Windows is getting disgusting

[AndyC_772]

Unfortunately, there also seems to be an underlying belief amongst that same community, that ease of use is somehow a weakness.

It's not a weakness in itself, but it is different.  It's a different way to design a system, it's a different way to use a system.  Increased ease of use is almost always associated with a reduction in flexibility.  You simply CANNOT have a GUI with one big button in the middle that does everything a user might need a computer to do.

I respectfully submit that by far and away the biggest growth area in computing devices, is in phones and tablets, where no other type of interface is possible.

I totally understand that producing a GUI represents a lot of work. I've done it. But it's not just 'wasted effort to save people who are lazy from having to learn anything'. A GUI isn't just a configuration device, it's a fantastic way to show off what a tool is actually capable of doing, or not doing.

Let me cite a concrete example. Not so many years ago I was running Ubuntu as my everyday desktop OS. It was around the time when wireless networking was really taking off, but manufacturers were reluctant to provide open source drivers for their wireless chipsets. So, getting wireless to work at all required a massive amount of effort by the developers... something for which, as a user, I'm both grateful and indifferent in equal measure.

Despite this, the difficult and important bit had actually been achieved. Provided I went through the hassle of downloading the Windows driver, extracting microcode from it using a command line tool, installing the right version of some package from somewhere, and sacrificing a chicken under a full moon, it worked.

Only... even after all this, the final 10% of effort simply hadn't been put in. There was no nice, simple drop-down box listing all available networks to choose from. No easy way to say "connect to this one automatically at start-up". Actually using the wireless network was still a pain, until several releases later when the UI was finally finished.

Most Linux users are of the belief that once you get past that initial learning curve, the benefits outweigh the time invested.

This particular user decided that permanently living on an uphill part of that curve was a painful waste of time for little or no actual benefit, gave up, and is now much happier and more productive with Windows.

Unfortunately, given the direction Windows is going, I may have to switch back. I don't relish the prospect. Dragons to slay, and all that.

Yes Linux can be a PITA at times, but I find Windows to be far more of a PITA far more often, which is why I use it as little as possible.  I still keep it around though because there are some programs I need it for.  I also keep Linux around because there are a LOT of programs and a LOT of jobs I simply can't do, at all, if I could only use Windows.

I completely agree. I use Cadence schematic and PCB software professionally, every day, and there's no OrCad for Linux.

Not sure there's any solution to that problem other than a separate Windows PC with a hardware firewall that only lets it access my file server, and nothing else.

[Kostas]

Gimp doesn't come even close to the same capabilities as Photoshop CC. You are forgetting the many other pieces of software in Adobe CC.

Many people claim this, but it seems they never have any objective evidence to back it up. Have you asked for a certain feature on the gimp forums and not received a response? I'm sure you can do everything in GIMP that you can in Photoshop. It might have a learning curve initially, but everything does.

I use both Linux and Windows and find Gimp a very nice piece of software. For the most part, it can do whatever Adobe Photoshop does, but it doesn't support 16bits per channel. A 48bit tiff file will open, but you get a warning that your photo will be converted to 8bits per channel and some information will be lost. This thing has dragged on for too long and it can be a show stopper. I find it weird that 16bits per channel aren't supported yet.

[Artlav]

I find it weird that 16bits per channel aren't supported yet.

I find it weird that there are 16bit graphics formats out there in the world of 8bit display devices.

Having made a digital camera before, i understand why it might be needed, but the first step in the data processing pipeline was to convert to 8bit with preserving as much of the data as possible, exactly because there is nothing to support, work or just display a more-than-8 bit image.

So i would imagine the lack of support is due to the lack of imagination by the developers - the need for 16bit is not obvious by far.

[Armxnian]

I use both Linux and Windows and find Gimp a very nice piece of software. For the most part, it can do whatever Adobe Photoshop does, but it doesn't support 16bits per channel. A 48bit tiff file will open, but you get a warning that your photo will be converted to 8bits per channel and some information will be lost. This thing has dragged on for too long and it can be a show stopper. I find it weird that 16bits per channel aren't supported yet.

It's coming in the next update which is the GEGL port.
https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-support-hdr-imaging-and-processing-with-16bit-per-color-channel-precision

I find it weird that there are 16bit graphics formats out there in the world of 8bit display devices.

Having made a digital camera before, i understand why it might be needed, but the first step in the data processing pipeline was to convert to 8bit with preserving as much of the data as possible, exactly because there is nothing to support, work or just display a more-than-8 bit image.

So i would imagine the lack of support is due to the lack of imagination by the developers - the need for 16bit is not obvious by far.

16bpc is completely useless for display because no monitor can show it. And most people are happy with colors on a crappy 6bit dithered to 8bit TN panel. But for processing, the more precision the better.

[AndyC_772]

the need for 16bit is not obvious by far.

It doesn't need to be "obvious", it just needs to be requested by those who have a requirement for it. Another example, I'm afraid, of the Linux community trying to tell their users what they do or don't need.

For what it's worth, 16 bit depth allows images to be manipulated while still retaining smooth gradations, even if a layer has been darkened by one process and then lightened by another. The extra detail isn't visible, but it is necessary to avoid unwanted quantisation during processing.

[Kostas]

I find it weird that 16bits per channel aren't supported yet.

I find it weird that there are 16bit graphics formats out there in the world of 8bit display devices.

Having made a digital camera before, i understand why it might be needed, but the first step in the data processing pipeline was to convert to 8bit with preserving as much of the data as possible, exactly because there is nothing to support, work or just display a more-than-8 bit image.

So i would imagine the lack of support is due to the lack of imagination by the developers - the need for 16bit is not obvious by far.

You may already know it, but sometimes you need to enhance a photograph and extract as much information as possible from highlights or shadows. This tiny bit of information can be critical and converting everything to 8bits per channel removes it. You may also get ugly "banding" when doing some processing exactly because of 8bits per channel. So yes, a display may only show 8bits per channel, but it can be irrelevant. Meanwhile, it's not that the developers aren't imaginative enough, because they are informed about the usefulness of such a feature. In the end, if Gimp is touted to be a Photoshop replacement, it needs to support some key things that Photoshop (as an industry standard) supports.

[eugenenine]

It goes back to the old saying "Every OS Sucks"
I've had to use Windows on $work$ provided PC's for the last decade and I'll never use it on my own machine.  I've lost so much time to the random reboot or bluescreen, inability to resume, excel/word or sharepoint just eating my document, etc.  I've opened cases with Microsoft for servers I supported when, despite the enterprise license, deciding it was not longer legal or strange bugs that got a "won't fix" status.
The rare times I've had an issue with an open source program, I sign up for their forum, post and get a fix.  It just amazes me for the amount of $ that goes into close source software in all the development processes and qa testing that there are so many problems.

That's pretty bad luck, I don't even remember when is the last time I got a blue screen of death, reboots or anything unexpected. Maybe they just give you subpar computers at work. Granted that our IT dept is really really good and they are the ones that investigate what systems we should use for our development environment.

It could be that the image they use is crap.  My wife's newish Window laptop hasn't BSOD'ed yet but it also refuses to turn off the speakers when she uses a headset or print on legal size paper, she has to borrow my Linux box for those things.  And it does decide to reboot for patches while she's working as well so to the end user who just lost their work its just as bad as a BSOD.

[MrSlack]

Because users... sigh.

[rdl]

Microsoft has chosen the default settings for Windows Update to be the most annoying possible. The same goes for pretty much everything else in Windows. To take control of Windows Update, go into the settings and change it to "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them."

[AlxDroidDev]

A bit out of topic for this page, but within the Linux vs. Windows discussion that's was going on a few pages ago.

Microsoft is going to support MS SQL Server on Linux starting mid-2017:

From the Official Microsoft Blog: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-on-linux/

[MrSlack]

Perfectly on topic. If you can afford SQL Server you can pay for a Windows Server license. Not sure why they are doing that.

[AlxDroidDev]

Perfectly on topic. If you can afford SQL Server you can pay for a Windows Server license. Not sure why they are doing that.

IMHO, it's going to be quite damaging to Oracle. The Linux community has been quite angry at Oracle for what they did to MySQL, and lots of people have since then moved from MySQL to MariaDB (100% compatible). Oracle, like blueskull wrote, is a lot more expensive than SQL Server. Many distros have been shipping with MariaDB instead of MySQL since 2015.

Besides, for many types of businesses, Microsoft's licensing programs are a lot more acessible than Oracle's. The college whose IT dept I run, uses MS SQL Server (for which I am also the DBA), because it was 1/20 of the price Oracle would be at the time. I stil had to pay licensing fees for the servers' OS (W2k8 R2), but I might save on that once SQL Server for linux is available.

MS SQL Server is a lot better than MySQL, MariaDB or Postgress, and only loses to Oracle and DB2 in some scenarios, but beats both of them hands down in price.

[MrSlack]

No one likes Oracle. Apart from Larry. Larry likes his Island. And his yacht ... I'll probably get sued for this post....

Perfectly on topic. If you can afford SQL Server you can pay for a Windows Server license. Not sure why they are doing that.

Possibly for migrating to a full *nix environment? Oracle and DB2 are too expensive, and MYSQL/Postgre are free. There gotta be some thing in between in terms of price and support -- that is MS SQL.

I doubt it. There's no advantage as the transient knowledge is all tied to Windows. I'm the only guy in a 250 strong company who does both Windows and Linux stuff both in a professional capacity.

It runs rings around Oracle and DB2 in a few areas as well. We're mixed mode. Our SQL 2014 + Fusion IO + Enterprise SSD on a couple of high end HP DL series nodes flattens our equivalent specced Oracle Exadata cluster (which cost 10x the amount!)

[rrinker]

 I don't know about all the knowledge being tied to Windows. As a consultant I do a little of everything in mostly Windows environments - server stuff, lots of Exchange, SQL, and other things Microsoft. I've run into plenty of people who can run rings around me in SQL Server but have just the barest clue of how anything happens outside of the SQL environment. I think as long as they can manage the SQL side of things (and there are all sorts of command line options these days - so it's not just the Management Studio GUI), they won't care what the underlying OS is. This should be a very good thing for Microsoft. I've always felt that SQL Server was somewhat underrated, all the huge applications seem to gravitate to Oracle even though the capabilities are on par, and MS SQL is much more approachable. If you think Microsoft licensing policies are Draconian, don't even glance at Oracle's. You can usually tell when Larry needs a new yacht, a required incremental update with huge fees is released. 

[suicidaleggroll]

I almost exclusively use Linux, but I do have a few Win 7 VMs around for those programs that need them.

This morning I decided to update one of them, since it had been a while.  In the past I've been burned by trying to do too many updates at once, so I started with one.  Just one update, around 5 MB, some Silverlight security patch.  THREE HOURS LATER it's still running, "0 KB total, 0% complete".  The indicators on the VM show almost constant HD and net activity, and C:\Windows\Software Distribution has increased in size by EIGHT HUNDRED MB, and is STILL GROWING.

Quick update - it's been over 48 hours, and they're still going.
That first update took somewhere around 5 hours to complete.  The next 8 updates took about 4 hours, the next 10 about 6 hours.  At this point I checked for more updates, which took about 4-5 hours.  I'm currently about 2 hours into another batch of 11 updates, with no sign of progress.

This machine has never had this problem before.  It's very fast, no hiccups or other delays, and it's always done updates in a reasonable amount of time.  The last time I did updates was in September 2015, and during some searching to identify the problem I found this:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-update/windows-7-update-install-time-taking-a-very-long/f49298d1-860f-49c7-8640-960afe3e9832?page=1

Windows IT pro after Windows IT pro talking about the ten-fold increase in update times required on Windows 7 starting around September 2015, right after Microsoft released Windows 10.

I'm fairly confident this behavior is intentional now...

[MrSlack]

Do you have an SSD and is it an SP1 disk? Initial update run takes ~40 mins on an SP1 disk and requires a couple of reboots only. This is normal. There are a lot of updates! You can use wsusoffline to do this in one go if you have to do it often.

The trick is to run sysprep afterwards without the generalise option then use a USB utility disk of some sort to copy the hard disk to a portable disk (i use a Linux boot CD and DD/gzip). Then if you screw the install, dd it back again and go through the OOBE and restore your data. You can reimage your system in a few minutes then.

I did a fresh win10 build 1511 install on my laptop today (6 year old X201) and it took 8 minutes to install and then 5 to do updates. That's because the previous 20-odd years of NT updates are rolled into the wim image on the disk.

[suicidaleggroll]

Do you have an SSD and is it an SP1 disk?

Yes and yes.  It's not a new install either, it's been around for a long time, it's just been about 5 months since the last system update.  Everything else on the machine is behaving completely normal.

I did a fresh win10 build 1511 install on my laptop today (6 year old X201) and it took 8 minutes to install and then 5 to do updates. That's because the previous 20-odd years of NT updates are rolled into the wim image on the disk.

That's Windows 10, the delays appear to be isolated to Windows 7, and started shortly after Windows 10 was released.  I have a strong suspicion this is the result of Microsoft intentionally trying to piss off Windows 7 users to the point of doing the "upgrade".  The timing is just too coincidental and the problem too widespread (see the replies in the link in my previous post).

[MrSlack]

It's not intentional - the whole MSI/MSU update process is a mess and NTFS sucks on lots of small files. This makes the whole thing a gigantic turd as time progresses. I have it on good authority that it's going to be fixed for good in the next couple of years.

[Artlav]

On topic of Linux usability: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/knock-off-usb-blaster-in-linux-issues/
Another one is that a CP2102 USB-to-serial adapter can't be set to 128000 baud rate, while in Windows it just does.
It's these minor issues that nag at you...

[AlxDroidDev]

Might be old news, but today Microsoft is releasing its own Linux distro, SONIC, and it is based on Debian.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/microsoft_sonic_debian/

[eugenenine]

And it does decide to reboot for patches while she's working as well so to the end user who just lost their work its just as bad as a BSOD.

Why don't you select "4 hours" and hit the "Postpone" button?

In Win 8+ it doesn't always ask.  I found the MSKB a while back that says basically if they deem the patch critical enough it will install/reboot without prompting.
$work$ they push out the patches and will force reboots as well.  Two laptops ago they handed me a freshly imaged one and once I logged on it tried to install so many patches at once it borked itsself and had to be re-imaged.
Then there are all the times I edited a document in Sharepoint and came into work the next day and the changes weren't there.  Or the .tmp files left from an Excel crash.  Both unrelated to the OS but M$ products.  Or the typeperf cpu% bug in Server 2003.

[elgonzo]

Has anyone experience with FreeBSD as desktop OS?

While i am (still) a happy user of Win 7, it has been clear to me since many weeks now that Windows 10 and MS's apparent strategy of SaaS/DaaS and user tracking at OS level is not something i can agree with. Well, i certainly also do not agree with MS abusing the Windows update mechanism to sneak in Win10 ad/nag ware. Generally speaking, i align with opinions as voiced by AndyC_772 (and certainly by others as well, but don't expect me to read every single post in a 13-page thread ), so there is no need to repeat here my almost identical sentiment.

OSX is not a desired option, as my current hardware is too good/powerful to just 'throw it away' just for a Mac, and i have no desire to turn my PC into a Hackintosh with all those possible hardware/driver problems that i might or might not have to face, who knows...

Which leaves me with Linux or FreeBSD. FreeBSD is preferred, because the [Free]BSD licensing model is so much saner and nicer than the cancerous virulent GPL which seems to be so prevalent in the Linux environment. A heavy emphasis on GPL is not a K.O. criteria for a Linux distro, but it makes me lean towards FreeBSD (assuming FreeBSD is usable as a no-hassle, practical desktop OS).

[MrSlack]

A freebsd desktop isn't much hassle. A freebsd laptop is.

Probably worth a look at PCBSD which is a customised freebsd http://www.pcbsd.org/

Agree with GPL. Total PITA

[elgonzo]

A freebsd desktop isn't much hassle. A freebsd laptop is.

Probably worth a look at PCBSD which is a customised freebsd http://www.pcbsd.org/

Agree with GPL. Total PITA

Yeah, i did read that FreeBSD has issues with hibernation/standby/wake up/resume or something along those lines. Fortunately, in my case it is not about a laptop but only a proper immobile PC.
Oh, also thanks for the link

[neil555]

Ghost BSD is also really good though getting the wifi to work is a bit of a pain on some laptops