Windows is getting disgusting

[Zero999]

I have enjoyed the used of those scripting capabilities for several applications.  It is too bad that tools can't be released to the public because there will be people who choose to misuse them.  While you can ding MS for their naivety in putting these tools out, you can't fault their intentions.

It wasn't overlooked it was ignored, their policy was that people prefer convenience over security so they provided convenience. That seems to have changed though.

I think it's more lack of foresight, rather than wilful ignorance. When VBA was created security wasn't such a great concern because most computers weren't connected to the Internet, with many being single user machines. The trouble is it took a long time for Microsoft to start taking security seriously.

I do like the generic names, it tells you what the program does and it sounds clean and professional. One of my gripes about Linux/FOSS is that so much of the software has silly/annoying/suggestive or otherwise unprofessional names and I would not underestimate the degree to which this makes it hard for people to take them seriously.

Yes, that's an advantage of choosing plain names. On the downside it makes the product less distinguished and makes trademarking it much more difficult. Microsoft can't trademark the word "Windows", so they have to say Microsoft Windows and use the logo.

I think the best product names are descriptive, professional and original enough to make the product stand-out.

[apis]

I think it's more lack of foresight, rather than wilful ignorance. When VBA was created security wasn't such a great concern because most computers weren't connected to the Internet, with many being single user machines. The trouble is it took a long time for Microsoft to start taking security seriously.

It is true that Windows evolved from DOS which was a single user system. Conversely UNIX was multiuser and networked from the start so they had to deal with security early on. In many cases DOS was "good enough", but as computers became more and more interconnected the lack of security also became more of a problem. These problems weren't hard to predict, many security issues were well known from the world of networked computers (e.g. firewalls had existed since the 80's) but Microsoft's response to the critics was that convenience trumps security and that was their official policy for a long time. That is why they didn't bother with things like admin accounts or firewalls, things that cause a hassle without any immediate benefit to the end user. A firewall is one more thing that can go wrong and prevent the applications from not working properly. That might even have been the right decision from a business perspective, "don't fix it if it's not broken", and fixing it would have costed them money. On the other hand, considering their market dominance they could have done whatever they wanted and people wouldn't have had much options either way. Apple was not much competition without Steve Jobs and Linux lacked hardware support. It turned out it was an unfortunate and costly decision for many end users though.

[SiliconWizard]

The mentioned update is the following: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4493132/windows-7-update-kb4493132
It appears unchecked by default in Windows update, but is flagged as "important". I think that's exactly what MS did at first with GWX. You can still mask it though so it doesn't constantly reappear... until next time.

Looks like I was right. Although I masked this update, the last Windows update check made it reappear today, and now it is checked by default.

[bd139]

Well fuck it. Yesterday afternoon Windows 10 decided to hose itself right in the middle of something important. Trying to print + sign + scan some contract documents after the last set of updates and I'm getting GP faults all over the place printing. Eventually it blue screened with a fatal exception caused by the spooler ffs. On boot up, no printers working, no scanners working, network not working.

So digging in my USB stick collection for the bootable windows 10 stick it turned out my eldest had nicked it, formatted it FAT32 and used it to put films on for her television 

Next best option to get something going: xubuntu 18.04 I had lying around for the old desktop I had. Back on my feet after 30 minutes. 24 hours in, I'm not sure the OS actually matters these days. There's nothing I can't do that I wasn't doing before and TBH this is a lot more convenient having a fast, decent shell rather than the fucked up thing that WSL is.

Interestingly I'm sitting here with 13 hours battery left after a full charge. powertop reports 4.95W of power being used. The thinkpad keyboard works fine, as does the touchpad and nipple mouse out of the box, power management shows both batteries fine. None of this shit works properly on windows 10.

When it came to scan and print I just ran hp-setup, already installed and I can scan to PDF instantly. I could print without any config - the printer just appeared!

[IDEngineer]

When I recently needed a new laptop, my solution was to search the manufacturer support sites and list their latest models that offer native Win7 and/or offer drivers for Win7. I only had to go back a couple of years, and honestly nothing has happened in the laptop world in the last two years that I absolutely must have. From that list, I picked the laptop with the best feature set and best reviews.

My end result is I have a brand new, warranted laptop natively running Win7 with support from the manufacturer for that OS on that hardware.

What I DON'T have is a touchscreen (worse than useless), Win8 (stop trying to make laptops look like phones/tablets!), Win10 (almost as bad), constant nags from Microsoft about "we know better than you" security fixes and upgrades, etc.

My laptop sits there quietly, does what I want and nothing "extra". I'm very happy... and how many people can really say that about their Windows-based laptops these days?!?

IMHO Win7 was the sweet spot for the Windows environment. After that Microsoft lost the focus on what the product is really supposed to be. I dread the day that I'm forced to move past Win7 for some reason... not sure what I'll do then, but my first stop will be non-Microsoft options. Microsoft brought that upon themselves, if they'd maintained the Win7 mindset there would be no reason to look elsewhere. Instead, all they did was help their competition potentially steal customers from them. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

[james_s]

Well I guess if your system is bricked by an update at least you don't have to worry about getting hit by an exploit or malware infection.

Since Windows has regressed and Linux keeps inching along I have hopes that it will continue to get more practical on the desktop. The list of Windows-only software that I need is slowly but steadily shrinking and even now if I really had to I could use Ubuntu as a daily driver and fire up Win7 as needed on a spare laptop. I'll probably still stick with it as long as I can though, Win7 is still very nicely polished and with a bit of tweaking works exactly the way I like. I'd take Ubuntu over Win10 any day though, if only for the fact that the update process is painless, updates aren't obfuscated as to their true purpose, they never hijack the machine, security updates are not mixed in with arbitrary UI/feature changes, etc.

[Halcyon]

Since Windows has regressed and Linux keeps inching along I have hopes that it will continue to get more practical on the desktop. The list of Windows-only software that I need is slowly but steadily shrinking and even now if I really had to I could use Ubuntu as a daily driver and fire up Win7 as needed on a spare laptop. I'll probably still stick with it as long as I can though, Win7 is still very nicely polished and with a bit of tweaking works exactly the way I like. I'd take Ubuntu over Win10 any day though, if only for the fact that the update process is painless, updates aren't obfuscated as to their true purpose, they never hijack the machine, security updates are not mixed in with arbitrary UI/feature changes, etc.

My experience is the same. I now run Fedora 29 Workstation on my desktop machine. The few Windows applications which I need run perfectly well under WINE. Most applications have a Linux installer. I am also very impressed by the latest version of GIMP, which is now more like Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop than it ever has been.

I don't miss Windows *at all* (and this is coming from a 30+ year veteran of running every version of Windows). My work machines run Windows 10 and it's painful. It hinders my workflow more than anything.

Now that gaming is also getting better support on Linux, I foresee in the next 5-10 years, it will become a serious competitor to Microsoft.