's a system for maximizing profits, it does what some people in it determined to be most efficient for that goal. If saying it "loves open source now" on their websites to "befriend" and attract a new wave of devs is most efficient, then that's what it'll do. When the situation changes, it'll kill competition using any means it can get away with just like it always did.
From my experience with Firefox (which is better) and Chrome (which is faster, especially on old CPUs, compared to Firefox after installing a similar set of extensions) and the knowledge of Edge being a customized Chromium build (notably with some awesome features added, e.g. a vertical tabs bar) I once speculated Edge probably is fast, also modern-standard, so in many cases there probably is no rational reason to install another web browser on a Windows machine which has Edge anyway. I then found out I was wrong: Egde turnt out to be slower than Firefox, let alone Chrome. All my slower/faster ratings are subjective though, I didn't run any benchmarks, it just really feels slow. Curious to mention that even on a low-RAM (4GB) PC Chrome feels the fastest even though it consumes more RAM than Firefox does.
Cynical take but… maybe excessive telemetry is causing it to chug? Especially if it somehow is waiting for a telemetry server response on a critical path rather than sending async?
It may be pretty good for previous-gen games and hardware, and that too after various compromises.
Current and next-gen PC hardware will always be optimized for Windows first, with some technologies being straight-up limited exclusively to Windows.
Not that gamers are losing out on anything valuable, of course. I run Debian stable and spend quite a few times gaming on it, and it turns out almost all the games that won't run on it aren't games worth playing altogether. But this is an opinion of the negligible minority like you and me. The Consumers will obviously care for the latest.
The Steam Deck is, at least for Valve, a first-class citizen of its platform. Tons of money and effort has been put in to bring it up to Windows. It’s not quite there yet, but it is a lot closer than you’re making it seem.
No DLSS or ray tracing. Those might work if I imported the game into Steam; the it would use the Steam settings where I think they do work, from what I've heard. But I don't care that much about DLSS or ray tracing.
Otherwise, I think I've got the highest graphics settings, though I haven't checked them.
The only app still making me want Windows is Paint.Net. It really feels by far the best, if not say perfect, non-pro picture editor ever. I would even pay for really good (Pinta is quirky although indispensable) Linux and Mac ports. I also love Visual Studio but JetBrains Rider seems more than a match. Games indeed have ended being a problem long ago. Perhaps some latest and greatest games still are, I dunno. Have anybopdy tried something like Hogwarts Legacy or Baldurs Gate 3 on Linux?
BG3 works well on my new recent install of Debian Bookworm with nonfree sw on, Nvidia RTX 2080 SUPER, nvidia prop driver 525 or 535 I think, KDE Plasma set to Xorg (Wayland caused some flickering, supposedly bad interaction between Wayland and nvidia drivers).
I think I don't have advanced stuff like DLSS and HDR though, maybe I could if I did some tinkering.
Which may be another motivation for them to buy up so much of the gaming industry. They can probably justify blanket banning anyone playing COD on Linux in the name of banning cheaters.
At the consulting company I work for Linux has been an option for 6+ years together with Mac and Windows.
Hey, even at the customer I work with now (a rather influential directorate), people have the option to choose Mac or Linux.
And: pro-tip, if you are going to work in such a place (public directorate), consider taking the Mac option because unlike with Windows PCs there are limits to how cheap the bean counters can get them and the budgets for hardware is optimised independently of the budget for hiring more people to cover for the fact that they aren't nearly as effective as they could have been and I am afraid - also the hiring budget. (The Linux option is the second best: you get the same hardware but with Linux you make the best out of it.)
That never ceases to amaze me: I mean, as software developers we usually get paid more in a month (or maybe two) than the company hardware we are using costs, so you would think it would be obvious to anyone that money spent on hardware which enables us to be more productive is money well spent?! But no, "do you really have to have the laptop with 32 GB RAM, isn't 16 GB enough?"...
This conversation exasperates me and has happened too often even at profitable and/or well funded companies. I don’t know what it is about ordering upgraded-spec computers that inspires people to desperately want to save money, but even as the decision maker on this I’ve had to repeatedly defend spending, say, and extra $150 on MacBook Pros rather than Airs to people who are oddly fixated on the topic.
That’s like one hour of the person using the machine’s time! To save them tons of frustration and wasted time from their computer thermal throttling while, say, hooked up to multiple monitors, compiling, and running a video call.
> I’ve had to repeatedly defend spending, say, and extra $150 on MacBook Pros rather than Airs
Funnily enough I've sometimes had problems with the reverse. I've got a bad back, and lighter laptops are easier for me to deal with than heavier ones especially when I'm on-call. But sometimes the only option available at work has been a 15" MacBook Pro or similarly sized Linux laptop.
I have a strong preference for Linux laptops but I'd really also like it to be small and lightweight!
My wife sustained a minor head injury when the weight of her new work-issued MacBook Pro caused her wheelchair to flip over backwards when she stood up momentarily. (It was hanging from the backrest.) MacBook Air is not an option currently on the menu.
If they'd see the skill discrepancy between Linux desktop users and Windows desktop users, businesses would never hire anyone with a Windows background again. I work in a heavy Microsoft environment these days and the skill level is just sad. If there's no button to click people are at a loss. If there's no GUI to consume the logs people don't know what to do. Whenever I interview, if you write C#/.NET but your daily driver is Linux, you're practically hired.
Probably a third of my colleagues is using Linux at work, me included.
And it is getting even more widespread as most of the "office" work moves to Office365 and such which are all cloud/web based, so which OS you are running literally doesn't matter anymore.
Fortunately the "corporate desktop world" (cough M$ Office cough) is getting less and less relevant the more things move to web apps. I'm not a big fan of web apps mind you, but at least that's a plus...
Enterprises have been pushing as much work as possible through the browser for a long time. Outside of a few niche applications I don't think they will have much of a problem migrating.
I'm glad to hear there have been some consequences to Microsoft's anti-user product direction. But where we need to see Linux permeate is outside of tech bubbles.
As I understand it, the most significant barriers for having all of the big games run on Linux are the anti-cheat software in multiplayer games.
Many of the games I've tried, just kind of work. Path of Exile, for example, worked on my PopOS system (AMD CPU / Nvidia GPU) with no fiddling. (I switched a couple of weeks ago.)
HL² on pop-os was ok (tried it last week), a bit glitchy though. Portal completely froze and had to be killed. Probably better with Nvidia; I was using intel graphics. Interesting to try it though
> Decided it's time to switch to Linux because everyone says windows games now work on Linux thanks to Valve's efforts
> Installed Nobara (fork of Fedora made for gaming) and proceeded to install my copy of Red Alert 2 (my most played game) via Wine
> Try to run game, 'Error: xxx32.dll not found' or something
> Spent over an hour looking up forum posts on fixing that error, manually copying that dll and other modded variants of that dll to the install directory, but no cigar, still same error or other error, don't remember exactly
> Throw in the towel and went back to Windows where Red Alert 2 'Just Works TM'. Definitely no "year of the Linux" for me. I don't care how many thousands of Steam games work on Linux if they're not the games and apps I own and play. But good luck.
Edit: nice to see I'm getting downvoted for telling a personal story on this topic. Very emotionally mature of you guys.
More generally, I usually have more success running older games under Wine than on Windows 10 or 11 - DXVK helps a lot with early directx9 games in particular, in my experience.
I use the DODI patched variant of Red Alert 2 which works out of the box on Windows 11 as it ships with all the necessary patched DLLs to work on modern Windows.
Maybe. But I ran out of patience after about an hour. If gaming on Linux is advertised to "just works TM" then it really must just work without hours of tinkering.
Always check protondb first. That will tell you how well the game works, and how to get it working. (I haven't checked what it says about RA2; there are games that really don't work.)
I actually thought the launchers (Steam and Heroic) would automatically take care of that, but that doesn't always seem to be the case.
My experience with RA2 is that it doesn't work on Windows or Linux without some patching. I redid the game lately and just applied some patch that I found to make it work on Windows and it worked out of the box on Proton for me.
Not sure if it's why you get downvoted but RA2 definitely doesn't work out of the box on Windows.
If I could have total control of the OS I would undo all of that bullshit. An OS shouldnt feel like it was made by Google full of ads nobody wants or is asking for. Also the insane telemetry considering telemetry left Microsoft with Windows 8 one of the more hated versions after Windows Millenium Me which was a buggy piece of trash.
Microsoft has always been full of marketing shitfucks. Like when they rebranded Lync to Skype just because and dumped a whole communication campaign on their paying customers just for one marketing goon's KPI.
But they get away with it. Nobody buys Microsoft because they're good. It's because they have so many fingers in the pie that you can't do without them. They know it and make their products just good enough to not be dropped in favour of something much better.
Microsoft updated Office 365 earlier this year so that all the Office apps also load an Edge-based version of Electron, because letting their developers build UI elements as if they were web page content is more efficient for Microsoft.
The tradeoff is that every Office user has an additional 10+ processes that consume enormous amounts of RAM, but looks like someone in MS Marketing managed to turn that into lemonade, because it means that the "make your computer faster" ad is likely accurate (for Office users). Thanks to the magic of caches and shared libraries, running Edge probably does use fewer system resources than running Firefox or Chrome when Edge-Electron is already running.
After reboot I had a notification message "Make your Computer Faster".
I wouldn't touch one of them with a 40 foot pole on the open web but this was an official MS message in notifications so I figured it was worth a look as it might be some general advice about official new MS tools for tweaking, booting faster, cleaning dead files, newest iteration of the usual stuff.
It immediately launched into an MS Edge installation that had to be killed via process explorer. no dialog about "do you want to?" etc.
MS really has gone beyond the pale here.