The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

[SpEd Kaczynski]

Fortunately they're removing Cortana, next version should have it removed,

Do you have any more info about that? I tried googling it and found that Microsoft is removing Cortana from Android and iOS on January 31st, 2020 but nothing about them removing it from Windows.

 

[OwO What's This?]

Do you have any more info about that? I tried googling it and found that Microsoft is removing Cortana from Android and iOS on January 31st, 2020 but nothing about them removing it from Windows.

ehh well they're not really removing it, but it's going to be pried off the taskbar

Cortana on Windows (Beta)—Now with more productivity! - Windows Insider

Today, we’re rolling out some changes to Cortana on Windows for Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. You may have heard that we’re evolving Cortana from a general digital assistant to a personal productivity assistant that helps you in the Microsoft 365 apps you use to get things done every day...

insider.windows.com

basically they're bringing Microsoft Bob back and it'll be easier to disregard

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

ehh well they're not really removing it, but it's going to be pried off the taskbar

But you can already remove it from the taskbar, I did it years ago.

And for replacing Explorer I have pretty much done that by running Voidtools Everything. Searches happens as you type and as long as you know where or what something is it is much faster to narrow it down than hunting for something in Explorer or using the terrible, terrible windows search function.

 

[OwO What's This?]

But you can already remove it from the taskbar, I did it years ago.

And for replacing Explorer I have pretty much done that by running Voidtools Everything. Searches happens as you type and as long as you know where or what something is it is much faster to narrow it down and launch it in explorer.

no you hide it from the taskbar, it's still there. they're separating it into its own app instead of being this weird taskbar leech

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

no you hide it from the taskbar, it's still there. they're separating it into its own app instead of being this weird taskbar leech

Oh. Thanks, I did not know that.

Windows 8 was the worst Windows. God damn I hate Windows 8. Win10 feels so good compared to it.

 

[GethN7]

Oh. Thanks, I did not know that.

Windows 8 was the worst Windows. God damn I hate Windows 8. Win10 feels so good compared to it.

My mother got a laptop awhile back with that installed and was basically begging me moments after trying it's shitty desktop to find her a Windows 10 install to get the hell away from that abomination.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Not going to quote anything, just general replies.

* Actual ran Windows 10 on HDD in an old refurb tower for a while, before buying an SSD to act as boot drive. It work acceptably for me, although I wouldn't get a new computer with it (If you getting a SSD to install Windows on, I would recommend getting at least 250 GB, even if it is just a system drive). Also, I wouldn't give up on HDD yet, at least for data storage.

* I think the reason Windows 10 was brought out so quickly was because everybody, particularly businesses, hated Windows 8, which was designed to "unify" the desktop and mobile devices, to go along with MS's push into the smartphone market. It might have worked, but by the time Windows 8 came around it was too late and it eventually died (although Microsoft's own surface line seems to doing well, can anybody talk about the Windows 10 experience). Also, the whole industry is moving towards development model of release it as shit now and slowly engooden it over time, so no surprises Windows has done that as well. And I would agree that it has actually worked in favor Hopefully the death of Cortana portends to the death all the other retard digital assistants.

Also, these thread reminded of this video on why Windows 10 and its bugs:

 

[???]

Linux is extremely hit or miss on newer hardware, especially with a lot of distros using old kernels.

I like a lot of things front many distros, but no one ever puts all the things I like together. It can't be fixed by making a new distro, except maybe by making something which automatically scans your hardware and holds your hand while it guides you through a customized Gentoo install. While that would be tremendously useful for users, a lot of people on the spectrum would endlessly reeeeeee about it, conveniently ignoring that they aren't the target audience.

TBH if I was a hardware manufacturer - say a company making high end RISC-V stuff for workstations, servers, parallel supercomputers, crypto mining, data centers, cell phones, and gaming desktops - and I wanted to get people to buy my hardware, I'd target something like Minix or make my own OS and pay companies to get their games or animation/CGI software or whatever to compile on it. It wouldn't take much to get CGI workstations to jump away from Apple, especially if I open source all my hardware drivers.

I would use a micro-kernel architecture for stability, security, and ease of maintainability. I'd take ideas from Plan 9, Inferno, Haiku, Gentoo, Mint, and the various anti-systemd distros - I can go into detail on what I would take from each if you like. I'd have a standard for everything, and standard software for everything from init to email, web browsing, audio, and windowing systems, among others. All standard software and essential system components would need to be written in C and optimized for maintainability, reliability, and security. I would ban poorly implemented versions of certain languages and in general curate the ecosystem. Changes in the OS would first require a change to the standard, and since it's open source I could let the spergs experiment and steal the best ideas.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

My mother got a laptop awhile back with that installed and was basically begging me moments after trying it's shitty desktop to find her a Windows 10 install to get the hell away from that abomination.

"oh no no no no I touched the Windows key!" sums up Win8 for me. That tile interface used to launch programs is so bad, not every program shows up there, or maybe they do but their icon is tiny and tucked away somewhere among all the crap at the far end of everything. Portable programs sure as shit don't show up. Scrolling sideways on a PC was a dumb fucking idea. It's also slow on a laptop HDD, slow as in much slower than a regular start menu where accidentally pressing the win key is no big deal. The people that came up with this shit needs to be caned.

Being able to effectively launch a program means littering the desktop in shortcuts or navigating the C: drive to where it is installed, not everything can be pinned to the taskbar. Is it in Program Files or Program Files(x86)? Is it in a folder with the programs name or the developers name? Maybe I can searc-oh no no no I touched the Windows key again!

 

[H&K Hates You]

Not going to quote anything, just general replies.

* Actual ran Windows 10 on HDD in an old refurb tower for a while, before buying an SSD to act as boot drive. It work acceptably for me, although I wouldn't get a new computer with it (If you getting a SSD to install Windows on, I would recommend getting at least 250 GB, even if it is just a system drive). Also, I wouldn't give up on HDD yet, at least for data storage.

* I think the reason Windows 10 was brought out so quickly was because everybody, particularly businesses, hated Windows 8, which was designed to "unify" the desktop and mobile devices, to go along with MS's push into the smartphone market. It might have worked, but by the time Windows 8 came around it was too late and it eventually died (although Microsoft's own surface line seems to doing well, can anybody talk about the Windows 10 experience). Also, the whole industry is moving towards development model of release it as shit now and slowly engooden it over time, so no surprises Windows has done that as well. And I would agree that it has actually worked in favor Hopefully the death of Cortana portends to the death all the other exceptional individual digital assistants.

Also, these thread reminded of this video on why Windows 10 and its bugs:

Definitely agree on going for the 250 GB ssd.

 

[Kosher Dill]

"oh no no no no I touched the Windows key!" sums up Win8 for me.

I use Win 8.1 with the Classic Shell mod installed, which gives you back the Start menu and makes the Windows key act like it did in Win7, among other things. Once you do that it's a perfectly usable OS, though the UI is a notch below 7's. I'm sticking it out on 8.1 until either it goes out of support and I jump ship to Linux, or Microsoft comes out with a non-spyware desktop OS. We'll see about that.

 

[The Fool]

Also, these thread reminded of this video on why Windows 10 and its bugs:

(I don't recommend taking Nerdgasm seriously, he has a hateboner for MS ever since they fired him. He tardraged pretty hard in a video about it and came up with conspiracies about how it's run by AIs)

I would use a micro-kernel architecture for stability, security, and ease of maintainability.

I used to think microkernels were the bee's knees, but, honestly, they're impractical. First they're not maintainable, it's the whole reason pretty much every kernel in the world is at least partially monolithic (IBM and Apple tried hard to make one and both failed spectacularly after wasting a shit ton of money). Stability also is questionable and/or doesn't matter. What does it matter on the OS architecture if a critical driver goes down? You still corrupted data and entered a state in which the OS can no longer work, only difference is how the OS decides to kill itself after that. Drivers are what needs to be focused on for stability, not the kernel, so you may as well make them the kernel. Non-critical drivers can be usermode even in a monolithic OS, which is exactly how they're implemented in Linux. And kernel modules make kernel drivers maintainable without having to worry about the message passing abstraction of microkernels.

Linux and Windows really demonstrate the best and most practical ways of implementing a "hybrid" design and they work extremely well. I honestly hesitate to call Linux monolithic at this point, but I also think NT is the only "true" hybrid kernel. Honestly, classifying kernel architectures is a nightmare and I usually like to avoid thinking about that these days. Point is, it's drivers that matter, the kernel's just there to provide a framework for the drivers to work in.

All standard software and essential system components would need to be written in C

Why? C is obsolete and a nightmare to write anything in. Don't even have to mention Greenspun's 10th rule. I'd use Rust or make my own language (if your dream OS has it's entire own custom software suite, what more is adding a custom language to that? MS made C# and rewrote half of Windows in it, and CP/M is written in PL/M).

 

[???]

How are they not maintainable? The Minix kernel is tiny. You could fit the entire thing in a modern L2 cache, I believe. Less code means less complexity means ease of maintenance. The standardized means of communicating with devices only increases ease of maintenance.

Reliability/stability matters in different scenarios than just desktops (servers, anyone?), but being able to recover from say a sound driver crashing without a ton of arcane bs would be nice. Doubly so if I have a nice error log to look at. Recovering from a critical service failure on an airplane should ideally not involve a system reboot.

IIRC a lot of virtualized/hypervisor stuff uses message passing because it scales well.

Most of C's problems come from shitty C implementations, not always the language itself. While I wouldn't come up with my own language, I would definitely make a C toolchain optimized for security, ease of debugging, and safety.

It's better to write safe and maintainable C than to try to write something optimized for speed in another language. You can always further optimize it for more speed later.

I doubt Rust will exist in 10 years. Just as Java was an attempt to lower the entrance barrier to software engineering for Pajeets, Rust is the same attempt but for women, troons, and scripting language developers.

I do love modularity though. I want something where you can easily drop in parts of the kernel - like the CPU scheduler - and run tests to see which performs best under different workloads and configurations. The logic for this is it allows rapid development.

I remember reading a lot of crusty old farts bitch (rightly so) that their old Common Lisp machines had features decades ago that *nix lacks today. My goal is to get the best of both worlds: rapid, easy development, and learning from all the mistakes of the past with a clean break to do everything right the first time. This is why having a paper standard and a standard but modular OS is so important... the mistake hardest to recover from is making critical decisions too soon. By making it easy for spergs to experiment I get the benefit of their work, and then I can select the optimal, most modular implementation of the thing everyone wants and needs before the next iteration of the development cycle begins.

 

[The Fool]

Recovering from a critical service failure on an airplane should ideally not involve a system reboot.

I think you missed my point. The critical service should not crash. This fallacy in the microkernel philosophy can essentially be analogued as "My heart is very healthy because I always carry a defibrillator with me." If your heart is healthy, you shouldn't need that. Take a page from how they designed the software for the Curiosity rover. Nothing in it crashes. Not because they used a microkernel (it's an RTOS) but because they wrote the software to not crash in the first place.

Write software to not crash, don't make a system that encourages crashing. As Dave Cutler said, "if you don't put bugs in, you don't have to take them out"

Most of C's problems come from shitty C implementations, not always the language itself. While I wouldn't come up with my own language, I would definitely make a C toolchain optimized for security, ease of debugging, and safety.

It's better to write safe and maintainable C than to try to write something optimized for speed in another language. You can always further optimize it for more speed later.

I doubt Rust will exist in 10 years. Just as Java was an attempt to lower the entrance barrier to software engineering for Pajeets, Rust is the same attempt but for women, troons, and scripting language developers.

C absolutely is shit because of it's own faults. People commonly say if C was designed today, it wouldn't be C. With every decade it misses out on another massive revolution in software engineering, like object-oriented (real OOP with namespaces, not "just use a struct"), resource lifetime tracking and asynchronous programming. There's no facilities in the language to guarantee handling a resource. A lot of projects pretty much have to implement a garbage collector because it doesn't have anything like C++'s smart pointers. C is only usable after you essentially write an entire runtime/VM around it. I wouldn't trust a C program unless it was vetted by a staff of engineers who specifically have a fetish for finding flaws in people's code, whereas I'd far more trust something written in Rust to not leak or corrupt data as C is so infamous for. If Java's motto is "NullPointerException" then C's is "SEGFAULT". Sorry I sound so impassioned about this, I've just never heard someone call C "secure". Also wouldn't call it easy to debug either without reflection.

Oh yeah, and macros. Nobody likes macros. Actually they're considered the worst possible macro implementation in any language. C# explicitly banned them from entering the language.

Rust is gaining massive traction right now. I don't like it's userbase either, but that's no reason to dismiss it as a wildly adopted technology that's becoming more relevant every day. Especially because it essentially is C with everything it's missing that I mentioned. Also, Java didn't die on it's own, it was killed by Microsoft and Oracle. Microsoft because they invented C#, Oracle because Oracle is Oracle. Also, saying "X technology will fail because Y failed" is a fallacy and makes zero sense. People have said, and still do say the same thing about C# in relation to Visual Basic. C# is one of the top languages on StackOverflow and GitHub, so that already proves that argument wrong.

 

[אΩ+1]

The truth about Cortana

Spoiler

It's really a glorfield version of bonzai buddy.

 

[OwO What's This?]

Rust is gaining massive traction right now. I don't like it's userbase either, but that's no reason to dismiss it as a wildly adopted technology that's becoming more relevant every day. Especially because it essentially is C with everything it's missing that I mentioned. Also, Java didn't die on it's own, it was killed by Microsoft and Oracle. Microsoft because they invented C#, Oracle because Oracle is Oracle. Also, saying "X technology will fail because Y failed" is a fallacy and makes zero sense. People have said, and still do say the same thing about C# in relation to Visual Basic. C# is one of the top languages on StackOverflow and GitHub, so that already proves that argument wrong.

Rust's compilers do something that a lot of up and coming compilers like to do these days so the programming language they're associated with doesn't gain the reputation for being a buggy mess: If there's something the least bit fucky about the code it won't let you compile and it supplies no means of overriding this behavior.

it handles dependencies in a way that's similar to python, except it allows for multiple versions of the same dependency so you don't have to create virtual environments for every project, plus dependencies that have dependencies of their own that might clash with what the project needs are properly cared for.

it's lacking in the GUI department but it seems like there's a big push for support for that. they're at a crossroads between either supporting Qt5 (which is still undergoing rapid change) or coming up with their own RUST-specific GUI libraries.

 

[אΩ+1]

Microsoft has released the first developer preview of Windows 10X giving us our first proper look at Microsoft's new OS. Let's go hands-on and see what's new.

 

[The Fool]

Wow, really cool, I knew they were doing a UI redesign for foldables but I didn't think it was this extensive.

I have a few concerns, that it looks way too much like GNOME3 and, where are the tiles? I like tiles. This feels like an entirely different product, and I don't think I have to remind people how well competing products work for MS (Phone 7, Phone 8, Phone 10, PE, the dissonance between ME and XP even though that was intentional and necessary). in 2016 MS was going on and on about "OneCore! The single core for all Windows versions! No more separate competing products!" and this sounds radically different from OneCore. I honestly believed MS when they said that, what with Satya being at the heel and radically changing the company for the better. I guess old habits die hard. I'm cautiously excited.

I also wish they built this on top of Midori. I was recently reading some blog posts from a team member on that project and it's absolutely tantalizing, even better than the Singularity base of it. I really wish they'd do something with the damn thing already.

 

[אΩ+1]

Wow, really cool, I knew they were doing a UI redesign for foldables but I didn't think it was this extensive.

I have a few concerns, that it looks way too much like GNOME3 and, where are the tiles? I like tiles. This feels like an entirely different product, and I don't think I have to remind people how well competing products work for MS (Phone 7, Phone 8, Phone 10, PE, the dissonance between ME and XP even though that was intentional and necessary). in 2016 MS was going on and on about "OneCore! The single core for all Windows versions! No more separate competing products!" and this sounds radically different from OneCore. I honestly believed MS when they said that, what with Satya being at the heel and radically changing the company for the better. I guess old habits die hard. I'm cautiously excited.

I also wish they built this on top of Midori. I was recently reading some blog posts from a team member on that project and it's absolutely tantalizing, even better than the Singularity base of it. I really wish they'd do something with the damn thing already.

From I can see Windows 10 X and Xbox seem to be another attempt at unifying the windows software ecosystem aka the Series X by trying to get rid of legacy features and toolkits.
The biggest concern with this product would be the lack initial driver support making a bad first impression.

 

[The Fool]

From I can see Windows 10 X and Xbox seem to be another attempt at unifying the windows software ecosystem aka the Series X by trying to get rid of legacy features and toolkits.
The biggest concern with this product would be the lack initial driver support making a bad first impression.

Is there any resource that states the driver framework has changed? I'm really curious about what they changed with the internals.
Big issue with the convergence from XP to Vista is they changed the driver framework, current driver framework from Vista heavily encourages userland drivers. I don't see what they would have changed about it.
I know they stripped out a lot of "legacy stuff" (whatever that is) which might interfere with older hardware, but this seems primarily targeted at new devices and doesn't seem like a replacement for Windows 10. Not immediately, anyway.