Fixed
I honestly don't understand why Microsoft thought people would want their OS. It makes no sense.
271 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2018
With pi-hole on my DNS and ublock or similar on my browser I virtually never see adverts except when I start amazon without a query.
As for the interface, Classic Start Menu keeps my system effectively unchanged over Windoze version updates.
My one regret is that so many apps have gone the way of android using odd meaningless glyphs in random positions. Bring back CUA!!
I even like titlebars which change colour to highlight the window with focus.
PS: There is a lot to be said for focus follows mouse, with or without autoraise as you prefer.
For some time the only thing which has kept me on windoze was games. However most of the games I am interested in can now be played on linux and the only thing keeping me on windoze is inertia. I've freed up an M2 SSD and will shortly be installing linux on that to make the system multiboot. This will allow me to discover anything essential which I can't run under windows and can't do without.
Having spent considerable effort in beating win10 into submission and severing all ties from my system to MS (exccept for OS updates) why on earth would I want to switch to a new OS which has absolutely nothing new I want, let alone need.
With gaming on linux improving all the time I anticipate being an MS-free household next year.
Microsoft needs to lose the attitude that they alone know what is best for their users. The OS should be a hihly flexible interface to a set of services which users can mix and match to their own requirements. I've managed to beat windows 10 into submission, more or less, but from what I can see Win 11 would be more difficult and ive me nothing new that I want at the end of the process
To be honest, the only reason I have windoze at all is that there are gamers in the house. I run on an ultrawide monitor which makes a vertical taskbar more or less mandatory if you don't want to suffer from neckache. Anything which stretches across the whole screen (apart from games) is very difficult to handle. I do not have a M$ account and have no desire for one. I gather from what I have read that it is actually possible to install W11 without one, although much more difficult than it was for W10. Not sure if you could do an upgrade in place without the account, though, or if you can get rid of it later.
I'm told you can now run many windows games under linux so my current plan is to build a linux boot stick and see what I can get working.
I have chorme on my system although I don't actually use it unless I find a particularly picky website which does not support my browser(s) of choice. Hoever, reading the article prompted me to fire it up with a view to updating and looking to see what sort of privacy options it would provide.
Chrome started with a message to say it could not be upgraded but I could reinstall with the latest version. When I said yes a download page popped up with a pre-checked option
"Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google. Learn more"
in a font so small I had to almost put my nose on the page to read it.
Chrome is now deleted.
From morbid curiousity, I just tried to access x.com. It redirected to a twitter URL and presented me with a white box.
Yhe top line had an x to leave and a fancy X
Under which it said "Sign in to Twitter"
If you are going to launch a new brand surely you should make sure to use the new name not keep thowing the old one in people's faces?
I need to invest a bit more effort in getting games running reliably on linux then move permanently and totally to that platform.
And surely an enterprise platform should above all things be stable. Which business wants to have the expense and difficulty of answering mirriad "yesterday it worked, today it doesn't" queries on a monthly basis.
When I first joined IBM, some decades ago, they still claimed "Respect for the individual" as a core corporate belief. There were still procedures for raising and escalating issues, but the writing was on the wall. All of the corporate ethos evaporated. I eventually took early retirement when their latest rationalisation/improvement of the pension scheme left me in a situation where, had I stayed, I would have had to work several more years just to get back to the pension I was then entitled to.
Getting out was the best decision I ever made.
Can't agree more. I spend a lot of effort trying to get Win 10 to look as much like Win2000 as I can. With Classic Start Menu and a hell of a lot of registry hacks it comes moderately close. I see no compelling reason to upgrade to Win 11 and several months of pain if I do, with no guarantee that I can get even as close as I am now to what I want.
I also use Linux with the xfce desktop. I'm currently holding off upgrading until I get a chance to see what the latest iteration looks like.
"Exciting new user experience"
If you see this, run. And it is not just computer OS's. Virgin Media recently updated the interface to their TV box. There are now several screenfuls of lines of small pictures taken from the show they represent. Not that you will recognise most of them unless you are a real TV fanatic.
The general idea behind most modern interfaces seems to be make them as bright and flashy as possible and leave plenty of opportunities to advertise (even if they call it "recommended for you".
As for windows, I spend quite a bit of time with each new release, if I take it, trying to make it look as much like win2000 as possible. I've been moderately successful with Win 10 but you need to resort to settings, registry hacks, group policies and third party software to get close to anything I find accessible.
Win 11? Unless it changes dramatically I can't see myself ever taking it voluntarily. TBH almost the only thing I need even win10 for is gaming, I can do everythign else I want on linux and I don't even have to pay for it.
I bought one of the 5th generation NUC's with an i5 processor when they first came out and installed linux on it. It has been running more or less continuously ever since acting as a gatekeeper to my system from the big bad web and a backup when my main PC is down for some reason. Lovely and useful device. Can't see a real use case for this monster.
I could probably find a use for this as-and-when it is ready to ship. The website flags it as a beta product and there is a status list of various work items. The Mobian OS itself is flagged as unstable and the two alternatives as very unstable. Various other significant modules require work. I was amused by the entry for "suspend"
"Suspend but does not wake up". I think that is more commonly known as shutdown.
I'll bookmark the page and check in occasionally to see how it is progressing. Meanwhile my plans for a homebrew linux touch device based on the Pi are on hold.
In an ideal world you would be correct, but two points arise:
1. I am not in a position to know whether Palemoon is behaving correctly.
2. The problem websites are numeroius, and include a number of banks and the NHS. Suggesting to such institutions that they change code which works perfectly in all major browsers for the benefit of a single minority-use broiwser is an exercise in futility.
A suspect a good compromise would be for PM to detect this particular error condition and allow users to permit this error. Oddly, an early userland workaround, involving disabling HSTS via the Palemoon Commander utility, is no longer available as the disable option was removed from the utility.
Several people have mentioned Palemoon. This is still my browser of choice for many things but unfortunately there is an ongoing issue with various buttons (often in popup forms etc) in websites being unresponsive. The Palemoon response seems to be that they are doing the right thing and everyone else is wrong in allowing the button to be pressed. Which seems a little ... arrogant(?).
Yup. Personally I use MultiCommander which is similar (two panes) but offers tree-sidebars in each window if required and a lot of extra stuff. Lacks the FTP support (I use filezilla) but has an interesting "flat filesystem" view which is sometimes quite useful.
I just wish file selection dialogs could be trained to use something other than bits of File Manager.
"are just the beginning of our Windows and Microsoft cloud integration." Possibly the most frightening thing I have heard from M$ since they first announced Win 10 as an operating system for life or whatever the marketing shite was at the time.
Given that nowadays the only thing I actually NEED windoze for is games I'll have to keep a close eye on Gamebuntu and its ilk.
I had a call this morning from someone telling me the extended warranty on my washing machine had expired and they were ringing to renew it. I found this strange since I never take out extended warranties in the first place and I declined immediately. However, I'm pretty sure the woman said she was from Appliance Cover. Fortunately, although elderly, I am not particularly vulnerable (except to physical violence)
Actually, pi-hole does not block the text ads at the top of a search as they are served from google.com. However, it does block http://www.googleadservices.com so if you click on the ad you will not see it. In some ways this is the worst possible outcome as it can leave you with a completely unclickable page of crud when you do a seach. Fortunately, if you run an in-browser adblocker as well and block google.com with that then the ads vanish (at least they do with Adblock Latitude).