Bill Gates wants to eat your soul

[waregim]

@RX Indeed, we have enough issues with M$.

I have Win10 here, and dont like it. Its full of hideously bloated 'services' which fortunately in my early version were mostly disposable. I dont really like Win7 that much, but at least they didnt try to f*ck with the filesystem that much. XP is tolerable, but the best OS ever was Win2000. Of course that latter are being deprecated, and are unable to handle modern multimedia.
Their increased 'security' is a joke when their firewall can be remotely programmed. Totally effing useless. I turn off the 'Security Center' on all my machines, and yank Defender. UAC is a joke.

The only purpose an OS should serve is to run the programs, not the user. Win10 is full of crapware and eye candy, trying to get you to pay for things you can get for free from FOSS. I wont allow it near my network.

I use Potplayer, because my needs are simple and I only write DVDs, not use them for media. I use as little M$ apps as possible, always using alternatives when available. They are vectors of attack.

That said, Linux is also losing its way, by forsaking freedom for a GUI-centric architecture slowly eroding user control, by garbage like SystemD and hobbled junk like Wayland.

When Ubuntu first came around, Canonical sent out packages of its CDs for free. Originally I downloaded Linux Slackware from Sunsite with a 14.4 modem. Could never wrap my head around paying for a free software!

@FO Took a look at that M$ 'distro' link, and from first sight Chocolatey is better. I can kill the KB packages before they install easily enough - though I doubt this would be an option with the M$ version. And its only for Win10, screwing the Win8 users.

Of interest is that Powershell has a nice little archive of around 7000 files, with some for Linux and Python. SOme interesting utilities outside of the junk for AWS and its own Cloud.

However I would agree that Apple lost a golden oppurtunity to take over the desktop market when M$ screwd the pooch with Win8 (worse than Millenium) and doubled down with Win10. Something that would allow Iphone users to interact with a *real* computer.

I think the pnan for M$ is to migrate Win into the cloud, and have desktop users work with Linux apps figuring that they will all sooner or later want to 'upgrade' from LibreOffice of Office365.

Beaths the hell out me why though. The basic office apps, are well, basic office apps, and dont need a technology greater than Win95 to run.

[RobertX]

I remember when Canonical did that too! I got Ubuntu and Kubuntu from them, fully free of charge, meaning no shipping!

Then I discovered that I can customise my OS by using Remastersys, until that was eventually discontinued. Now, I just use Cubic and make my own distro from there. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just go to Cubic's Launchpad page, it's actually pretty good.

Now why do I use Cubic and Remastersys? Because in an event of an OS fuck-up, I can just re-install the customised OS without having to install everything else. Maybe it's criminal, or that it's not following traditional practises, but I stand by my methods.

[Fant0men]

That said, Linux is also losing its way, by forsaking freedom for a GUI-centric architecture slowly eroding user control, by garbage like SystemD and hobbled junk like Wayland.

The only real problem with Wayland is that desktop environments and window managers won't support it. Many people have this inaccurate idea that Wayland isn't ready or finished yet, but it's been ready for years. Fedora ships with Wayland as the default display server, and it works really well in GNOME (since they've actually bothered to support it). I used Wayland with GNOME for a year and didn't have a single problem. All my X apps worked fine, due to XWayland (included in Wayland).

Right now I'm using MATE, as I like it better than GNOME. Sadly, MATE won't support Wayland anytime soon due to there not being many developers working on MATE to begin with, and they're focused on other things. That's the story with most of the less popular DEs. I've been thinking about taking KDE for another spin soon though, as I've upgraded Fedora some months ago and the KDE packages are probably a lot newer than they were last time I tried KDE. So, maybe they've sorted out some of the bugs. What I like about KDE is that it's less resource intensive these days than GNOME, and probably even MATE. It uses less RAM.

Look into the history of how the X Window System was created, and you will see that the description "hobbled junk" is more applicable to X than to Wayland. X is nothing short of an engineering disaster. None of the X specific "features" are used anymore, but everything is handled by the window managers. It's the window manager that does all the rendering, and the finished bitmap is then sent via IPC to X to be displayed on the screen. X is basically a glorified image viewer, and most of the development work on the WM / DE side is trying to get around X and trick it into doing what's needed. The people who created Wayland are former X.Org developers, and they know full well the limitations of X.

Due to Linux being a UNIX-derivative it will never become GUI-centric, as UNIX by definition is text-based, with the GUI running on top of the TTYs. That is indeed a great thing, and I wouldn't worry about this situation changing anytime soon.

[RobertX]

Fant0men, my mother respects Bill Gates as she says he worked hard and the people who hate him are jealous of him.

What do you say about those assessments?

[Fant0men]

Fant0men, my mother respects Bill Gates as she says he worked hard and the people who hate him are jealous of him.

What do you say about those assessments?

I'd say your mother has bought into the media hype about Bill Gates that he has probably paid for with his own money. If anything, Bill Gates is a sly business man who happened to be at the right place at the right time, securing a contract with IBM to provide the OS for the new PC platform as it was being launched in the early 80s. The only issue is, of course, that Microsoft didn't have an OS of their own to sell at that time. They tricked IBM, and they used the money they got from the IBM contract to buy a hacked together OS by some guy in Seattle. That OS was called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), and it's what Microsoft rebranded as MS-DOS. Windows was Microsoft's attempt to straight-up plagiarize Apple's GUI in Mac OS, and it ran as a shell on top of DOS to begin with. All the way up to Windows ME, released in 2000, Windows was based on MS-DOS, which is QDOS, which is an OS that Microsoft didn't create themselves, but bought from someone else. Getting that contract with IBM is how Microsoft got its monopoly, and they maintain it by forcing OEMs to preinstall Windows on all their machines, hence preventing anyone else from getting into the desktop PC market.

Microsoft never comes up with good ideas on their own, but they always copy other companies or buy them up.

I'm not jealous of Bill Gates, but I'm just tired of seeing Windows being in use everywhere, when I know that it's technically an inferior product.

Compare Bill Gates with Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux kernel, and there's a world of difference. Linus Torvalds both created the kernel himself to begin with, and he's been involved in its development the whole time, up until today. Linus Torvalds is a great programmer. Bill Gates is a great businessman, and I would argue, also a psychopath with no compassion.

[RobertX]

Yeah, I agree.

The fact that guys like Torvalds and Stallman are not known by computer users is criminal.

EDIT: Actually I lied; it's not my mother who said those things, it's an acquaintance. I picked my mother arbitrarily to put words in... it's an "all intents and purposes" kind of thing. However, she still insists that I don't try to convince her to use GNU/Linux even though I keep telling her that she would want to sooner or later. When she graduated from business school for an accounting job, she has already been claimed as a soulless Windows user, and quite frankly I was too at that time, I was at the age of 18. She graduated at the same time she learned how to use a computer, so you should understand the difficulty of switching to an OS like GNU/Linux. She's not dumb, she's actually pretty wise and knowledgeable, but then again, who doesn't want to use Windows?

I have always wanted to know how they're bullying the OEM market. I know that they always install Windows, but didn't the OEM guys pick whatever OS to install? And another thing, a local store offers a GNU/Linux installation service for $50 Canadian. Is it worth it?

[Fant0men]

I have always wanted to know how they're bullying the OEM market. I know that they always install Windows, but didn't the OEM guys pick whatever OS to install? And another thing, a local store offers a GNU/Linux installation service for $50 Canadian. Is it worth it?

They lower their license fees to OEMs who only preinstall Windows, and raise the license fees if OEMs also preinstall other operating systems. That's how Microsoft does it.

[RobertX]

That's fucked up.

Does Apple do that?

Do you know of any OEM builders who sell their computers with GNU/Linux OSs?

Is there any reason why you should take your system to a dealer to install GNU?Linux OSs on for $50?

And one more thing: when I buy a computer, a new one, I always wipe the drive, deleting all traces of the crap the store has put into the computer, and install my pirate/Free operating systems!

I'm so evil, MUHAHAHAHHAHAHAH!

[Fant0men]

That's fucked up.

Does Apple do that?

Do you know of any OEM builders who sell their computers with GNU/Linux OSs?

Is there any reason why you should take your system to a dealer to install GNU?Linux OSs on for $50?

And one more thing: when I buy a computer, a new one, I always wipe the drive, deleting all traces of the crap the store has put into the computer, and install my pirate/Free operating systems!

I'm so evil, MUHAHAHAHHAHAHAH!

Apple doesn't have to do that, since they control both the software and hardware. They make their own shit from the ground up, so it's a different story with them. They're not going to release macOS to other platforms anytime soon, not while they're making their own computers.

I think at least Dell and Lenovo sell PCs with Linux preinstalled. There may be other OEMs that do that as well. I don't buy OEMs so I'm not fully informed about this. But there's a reason why OEMs have only offered Windows historically, and it's because of the license fees. So the OEMs who still decide to offer Linux probably do pay more money to Microsoft as a consequence.

The best thing to do is really to buy the hardware components separately and build your own PC. That's what I usually do. That way I don't pay the Microsoft tax. If you're getting a laptop then I guess you could buy a Lenovo or something.

[RobertX]

You said that the best way to buy a computer is to build it and not pay for OEM software, and that you've done it for a long time.

Now, off-topic: how "easy" is it to turn off Secure Boot or UEFI, if you need to do that to install GNU/Linux distributions?

Back on-topic: After saying all that about Gates, do you think Gates deserve a little amount of respect? After all, most tyrants in history are praised and respected before they fall.