An OS used by billions of people including government agencies, hospitals, and nonprofits is not some videogame that needs new content. It's mission critical software, and these utter delinquents are treating it like a Steam early release.
If MS won't get its act together, they should be regulated, broken up, or have their OS seized by eminent domain for the public good.
If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software.
Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost. It just fails to surface an overwrite dialogue, and assumes the result is no.
I know you're saying this in jest, but the (US) government wrote code to fly to the moon and back, control robots on Mars, and model the earth (e.g. DoD's WGS 84, all the work by NIST, etc.). Sure, healthcare.gov was not a smooth rollout, but they do deserve some credit overall.
Now Windows on the other hand.... I just set up Windows on a new laptop I bought recently.. just plain Windows as it shipped with my new laptop. Didn't do anything "outside the box" here. I've let it update after this fiasco was supposedly over, restarted - and, of course - can't boot, everything's corrupted, had to reinstall Windows from scratch. Never had this happen with macOS, FreeBSD, or Linux.
It's hard to believe, but it really is _that_ bad. I wish it wasn't!
Never happened to me with Windows. It's not the best, but works.
Linux on the over hand it's a continuous installation of drivers and fixing functionality that works out of the box on my windows: graphics problems, audio, screen, usb, WiFi.
Of course and then you try to install some module and says you have incompatible modules. Then you need to figure out what modules you need to change to match the version of the module to install. This was a few years ago, but I don't have the time to do this.
Plus window management is broken on Linux, too many bugs. Last time I couldn't even alt tab like windows.
You don't appreciate the difference between knowing what's happening to your system well enough to fix it and hoping that an "update" doesn't cause too much unrecoverable damage when it installs itself behind your back.
Working out of the box is nice, but what's magically fixed can be magically broken just as easily. Traditional Linux was more work to get working, but once I got it working I could rely on it to stay working rather than getting broken in the next update. (Linux is no different from windows these days, so I've moved to FreeBSD).
I find windows more problematic, because of the unpredictability. FreeBSD experience: spend a day or two setting it up, but after that you can rely on it always working. Windows experience: it works the first time, but every few months it will have an update that breaks things for a bit.
I tried switching to Linux again for desktop usage since Proton became a thing and I was tired of the weird new licensing model. Installed the new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and after fiddling around for a week I still couldn't get my sound cards to work properly. The sound quality is just bad and the sound often cuts.
Honestly if I had a little willpower I think I might have been able to get a satisfying result at some point but the effort just wasn't worth it for me. I use my home computer like 3-4hrs a week in the weekend for games and maybe hobby projects if I don't feel like dying. I'd rather just have something that plainly works in a predictable manner, but even that seems to be asking too much nowadays...
> If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software.
That's because they're usually required to accept the lowest reasonable bid. As someone who works in the public sector, trust me, we try to get the money to people we know will do a good job. We have to work with the shit we buy every day. We want it to be good. There's just a lot of people willing to put in maximum of effort on a bid and minimal effort on execution.
> Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost.
I mean, kind of. I agree it's not as bad as the article implies. However, it's a pretty common pattern to download a zip file, extract and overwrite, and then throw out the zip file. It's not directly resulting in data loss, but a very common user pattern will result in data loss when you encounter this bug.
As someone who had to deal with them from both sides, EU public procurement laws are fucked up beyond repair. There is, however, a simple cure for software that the public sector is avoiding in most places:
1. base the software on an established, battle-tested open source product, there is one for almost any business case
2. use the money to hire an in-house team, hiring norms in public sector at least ALLOW for quality selection, unlike public procurement ones
3. develop in the open, invest into visibility, attract community members
4. shill, try to get as many agencies across your and other member states to pick the same solution and co-develop the software with you, this way the cost drops for everyone
Even if you can't find something to satisfy point 1., the other three points would still work to your benefit. If you can push this for long enough to make the software standard in more places, you could get a critical mass of outside developers to form consultancies you could hire later for additional work.
I know Munich is poster-boy of this not working for desktop OS-es but that's really a consequence of two things:
1. They made all the wrong choices (heavy customization, chasing windows look and feel, not tracking upstream progress)
2. They got elected officials who were effectively Microsoft shills (the top-down decision to go back to Windows was heavily pushed by a single executive who was pissed off he couldn't use Outlook he was used to on his previous drone job).
Turns out they often need to tender as fast as possible and just use "lowest price satisfying all other criteria" as a way of choice.
> Turns out it is very easy to be 50% cheaper than anybody else if you are not required to have a working product.
You are allowed to specify absolute requirements in addition to sorting criteria. For example, you can say, worth more than some price, "the contractor shall have at least n years of experience". As descendant says, these are used to work around ban of subjective selection. Sometimes, they overdo it, and no vendors qualify at all.
> You are allowed to specify absolute requirements in addition to sorting criteria. For example, you can say, worth more than some price, "the contractor shall have at least n years of experiene".
Exactly these are being used to pick a specific vendor. "Must have at least N people certified to do X for at least Y years", with "must have turnover of X for the last Y years" and few more, and you find out, that there is exactly one company qualifying.
There is no fast when talking abou tenders. You need to give at least 6 months by law to give companies a chance to respond. If they start asking basic questions, they get extra time to read each others answer. 9 months to 1 year seems a reasonable guess for a not to big tender
Isn't there already precedent for the state to step-in to ensure the continued survival of privately-owned and operated corporations and infrastructure that society has taken a strong dependency on? ("too big to fail", etc)
Even if there was precedent, I cannot imagine a single government taking over an globally distributed operating system AND making it better.
The US Government could maybe do something like force Microsoft to sell Windows to another large company at firesale prices, like Google or IBM, in the same way that Merrill Lynch was forced to sell at bargain basement prices to Bank Of America, at which point BofA became too big-ger to fail.
Some Windows Insider MVPs are getting really frustrated with the ”danks and memes” way Windows is developed nowadays [1]. I guess this is the eternal pendulum, swinging between “too boring” and “too hip”.
I bet a lot of enterprises are still using Windows 7 or older because they are mission critical systems for the reasons you state above . (Also because they have to validate all their software to the new operating system .
Win 10 LTSB is really, really good. If you can get it, you should be running it. It would be worth paying a premium for if Microsoft would sell it retail, rather than only through MSDN or volume licensing.
There's an LTS version of win 10 without the constant feature updates. Do you actually support desktop Windows in any of those industries with mission critical desktops? If so, you need to educate yourself. If not, your rant is coming from an uninformed position.
It's on a completely different release schedule. Sure anything can have bugs but this is not going to get bugs introduced through feature-adds. It doesn't get these feature updates. It's stable. This is the entire point. You test and validate before your deploy and then you deploy and it remains stable.
Seized, absolutely not. Of course since the government already has the source there is nothing that needs to be seized. The government can just declare the temporary monopoly that they granted on copying it to be over (to be clear, this would take an act of congress...).
I'd almost be sympathetic to them doing that - but I also think the outcome would be absolutely terrible. Necessary maintenance (fixing security bugs, updating to new hardware, etc) takes a lot of work and I'm not clear that anyone else would step up to do a good job of it. See how the various android OEMs act...
MacOS works very well. And if you don’t like Apple hardware, so do many Linux distributions (Ubuntu is very popular and easy to get support for), and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD if you are willing to put in more time.
Most people are better served by NOT windows. Using Win10 without a specific program that isn’t available for macOS/Linux is bordering on masochism.
I have the opposite experience with Win support - my parents replaced their aging windows laptop with a new win10 one, and I had to spend the weekend trying to get their old printer and scanner working again, whereas it still works out of the box with the latest Ubuntu.
The main difference these days, once you got past the setup, is that as a non LTSB/LTSC user, Microsoft keeps inflicting damage onto you (e.g. in the form of reappearing Candy Crush) with no way for you to stop it without continuously actively fighting.
If MS won't get its act together, they should be regulated, broken up, or have their OS seized by eminent domain for the public good.