"Ohai, this is Windows. You may have noticed that I killed all the long-running jobs that you left going overnight and restarted your computer so that I could inject some AI-flavored bullshit you never asked for into your (*) operating system. You're welcome!!!”
(*) “It's not actually yours, of course. The OS now works for our Marketing Department rather than you. kthxbai.”
Why would anyone use MSWindows when alternatives exist is beyond me. Is the founder effect so strong? Is the switching cost so high? Are there really killer apps that lock a user in that don't run elsewhere, when even most of Microsoft software is web-based nowadays? #MIcrosoft#MSWindows
@angusm I live in hope that my corporate Windows 10 laptop won’t get any of this rubbish, but I suspect I’m being naive.
My MacBook isn’t yet infected, but given Apple’s enthusiastic injection of ads into some of its apps (I’m looking at you, News!), I suspect the unhelpful nonsense AI (as opposed to the useful stuff in Photos) will follow eventually.
But killing the long-running jobs and restarting is the ultimate Fuck You - they have zero respect for their users.
@Myryama Windows 10 gets EOL'd on October 14, 2025, so you have about two years left before you have to seriously consider making the jump (and if Windows 7 is anything to go by, they may continue to put out emergency security patches for some time after that).
By late 2025, the obsession with "AI" may have died down a little, but I don't expect the marketing nags to do anything but intensify.
@kkarhan It's the old, old problem of some software/hardware only working with Windows. The software I want isn't available on Linux; the hardware won't work with MacOS, so I’m at the mercy of whatever Redmond wants to throw at me.
I do use Ubuntu for some of my servers, though. Of the Linux variants I've tried, it might be my favorite.
@josefgarvi DXVK translates DirectX calls to Vulkan Linux system calls if I understood correctly and Proton is a version of wine made by Valve. These two things made it possible to play windows games in Linux without much trouble. They were mainly created for gaming but I think these things may help someone to use windows apps in linux though I wouldn't recommend it if its not working for you.
@pikachu_sensei@josefgarvi kinda, they basically take the system calls and trnaslate them from Win32 / Win64 to your underlying host system.
This helps.for more performance sensitive applications that would.otherwise require more complex VM setups with a dedicaded GPU being passed through to the Gues OS (Windows in this case)...
And unless an application is specifically designed to not run in Wine or even a VM chances are it'll just work.
@pasmac@kkarhan Thanks for the suggestions, but the consensus from those who've tried Wine with this stuff seems to be that it works, but not well. And installing a Windows VM doesn't get you away from Windows, it just adds a layer of virtualization to the problem.
@angusm@kkarhan unfortunately that is a very common issue … someone remember to enforce something, because only know one specific OS … many times end in outdated software or vendor specific …
When someone want to impose her views knowing that in the end will not support that view is always easy…
@pasmac@angusm Still, a #VM is preferable over #BareMetal as it allows isolation and doesn't brick one's workflow because #Windows being Windows = binary trash that constantly reboots and crashes.
Also you can simply backup & restore that VM when you need to and don't have to setup everything from scratch...
@kkarhan@angusm@ubuntu I agree, but as a sim-racing nerd I simply don’t have a choice. Even with Linux/Proton/SteamVR it just won’t work.
I dual booted Linux and Win10 for 2 years but stopped when I realized that in 2023 a GPU driver update basically still makes the desktop environment shit the bed like it did back in the early 2000s. And if you want good VR performance, AMD is just not an option over Nvidia.
@kkarhan@angusm@ubuntu that’s fair, and I agree. However when you factor in drivers for wheelbases, motion rigs, telemetry stuff like Simhub, addon apps like Racelabs and Kapps, VR support, iRacing’s anti-cheat software; I’ll be gray and dead before it happens. There’s just too much Windows based connective tissue and not enough Linux users to make it make sense. 🫤
@detritus I use the term loosely, of course, but to me the essence of #enshittification is "lock-in + degradation”. No matter how bad something is to begin with, if it is deliberately made worse in order to extract a profit from a more or less captive audience, that's enshittification.
That, at least, is my understanding, but I'll let @pluralistic be the final arbiter. And if you want to propose a more specialized term like, say, “pessimization”, I'll go along with that too.
@pluralistic@angusm I dunno, I think only for people that ever voluntarily wanted to use Windoze. I've always tried and mostly succeeded at avoiding it. Which isn't the case with platforms you used as examples in your original essay, like Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, etc. These online "places" were enjoyable and people actually wanted to use them, they were originally fun and/or rewarding, and then they got gradually trapped like flies in a web. Windoze was more like the fly knew it was a trap but it had to use it, for $job, and it sucked from the start and then it just kept sucking more, and more, and more....
Add comment