Windows compatibility bonanza: What nobody tells you about Linux and OSX

[jeronimov]

1. Windows nightmare

I’m 40 and I’ve been using a version of Windows my entire adult life. Half of that time I’ve hated it for some reason. DLL hell, the blue screen of death, the freezing, the crashing, Millenium, Vista, the boring UI, the annoying UI, the alien UI (8), the lack of support, the drop of support, the viruses, the updates in general but  the compulsory ones in particular, the inclusion of ads, the broadcasting of my data without my permission... you name it. If you are a windows user you know this list is by no means complete.

 

2. Linux & OSX bliss

So naturally, escaping from Windows, I have used Linux and OSX. Both beautiful and solid. Fell in love with each immediately. Even with the early Corel Linux, Debian or Red Hat. When I first saw Ubuntu it was gorgeous and very easy to use. Recently, I have settled for a Gnome Fedora. OSX is breathtaking and fun. I still have a Power PC iBook that can run Call of Duty and Quake 3 despite its 32 MB video card. I use Tiger (10.4) on that Mac in 2018 and not just for fun. Word for Mac 2008 is far more advanced than Word 2016 for Windows when it comes to the aesthetics of the resulting documents.

 

3. Unspoken drawbacks

But there is something that no one will tell you about Apple Operating Systems: They are all incompatible with each other. You can run some apps for OS9 in a built in emulator but a lot of apps will not run unless you actually buy an older Mac with that particular OS. It certainly feels odd to a Windows user to hit that wall. Having software for a previous OS on a Mac is like having an .exe or an .rpm. It just belongs to a different universe but with the same logo. Sure, there are emulators and virtual machines.
On the Linux side, I kept breaking Ubuntu just by trying to install programs for basic desktop publishing and general office tasks. After a few weeks I'd always do something fatal to Ubuntu so I settled for Fedora because it is more robust. But running some essential apps on a fresh install of a 3 year old release may prove a challenge.
Just yesterday I installed Fedora 22 (2015) on an old Core Duo because I remembered that it ran great on that machine. 3 years later, all the tweaks that made it great for me are no longer supported which translates into a lot of digging, downloading, and struggling to install. Some essential apps such as Chrome will refuse to install. What is the last stable version of Chrome that ran in Fedora 22 and where can I download it? I do not know. Netflix does not work, Calibre installs but does not open. I must format and go for Fedora 28 which solves all my problems.
 

4. The one who runs it all

But then I find myself thinking about that Windows 7 32 Bit I have on the same Core Duo. It runs everything by double clicking on it. It runs all programs made for windows today, it runs stuff made for XP in 2001, for windows 98, 95 and even programs and games made for DOS. 
Sure, there are hiccups. Sometimes you have to use compatibility mode. Here and there you may encounter a program that will just not work no matter what you try. But that, if find, is the exception. 
Microsoft -the old Microsoft- does not get enough credit, I think, for its compatibility extravaganza that meant you did not need to buy the same program or game every time there was a new version of windows. Office 2003 works fine on Windows 7.
I still find myself trying to escape Windows. I go to other desktops looking for novel commands, different attributes and nicer shortcuts; but I always end up going back to that boring, familiar place. Usually because there is something I need to do and there is a software that will do it for me on Windows. And It will run after a mere double click.

[CerberusFlame99]

Honestly you should write a book lmao. the vocabulary you used in this captured my attention. But I definitely see what you mean. And for all the crap people give windows, I have to say. It just works. Its easy enough for anyone to use and as long as youre not doing anything crazy, its stable.

[KarathKasun]

Microsoft has DECADES of experience in this particular capability, and its the main reason it still owns the desktop OS market.

 

Linux, as an ecosystem, is FAR too unstable for production use outside of providing services to other devices through some kind of abstraction layer, and OS X is far too intoxicated on its own farts to consider running old code.

 

I use all three and have no allegiance to a particular OS.  The one constant is that I will always have a Windows box in running condition while Linux/OSX boxes come and go.

[jde3]

On 6/24/2018 at 9:53 PM, KarathKasun said:

Microsoft has DECADES of experience in this particular capability, and its the main reason it still owns the desktop OS market.

I like when people think Microsoft is somehow really good because they have been around a long time and are popular. If you'd ever been to Redmond you'd know how arrogant they are. I remember one conversation I had with someone in the project when the ribbon came out the conversation went like this.

 

Me: Why?

Them: Because it's easier to use.

Me: How is breaking your own UI guidelines easier? People already familiar with the software will have a harder time with it.

Them: We designed it with newer users in mind.

Me: Bill Gates was the person who championed a common interfaces in the 90's but now you have IE, Office, Outlook etc all with different versions of the ribbon UI.. The idea was to learn one app so you spend less time learning others but.. you've broken that concept here.

 

It was pretty much like talking to a brick wall. I couldn't seem to make them understand that not everyone is a grandma that has never seen a computer before. A poor culture in an industry creates a poor product and Microsoft has some extremely bad habits lead by their arrogant assumptions. You can see it in the products they release. They put out things without any customer demand because someone there had an idea and thought it was good. They buy innovation, (dos, office, hotmail, skype) they don't create it.

 

On 6/24/2018 at 9:03 PM, jeronimov said:

1. Windows nightmare

I’m 40 and I’ve been using a version of Windows my entire adult life. Half of that time I’ve hated it for some reason. DLL hell, the blue screen of death, the freezing, the crashing, Millenium, Vista, the boring UI, the annoying UI, the alien UI (8), the lack of support, the drop of support, the viruses, the updates in general but  the compulsory ones in particular, the inclusion of ads, the broadcasting of my data without my permission... you name it. If you are a windows user you know this list is by no means complete.

 

2. Linux & OSX bliss

So naturally, escaping from Windows, I have used Linux and OSX. Both beautiful and solid. Fell in love with each immediately. Even with the early Corel Linux, Debian

An old schooler. I used Corel as well.. it had a hacked up KDE 1 desktop and an older (at the time) kernel. Not a bad distro just not well maintained.

 

Linux has PROBLEMS that is true. I had some FreeBSD and OpenBSD on systems but after the systemd fiasco I moved all my servers to FreeBSD and never looked back.. it was the last straw. I've found in probably the last 10 years that I've used it to be a breath of fresh air, clean system layout, concise and effective tools and generally just overall easy to use. (for experts) It'd make a hell of a workstation with a little bit of polish here and there.

 

The RedHat camp some time along the road stopped trying to emulate Unix and started to emulate Windows. They have a real mess of an OS now. Does that mean Windows is better? I don't think so.. I might get another Mac, I haven't owned one for about 10 years but.. man I just hate the apple app ecosystem.. As far as Linux today, if I use it I pretty much build my own thing on Gentoo and cut out all the parts I don't like (there are many my portage config is several hundred lines now)

 

I tried Ubuntu recently for the first time in a decade. and... I like it.. but when I started to try to fix a wifi problem and I ran into a sea of hellish scripts and hacked up crap under the hood that really turned me off to it. (why isn't wpa_supplicant info in a txt file good enough? idk) I've used Linux almost every day since 1996 and I couldn't fix some of the shit in there.. it's poor design. This stuff would never fly on FreeBSD where : gasp : ifconfig does wifi itself.. OMG what a crazy concept! ifconfig controlling interfaces.. madness. The Linux way would be to make 3 or 4 different programs do parts of it then replace ifconfig with ip instead of fixing it (they even named it the wrong thing as some network interfaces don't use ip protocol) - Most of the bad Linux decisions comes out of Redhat and FreeDesktop.org or it's just people throwing shit against the wall.. there is very little elegant design in Linux.

[jeronimov]

jde3, You sound like a fellow who can "compile a kernel". Not me. I write, once again, from my Fedora 28. I can not, or should not, boot from my Windows 7 -the same Windows 7 which was the object of my praise- because as karma will have it... a few hours after writing such an exuberant flattery a new and undefeated Ransomware virus took EVERYTHING from me. I still have Fedora, Tiger (10.4.11 on a power PC Mac) and Windows 10 on a Laptop. But that windows 7 partition was my MAIN partition. The virus left nothing and I died a little inside. I had to lay in bed and curse the sequence of clicks that led to the encryption of hundreds of Gigabytes of information.

Unfortunately for the hackers I am old and backup frequently. 

[jde3]

6 hours ago, jeronimov said:

jde3, You sound like a fellow who can "compile a kernel". Not me. I write, once again, from my Fedora 28. I can not, or should not, boot from my Windows 7 -the same Windows 7 which was the object of my praise- because as karma will have it... a few hours after writing such an exuberant flattery a new and undefeated Ransomware virus took EVERYTHING from me. I still have Fedora, Tiger (10.4.11 on a power PC Mac) and Windows 10 on a Laptop. But that windows 7 partition was my MAIN partition. The virus left nothing and I died a little inside. I had to lay in bed and curse the sequence of clicks that led to the encryption of hundreds of Gigabytes of information.

Unfortunately for the hackers I am old and backup frequently. 

Harsh man. Unfortunately there is no panacea for the ills of computing. There probably never will be so we have to make choices between bad and.. less bad.

[Giganthrax]

Windows works, simple as. It runs most software, especially games, it's easy to use, the newest one is free if you don't mind a watermark, it hits the sweet spot between being harder to break while also giving the user a lot of freedom, etc.

 

OSX on the other hand is locked into godawful invasive Apple apps ecosystem and is basically designed to make you buy new Macs every couple of years, which to a third world guy like me is a laughably unrealistic proposition.

 

Linux looks cool in theory (I love free software) but it's just way too fricking hard to use, troubleshoot, or just make it work even for an advanced user like me. Unless someone is a programmer or some such power user, I don't understand why they'd ever bother with linux when windows 10 is free.

[jeronimov]

1 hour ago, Giganthrax said:

I don't understand why they'd ever bother with linux when windows 10 is free.

In my case, other than just running from a boring desktop, whenever I know I'm going to "sketchy" parts of the web (e.g. I was planning to download some pdf books for a research and those searches can take you to funny places) I use Linux to avoid infecting my main partition even when I go deep for a pdf file that looks fake. 

[jde3]

7 hours ago, Giganthrax said:

I don't understand why they'd ever bother with linux when windows 10 is free.

That's funny.. I find Windows really hard to use. I don't mean mousing around the desktop. I mean really controlling the hardware your system is using. Controlling what programs run and what ones don't. The registry is sooo stupid, every time I touch it I feel dirty. Also have you ever tried to address a raw device in windows? dear god.

[chiller15]

7 hours ago, Giganthrax said:

I don't understand why they'd ever bother with linux when windows 10 is free.

I don't understand why people still think Windows 10 is free. It isn't and has never been free. There was a free upgrade programme from Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, but that's still not free. You had to have a licensed copy of Windows to upgrade it. If you buy a new PC, part of the cost will be for the version of Windows. If you build a PC, you have buy a copy of Windows 10.

[jde3]

Ya that too.. and how do you even do disk encryption properly in windows?

 

Bitlocker is insecure, its design sucks and it's vulnerable to a lot of attacks and do they give your fucking private key to Microsoft? At best it's questionable. So what are the options use VeraCrypt? That is questionable too but better. Closed source encryption just doesn't work.

 

Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/can_the_nsa_bre_1.html

 

It's not an easy OS to use. It's extremely complicated and often poorly documented. You can't even change the default keyboard shortcuts without serious hacks.

[KarathKasun]

9 hours ago, jde3 said:

Ya that too.. and how do you even do disk encryption properly in windows?

 

Bitlocker is insecure, its design sucks and it's vulnerable to a lot of attacks and do they give your fucking private key to Microsoft? At best it's questionable. So what are the options use VeraCrypt? That is questionable too but better. Closed source encryption just doesn't work.

 

Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/can_the_nsa_bre_1.html

 

It's not an easy OS to use. It's extremely complicated and often poorly documented. You can't even change the default keyboard shortcuts without serious hacks.

Truecrypt.

 

Also, "poorly documented and extremely complicated"...  sounds like you are talking about Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch. That argument holds no water now that there is a whole encyclopedia of information on Windows that is a Google away, just like Linux.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

On 6/28/2018 at 12:53 AM, jde3 said:

They buy innovation, (dos, office, hotmail, skype) they don't create it.

More like they buy innovation, then destroy it.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

17 hours ago, Giganthrax said:

windows 10 is free.

You mean was "free".

[KarathKasun]

45 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

You mean was "free".

Technically, W10 works w/o a license and its available for DL on the MS website.  The basic functionality is, in effect, free.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

40 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Technically, W10 works w/o a license and its available for DL on the MS website.  The basic functionality is, in effect, free.

Totally wrong. It was never free. You had to have a previous license--Win 7 or Win 8.1--to get a free upgrade and that was only for the for the first year. Now, you may be able to download it for free and use it for a short while, but then you will have to pony up for the license to keep using it.

[KarathKasun]

4 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Totally wrong. It was never free. You had to have a previous license--Win 7 or Win 8.1--to get a free upgrade and that was only for the for the first year. Now, you may be able to download it for free and use it for a short while, but then you will have to pony up for the license to keep using it.

No, it works indefinitely.  I have a machine running W10 with the activation banner that has been that way for a bit over a year.  The only downsides are the watermark and all customization functionality is disabled.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

No, it works indefinitely.  I have a machine running W10 with the activation banner that has been that way for a bit over a year.  The only downsides are the watermark and all customization functionality is disabled.

Must be a fluke.

[KarathKasun]

3 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Must be a fluke.

Nope, I know multiple people (at least 5 who are local and I have seen/worked on their machines) using W10 in this fashion long term.  You should test things before discrediting them.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Nope, I know multiple people (at least 5 who are local and I have seen/worked on their machines) using W10 in this fashion.  You should test things before discrediting them.

There is no way I'm ever going to expose one of my machines to that abomination.

 

You may be getting away with it but it's probably illegal.

[KarathKasun]

1 minute ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

There is no way I'm ever going to expose one of my machines to that abomination.

 

You may be getting away with it but it's probably illegal.

Looking through the EULA does not suggest that it is.  MS is making money off of anyone using W10 without tons of DNS entries blocked on their network, so why make using it w/o a license illegal?

[jde3]

3 hours ago, KarathKasun said:

Truecrypt.

 

Also, "poorly documented and extremely complicated"...  sounds like you are talking about Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch. That argument holds no water now that there is a whole encyclopedia of information on Windows that is a Google away, just like Linux.

You don't know what your talking about. The creator of TrueCrypt was anonymous, he used an alias online. It's believed he was an employee at the NSA. In 2014 he came out and said that TrueCrypt was unsafe for use and he published a patch for the software that could only decrypt volumes not create new ones.. Since then the fork VeraCrypt was started as a replacement. Don't touch TrueCrypt. (and frankly VeraCrypt itself is somewhat sketchy because it's the same product in the end.)

 

You ready to put that windows thing to the test?

 

So I like having my taskbar at the top of my screen.. but sometimes the top of the window frame will land under the taskbar. (I've never seen this behaviour on any desktop on Linux.) How do I fix that so it never happens? I don't want a keybord shortcut, or autohide the taskbar or move it, I want it to not occur at all.

 

Or..

 

I want to have consistent fonts on my desktop but when I right click on the start menu, taskbar, desktop, icons like edge and mail all the fonts and UI are different how do I fix this?

 

^ This would never fly on Linux. You guys don't even see it though because you are so use to it being bad.

[Giganthrax]

Guys, windows 10 is free.

 

I just did a fresh Win10 install today, and it's free. You don't need a licence. However, if you don't buy a licence, a lot of the customization options (changing colors, background, etc.) are greyed out and unavailable. There's also a watermark and it occasionally nags you to activate it.

 

However, the OS itself works perfectly fine despite this. 

 

EDIT: Also, win10 pro is like 6$ on ebay from sellers with a billion sold units and 99% positive reviews. It's pretty much as  cheap as it can get. 

[Giganthrax]

18 hours ago, jeronimov said:

In my case, other than just running from a boring desktop, whenever I know I'm going to "sketchy" parts of the web (e.g. I was planning to download some pdf books for a research and those searches can take you to funny places) I use Linux to avoid infecting my main partition even when I go deep for a pdf file that looks fake. 

You should follow the way of the Linus and browse sketchy websites via virtual machine.  

[KarathKasun]

59 minutes ago, jde3 said:

You don't know what your talking about. The creator of TrueCrypt was anonymous, he used an alias online. It's believed he was an employee at the NSA. In 2014 he came out and said that TrueCrypt was unsafe for use and he published a patch for the software that could only decrypt volumes not create new ones.. Since then the fork VeraCrypt was started as a replacement. Don't touch TrueCrypt. (and frankly VeraCrypt itself is somewhat sketchy because it's the same product in the end.)

 

You ready to put that windows thing to the test?

 

So I like having my taskbar at the top of my screen.. but sometimes the top of the window frame will land under the taskbar. (I've never seen this behaviour on any desktop on Linux.) How do I fix that so it never happens? I don't want a keybord shortcut, or autohide the taskbar or move it, I want it to not occur at all.

 

Or..

 

I want to have consistent fonts on my desktop but when I right click on the start menu, taskbar, desktop, icons like edge and mail all the fonts and UI are different how do I fix this?

 

 

^ This would never fly on Linux. You guys don't even see it though because you are so use to it being bad.

Except this happens on Linux too.  It happens for the same reason there as in Windows, different apps using different GUI toolkits.  Windows is now running two GUI toolkits within the OS itself for, you guessed it, backwards compatibility.  Ill take a mishmash of styles rather than having programs where the WM fails to display any of the context menus because they were scripted for a different WM/GUI.  Also, if you did not know, there are full shell replacements for Windows.

 

For the taskbar, this isn't a mac, the taskbar goes on the bottom.  My most hated "feature" of Ubuntu/Gnome is the taskbar/activities system, it is 100% crap and gets in its own way more often than not.  Why do I want a bunch of related stuff all over the screen when It should all be in one place?  I find myself using LXDE+X-Term more often because it uses less resources and is faster/easier to use.

 

As for TC and VC vs Linux encryption, what does it matter when you can use tons of other methods to completely mitigate the disk encryption?  You don't need to crack the library/volume of a running system to get the data with modern exploits, you just fool the system into putting a decryption request through with its own credentials while you sniff the resulting read.  In use file ciphering is worthless at this point and cold storage encryption isn't going to save anyone's data when the production system is online.