Posts by Penguinista

Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users

Re: hobbyist level

That's a very sweeping statement, but I guess I hate beating a dead horse about the decreasing quality of Microsoft products and the fact Microsoft keeps listening to the ludicrous decisions of its shareholders and top exec than the feedback of their users.

Let's be honest, Microsoft don't care about their users and they don't care about you — you'll always be a rug-pull away from them taking control of your operating system from you.

To be fair, you did make me laugh regarding your newbie Linux user experience. I remember that happening in the late 90s and early 2000s, including on Windows forums when Windows 95's compatibility was troublesome. And here we are today where the ‘average’ Windows user *still* downloads files off the internet and opens them whilst being too impatient to read various prompts and warnings. But, hey, I don't want to beat that dead horse either like I do regarding Microsoft's incessant need to hide file extensions by default — that's still such a dumb feature, in my opinion.

Anyway, Snakey boy, you keep beating your horses whilst keeping your eyes are closed to what's being snatched away from under your nose by the tech bros.

Re: Consumer level owner

Sorry, but what's a ‘consumer level owner’ when it's at home? If a ‘consumer level owner’ is a person who owns something, such as a product or asset, and uses it in some way, then I'm that too and I wasn't completely baffled.

Also, I didn't say I enjoyed fixing my issue — I just said it wasn't difficult to fix with a little bit of research, something which seems to be a dying art these days. Do you not use any forums for your Windows-related issues, or is using Microsoft's forum too ‘hobbyist’ for you? I'm genuinely intrigued to know what makes something ‘hobbyist’ or not.

Also, I'm pretty sure Ubuntu is developed by a British company called Canonical and a community of other developers, so I'm not convinced it's exclusively a hobbyists OS. It's a similar situation for Fedora Linux (consisting of a community of developers and Red Hat employees) and Pop!_OS (employees at System76), so I don't think it's as black and white as people make out.

Re: M$ good, Linux bad

You obviously highlight your ignorance — and dare I say arrogance — by calling Linux a ‘“hobbyist level” OS on the desktop’. You're welcome to have an opinion, but opinions don't equal facts.

Oh, and for the record, I bought a PC without checking whether it would be compatible with a Linux desktop OS. Even with an Nvidia graphics card, it wasn't that difficult to get up and running on Ubuntu 20.04 (at the time) barring a quirk that caused it to stutter but that was down to the Nvidia graphics driver which was easily mitigated using a kernel boot config option I found on one of the numerous Linux forums. So you probably need to stop talking twaddle about Linux users always choosing compatible hardware from the get-go — in my experience, choosing compatible Linux hardware from the get-go is the exception rather than the norm for the technology circles I operate within, namely education.

Also, have you even used any of the various Linux desktop OSs recently? You'll be surprised how ‘non-hobbyist level’ they have become over the last five-plus years, unless you're still living in the dark ages and/or wearing your Microsoft-branded rose-tinted glasses.

Oh, and I was a big Microsoft fanboi until 2018. That's when I tried a Linux desktop OS for the umpteenth time and it finally clicked with me, maybe because of the direction Windows — namely Windows 10 — was being taken by Microsoft, such as the increasingly pushy upsell of Microsoft's online services being baked into the operating system, the disrespect for user choice such as system updates re-enabling features I'd deliberately turned off, and the underhanded data-slurping tactics. So, if I have ‘frequent biases’ regarding my ‘OS obsession’, then so be it. Choices change, opinions change. If you love Windows then good for you, but just don't be a dick about it when others don't think the same.

In the meantime, I hope you have a good day :⁠-⁠)

Beer icon, because we can agree to disagree.

Workday beats Oracle and Microsoft in UK 'Matrix' ERP deal

Re: Anything but Oracle

Oh, I agree! My employer is also going down the Oracle Fusion route, and having seen the out-of-the-box implementation (because customisation of it costs even more money), it looks like a steaming turd of jankiness. But the bigwigs seem to love it (even though they are unlikely to be the ones to use it regularly), so they've bought into it without hesitation, all because of the ‘Oracle’ badge on it.

The same bigwigs are also the ones who keep lapping up costly and increasingly buggy software and systems, especially from Microsoft, and wonder why they keep getting stung with unexpected costs, unwanted features and difficult-to-replace legacy applications that prove difficult to avoid — vendor lock-in is a massively restrictive and expensive choice, with failure resulting in top dogs getting quietly shuffled out of the back door with a cushy pay-off whilst those remaining worry about where their next pay cheque is coming from and how to maintain these travesties.

Time will tell whether I'm proved right or wrong...

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Re: This is why I abandoned Windows.

This was essentially me back in 2018, except it was a W7 laptop before it [the OS] became end-of-life.

I started things as a dual-boot experience – mainly by partitioning free space on my physical disk using the “Install along side another Operating System” option. Since mid-2020, I've gone full-on Linux desktop after hardly using the Windows partition in the space of about 12 months after first dual-booting, then never using the Windows partition for pretty much all of 2019.

I've used W10 and W11 in the last two years (for work usage) and it has been a horrible, productivity-killing and frustrating experience, especially when I'm stuck at the “Getting Windows Ready” screen for prolonged periods on a regular basis after choosing “Shutdown”, not “Update and Shutdown”.

In comparison, Linux desktop distros have been a breath of fresh air in recent years, to the point that I now have family members either using one, or looking to try one, with some looking to return to Linux after getting newer W10/W11 laptops/desktops, all because Linux keeps out of the way of what they want to do, unlike Windows 10/11 which is ‘really invasive and needy’ according to my 18-year-old step-daughter who previously used Windows but finds Linux distros more intuitive, and considerably better at respecting users and their choices. She's dreading the thought of having to tolerate W11 and its annoyances whilst using the university campus IT equipment...Ooof!

After nearly two decades of waiting, GNOME 44 brings you... image thumbnails

Unpopular opinion: I quite like the GNOME 40-series desktop environment

To be honest, the GNOME desktop environment (since using version 3.28) suits my workflow and ‘clean desk’ mindset, so I'm obviously in the minority. But each to their own and I hope you enjoy what works best for you :-)

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

To be fair, it's probably the one time where Microsoft's (old?) “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy might actually be welcomed...