You rang? Windows 10 gets ever cosier with Android, unleashes Calls on Insiders Microsoft squeezed out a fresh build of Windows 10 last night, and finally released the much-anticipated Calls feature to eager Windows Insiders. Announced on-stage at Samsung's Unpacked event and shown off at the Microsoft's Surface shindig last week, the feature (Android only, naturally) allows a Your Phone user to make and …
If by “standard tab” you mean switching away from the utterly pointless and space-wasting “extended view”, there’s a GPO to permanently fix that:
User Config -> Admin Templates -> Windows Components -> Microsoft Management Console -> Restricted/Permitted snap-ins -> Extension snap-ins -> Extended View (Web View) = Disabled
Yeah but understanding such issues and programming their fixes are hard, and product managers have to be seen to be doing something each release cycle to keep their job. So they convince senior management such things are complicated, slow to fix and maybe not worth the effort, and go for the low hanging fruit. Senior management doesn't give a shit as long as new releases are emmited at the desired cadence and don't diverge from their vision.
Hence a shitshow of pointless feature bloat and a growing backlog of real issues that will never get fixed.
Cynical? Moi?
We're rapidly reaching the position (if indeed we haven't already got there) where MS, Google et al make all our decisions for us - including what we want to do with our computers, what we should have wanted to search for on the web, and whether we care about privacy (they assume we don't).
Oh for the days of DOS and for bare metal. I used to have total control over the computer I'd paid for, and I did some pretty amazing stuff without having "my hand held" by vendors.
Ok, let me just have a look at a few games I've been playing recently without problems on Windows:
Subnautica: Apparently it will work under Wine "99%", after a bunch of fiddling. So it's a starter, but clearly not up to par.
Forza Horizon 4: Nope, unsurprisingly for a Microsoft game, no one seems to have got this working on Linux
FTL: Has a Linux version, so all good. (Although you might need to disable PulseAudio to prevent it locking up)
Surviving Mars: Also seem to have a Linux installer (if you buy from GoG).
The Bradwell Conspiracy: No mention of it anywhere on the internet, but it's just come out. I'm going to chalk this down as a 'probably not'.
To sum up; a lot better than I was expecting, but still only about 85% of the way there.
That would be a pretty big shock to, erm, me, who games on Linux with some frequency. Just bought a gaming laptop not long ago with the intent of running Linux on it exclusively (Windows 10 is the non-starter here. Would not touch that shite if I was in biohazard suit!).
Okay, what games do you play then run natively in Linux? This isn't a challenge, I am really interested, because when I looked into this, the majority of the games in my library are not supported under Linux without messing around with a "wrapper" type tool such as Wine.
It would just be a little more convenient, especially if you work with headphones on anyway.
I use the messages.google.com service that lets me read and reply to texts via the web page, and I find this much more convenient than getting the phone out of my pocket to read and having a full size keyboard to reply.
For SMS I used to have a small app that was able to read and send them when the phone was connected to the PC, 1998-9 circa... IIRC it used simple AT commands, without any "web service" reading my SMS between. Of course, removed in the new shiny mobes.
I wonder why they took so long to re-implement such features.
MS could have implemented them already in Win8/WP8 times - easier when you control both OS, and it could have made them sell some devices more....
If you ask me, it's pretty shameful that in 2019 we've only just invented a way for your computer (which is probably already connected to the world's primary network) to communicate with someone on a phone (which is probably also connected to the same network). if you'd have asked me that question 30 years ago I would have expected us to have got that figured out by the year 2000
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