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ranovich @lemmy.ml

I need to vent about Windows. I want workplaces to use Linux.

Fuck Windows and Microsoft really. Today I had a meeting call through Teams first thing in the morning so I start my computer 10 minutes earlier than the call because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot and for Windows to be responsive. Windows decides to apply some past update so it takes 2 or 3 additional minutes which is fine, I am just in time for the meeting call. Well, 10 minutes into the call a notification in windows appears that the computer will restart in 5 minutes and with no option to postpone WTF. Imagine this was an important sales call, an emergency or something else critical, I might be fucked. The computer restarted I started my linux personal computer and I connect my bluetooth headphones to the it but no, they were connected to the Windows computer while it was restarting so I could not just call from it as the microphone started failing a few weeks ago. (I will just replace it, thanks Framework). So fuck my company for using Windows. Fuck Windows for developing such a nightmare OS with so shitty code. This was for sure a patch for a critical vulnerability, like always. And WTF this is Windows for a business, have a fucking super stable branch that does not need patches every other day. I don't care about your updates to the shitty weather widget, just have a fucking working operating system that let's me do my work. Fuck Microsoft monopolistic practices that keeps people and businesses from switching to Linux. There is no better publicity for Linux that Windows itself. Most Linux/GNU distros just let you choose when to update.

133 comments

  • Windows fr thinks that getting updates done is more important than getting work done.

  • I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I've used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven't touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:

    • After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, "what do you mean, it's a fucking jpeg." Then it did the same thing for a .zip.
    • I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. "No worries" I thought, "I made a restore point!" I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it's own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.

    I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.

    • One similar thing happened to me on windows 8 (except I wasn't testing it, I lost everything on my pc that day because it didn't just fail to update and restore..it just fucked my drive with it !), so it's not even a new type of issue. Even windows 10 was fucked, had a friend who never used bitlocker, never even knew it was a thing, who got his pc encrypted by it after an update, unable to unlock the damn thing, every solutions failed and had no other choice but to wipe his drive. It's crazy how bad and unpractical windows can be.

  • my boss told me today if we moved to literally any non-microsoft platform or software, i'd be out of a job.

    and he's right. most of us only have careers because microsoft can't push out a software that's more than barebone functional - and everyone use them even if there are far superior alternatives out there literally only because of familiarity.

    i'm not planning to stop giving microsoft shit of course. they should be criminally prosecuted over their exchange service even and how it's blacklisting competitors to force businesses onto the platform a la microsoft classic tactics. but eh.

  • "Tell me it's Friday without saying it's Friday" ;)

    But to the point, yeah, my current job tried to convince me to switch to Windows. I tried, it was miserable experience, it broke in 3 days and all that was even before the current Windows ludicrousness

  • This. If updates are SO important, then Windows can do it while it's shutting down.

  • I have a channel on my team's Slack were I just vent off on these kind of situations 😬

    #windows-is-the-best, inspired from #gitlab-is-the-best, the chan were everyone vents off when the CI refuses to pick up workers 😅

  • Then come up with a better alternative to office 365.

    Windows isn't keeping Microsoft around. Its their office software. (and azure)

    • what makes their office software so much better than, say, libreoffice? i don't work an office job, and haven't had the misfortune of running windows since i dropped windows 7, but when i did switch, the programs seemed basically the same. office software seemed like a solved problem by then. what new features has microsoft added and convinced people they need that foss options don't have?

      • They are extremely integrated into the rest of the ecosystem and are insanely pervasive among 9-5 desk jockies. They aren't gonna relearn a spreadsheet software especially when it doesn't have all the same features as the thing they have been using for 20 years. Not to mention they dont actually give a shit about how much their company is paying for it. The majority of these people dont know what FOSS is and are just using computers because that's what pays their rent.

        Libre office is very far from being a drop in replacement for 365 and will most definitely never replace it. At the end of the day its all about userbase. Why do people still use twitter and Instagram even though there are FOSS alternatives that may be even better? Because that's what everyone else uses and most people just dont care.

      • Good question. I wish I had a better answer than what I'm about to say.

        It just is.

        I'm a diehard anti-Windows, Linux-lovin', FOSS crusader myself, but if Microsoft released a copy of MS Office for Linux (as a one-time-purchase), I would buy it today.

        For most tasks, you're right, there's not much you can't do in LibreOffice. But the interface is clunkier. Excel makes it easier to make good-looking spreadsheets. And as much as it hurts me to say, looks matter when dealing with nontechnical folks.

        Plus there are some things that are just more intuitive in Excel, like certain kinds of charts and graphs. There are some advanced features of Excel that don't even exist in LibreOffice. Like chart styles and certain team collaboration features.

        Compatibility is... okay... For the most part, but having it all guaranteed by a bunch of paid devs would be really nice.

        There is a more detailed list here

      • It just does more and more easily. It styles things better, makes them more professional looking with a click. It can do certain things like nested tables in Word that Writer cannot do. Excel is much more powerful than calc, it has more functions, more refined functions, it's easier to work with, has more and prettier chart options. And oh you can create tables in Excel that are sortable. There are many other cases.

        Now for the last two the die-hards will whine and whinge about how you should just use a software for creating charts and a database but sometimes you just want to make something quick, sometimes that's overkill for what you need. Grandpa doesn't need to learn how to deal with databases just to make a sortable list of books he's read, he can just use excel and the Libreoffice people telling him to pound sand because they won't add that feature to calc because it doesn't belong there means he and many other people don't use calc, they use MS office. Likewise the Libreoffice defense force saying of making graphs and charts to just use dedicated software, well many corporate types, business people, white collar workers don't understand those things and may not be able to get them installed, what they understand, what they already have is MS office and it works and has lots of pretty, professional, very slick options which don't make them look poorly in office meeting presentations.

        Just on the sortable tables front, I can't tell you how many times I've run into hobby stuff that's based on an excel file with tables that rely on being sortable. From stat sheet creators to mini-databases (<2000 rows) on some game created by fans.

        It's useful for those who need the very bare basics of being able to open and read basic MS word documents, csv files, excel files, and to write an occasional letter. But the moment you need to start doing beyond basic formatting or dealing with files that have that, you run into issues.

        You have this gulf of usability, it's useful for people at the very bottom of the basic needs pole, barely computer literate types who think facebook is the internet and it's useful for highly technically competent people who can and do use other dedicated software, often without GUIs to solve problems, it's a frustration for the middle 60% of the population who are more than basically computer literate but not scientifically trained, not CS or IT.

    • Actually staff and commercial vendors are keeping Windows. Plus no one gets fired for choosing MS products. That IT staff are all Windows certified means Windows will always be the answer. That users are similarly trained and need certain Windows software will mean they demand it too.

      • I'd be so bold as to say about 90% of windows business users are only using it for office/excel/outlook

    • Nextcloud and LibreOffice: allow us to introduce ourselves

    • Idk about you but for me Libreoffice is way better than MS crapwares.

  • A month ago, a windows update made my laptop crawl to a stop. It needed 2-3 hours to respond after a restart/shutdown. It would crash saying the search wasn't initialised, I couldn't type into the search. Fucking nightmare

  • The differences in sheer speed and responsiveness is something FOSS alternatives need much more publicity about. When the requirements for one product are "help the user do what they want" and the requirements for another product are "synergize the KPIs of these 53 stakeholders in our trillion dollar conglomerate, monetize our market position in every way possible, and check the minimum viable checkboxes to keep end users engaged with the brand" it shows!

    Windows to Linux is of course the most significant and worthwhile. As I like to describe it, even using the most full-featured distros out there (Linux Mint Cinnamon gang represent!) any flavor of Linux is like greased lightning compared with windows. And I mean Windows 10, not even 11.

    A few weeks ago I turned on an old secondary desktop PC that had been powered off for a month. It had numerous updates, everything except installing a new named version. Even the kernel. I decided to time it. From the time I opened the software update GUI -- including typing in my password, letting it download, letting it install, getting the "yo, reboot when you're ready," etc -- it was done in 5 minutes. And those were 5 minutes where the computer was totally usable. Running the current version of the full featured Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 on a PC from 2011!

    My favorite recent example is the switch from Plex to Jellyfin. Now granted, fully self-hosting means more IT admin type stuff for me so that family members and I can securely connect remotely. But god damn if every single app I have tried doesn't feel like warp speed compared with the Plex versions. Did you know that watching my media using the WebOS app on my LG TV does not have to be dog shit slow? And don't even get me started on phone apps like Finamp. (it really whips the jelly's ass?)

  • Some governments outside the US either already have or are ditching Windows for Linux.

  • Re Microsoft in general. I had to install Powershell on Linux recently to get a work related task done. It was packaged on the Arch User Repository, so easily done.

    Got the task done and went to uninstall Powershell and realised there that the installed size was 186 MB. Checked the installed size of Linux-zen kernel and modules: 143 MB. So this tiny MS command-line utility was heftier than the kernel and drivers for all supported hardware. How do they even manage that?

133 comments