The lack of a "this is a serious machine" setting in Windows is baffling. I have Windows 10 Enterprise installed in a 20 core/128 GB RAM workstation that is used for lengthy numerical simulations. And yet it happily reboots randomly and it keeps filling the start menu with silly game icons (candy crush, etc.). Super fun for your boss to point out and say "so this is why you use this machine, for candy crush?"
Whoa, I primarily run Win 10 Pro on my home machine and was assuming that if I'd splashed out for an Enterprise license, I wouldn't be having this problem of extremely pushy/sneaky updates.
It's good to know I'm probably saving hundreds of dollars (if a home user can even buy a single enterprise license without too much hassle) for basically the same pain.
That's good. It's an ordeal to disable them on Pro, and the once-good guide I found[1] is usually out of date (or some of its settings get overridden) with every major update.
I could have been more clear. That was directed at the first clause:
> You can disable these “features” on enterprise
Or are you saying that it's not good that they can be disabled (perhaps because people get lazy, run out-of-date vulnerable software, and end up infected with ransomware or part of a botnet?)
My guess would be that their point is: It's not good that those things are in Windows at all, and it's even worse that you have to dig around to disable them. I'd certainly agree there.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but when the Forbes article author was complaining about a random unplanned forced update I thought surely the guy just didn't bother to change the default settings.
Now I've come to your comment and am now realizing that apparently there is no built in functionality to prevent forced update/reboots (while connected to the internet) in Windows 10.
I not crazy anti-Microsoft, but that's absurd and honestly aside from gaming (which I don't have a gaming PC anyways) I miss nothing from Windows.
I see comments about Linux on random laptops, I've only have had good experiences with it generally. I'm not a power user. I've run at least one distro or another on a random cheap netbook, a 2005-08 Sony laptop, a low end and higher end Lenovo laptops, and honestly other than the one I'm on right now I've not had the problems people talk about it (something related to the CPU was crashing the system, found a solution online and everything is good now). Maybe I'm just lucky.
The worst part is that there is a setting for it (at least on the pro version). However, even with it selected I see an automatic reboot every three or four months. And that is by applying updates when I happen to work on it.
And there is nothing to disable the shortcuts or installation of silly program like candy crush.
I remember reading something about a Windows 10 edition without all this crap, but it was only for very big accounts and with a specific contract with Microsoft.
I don't want come across as trying to convert or be rude, but what does Windows provide, both home users and businesses, that open source operating systems are unable to do?
As someone just kind of starting out, is Windows promising for future career building?
I understand backwards compatibly and larger selection of games, and that hardware manufacturers will provide software.
Nothing really, except for mindshare. Turns out, that's a huge factor that sadly cannot be overcome that easily (especially for organizations with less technically inclined people).
If you look at the big IT stories around OSS (e.g. LiMux; in Switzerland there was a similar story in Solothurn), you'll find that the reason for those failures usually comes down to people refusing to give OSS the benefit of the doubt, often combined with incompetent project management.
Windows does not seem to be aimed at power users anymore, unless they are in a big company environment. You can manage which updates are sent, and when, if you have a Windows server distributing the updates. But that is overkill for small companies.
It really kills me every time I see a Windows hint like this. Ten or fifteen or maybe even twenty years ago, one of Windows' arguments against Linux was that configuring simple things (like, say, preventing automatic updates from interrupting your fucking workflow) involved some series of arcane commands that I'll never be able to walk my wife or my mom through over the phone.
Now it's literally the opposite.
My wife's laptop runs OpenSUSE (or maybe Manjaro, I can't remember what I put on there after she got upset with Mint for whatever reason; whatever it was, the updates work and she can get whatever software she wants to work without my intervention, because I haven't heard about it for almost a year.) My mom's still cursing Windows 10 almost daily, and still bemoans the loss of Windows 7 (lol). But she's literally terrified to let me install anything else, even after I've shown her how easy it is to use. Microsoft has completely removed her ability to choose something else. She trusts them more than me. It's scary.
LTSB is fantastic, except there is no linux subsystem. If you can live without that, or use Cygwin instead, it's far and away the best Windows distribution.
Not sure that my Uni can support these, plus they have no Linux subsystem (which is quite useful) and last time I heard, they are ditching Office 365 ProPlus support for that branch (which is the Office we use on campus, and I require in my workflow).
I thought it was a "serious machine" used only for "lengthy numerical simulations." Seems more like your person desktop computer, that you happen to run some numerical simulations on.
Plus if you're at Uni you likely DO have access to Windows 10 Education Edition which is a version of Enterprise without several of the things you complained about.
The word "only" appears nowhere in my comment. It is a workstation, in which additional tasks are expected to be completed while simulations are running (some LES cases take several weeks), including CFD pre- and post-processing, CAD work, typesetting publications, preparing lectures and tests, etc. I fail to see how, in your opinion, this makes the use of the machine not serious, or makes random reboots and installing silly games pertinent or understandable.
Windows 10 Education Edition does not seem to be available in the software repository of my Uni. Which obnoxious features do you say are absent in this version, compared to Enterprise?
> it keeps filling the start menu with silly game icons (candy crush, etc.)
Do you mean literally? You've removed candy crush from the start menu and windows put it there again? Or it was something on microsoft store live tile? Right click, more, Turn Live Tile off.
We use windows in an enterprise setup in the company I work for. No candy crush or forced reboots. Enterprises control all these via group policy, that's what enterprise edition is for.
In a previous role at a very security conscious company I designed and built a malware analysis platform built on Linux with KVM VMs. Some of these needed to be Windows because of certain software we ran, and we needed to be sure they were fully patched and free of any malware from a previous run. So snapshots were no good, we needed to built new VMs from the Windows equivalent of a kickstart ( autoattend.xml). This worked fine for a couple of months.
Until Microsoft decided that their 'Professional' SKU shouldn't do this. So suddenly our auto builds stopped working as they were waiting for product keys that we already supplied.We could have gone to Enterprise, with the associated volume licensing agreement, but it was ridiculous and let a sour taste in our mouths. All this time the Linux VMs happily rebuilt in less than 2 minutes.
I've literally talked today to a company who want me to move their large Windows deployment to Linux for the same reason. Nobody wants to be held hostage to a supplier.
The guy from the article is still in the honeymoon phase. Wait until he tries to move all his files from one disk to another, zipping them to a pendrive in batches, and restoring them on his shiny new system. And doing this in a multi-tasking way as this is time-consuming. Simple task? When he is done, when trying to open a file, he will find the destination folder is full of corrupted files.
Stunned? This was true 15 years ago, and as recent as 2 months ago (on a range of distros, last one Ubuntu). How serious a system is that? I'd say it disqualifies the system for all uses.
Regardless, as a desktop foundation Linux is a dream that had a place in time. Permissions, usernames, Posix filetimes and C itself are all non-starters in this era. They bog down trivial tasks, but also development and distribution, to the point of provoking a survivors-bias so bad that those survivors will die blind, swearing the OS is sliced bread and that all of humanity missed out. Bash is their unsung hero.
Don't listen. It's poison our community is full of. The Linux folks just want more help to put out all the fires, and, if need be, fool you into believing their gospel.
Reality is: heaven will never come to pass. Linux hurts more than it gives back. It's a brain drain. It's time to die. Please die.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here at HN, but I feel like there is a very important point that the author has skipped over:
Part of why the install process and general use experience went so well is all the time and effort Dell put into explicitly developing Linux support for this exact model. They likely made hardware choices (e.g. Intel wifi chipset instead of Qualcomm/Atheros) based on existing Linux driver availability. And in cases where a driver wasn't available, or didn't work perfectly off the shelf, Dell probably put coders to work customizing that driver to suit the configuration of the XPS.
In a way, this is a bit like buying a Microsoft Surface and then being thrilled at how Windows installs and runs on it. For the sake of people who read this article and try installing Ubuntu 18.04 on an arbitrary laptop, I think the author should mention that there was already a ton of bigco effort to make this configuration of HW/SW work smoothly.
In my experience, Ubuntu gets more polished and newbie-friendly with every release, but I do think some readers might try to follow in the author's footsteps with their own miscellaneous laptop, get discouraged, and then be soured on Linux again for a while. I don't want that to happen. I want to see Linux gobble up more of Windows 10's market share. If that means the population needs to homogenize a bit on the hardware front, so be it.
> I want to see Linux gobble up more of Windows 10's market share.
Then encourage developers to agree on a standardized and long-term supported base system and promote AppImage as the primary means of distributing non-system software. A stable driver ABI wouldn't hurt either, but if there's something more difficult than getting the community to agree on a base system it'll be convincing the kernel devs to help proprietary drivers work properly.
Seriously, Linux Desktop evangelists have supposedly been trying to woo users for decades now and somehow they are unable to grasp the simple concept that it is a pain in the ass for developers to target their platform, and without developers targeting their platform they won't have the applications the user needs to do their work. Lately they've been hailing the coming WebAppocalypse as a way to free them from having to build a real platform, but sadly for them that means any web kiosk will do and Linux Desktop is still irrelevant.
I agree that such standardization would be valuable, and I will try to agitate for that. For the average person, however, it seems that a web browser is practically the whole OS to them. I bet a media player, and office productivity software round out the top three applications. Any OS that offers a stable platform for running those could theoretically satisfy a huge chunk of the population. For this hypothetical average user, if a browser is the only interface they use and have familiarity with, what difference does the underlying OS make to them? In this regard, mobile devices have already filled much of that niche.
With all the news stories lately about data collection and misuse, I hope that opposition to surveillance is growing among the population. Maybe one day they'll see it like this: I can run my browser here, pay Microsoft for the privilege, make it easy for them to surveil me, and accept their pushy updates with unwanted restarts. Or I can run it on this other OS that costs $0, and doesn't send data back to Microsoft.
Maybe I'm misjudging the population and they actually don't care at all, but I hope that's changing with the past few years of data scandals, and the recent deluge of ToS update emails from companies preparing for the GDPR. The phrase "data collection", and some idea of its consequences, should now be more prominent in the collective consciousness. It strikes me as a great time for FLOSS software to try riding the wave of that attitude.
Yeah, see, Linux Desktop evangelists have been using variations of the "but for the average person..." line for 2 decades now. Where has that gotten them?
> what difference does the underlying OS make to them? In this regard, mobile devices have already filled much of that niche.
On this I agree. Therefore: don't bother targeting this class of user since they aren't someone who needs a desktop OS.
> It strikes me as a great time for FLOSS software to try riding the wave of that attitude.
I don't think so, and the reason is simple: FLOSS software isn't (usually) developed as a product. Very little consideration is given to the end user experience in terms of convenience, simplicity, flexibility, etc. The developers build whatever it is they want to make and then shove it into the world, which is fine so long as you're not asking others to actually use it.
> don't bother targeting this class of user since they aren't someone who needs a desktop OS
If they only want to consume content, then yeah, they have little need for a desktop OS. They still stand to gain from a system with less surveillance. I found the LineageOS install process to be pretty simple, but I have some tech experience. It seems to me that a good first step would be legal mandates that users be able to unlock the bootloaders of their mobile devices and reflash. Even if the end user doesn't have the skills to do it themselves, at least phone service shops could do it without having to use a questionable, unauditable, exploit tool.
I think the world would be a better place if more people were interested in making stuff, and making stuff becomes much easier with a full-featured OS. So, to me, that population is still worth targeting with a "think of the cool stuff you could make".
What's the solution? I don't know. Encourage kids to repair, reverse-engineer, and build their own stuff, from software to hardware? Support the "maker" trend? When I was a kid, I had dreams of building robots and it seemed totally out of reach because there was little going on in my town. Nowadays all the pieces are available commercially off the shelf, many are cheap, and some are quite well polished: I certainly evangelize the Arduino when I see a simple automation problem that needs to be solved on the cheap.
Then again, I work in an academic research environment where buying the corresponding industrial-grade hardware would take a big bite out of the budget. In this setting, it's easier to justify spending a little on hardware, and more on hours. I think the calculus is similar in the developing world, so maybe they're the ones to target. As I understand, Linux is doing better there than in the US.
> FLOSS software isn't (usually) developed as a product. Very little consideration is given to the end user experience in terms of convenience, simplicity, flexibility, etc.
That's for damn sure. I don't have any solution for that other than the wishful thinking above: if more people were interested in and capable of making things, then maybe there would be more pull requests with small fixes for bugs and usability warts.
FLOSS development today seems a lot like herding cats, so maybe adding more people will just make it worse. But, instead of a user firing off a poorly written bug report, probably directed to the wrong section of the project tracker, it would be great if more of the userbase instead had the expertise to make bugfixes and submit them.
I am enjoying this back-and-forth, but if you've been around the net a time or two and are totally sick of discussions like these, I understand. I think we already agree about a lot of this.
You have hit the nail on the head. I moved from Windows to Ubuntu many years back. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my windows machine in 2010 and by chance everything worked like magic. I purchased a new machine in 2015 without much thought and installed Ubuntu. To my horror it would not detect my Qualcomm wifi and AMD Radeon Graphics. Banged my head around to find a solution to Qualcomm wifi. But the 2gb graphics card is just a piece of silicon on my motherboard which does not work.
I'm sure they meant 10.04. As I recall, 10.04 was the first time I ever thought Linux might actually have a shot at the desktop, it was that much of an improvement. Had Canonical not gone crazy a few years later, who knows if that would have panned out or not.
I don't agree that this is such a big deal any more. I've been running Thinkpads for a little over a decade, and and almost every single Fedora release has worked flawlessly out of the box (with the exception of proprietary fingerprint sensors or S0i3 sleep states).
I've got mates with the developer edition Ubuntu XPSs and actually consider Thinkpad+Fedora to be a better, more stable choice. Maybe the number of RH devs with Thinkpads has something to do with it.
You said it yourself — you’ve been running ThinkPads with Fedora. So essentially, you have restricted yourself to one particular line of laptops and one distribution. That is probably why you havn’t felt the pain of having to figure out why the trackpad stops working once in a while — or why the sound card went all mute — or why the battery life suddenly went from being decent to downright horrible.
While I have had some problems running OpenBSD on random hardware, I have not had any trouble running certain recent Linux distros on a wider variety of hardware, including various laptops from Dell, Compaq, Lenovo, and HP. (Let me hasten to add that OpenBSD's hardware support has improved significantly in the last two years and runs flawlessly on most of these machines as well, though sometimes there's some bit of fiddling required.)
Well, my experience has been drastically different - although I haven’t tried to use Linux as my daily driver in the last 4-5 years when I switched to macOS after having used one or the other Linux distribution as my main OS for about 12 years. Maybe Linux has improved since then, but I am not buying a Dell XPS or a Thinkpad to find out. Nor do I have no desire to spend all my free time playing the sysadmin.
PS. I make a living out of working on massive mission critical Linux deployments on the server side. So I am very well aware of how to fix the issues — I just don’t care anymore.
I'm totally with you in not wanting to spend free time fiddling with a system for a laptop that is used for really basic stuff.
The interesting thing is that in the last couple of years, some of the Linux distros are now pain-free to the point that I have had no problems installing them for my wife and then leaving the rest to her. She has zero interest in anything beyond getting stuff done.
I guess my point is that certain distros have actually sort of quietly gotten to that place where it's better as a consumer laptop OS than Windows. So for very little money compared to a Windows or especially an Apple laptop, it's easy to buy her a well-equipped machine and get her up and running quickly, and it's very easy to maintain. That is a good thing.
'Linux' tends to have a reputation as being complicated to use or it's just for developers, etc. But nothing could be further from the truth. If you install one of the more modern distributions like Ubuntu, the OS runs faster, easier to use and much more friendly for just getting stuff done.
I've now realised that I will never buy another Microsoft OS after using Windows 10. I had to download a separate program to switch off all the spyware and to disable crippling updates. This isn't even a problem with Ubuntu.
Linux is only "easier to use" so long as you never color outside the lines of whatever the distro had in mind for a use case. So basically, as long as you treat it like either a web kiosk or a web-dev workstation you'll be ok.
I also doubt that it runs faster in any meaningful way. Certainly my own anecdotal experience doesn't suggest that.
And God help you if you ever have to delve into the goldbergesque internals to fix something. Though to be fair Windows 10 isn't any better in this regard if it involves anything added since Windows 8.
What do you have in mind for "outside the lines"? Gaming?
I've found the opposite. I'm a grad student, and my department assigned me to a computer with Windows 7.
I found it incredibly counter-intuitive and difficult to do things as simple as navigating to hidden directories or opening files therein, let alone anything even slightly further outside the lines of what my grandpa would use a computer for.
It felt like Windows deliberately obfuscated everything, hiding it behind smoke and mirrors for the sake of a "friendlier" facade. Which makes it all the more frustrating -- why would someone go out of their way to make my life more difficult?
The old saying that the "free" in "free software" is about freedom really hit home after my experiences. Linux never got in my way.
> What do you have in mind for "outside the lines"? Gaming?
How do I put an application on a different disk?
> I found it incredibly counter-intuitive and difficult to do things as simple as navigating to hidden directories or opening files therein
View->Hidden Items. Admittedly, such a thing shouldn't be necessary, but Linux has the exact same mechanism for hiding `.` files in its file explorers.
> It felt like Windows deliberately obfuscated everything, hiding it behind smoke and mirrors for the sake of a "friendlier" facade.
Funny, that's exactly how I'd describe every "easy to use" Linux Desktop I've ever encountered. And my point is that once you peek around that facade, what you find is a Rube Goldberg machine.
So either have a completely separate install or recompile your application from source (which assumes it is open source and you've got the build environment correct). Gee, isn't that convenient?
Like I said: try to color outside the lines and all that fake ease of use stuff goes away and you have to deal with the garbage pile of a system underneath.
I don't want to go down this road but it is easier than how you make it out to be. For example matlab can be installed in $HOME even though it is proprietary because the install script takes that into account.
I got frustrated by the Windows updates and app updates that I am willing to put in that extra effort once to install something and then forget about it than try to fight the system on a daily basis.
Proprietary application developers pretty much have to do that, because there are no standards between distributions so they have to remain flexible. OSS developers don't bother because, hey, you can just recompile from source! Not that that would actually make your application portable, mind you, you'd just have different hardcoded paths.
If there was a standardized base system and AppImage was embraced for deploying applications, that would make all application developer's lives easier, proprietary or otherwise, and all that wasted effort maintaining out of date applications across distro-specific repositories could stop.
I think there is still a fundamental difference in the way you troubleshoot things between Linux and Windows. In Linux you can usually find something on Stack overflow or Ask Ubuntu, copy a few commands into the terminal and get things working. In Windows you can find some icons in the settings related to what you are doing and randomly click until things work again. While I prefer the first option I can understand why others (who are not IT professionals) prefer the second.
By the same token though, I find it much easier to fix remotely. I got tired of having to talk my father through tech support issues, since under windows it often required me walking him through all the steps. Far easier to email him a command string and tell him to paste it into the terminal. Sure, this doesn't help him learn how to fix things himself, but he has zero interest in learning to use the computer for anything more than a web browser anyway. And the lack of malware is a nice plus.
If he just needs a Web browser, I've found that the iPad is the best solution here. Both hardware and software are very durable, and portable. Get a Bluetooth keyboard and some sort of stand for the tablet and you're set.
Except those things you find on SO often don't work because they're from 2010 and the way the internals are organized in your more modern distro are different, or they only ever applied to red hat based distros and you're on a debian based one, or the problem in question only looks very similar to a known bug in some old version of pulseaudio, etc.
Personally, I'm in favor of discoverability, especially for troubleshooting. Sadly, Windows is becomming more and more like Linux in this regard as time goes on and they try to make it into a phablet OS.
Video playback has still screen tearing in a default Ubuntu installation, something that has not been an issue in either Mac OSX or Windows for a long time.
I had a similar experience a few months ago. I run Windows 10 Professional on my iMac using Boot Camp for Windows specific stuff — hard to believe, but such things do still exist in 2018. I was facing some slowness while working on something urgent, so I decided to go with the old standby — a reboot. To my dismay, I was greeed with a “Windows is updating — don’t power off” message which stuck around for more than an hour. The work I was doing was on the local drive and quite urgent. I ended up having to pull out my laptop and do the whole work from scratch while Windows was “updating”.
I am sure there is a setting which could have prevented the machine from updating my machine in the background, but that is not the point. Why can I not be allowed to update/reboot on my own schedule by default instead of being forced into it unless I opt out? Why is it opt out instead of opt in? The fact that it is an opt out tells me that Microsoft actually knows that no one will actually opt into this madness by choice. And why was I not at least warned that my machine is going into a self induced coma which would leave it unusable for more than an hour when I tried to reboot?
And let us not even forget about the adware that gets installed with every major upgrade. I bought the Windows license for the full price — surely I deserve a break from this nonsense?
Behaviour like this is the reason I prefer macOS for serious work — despite its problems. Linux, while good on server side, is just not polished enough to be my daily driver on the client. A few (~4-5) years ago, I used to run Linux on my main work a laptop - a Lenovo. But I ended up having to act the sysadmin way too frequently for my liking. Touchpad going dead randomly (won’t come back without reboots), battery life going from decent to horrible after certain updates, overheating at times for no obvious reason, not so great media playback, trouble with sound and Bluetooth etc were some of the common problems. I fixed many of them, but every update brought its own share of headaches until I decided it just wasn’t worth my time. And I am saying this as someone who makes a living working on Linux on the server side. I can’t imagine an average Joe going to the lengths I did to fix the boatload of issues that come bundled with Linux.
Eventually, I ended up buying a Mac for my daily driver. While I can’t say everything has been completely smooth, it has been relatively headache free. I still run Linux on EC2 for my Linux needs, but I don’t see myself going back to it on the client side in the near future. With macOS, I get the UNIX like interface with a decent GUI and hardware support.
I had one of those stupid expensive macs for years before changing jobs and getting an XPS 15. I love the machine with Ubuntu except for one critical flaw: the stupid thing goes into this thermal safety mode so damn easily. I'll be compiling code for five minutes and suddenly my browser that I'm developing in becomes a choppy unusuable mess. No matter how long I wait nothing recovers until I reboot.
Also gaming is nearly impossible because of the same issue. I suspect the xps15 is more powerful than its cooling can handle. I'm not sure how normal that is for laptops.
Also: when installing Ubuntu on my XPS I had to toggle some bios option about drives. Maybe that's the issue he had with Mint and didn't report fixing Ubuntu.
For what it's worth, I managed to fix the thermal throttling on my 9560 (sounds like you have the same model) by carefully removing all of the old thermal paste from the heat spreaders using rubbing alcohol and re-pasting it all. I also added some thermal pads to connect some components to the bottom case. There are guides online on how to do this if you Google around.
Personally I think it's inexcusable to need to go through all this on a brand new £2000 laptop but I liked it enough to go to the effort and, like I said, it did completely cure the issues in my case and has been fine for the past 6 months or so.
Sounds like you got a lemon of a paste job. My XPS 15 is able to run with a full load on all cores for hours at a time. Similarly, gaming on it doesn't seem to cause any issues.
It's possible that external factors are the issue (such as ambient temperatures), however I'd wager that a proper repaste of both the CPU and GPU would improve cooling.
By default the XPS (and actually most Dell laptops) seem to come set to RAID rather than AHCI, which is likely the BIOS change you're referring to.
It's a compromise for its super compact dimension, sadly throttling down the cpu defensively is becoming very common for a lot of models, even the last macbook iteration has that problem
That's one of the reasons for which I still keep buying "thicker" laptops like the T series of lenovo.
The latest MacBook with i9 also throttles heavily to the degree that it's worse than the i7 model.
When I was researching laptops, they all seem to have problems actually putting the CPU under load for extended periods of time. Loud fan noise, throttling etc.
They all seem to be built for mostly idle CPU loads, with spiking only for a few secs at a time to load programs.
Which year is that XPS 15 from? I considered buying one in early 2014 but I didn't because a lot of people was having issues like that (both on Windows and Linux.)
I can’t ditch windows, Mac OS, iOS, or Linux. I have a separate device for each as I need something that one of those OS’s offer that another one won’t. “You need the right tool for the job” and there is no “one” tool.
