Yep. I’m in the middle of switching from macOS back to windows because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS. I’ve had to build out a locked down windows 10 LTSC build to get anywhere near a sensible outcome for me.
I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.
> I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.
Personally, or at work? Personally, the first steps are actually pretty easy: install an operating system that doesn't do this stuff. And then deal with the fallout as best you can without going back — e.g. finding replacements for software that only ran on $OTHER_OS. Source: did it decades ago. No regrets.
At work? Good luck. We have no credible professional bodies that enough workers are involved in for them to have much relevance, and employers that actually have any kind of values relevant to this discussion are vanishingly rare.
I think the most productive thing would be to start conversations about ethical choices in the computing professions. Start local (friends, colleagues, local meet-ups). Find existing groups with similar values, and share experiences. Then _federate_. Set up regular inter-group meet-ups. Over time, formalise a union out of the federation.
Edit: oh, and don't be an extremist. Keep your policies lean and well within the Overton window. Pick your battles carefully. Compromise isn't weakness — it's just realistic. As long as you're moving things in the right direction, it's still good.
> I’d more expect the revolt to be along the lines of calling Microsoft out for being a dick. More an intervention than a revolt.
To Microsoft, that isn't considered to be a revolt or an intervention. When receiving consumer input of such a nature, the preferred terminology is "Positive user experience report."
> because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS.
IT departments in huge corporations have purchasing requirements specs. Require any software that you pay money for to run on at least one non-Microsoft operating system. As a second source requirement.
If more than a trivial number of large corporations do this, developers make sure their software runs on other systems, which is what allows users to switch. Large IT departments are in a position to actually move the needle here.
This also has the side benefit of being a heuristic that excludes primarily low-quality software, because most higher-quality software is already portable.
I work for a pretty large financial corporation. They sent out the IT roadmap for the next year and in it was casually mentioned that they expect Macs to be the dominant platform in the next five years. Our current mac usage is <15% and as a result support is an afterthought with a very frustrating experience. For them to say that and push for this change in an industry that very strongly favours Windows is the clearest indication I’ve seen that Windows is starting to lose.
Windows doesn't matter to Microsoft now. The big sellers are Azure and Office 365 and they work on Macs.
As for market share in the US, I very much doubt it's that high really. There are huge unimaginable swathes of windows boxes which won't show up in GlobalStats at all. I know a company with 50,000 desktops that can only visit a web site on an internal network for example. Those sorts of installations are everywhere.
I already see this situation with Google, where non-technical folks will push back on choosing Google products even if they are the only credible player because of the perception that Google cancels everything and they don't want to be caught out.
Microsoft is playing with fire if they think that screwing with their customers computers will have no repercussions with other products.
They've build up enough political capital to expend it, upset their customers, and normalize all these dark patterns. They're taking the risk that 5 years later everyone will consider these things common and not be bothered by them. Apple did the same thing by making an attractive ecosystem. Windows is using its dominance as a platform to make the same exchange.
And this includes company computers. Imagine if commercial "seats" were factored out, in order to show how actual people are voting with their wallets.
Fintech here. Also large. We have no Macs. We will probably never have any. We have a lot of software which will most likely never work on them. None of our clients have them as well.
Also another company we are related to tried a roll out and found they couldn't get Apple to deliver anything other than crap off the shelf configs in any quantity. Dell could. So the trial was ended.
No one does this or cares. They care about delivery and keeping ROI high and costs down, not demanding platforms.
I wouldn't draw any assumption that higher quality software is portable. I've seen monocultural genius (Keysight Genesys) and cross platform garbage (libreoffice) for example.
> I’ve had to build out a locked down windows 10 LTSC build to get anywhere near a sensible outcome for me.
Smart move. Truly sucks that we have to do this nowadays, but this is what Microsoft has become. Back in the day I would format a machine I purchased from a vendor due to all the added garbage; Microsoft is becoming just as bad.
I had ham radio passed down to me. This turned out, ironically considering it’s a communications hobby, to be isolating and a rather nasty bubble. Sort of like an aether 4chan full of bigots, racists and status chasing money spenders. Explained my father entirely.
There are some niches in it which are still manageable (QRP, SOTA) but I don’t want to become associated with the rest of them.
YMMV but I would encourage people to find their own interests and try and look for more progressive ones without a perpetually ageing demographic.
I found photography, hiking, travelling to be a better social outcome.
Every hobby has this though. I felt fortunate to have discovered SWL, GMRS, Amateur Radio, etc. long after learning the same lesson with everything from Trail maintenance work to Disc Golf to Drones to Pickleball.
If association and its ah...trappings are important to you, it's far easier to manage down your inner critic by exploring a nuanced approach to association in context than it is to find a hobby that's more/less immune to such problems.
(This is doubly true if you are interested in the broader topic of interests and hobbies)
The ratio of cranks and weirdos to normal people is 9:1 with ham radio. It’s usually the other way round with other hobbies.
The thing that gets me with ham radio is some see it as a social responsibility even here in the UK where its totally unnecessary from an emergency comms perspective.
> The ratio of cranks and weirdos to normal people is 9:1 with ham radio.
Not sure what "weirdos" is meant to mean in context but with regard to disagreeable people, this has not been my experience at all unless I go looking for it. YouTube comments, specific freqs in 80m band come to mind, but again, not where I typically go to look for anything interesting.
Local friends and meetups, classes, and even the academic side of the hobby are pretty amazing. Emergency drills at the local hospital are fun and I've connected with really nice people in and out of the hobby that way.
> totally unnecessary from an emergency comms perspective.
Completely different over here I guess. I've assisted people in wildfire emergencies and cell outages due to fiber optic cuts.
I've also had some close calls while hiking in e.g. sudden lightning storms in remote areas and had people on the radio asking how I was doing, if I needed assist, etc.
Seems what you shared is more about your local and family experience though? If so, don't let my take on the situation yum your yucks...
The academic side is less bananas I will give you that. And your comment about 80m is spot on. The problem we have here in the UK, is that it's pretty easy to get a 2m HT and a license to use it. Huge swathes of amateurs never progress past that or take a technical interest at all. I've lived in 3 separate areas where the local 2m nets are full of people with very defective personalities. The sort you'd find in a flat-roofed pub. And they're the guys who actually go to the clubs and the hamfests here.
It's pretty not exciting here as far as emergencies go. So our emcom network (Raynet) are limited to dressing up like police offers as far as they can legally do it and managing the car park at public events. The real emergency services here are very well equipped to handle this themselves with cross service commercial radios. And there's very few places you can't get a 4G signal now, even in the middle of bloody nowhere.
I did enjoy working CW QRP and chasing miles-per-watt to some degree. It was also difficult to be an asshole on CW so people didn't bother. SSB / FM is just urgh.
> YMMV but I would encourage people to find their own interests and try and look for more progressive ones without a perpetually ageing demographic.
I'm of the opposite mindset: responding to unpalatable elements of a given subculture by abandoning it entirely only reinforces those unpalatable elements. Better to persist - and in doing so, encourage others of your mindset to persist alongside you.
I don't blame people for choosing to abandon subcultures entirely rather than persist within them - persistence is exhausting, after all, and it's unreasonable to demand that people exhaust themselves for minimal reward - but I do think persistence produces the best outcome for everyone long-term.
Having met a lot of people I think the license gives some kind officialdom and status which they are otherwise lacking and desire. This is an attribute demanded by a large number of people with defective personalities.
Granted a chunk of people go in for the technical interest (I did ultimately) but the other folk rub off on a lot of them and it normalises into the amorphous bubble of defective personalities.
Completely agree with this. Having ported a lot of old non async c# to async, even mixing the notions for a moment is a disaster. This was a world of pain in the late .net classic lifecycle (4.5-4.8) where Microsoft kept fucking it up as well as us.
If you have legacy or UI code you are best served using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Threading to ease the pain. Not using it will land you in a world of random deadlocks and disappearing data from variables.
vs-threading should be part of the .NET standard library but somehow isn't.
I had a fairly extensive personal web site for a number of years used as a professional profile. Unfortunately someone I met on a dating app turned out to be a bit of a psychopath and I had to pretty much cut her off. She managed to find the web site on the public Internet and get in contact with me directly and caused me a lot of problems leading to me having to dispose of the web site, the domain, my phone number and update lots of professional contacts.
I prefer a lot of anonymity now. I don't have any social media profiles or public facing stuff. And you know what? It has done no harm whatsoever to my professional life or connections. All that stuff that sucks you in is 100% optional.
I’m convinced the only thing Wi-Fi doesn’t fuck out on at the moment is windows. Had problems with Linux, macs and android for the last few years. Just works on windows!
Fair but I wanted to be a fighter pilot because the money was better than driving a bus. So I learned c#. The company I worked for, a software dev house, said that they were VB only be they wouldn’t bring in c#. They died within 6 months of me and everyone else leaving.
C# and .Net was a gold rush. VB was only valuable where the primary business function was not software delivery.
That’s pretty funny. I just bought a pixel 6a with the intent of replacing my iPhone. About an hour of “how the hell do people put up with this shit” and it’s going. Then I wake up to this.
Your brain definitely gets trained on one system and moving off hurts. Hell, I've had my work Macbook for 5 years and I still curse the keyboard shortcuts that are all wrong (and the even more shortcuts that it's missing).
