I've deactivated all reporting and services that call back home (at least which I was aware of). In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
So far I can assure you: Compared to my Android phone Windows 10 is absolutely mute. There're no noticeable differences compared to Windows 7.
You seem to be more driven by your hatred towards Microsoft than by real privacy concerns.
>>I've deactivated all reporting and services that call back home (at least which I was aware of). In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
I'm going to recommend to you, or anyone, wanting to verify Windows 10 network behavior to do it without depending on software running on the OS itself. Try verifying it again using network analyzing software on linux or macosx, running downstream of your network setup. e.g., a router that's running linux you can ssh into and run "ngrep"(kinda like a commandline version of wiresahrk) and verify from there.
I'm going to recommend deadlisting/disassembly instead. Network analysis doesn't give as much context for exactly what is sent, and there seems to be - as far as I can see, yet? - a total lack of hard data and verifiable evidence about what all this "telemetry" actually is, what can be turned off, what can't, and what actually gets sent to whom, when, from what, and why.
The "evidence" I have seen so far that Windows 10 communicates with its maker is, let's be honest, pretty scaremongery and includes things like LLMNR traffic - which is link-local! - and neglects to consider that Windows Update now checks much more frequently (because of the accelerated release cadence of a rolling release) and essentially torrents its updates now, P2P-style.
If there's a real privacy issue - and there may well be, especially on default settings - we need reliable, detailed, hard information to see what binaries send what to where to begin to address it, and to see what can be turned off, what should be, etc. Does anyone know if anyone's begun that analysis yet?
(Of course it really should be Microsoft openly discussing this, but in the absence of that, the mantle inevitably falls to independent researchers.)
I would be astonished to see "below the stack" communications for anything official from Microsoft, because that takes the public conversation from "look at all these features that affect privacy" to "look at how Microsoft is TRYING TO HIDE privacy invading features."
Since MS knows that Windows communications are going to be under a microscope anyway the odds of them expecting to successfully hide the very existence of communications seem low to me, and once they're known to exist they WILL be inspected and publicized.
I'd expect the below-stack communications to be from espionage folks instead, quite frankly.
That is just plain naiveté. Big corporations don't have the accountability as individuals or smaller companies. They can just scrapgoat someone. Just watch some docus like the enron one http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/. Those dystopian futures many writers romance about are going to come true soon.
Could you recommend a resource that would provide some good information on this? I keep hearing about ways to modify routers to operate this way, but have yet to come across something that clearly describes how this is done.
It's probably overly complicated, but because I happened to have an extra router laying about it was the easiest way for me to do it. The setup ultimately looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/klNvoTS.png
The spare router is really only needed for the smartphone. Anything with an ethernet port can be connected directly to the linux laptop.
As someone tech-savvy and having used WireShark, even, I'm curious to know from my sibling commenters, what are you thinking? Of course you start by buying hardware or modifying a router. Parent comment is specifically asking for "good information" and something that "clearly defines how this is done." IMO, xfalcox and lewiseason come closest to actually answering the question, because their links mention specific software.
But simply installing software isn't enough, it needs to be configured. How does one set up OpenWRT or WireShark to filter for this kind of information? What pitfalls might one encounter? Do you need a CS degree in order to interpret the data? What keywords should one use when searching for more information?
With vague answers like the ones so far, you're just making it seem more difficult and intimidating for anyone that has little to no experience in this area. If we want people to be more concerned about their privacy, it needs to be as easy (or easier) for people to take control of their information as it is for them to give it away.
Edit: smtddr has the right idea, thumbs up. Should have hit refresh one more time before posting.
As bitwise said, best is to use a small linux computer on the same lan. You could use any computer really, just make it different than the host you are trying to capture on!
Even easier (buying hubs is hard) and possibly cheaper (switches with mirror ports aren't the cheapest) is to just stick two network cards into your linux box, set up a layer-2 bridge and sniff everything going between.
If you happen to have a computer with both WiFi and ethernet (many/most laptops these days), set it up as a bridge, connect the Windows machine to one of those interfaces and use the other one to connect to the internet.
Deactivating the services that call home doesn't stop Windows 10 from calling home. You can only completely disable "telemetry" if you have Windows 10 Enterprise Edition and even then I'm not entirely sure it does completely shut down.
And anyway, even getting to this meant manually ticking out dozens of boxes in several settings windows and installing a packet sniffer to check your own computer for unwanted connections. Nevermind that running a packet sniffer on your outgoing connections usually means you suspect you have a virus (which is what Win10 is?), it requires technical expertise that 95% of Win10 users won't have.
No I don't think GP was driven by hatred of Microsoft, as much as a genuine dislike of an operating system which hands over control of your own computer to someone else. I always thought Stallman was being hyperbolic when he said "with free software the users control the computer, with proprietary the computer controls the users", but I don't anymore.
The good thing is that those 95% are often willing to pay for services like virus removal and the like, so maybe Microsoft has created a new industry for surveillance removal!
> Compared to my Android phone Windows 10 is absolutely mute.
I think this says more about Android than it does about Windows 10. Windows 10 has crazy defaults, but so does android and many android apps want access to my info for no good reason (e.g. news apps wanting access to list my accounts, my phone number, my contacts, precise location etc.). Comparing privacy defaults of Windows to Android is not comparing it to a particularly high bar.
This is a main reason that I have avoided Android so far. The iOS permissions model is a far better model. At least with the next release of Android (Marshmallow) they are fixing some of this and hopefully you will be able to use apps without giving them access to so much info.
If your phone is rooted, you can try installing XPrivacy to manage permissions for Apps. I used it for a while when I had to have Skype on my phone. It worked great to lock Skype out of GPS, Contacts, etc.
There was a noticable performance hit, but my phone is 3+ years old. It likely would not be as much on a newer phone.
As far as I can tell, I still only have the option of accepting or denying apps' permission on CyanogenMod. Also, I can hide my contacts and location from apps, if I'm really persistent about clicking the deny box a million times. But I still can't approve only the app permissions I want and not approve the ones I don't (which coincidentally are not essential to app functioning).
> But I still can't approve only the app permissions I want and not approve the ones I don't (which coincidentally are not essential to app functioning).
Hmm? I can do exactly this in the Privacy Guard settings.
You can choose which permissions you want an app to have and which you don't. You can also set to Ask every time as well as just blanket blocking/.allowing permanently.
Oh wow. You're right. The option does exist. It's just hidden behind a stupid, non-sensical UI. Apparently if I long tap the app name, I get a lot of options. This is great. I don't understand why they hide it behind such a stupid, non-obvious UI. Do I need to long tap every single other UI element to get some functionality that should be obvious? Until they make a proper UI for it, it might as well not exist.
I'm unsure why I cannot replt to ionised to ask which version he/she's running. I remmberPrivacy Guard briefly had those features, or was it when 'Roid inadvertently included the privacy feature they pulled d right after the EFF praised them for it? Either way, I'm sure my new flip phone will spy on me, I'll minimize what I give them... a removable battery doesn't interfere with elegan design on a clam, apparently.
In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
How do you know glasswire sees all network activity? What about data that piggybacks on legitimate network activity (e.g. the requests to update.microsoft.com)?
I have a license for like every single Microsoft's product (Windows 8.1, Office 365, Dreamspark account, 1 TB of data on OneDrive, some Skype premium minutes) and yet, I completely agree with him. I love Microsoft's products and I'm using them when I need to use them, but Windows stopped being my primary operating system ever since that whole Snowden scandal.
People just automatically assume that I hate Microsoft because I'm using Linux as the only operating system on my primary laptop. That's not even remotely the case.
> but Windows stopped being my primary operating system ever since that whole Snowden scandal.
Snowden released nothing specifically about Windows. No backdoors, no specific cooperation, only the NSA's bespoke malware (but they also have malware for everything under the sun, Linux, uEFI, RAID firmware, cell modems, etc).
Sure, the NSA were spying on Microsoft by hooking the fiber lines between Microsoft's data centers in order to gain backdoor access to Hotmail (now Outlook.com). But they did the same thing to Google and several other organisations.
> Snowden released nothing specifically about Windows. No backdoors, no specific cooperation.
This is the exact opposite of what was claimed in many of the documents that were leaked. One example;
July 31, 2012
Microsoft (MS) began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. This new Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption effectively cut off collection of the new service for FAA 702 and likely 12333 (to some degree) for the Intelligence Community (IC). MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL. These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.
Did you not see the evidence in the bottom left corner?
( Microsoft 9/11/07 )
> Microsoft weren't an adopter at all
They were compared to the other businesses listed on that lide.
> PRISM is the theft of unencrypted data on dedicated lines between data centers.
This is as common misunderstanding. There are quite a few NSA programs that tap lines, which serve as inputs to XKEYSCORE. Some of these taps are line taps or Tailored Access based attacks, but those are not PRISM.
PRISM is the "polite" way the NSA gets their data, using FISA warrants and the cooperation of the business. They ask for a tap, and the business accommodates them. IF a business decides to not be part of prism, that's when the NSA simply takes the data via other means. The entire point of PRISM as a program is that it involves asking private business to participate.
> PRISM has absolutely nothing to do with Windows at all.
When windows 10 decides to make all those network connections, where are they going? They're writing to some sort of database at Microsoft. Now that windows has made the network part of the OS, the situation at the remote data center becomes relevant.
The key here is the tap. People are under some delusion the NSA/FBI presents a list of actual suspects to said companies (regardless if they have "cleared" employees or not).
Microsoft (MS) began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. This new Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption effectively cut off collection of the new service for FAA 702 and likely 12333 (to some degree) for the Intelligence Community (IC). MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL. These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.
OP's point is that the whole Snowden thing was about datacenters, which happened to all biggest players so not using Windows is not going to mitigate that fact.
Even if that were true (as another commenter pointed out, Snowden's leaks are about far more than just datacenter snooping), that still puts Windows users at a lot of risk; when basically your whole computer is being continuously synchronized with Microsoft's servers, your whole computer is now vulnerable to such datacenter attacks.
That whole PRISM thingy was the reason why I tried Linux. I didn't continue using it because I was scared for my privacy. I continued using it because it was awesome and satisfied every single one of my needs.
I must say that privacy is a matter of trust. We rely on code that we haven't inspected. Even open source software doesn't get that much scrutiny as the various major recent vulnerabilities have shown.
So getting worried because Microsoft is turning against their users by exploiting their data is a legitimate concern. I have disabled all these settings too but I must say that Microsoft damaged the trust I had in them. I always used windows and I am a big fan of the .net framework and of visual studio. But I am now considering learning Linux. I have zero interest in an OS that leaks my personal data.
And you seem to be driven by pure passion toward your beloved corporation that you felt the need to create an account here, 1 hour ago, just to inform us how mute Win 10 is compared to an android phone.
>>I've deactivated all reporting and services that call back home (at least which I was aware of). In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
That's great. And what have you done about Microsoft not telling you what is inside each Windows Update?
Here's what I've been using, in addition to all the manual stuff and things like Destroy Windows 10 Spying[1]:
https://gist.github.com/LordJZ/70d463335b2b7ab06e4f
(still contains some stuff from DW10S because I started collecting snippets before it was released)
Microsoft is not driven by stupid people. I would expect that system update packets to home base would possess information that would be useful to MS researchers, among other things. Even if it's not there, MS should be experts in steganography. They don't have to leave you clues what they use.
The questionable part is that they're there in the first place and enabled by default. I'd be fine with that if the telemetry and what not was opt-in as opposed to a lot of toggle switches spread across multiple settings.
Not really, there's a bunch of other options that are not in the privacy section and need to be explicitly toggled off in the scheduled tasks manager (I forgot what was the name of it).
Hatred for Microsoft? I have none. I do hate the fact that we have an absolutely free operating system that works just fine but thanks to Bill Gates 90s shenanigans and aggressive and illegal market and business tactics we're stuck with a proprietary system that is totally unnecessary and as it continues that system becomes more and more invasive. And that system is a black box that you can't trust.
Google started engineering features that were supposedly opt-in but they were so convenient that most people opted in anyway. Google forced people to divulge their data, for instance location, for navigation. It did not actually need the level of data it collects to provide navigation, it was just a way to steal their location privacy to increase its marketing reach and to improve the service not necessarily for the user but for its own business needs. How long before Microsoft starts employing the same tactics. You know you have a choice but it's a totally false choice!
When you post "M$" in a reply I automatically mark you as rabidly anti-Microsoft and usually stop reading. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but childish acts such as those have no place in a rational discussion.
It's definitely an overplayed cheap-shot at Microsoft, but that's not to say it's anything but deserved. It's certainly not disingenuous to paint Microsoft as profit-centric above all. Historically speaking they've gone above and beyond to hurt pro-developer and pro-libre efforts in this industry in the name of their margins.
Is it so awful to use an acronym that reminds the reader of these practices? I think it's prudent to not use it, only because it detracts from his point when readers like yourself become distracted by it. But it's not as "rabidly anti-Microsoft" as you are painting it to be, either.
Okay stop reading. Your response smells of fanboyism, blind faith, and ad-hominem attacks which are rather childish in themselves. I got my point across and it seems the vast readership is behind me.
The vast readership... on a site where open source is the primary religion and the readership includes a significant population of Slashdot escapees. Look up "confirmation bias" and "preaching to the choir".
> we're stuck with a proprietary system that is totally unnecessary
I think you are being a bit biased on this one. There are a lot of applications that the "free" alternative is just not good enough in comparison with the propetary one.
Just to name a few:
Gimp and Photoshop
Inkscape and Illustrator
Maya/3DStudio and Blender
I would even add Office and LibreOffice but the later is actually good enough for a good chunk of people.
"good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, all of which are absolutely powerful and capable of (and actually used for) the highest level professional results.
That there are features and quality from the well-funded proprietary tools that are lacking in the free/open ones is undeniable. But the examples you chose are ones where if we had to use the free/open ones, we would be just fine. These are cases where free/open options are actually pretty darn nice.
> "good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender
I said that keeping in mind professional use. There are some people who can effectly replace Office with LibreOffice at work and the number is significant.
However, when you try to do the same with a designer then Gimp, Inkscape and Blender falls behind, so yeah... A dev could do a minor manipulation on an image using Gimp, but don't ask a designer to produce a print-ready poster using it.
Yeah, but "print-ready posters" ain't the only professional use for raster graphics software anymore. GIMP (in my experience, at least) works quite well for digital work; it's only print work that it's significantly lacking (particularly due to the lack of proper CMYK support).
Surely they would use a vector graphics program for such a task? Although I'm not a designer I certainly do (Inkscape) and would hate to try to produce a poster with a raster graphics program.
Hey on the bright side, just look how far we have already got without too much financial incentives!!
My motivation for using libre software is:
- When you use a proprietary software, you are using "somebody else's software, licensed for your usage".
- When you are using libre software, you are using YOUR software.
Software built for profit have better incentives for financial development support, and that's why it's hard for libre software to catch up on features.
We can support libre software with donations (or better not giving money to the locked competence), and more importantly using the libre software that lacks of the non-vital features, at least at personal level.
In the long run, libre will outlast the locked, it's a matter of financial incentives.
If Microsoft did not advise OEM's to preinstall Windows, the cheapest desktops and laptops would be those with a GNU/Linux distro (no Windows license). Then perhaps Linux would have a wider adoption on the desktop.
And if Linux had any significant market share (I'd say even 10-20%) you would have native Linux versions of most of that software - not entirely unlike what you have on OS X.
But professionals now have a very good, non-ideological reason to choose a Linux OS over Windows. How many professionals are comfortable with an operating system that collects and sends everything they load, type or save to Microsoft and their corporate and government partners?
In some cases (e.g. legal and medical services) the very potential may be illegal in some countries -- and the proof could lose not just someone's business but their license to practice.
Any good examples of closed source applications being financially successful on Linux? How do the opportunities on Linux compare with investing in applications for other platforms?
It's not so much about "caring" as about the ability to pay programmers to create profitable software.
Thanks for the links, but it doesn't look very promising.
YoLinux looks old and has some non-working links, so I'm not sure it's being maintained. (Indeed, one link leads to Windows and Mac OS X software, not Linux.)
Lin-App, the most promising site, hasn't updated "What's up" since 15.04.2011. (Also, its most recent comments are 2 and 11 months ago.)
As it says in the URL, the TechDriven story is also from 2011, and the programs are from Lin-App.
It's hard to see the signs of a vibrant ecosystem....
Linux + proprietary 3D graphics software is very popular in large shops (ILM, Pixar, DreamWorks, etc.). 3D graphics, CAD, etc. in general tends to have much stronger roots in the Unix world (by way of IRIX, with GNU/Linux being the most common migration path) than Windows.
Basically, for the big names in computer-animated movies, the Year of the Linux Desktop has already happened.
Loads. Mainly very expensive high end niche scientific packages (scientists tend to use Linux at a higher percentage than ordinary people so the market percentages are more favourable).
I'm thinking stuff that is available on Linux as well as Windows/OSx.
Examples include Matlab, the Avizo image analysis suite, a certain simulation package that was described as AllSIM in a controversial discussion relating to CERN last week on HN and Maya (not scientific but it does illustrate the sort of high end very expensive niche stuff that tends to have Linux versions).
Inkscape is nice and I use it all the time, but I am not a designer so it works for me just fine (I suspect is the same case in your office).
On the other hand, my sister is a designer, and there are so many missing features on Inkscape that prevent her to use it in her profession life. The comparison seems unfair, but it is the closest thing to an alternative for Illustrator in the software free world.
I find that many programmers find Inkscape or Gimp more than enough for their graphic needs, but it's really hard to come across a designer that would agree. Nobody likes to pay and pirate software; if designers found Gimp really up to the task, they would be rushing to use it and drop the Adobe monthly fee. The fact that this mass migration is not happening and has never happened in the past 10 years should tell us more than our own understanding of graphic tools would let us deduce.
I think that for a professional designer a £15 (or whatever it is now) monthly charge that can probably be expensed or tax offset anyway is small compared to learning a new UI or the potential difficulties that can arise when handing a non-Adobe file to a print shop.
What Adobe have achieved with photoshop is become the de facto standard for many aspects of design and image work. They have done this through a mixture of (1) being the best practical option and (2) some vendor lock in. We may not like it but well done to them.
Well, the limitations for GIMP in Print work is obvious and already mentioned above, but also consider the fact that "Photoshop" looks far better on a designers resume than being an expert in GIMP.
FWIW, I prefer GIMP at work when Photoshop is also already available to us. I still stick to GIMP because of its ease in scripting and automating my work via PyGimp. I'm aware Photoshop can script via AppleScript, VBScript, and JavaScript, but Python just makes more sense to me.
And not on the automation side, I have also created professional quality icons on GIMP used on our web application.
Bait and switch. Release a great service with sane privacy settings and policies, make any privacy-sensitive settings opt-in at first, get people using it and depending on it. Switch it to opt-out but no one notices or cares because they're already on the hook and it's a media darling. Then change the privacy settings and policies to something nefarious while leaving it opt-out. Even if the media brings up the new privacy issues, only the folks who are already privacy-conscious will notice or care, and they probably weren't using the service anyway.
See Spotify for a very recent example of this process.
Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible. UI seems to be one area that benefits--almost demands--a central planning authority. I'm reminded of Supported Features [1]. There is some great open source software out there. But I'm struggling to think of great open source software with a good UI.
Not that I'm saying Windows is good mind you. My personal preference would be OSX, which you can view as Windows with a better underlying OS or Unix with a decent UI. Either way it's a win.
> Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible.
This claim is usually made by Windows users who don't want to invest any effort and time to learn another desktop -- which they had to do in Win8 anyway.
Linux offers several nice desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, E17, etc.) which we can freely choose from. I am a Linux user since the 90's and I have always used it as my primary desktop. It works perfectly well for me. I consider the new Windows metro "desktop" more horrible than even simple Linux desktops.
Freedom has a price. Education has a price. Both require the sincere willingness to do something for it.
I used to make this claim as someone who had been using desktop gnu/linux for several years. I've been using OSX now for a year and so stopped making the claim. But it is really frustrating to hear people say "it works for me" to rebut claims that it doesn't work for most people. Such counters and arguments over them are basically single data points. If the point under discussion is "does desktop linux work well enough to gain massive amounts of market share?", then you need to run actual large scale trials comparing how hard it is for people to...
1) Start up a spreadsheet program and do things
2) Check social media and play some random video
3) Play League of Legends
4) <insert your favorite thing here>
Some of these things are indeed comparably easy in, say Ubuntu (or were pre-unity) for me, but I was an MIT undergrad that hung around SIPB, the computer club. My massive amounts of tech privilege make it impossible to individually evaluate if the user experience someone has with spreadsheets is acceptable unless I put real study into it. The same is probably true of many HN commenters. So until someone spends the time and money to run actual user experience studies, we have no data to say that the linux desktop can take over the world.
Also, there isn't even one "Linux desktop". There is mint, Ubuntu+gnome classic, Ubuntu+unity, ubuntu+some weird xmonad setup.
Another argument I often see for why Desktop Linux has an advantage is that "Linux is free as in beer". But it is not. If someone making $15/hr takes more than 8 hours (not unrealistic, at least for an MIT CS student back in 2010) fiddling with things and trying to get them to work, then desktop Linux is more expensive.
Regarding your points 1) to 4) this is exactly what I mean with investing some effort to discover how these things work in Linux. For 1) there are LibreOffice and gnumeric, for 2) there are mplayer, vlc, and several other tools, for 3) I don't know because Linux is not a gaming system but a workhorse. A modern Ubuntu distro provides thousands of applications for many purposes. If you don't like Unity or Gnome 3 then there are Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. Google is your friend.
Learning Linux is like learning LaTeX. It requires serious effort to become powerfully useful but then you never want to miss it because there is nothing that can actually compete.
OSX and Windows are easier to handle at the first place but if you get into the details then you may have more trouble than in Linux (driver problems, document formats) because there is no obsolescence in Linux. In OSX and Windows you depend on the cooperation of the manufacturers. In Linux drivers, applications, and document formats written decades ago still work.
My point isn't that I personally find Linux too hard, it is that for a large chunk of people, switching to Linux is far too expensive and this makes predictions about the rise of Desktop Linux too optimistic.
> Learning Linux is like learning LaTeX
This is a particularly fantastic analogy when you look at the type of error messages that LaTeX produces.
> This is a particularly fantastic analogy when you look at the type of error messages that LaTeX produces.
Nevertheless LaTeX is still the favorite DTP system among scientists. LaTeX is actually not too hard to learn. It just requires some mental effort to get it. Scientists are willing to do that. Some people obviously don't.
Linux is free as in speech, not free as in beer. You're free to use, copy, modify and distribute it subject to its license. It's not about price and never has been.
One of my gripes with Linux is that software all tends to feel like it was designed to look nice on the developer's particular flavor of window manager. The system as whole comes across as an inconsistent pile of different UIs. OS X has benefited a lot from interfaces all being put together in Xcode with elements snapping to the HIG standardized margins. And when something doesn't match (looking at you, cross platform Java apps), the users notice.
Maybe the average Linux user is OK with this, but I can't help but be bugged by it. Cost of having so many options, I suppose.
Elementary does better than most, but only by including a set of software designed explicitly to fit there.
I would point out that Windows programs written for different versions of the OS will appear different when running on the same machine. For instance, in my Windows 7 VM, LibreOffice has a white X on a red button to close the window, while Word has a black X on a grey background.
Hm, I haven't seen different versions of the close glyph, but I believe it. There are about 10 variations on contextual menus depending on what you're right clicking. I don't love that about Windows either.
As far as the general look and feel though, it still manages to feel more consistent. There are enough conventions like "clickable things have a hover effect" and relatively consistent styling of UI icons (pre-10 anyway) for it to feel like it's all one system.
Well, I don't think that Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual Studio are that similar. Both of them are using style different than the system default. Throw apps from other vendors into the mix, see Photoshop or Lightroom for example and it gets very difficult to argue, that the Windows desktop has unified style. Let's not go into the whole 'with WPF you can style your app any way you want' topic, because that's when the whole differentiation thing exploded.
Not that OSX is any better - Apple's own Pro apps always had different look that the rest of the system. iTunes was always experimenting with looking odd. Also, third party apps look different - Office, Adobe apps, etc.
So, it nothing wrong with Linux, all systems are like this.
It's funny, but my gripes with linux aren't the UI.. I use an Ubuntu Server VM via SSH most of the day... my desktop is windows, my laptop is OSX, and the computer I use the most not working is my Ubuntu HTPC (Unity)... I actually like Windows 7's UI the most.. though 10 is tolerable after disabling all the damned search options.
That said, every single time I've tried to use a Linux OS either as my primary laptop or desktop OS I experience significant problems that no end user should have to deal with... the last time, I added a drive after install... the system updates included an update to grub.. next reboot, wouldn't even load... after 3 days of setting up my environment, applications, vmware, etc, etc... I can't even fucking boot.
The time before that I couldn't get both monitors to work... twice before that I picked recommended hardware for linux support (straight intel graphics) and hit weird regressions when the OS updated on one, and the other just some wierd suspend issues..
I agree "works fine" for the desktop is a huge stretch... it does appear to mostly work okay for my HTPC, except when it resumes from suspend there's no sound (fortunately it's got an ssd and reboots fast), or that if I happen to turn it on too early before the TV is on, the display doesn't come on the screen (guessing it picks the DV port instead of the HDMI)...
either way.. still stuff that's worked in windows/osx forever, without issue.
> hat said, every single time I've tried to use a Linux OS either as my primary laptop or desktop OS I experience significant problems that no end user should have to deal with... the last time, I added a drive after install... the system updates included an update to grub.. next reboot, wouldn't even load... after 3 days of setting up my environment, applications, vmware, etc, etc... I can't even fucking boot.
was this in the 90s, early 2000s? Linux hasn't had those issues in a decade.
Suspend/Resume is horrible on Windows of me as well, my linux systems do so flawlessly, but there is a good 10% chance of blue screen when undocking my corporate windows laptop out of suspend.
The HTPC suspend issue is with current Ubuntu 15.04, Actually, I'm in pre-release channel because of another audio bug that rolled into regular updates for my chipset, I had no audio at all after said update. I had hoped the fixes would also fix the suspend issue with audio disappearing, but it hasn't.
The issue with booting was mid-late 2013, I haven't tried running Linux as the main OS on my desktop since, Windows 10 has me considering it.
I have to disagree about the linux desktop. I wish it was better, but for the first time in 10 years I started using microsoft (8.1) again on one of my computers. It has the same problems linux does: drivers, wifi connections. And when I try to close down to go somewhere, I occasionally get some kind of warning that I can't shut down or unplug because it's doing an update. Very aggravating (I'm getting a little wiser about it, but still I would like to be the one who decides when to update).
The problem, and the reason I wanted to give it a try, is software. Things like gotomeeting and such simple work there and are difficult to get working on linux. It cost me a (remote) developer, so I decided that my travel/home rig would be win 8.1 with linux in a VM. So far it's quite convenient, but I don't use much on the windows side.
I think with more adoption we could fix the software issues.
You're talking about a subjective experience as if it's something that can be objectively measured. I find it the other way around. I've used Macs since the 80's, but lately I hardly touch them, in part because I think the desktop experience is so much worse than GNOME, KDE, Unity, or even XFCE.
GNOME 3 in perticular is the best arranged desktop in my opinion because the way it separates the desktop and application launcher/switcher/search into two distinct modes and makes context switching so easy with just a key press, a click, or a hot corner. Everything is always in the same place and easy to access with little cognitive overhead. Whereas using the Mac application bar is really messy, trying to follow flyout menus that go off at odd angles, etc., and that's far from the only reason I dislike the UI. GNOME follows the way my mind works. I'm either using the applications I want or switching between them, and unifying everything in these categories makes so much sense, I'm surprised everyone doesn't follow the model.
That's entirely my opinion, and I tend to be biased and think the only reason people complain about the desktop experience is because it's not whatever they're used to, but the only thing I know for sure is that there's no one way to arrange a desktop that appeals to everyone.
Steam works great for me. There is no discernible difference to the Windows version. There are 1400+ games available now for Linux, including some (older) AAA games like Bioshock Infinite.
Just make sure to buy a Nvidia graphics card (and use their proprietary driver). The (proprietary) AMD drivers work, but their performance is much worse than on Windows.
* Steam for Linux is pretty rock-solid, at least on the common desktop environments. Some bugginess once you get into bare window manager territory (particularly WindowMaker or anything that's designed specifically for tiling), but otherwise works without issue.
* A very large number of indie games are targeting Linux either alongside or soon after Windows. Kerbal Space Program is the prodigial example here, and seems to be leading the charge for Unity3D.
* Pretty much everything made by Valve now runs on Linux natively, for obvious reasons. A part of me hopes that - when GabeN gets over his fear of the number "three" - Half Life 3 will launch on Linux/SteamOS first.
* Some non-Valve big-budget games and publishers are gradually making their way to Linux - both new and old. Borderlands 2/PS, much of the Tropico series, Cities: Skylines, Serious Sam 3, The Talos Principle, KoToR II (no KoToR I yet, alas, but since it's the same engine, there's probably a good chance of that changing soon), Civilization V/BE, various others.
* SteamOS is, in my experience as of late, excruciatingly difficult to install; Valve, in their wisdom, ships it as some zip archive instead of a more typical DVD/USB image. Perhaps the SteamOS installer is meant to be written to a USB stick with Windows rather than with Linux? Whatever the case, I've yet to get SteamOS to actually install, though I'm planning on revisiting it soon.
* Single-monitor setups are generally fine. Multi-monitor setups become problematic, since the games tend to do wacky things with their resolution and fullscreen-window sizes; I generally work around them by running games in windowed mode.
* Which graphics card vendor to go with depends on whether or not you want to stay strictly on the free software path. AMD's cards are currently vastly superior to Nvidia's when running on FOSS drivers, in no small part due to AMD actually participating in said driver's development. Nvidia's cards are currently superior to AMD's when running on proprietary drivers, though this might change once AMD migrates from fglrx (the current non-free driver) to something based on the FOSS "radeon" driver.
* Wine is quite fantastic nowadays, though game compatibility is still hit-and-miss. I regularly play Fallout: NV on Linux+Wine with very few issues (namely, the occasional crash after a few hours of gameplay); Fallout 3 is playable, but you can't use the Pip-Boy radio due to a bug with Wine and DirectSound (?) (sound will be garbled, and the game will crash with a deadlock after a half-minute or so). Valve's games are naturally very Wine-friendly (though this is no longer necessary, of course). Steam works reasonably well, but requires installing some font packages in order to get text to show up. Older games tend to work better than newer games.
I have no love for the direction in which Linux desktop seems to be heading today, but engineering concerns aside, it's been working fine for a long time.
No, it's not. Besides driver problems, missing support for newer OpenGL standards, fragmentation of desktop environments and a dozen of other problems, it doesn't even have GUI isolation (meaning that any X11 application can sniff your keyboard input):
As long as you stay away from perpetually-beta distributions that I shall not name, driver problems are really a non-issue. I haven't had a malfunctioning peripheral under Linux in a very long time now (years?). Driver problems are on-par with what you see on Windows :-).
> missing support for newer OpenGL standards
This has been a common complaint about OS X for a long time, and no one thought desktop on it didn't work.
> fragmentation of desktop environments
As long as the desktop respects ICCCM (hint: they all tend to do) and you don't write your application using some obscure, non-ICCCM compliant toolkit, this tends to be a non-issue.
> it doesn't even have GUI isolation (meaning that any X11 application can sniff your keyboard input):
This is true. However, the expectation is that you'll usually run open source software from trusted sources (and you can run untrusted applications in an Xnest session). Methods aside, it's just as easy for a malicious user to keylog you on Windows or OS X, the Linux keylogger is just more trivial to write.
I don't think it's even true that keyloggers are any harder to write on say Windows. The only thing they can't trivially get hold of is your password for the machine itself. (Of course, if you write a naive keylogger you're going to get caught by any AV software worth its salt.)
I don't think it's even true that keyloggers are any harder to write on say Windows.
This is false. Windows has a mechanism since Vista (UIPI) that provide some UI isolation (lower privilege processes can e.g. not listen to keystrokes on higher privilege processes):
E.g. web browsers normally run at the 'low' integrity level and cannot eavesdrop on other processes (which are normally at the 'medium' level). It would be nice if someone with knowledge Windows internals could explain UIPI a bit more, I gathered this knowledge a while ago due to being interested in the topic :).
Of course, if users just accept anything at UAC prompts, everything is lost ;).
As long as you stay away from perpetually-beta distributions that I shall not name, driver problems are really a non-issue. I haven't had a malfunctioning peripheral under Linux in a very long time now (years?). Driver problems are on-par with what you see on Windows :-).
I recently installed a workstation for using CUDA, with X11, using nVidia's off-the-shelf packages (the Ubuntu CUDA packages have some compatibility problems).
- On Ubuntu everything worked fine first (LTS, 14.04), after some upgrade, X11 did not come up anymore. Some problem with DKMS. While debugging, it doesn't help that Canonical has made disabling the display manager completely non-sensical. Something akin to
update-rc.d -f lightdm remove
does not work anymore. IIRC I had to pass a parameter on the Linux command-line through GRUB (really?). Of course, this was not documented in any logical place like a manpage.
- On CentOS installing the CUDA package simply gives a blank screen and you cannot switch to TTYs anymore. You still have to manually disable nouveau, etc:
Of course, this is just an anecdote. But my experience while still reading Linux forums and helping other people, it's often still work to get and keep hardware running.
I don't have much experience with Windows. But on the few HP/Dell workstations that I have set up, Windows generally worked out of the box.
As long as the desktop respects ICCCM (hint: they all tend to do) and you don't write your application using some obscure, non-ICCCM compliant toolkit, this tends to be a non-issue.
There is much more to a desktop than just being able to display windows rendered by a random toolkit, such as: consistent keyboard shortcuts, consistent look an feel, etc. Every time that I tried to switch back to Linux, the lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts drives me crazy (though they are typically somewhat consistent within the applications provided by KDE, GNOME, etc.).
it's just as easy for a malicious user to keylog you on Windows or OS X
OS X uses GUI isolation, only applications that a user has explicitly enabled in the accessibility options can listen in on keyboard events or send events. Moreover, app store applications use sandboxing by default and can't see files outside the sandbox. So, this is false.
> Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible.
I disagree. MS-DOS "works fine", and had many users. I would say that on average, UIs on Linux (both commandline and GUI) are better than those on MS-DOS, hence Linux UIs also work fine.
I wouldn't claim that the average Linux UI is great, or follows any HCI guidelines, or whatever. What I would claim is that it doesn't matter; all that matters is that it's possible to get the job done. Just like it was possible to get the job done on MS-DOS.
Regarding the XKCD reference, I think that's covered in the parent's statement "if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux". Those kinds of distinctions make it all too easy to move the goalposts; eg. "Linux is useless because it doesn't run MyProprietaryApp(TM)".
<rant sorry="yes">
Somewhat disagree. I use GNU/Linux-based OSes as my primary systems (because alternatives are less usable for my purposes), and I perceive them all being an ugly mess of barely cooperating pieces of software with piles of hacks to force those to work together.
Seriously, I don't have enough fingers on my hands to count different UI toolkits (every other one having its own font rendering, duh), service/daemon management subsystems, audio subsystems and VFS implementations, each having incompatible API and behaving differently. Every other program has its own standards - what would happen upon just clicking a link heavily depends on where you do this. Most software "somewhat works", not "works just fine". Besides, maybe, the very core GNU userland, which is, indeed, rock solid and quite consistent.
I'm unaware of alternatives, though. Fear, there aren't any.
</rant>
As far as OSS interfaces go, I wouldn't be surprised if you're using an open source browser right now, seeing as the closed source alternatives don't compare.
Windows has nothing to show for the billions of dollars put into it. Every installation of windows I've ever had was a piece of crap that got bugged out after a months use. It would be snappy at first and then it would start taking five minutes to boot, then when it did boot the whole OS would choke as soon as I opened the start menu. Then you have to give it a "cool down period" before you open any programs or it'll choke again.
Linux doesn't have this problem. It's a myth that Windows "just works" or that os x "just works". You have just as many buggy drivers and weird issues on those operating systems as you do Linux. For me, Linux with GNOME is just the easiest to use, most stable, prettiest, OS out there. I didn't have to use the command line or configure any text files. It just worked.
> As far as OSS interfaces go, I wouldn't be surprised if you're using an open source browser right now, seeing as the closed source alternatives don't compare.
Since he's a Mac user, that's not necessarily a good bet. Safari wins out handily in battery life, and Firefox's UI text rendering (tabs/URL/bookmarks) is comparatively atrocious.
Chrome benefits from its cross-platform bookmark sync, but the snappier interface, extra hour of battery, and the fact that it comes preinstalled all make Safari a pretty popular choice on OS X.
EDIT: Though I suppose Safari is a sorta-open-source project in the same way that Chrome is. Mostly it's the same as WebKit, but not entirely. Does Apple get much in the way of community contributions, or is it a "we have to publish the source, but we're not going to take your input" arrangement like Android?
Are you kidding me? If you're a full-stack developer, then try opening Android Studio & PyCharm IDE at the same time, and after approx. 1 hour, things just get horrible. Everything is stuck.
I don't know exactly what is happening, but somewhere the Swap handling horrible wrong.
This is not the general public experience. Sure, I've had similar issues before. Usually, I could trace the culprit to a specific motherboard chipset, or graphics card, not swap. Unless one of these apps is leaking memory.
On the other hand, I've had my fair share of windows weirdness. My work machine will from time to time not shutdown and I'll come the next day to a bluescreen. What does that say about windows? Nothing at all, it's likely a driver issue too.
I'm not sure how they could. It's just a text file.
There is however the issue that adding entries to the hosts file may not change anything, as the domains for this telemetry collection might be hardcoded elsewhere and would likely override/ignore the hosts file.
So you think customizing the OS fully to turn off the privacy intrusion and using a network monitoring tool is an "acceptable" solution for the mass market (99.99% of the users)?
Not addressing any potential privacy/security concerns but as far as daily operations, I've had it on my primary desktop workstation, my higher-end laptop, my girlfriend's budget laptop, and my work Surface Pro 1. Haven't noticed any slowdowns or lockups. If anything it's on par or a little faster than 8.1. I had a minor issue on my laptop at launch because it kept trying to install the wrong touchpad driver but I used the little "hide updates" app they provide and that sorted it until the underlying issue with Windows Update was addressed and it stopped trying to pull the wrong driver after a few days.
I use 10 at home, works perfect. Some people have issues with GPU driver support (old Nvidia card in my bro's case), and 100% cpu issue, also sounded like driver/software related.
I wouldn't update on a work machine however - no need to put your time at risk.
So far I can assure you: Compared to my Android phone Windows 10 is absolutely mute. There're no noticeable differences compared to Windows 7.
You seem to be more driven by your hatred towards Microsoft than by real privacy concerns.