My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

First off I dont mind what OS you are using. This rant isnt about the OS but about hypocrisy for some of the users. Secondly Im sorry for typos, I typed it on my phone while waking up.

People are calling Windows spyware, so they are using Linux or MacOS. Even though I disagree with the term spyware I would be fine with that if you weren't a hypocrite.

How many of the people who use Linux and call windows spyware uses Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter once in a while? I highly doubt you if you say you don't.

A few years back Ive tried to live without anything of google, this also meant blocking YouTube, their trackers an javascript libraries.
Not much of the internet still works if you block google servers.
Google is everywhere and always collects data.

Facebook and twitter also collects data about you. Everyone who has your number in their phone will share it with Whatsapp and google so they can build up a profile. Even if you dont block it.

What I am telling you is that its impossible to avoid being tracked by these companies (including MS).

Every company I mentioned here has a profile on you, if you want it or not.

So let's check which of these companies tries to follow European laws.
Google gets fine after fine but doesnt really try to avoid it.
It looks like Apple, MS, Facebook and Twitter are doing it better on this.

But if you check the European law every European citizen is allowed to request their complete profile collected by a company. And that means complete and not the public part you volunteered to give away.

So I tried it out.
Google didnt want to give it, apple didnt want to give it, Facebook didnt want to give it and Twitter doesnt want to give it.

The hypocrisy is becoming clesr with the following. I did get my complete profile from MS. It was a messy PDF file which crashed most PDF readers.
It contained a list of people I know and how I know them. It contained MS accounts I had in the past and my hobbies. (and quite a lot more)

So from these big companies MS is the only one following the European Law.

So yes they do collect data, but they are open in what they collect.

And Im not saying here that Microsoft is great just because they follow the law.

You can have your own opinion about this and do with it what you want. I just wanted to share some, maybe alternative, facts.

And again this isn't an OS rant or whatever. I dont mind what you do, but I do mind hypocrisy.

I really want this GitHub theme!

Source : Twitter

My views on the github/MS thingy.

I've had to explain in at least 20+ rants that some people might have legitimate reasons/opinions for disagreeing with this deal. I find it quite bad that I even have to say this but that aside for this rant.

Microsoft is a commercial company which does a lot for open source, that's a fact.

In my case, I mostly look at the part of Microsoft in regard to how they treat users and user privacy as this, in my opinion, shows for a great deal how trustworthy a company is.

It's publicly known that Microsoft joined the prism surveillance program in 2007 which in my opinion also meant selling out all users.
Next to that, through at least windows 10 it has done quite intrusive user tracking which I also see as a betrayal to its users.

I could go on and on about cases but I've made my point on at least microsoft.

As for github selling itself to Microsoft, this most likely means that it'll also be integrated within the prism network. That's my main point of concern as to why I disagree of this deal and have lost my trust in github for selling to a company which, imo, has absolutely no respect for its users' privacy and has ethics I entirely disagree with.

I still haven't formed an opinion on the rest of arguments out there as, due to a medical thing, I'm hardly able to focus right now.

You might agree or disagree, that's your very right and that's perfectly fine. Just don't say that I haven't come with an actual argument/opinion as for why I disagree with this deal.

Do not continue reading if you value your life.

Visual fucking studio 2015 installation. MOTHERFUCKER !!!

OK new project will only work on VS2015. Need to download it. OK, go to MS website. Project works with community edition. Fucking great. Download the installer. Run the installer. MOTHERFUCKER DON'T OPEN THE FUCKING BROWSER TO THANK ME, YOU FUCKING FUCK. Ok...Wait to download the packages. One fucking eternity later download completes. FUCKING GREAT. Proceed to package installation. After two fucking hours installation progress bar stays the same. Google "vs 2015 installation stuck windows 7". MOTHERFUCKING BACKGROUND PROCESS IS FUCKING STUCK AND INSTALLATION DOES NOT CONTINUE. FUCK YOU. I'VE LOST TWO HOURS. OK, stop the process. Installation gets cancelled. Run the installer again. STOP THANKING ME YOU PIECE OF SHIT :@ OK, check again all downloaded packages. All good. Continue with installation. Installation completes. MOTHERFUCKER WHY YOU WANT TO RESTART THE WHOLE SYSTEM ? FUCK YOUR WINDOWS UPDATES. Ok, restart and be done with it. SSD to the rescue. Try to set up the project.

MOTHERFUCKER I DIDN'T INSTALL THE C++ PACKAGES. WTF WERE YOU DOING ALL THAT TIME? OK, run installer again and install C++ packages. I SWEAR TO GOD MICROSOFT, IF YOU THANK ME ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, YOU'RE GETTING HATE MAIL.

Ok, installation completes. It's coding time. NO BITCH. VS2015 silently crashes after splash screen. :@@@ Google wtf is wrong again, turns out the C++ packages fuck shit up. Ok, pass some arguments to devenv.exe to reset. Restart VS. Ok, seems to be working now. Make a test project. Fucking awesome. Close VS and get the project files from perforce.

OK, files downloaded. Open VS again....

VS: "You're my bitch, you won't code today. Run from console and pass some shitty reset parameters"

YOU FUCKING FUCK. GO FUCK YOURSELF UP YOUR FUCKING ARSE. Ok, pass the parameters from console. Run again. Same "you're my bitch message" :@ OK, run with administrator rights, opens like charm. Run without admin rights again, "you're my bitch message". :@@@@@

Restart system, VS2015 finally opens project normally. Build project, 6934 errors.... :@ I'M DONE ! IM GOING BACK TO LINUX PROJECT. FUCK YOU ALL.

And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:

Meanwhile MicroSoft windows update be like this

Sister = bee ( who isn't a stranger to Ubuntu)
Me = Cee

Bee: can I use your laptop?
Cee : why ? Use yours ,it's works fine.
Bee : no I want to use yours and I need to work with windows.
Cee: 🤯
Bee : my work can only be done using windows.
Cee : fine do whatever ( doesn't want to argue )
* Le bee opens MS word, and starts her work *
Cee : 😤😤Seriously?
Bee : I don't like libre
Cee : 😑😑😑^∞
* Few moments later *
Bee : my work is done ,you can have your laptop,btw it's updating.
Cee : 😑😑😑😑😑
* 2000 years later *
*Opens Ubuntu *
*Getting a weird bug*
*Tried to fix *
*Can't open OS files * 👏👏👏🎆
* Windows not shutdown properly *
* Opens windows *
* Not able to login via pin *
* Password ? not accepted *
* Changes outlook password *
* Please chose a password you haven't chosen before *
* Logs in *
* types old pin to change pin *
*You've entered wrong pin too many times *
*System hanging a lot *
* Removes pin *
* Gets huge mcAfee restart system popups , every 10 sec *
* Just shutdown , feels irritated for the rest of the day*

* Regrets dual booting, shd have wiped the windows partition 😫😫*

*Wonders,what the hell did my sister even do to my laptop ?*

I hate Munich. Instead of using Windows, the city administration had built their own Linux distro called LiMux for all of the ~30000 city's computers. They invested years into developing it, because, hey, it's open source! Now they used it for four years, and just as Microsoft opens an office in town, they throw it all overboard and go back to Windows. Why? Because, umm, they can't even use MS Word, what all the others use and such.
This is such a bullshit. You had a good thing going here, in times of NSA surveillance and monopolies. Munich is such a capitalistic town. I'm happy to have moved out of it for good.

Users waiting for MS Windows to complete updates.

Whoever designed UEFI, FUCK YOU!! Giving the OS control over every fucking thing in the hardware instead of letting the BIOS do that separately, WHO IN THEIR RIGHT FUCKING MIND THOUGHT THAT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?!!

And same goes to fucking you Microsoft! How difficult is it to do a fucking ACPI shutdown and do it properly?! How fucking difficult is it to not make the fans spin like jet engines because why the fuck not?! And yes the fucking PC is dust-free and bloat-free so I don't want to see any fucking Wintard comment that.

You know where else I saw the inability to power down? In Linux 4.20-rc2. A kernel that is within active development, and rc2 at that!! A kernel branch that's designed to be unstable, for testing purposes. Meanwhile the stable branch of MS Windows does the same. Also designed to be unstable because fuck QA?! Filthy fucking motherfuckers!!

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

Tried to exit MS Word with :wq and started wondering why it isn't closing before I saw the Windows logo.

Dear diary,
Today is day 3 of Windows 11 for me, and after about an hour of gaming, everything got laggy. I thought it was an AV scanner taking its sweet time kind of lag, but then.... I couldn't switch back to the desktop, I couldn't launch the task manager, it was just a solid frozen brick, and then when I unpaused this game to go back into it.... it was frozen too.

So here I am , with a frozen machine, so I give up and attempt a hard reboot........ yep, your fucked too. Windows auto repair kicks in, and it freezes too.

So now I'm here, with a brick of a fucking machine, wondering wtf could have gone so wrong.

Finally, I've made it to the failed boot screen,

> bootrec /fixboot
permission denied.

🤔 dafuq you smoking?

Fine

> sfc /scannow
Permission denied

Ok.... I don't think I want to know how this works.

> chkdsk /f /r /x C:
Yay something fucking runs
.
.
.
no issues 🤨

Fuck it, reboot.

Oh, now you want to fucking boot you piece of shit.
Now to understand how the fuck you can get a permission denied when your running CMD before boot 😐

8:30 - get into office, boot windows
Windows: "Oh man, here's this update. If you're not doing it now, I will start in 15 minutes. No questions asked!"

9:45 - checking update status
Windows: "Well i'm nearly finished, just give me a sec..."

9:55 - whats's my pc doing
Windows: "Hey mate, I did it! I also restored those neat shortcuts to MS EDGE for you. Please use my browser"

10:00 - Well i can finally start working
Windows: "Yeah... you would. But i had to remove theese few applications, because they are not compatible anymore."

11:00 - Okay, installed all my stuff, did some coding. Time to test it. Lets boot up my VM.
Windows: "Oh so sorry mate. Not gonna show my network devices to Virtualbox anymore. Have fun reconfiguring your connections without them."

Fuck this fucking Windows 10!

The only reason we have Win10 on our machines, is because people in my office panicked the last day of the "free upgrade period" (and i was on holidays)...

It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.

The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.

Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.

At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.

To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.

The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.

We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.

Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.

After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.

We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.

End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.

We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.

We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)

PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.

VLC because it really is damn good. The only player which gives you a nice looking interface irrespective of the windowing system it runs upon - Gnome, KDE, XFCE, MS-Windows, Mac. And that 200% boost in audio is really helpful with files having very low audio.

My dog is like internet explorer...
He never responds to my commands

!WTF
Take a look at how big my SSD is(220GB).
Take a look at how much space I can remove with MS Disk Cleanup.

So there is a very very 👌 small risk that I will now erase the whole Windows Update File Server at Microsoft, lets see what's happens 🤞

"Sooo, children of the village, what are we going to write front-end in?" - I said to my infant students.
"Typescript with ts-loader/awesometypescript loader for webpack" - simultaneously yelled the kids.
"Exactly! Brilliant! And now, what are we going to be writing back-end in?" - asked I then.
The kids yelled: "PHP 7.2 with Laravel, or Go with Gingonic and juliensmith/httprouter, or Typescript without loader, with express/koa"
Truly stunned with their excellence, I asked "Well, now you 100% ain't gonna get it right - what are we going to be writing a desktop application that doesn't require a lot of native functionality and preferably, cross-platform in?" And the kids didn't hesitate to yell happily "Typescript targeting Electron", which has only brought tear to my eye.
"A native ms windows app?" "WPF under C#"
"A native gtk app?" "Vala"
"A native KDE/XFCE app?" "Cpp/Qt"
"A native mac app?" "Swift3.2/4"
I was in tears, just thinking about what future these kids have, but suddenly I have noticed one of kids seemed puzzled. It was Pajeet, an indian guy, ugh, his mom was a bitch. I asked him "What is wrong, little acoustic?" "But I like Java, and I would like to make back-end with Tomcat!" he replied. "Ooooh :3" cutely I moaned, trying to reach the handle of the table locker "I've got something just for you". I pulled out a rope, with sewed-in spikes, covered in drool and piss, came up to Pajeet and tenderly put it around his neck, making a knot. Pajeet fell under the table, and I got fired.

Due to inspiration of giving up with windows being slow (performance wise) always connecting to MS severs (I have slow internet) so it’s noticeable when I can download quicker on a raspberry pi then on a laptop - both over wifi 🤷‍♂️

And burning a fucking boot DVD for Ubuntu takes 3 fucking DVDs at 2.4x speed - before getting a successful boot disk 😞

I think it’s time to swap out this hdd and go to the dark side!

People were posting their programming companions. This one kept me amused through my early days with a computer. Who else remembers?

I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.

I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.

All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.

For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.

Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.

Why do devs hate windows (and all its products) so much? I mean yaa okay it is a shit os for you to get your development thingies done. Yaa I know its not open source. Yaa I know its not free. Yaa I know a lot of malwares are targetted towards windows. Yaa I know it takes decades to install updates which are released almost every week. And so on....

But wasnt windows the first operating system you laid your hands on? I mean me being a 90s born kid from India, Windows 98 was my first operating system and I was really in love with it as a teenager. MS paint was my playground and I used to go berserk over there. I mean come on. Being a teenager and knowing nothing about how a computer actually works, would you have been able to figure out how to run an NFS on linux? All the kickass presentations made in power point were so in during that time. The first code I ever wrote was in turbo C running on Windows XP. So whoever is bashing Windows and any of their products is a shit person because though Windows is not meant for developers (that too only some) it is a great operating system and I will always root for it in any forum/post where it is being bashed or criticized about. Not a Windows fan-boy (I dont known if there is even such a thing) but Windows is best for non-devs.

On reccomendation of @chabad360 I made this its own rant.

I switched from marketing to CS (complete with a three year degree, no Bootcamp). I still went to interviews as you'd expect a marketing man to go; in a suit. Commence the weirdest interview.

$I: interviewer
$M: Me

I: "You're not the typical engineer. Can you talk to real engineers?"

M: "could you elaborate"

I:"you're dressed in a suit. That leads me to think you're a MS user. Do you think you could talk to real, ie. Linux using engineers?"

M: " well, I haven't used windows in about a year soo..

I: "Mac isn't Linux."

M: "I'm aware. I've switched to Ubuntu so I could use KVM-QEMU android emulator with GPU pass through to train Deep Convolution Networks on mobile devices. Also had to compile Google's internal build tool because it had bugs I had to fix so I could compile the APK."

I: "ah, Ubuntu eh? **Insert Smirk** How about a follow-up?"

M: "no, I'm switching to Gentoo this week and would like to talk to real engineers about that."

I thanked him for the coffee and left.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

Fun with MS Teams 😂

Why windows you did this to me. It's very painful.

Windows update fails with error 0x1235

Me in Technet: Hey, ms, i got this error. How do i fix it?
MS: Install the Troubleshooting for Windows Update and follow the instructions. Before that, create a system restore just in case. Also, if the problem persists, go to your boot menu -> troubleshooting options and follow the instructions.
Hope it helps.
Found it helpful? Yes No

Other random people: just rename $WINDOWS ~BT to anything or delete it. Then continue the process.

.
.

I followed the random people advice and worked.

Fuck MS.

Because MS is dropping support and updates for Windows 7, I finally decided to install something else! Wanted to do it earlier, but I was clearly to lazy to do it.
I choosed Ubuntu, I know a lot of you hate it, but it is the one i'm used to, and i didn't want to search too complicated

Windows: Would you like me to give all your data to MS or somewhat less data?
Me: Well .. I guess .. I'll choose the Basic option..
Windows: Here is a fun fact .. I'll send all the data regardless of your choice :)

This is what's happening in the background, I think. I mean there isn't even a phuqing option to turn this thing off.

One of the things I really hate on Windows (and Microsoft software in general) is that the keyboard shortcuts are localized therefore are different from 90% of the apps that I use on a daily basis.

Two examples of this (EN-US vs PT-PT):
- "Save" is "Gravar" while "Underline" is "Sublinhar". This means that whenever I press Ctrl + S to save a doc in MS Word I underline a word instead of saving the bloody document.
- "All" is "Tudo" so when I want to select all the itens on a folder in the File Explorer I have to press Ctrl + T, the same shortcut I press in pretty much every single tabbed app to open a new tab.

This is terrible for the user experience because different languages provide different keyboard shortcuts to the user which goes against the concept of the usefulness of a keyboard shortcut: perform an action from anywhere without having to know its menu or menu description.

So this was going to be a comment but damn!!!!

Windows is seriously about making life harder for power users now, every fucking update lately is moving more easy to change things and fucking hiding them inside hidden menus or stupid links that don’t make sense. I mean fuck I just want to turn on dual screen with my laptop (because for some bizarre reason, just showing the desktop on the plugged in monitor is so hard to do automatically, especially since I just plugged a hdmi cable in) and the fucker was gone with nothing but a “detect screens” button before it would use an external screen.

Fuck I’m so close to pulling the plug on windows, but Linux just doesn’t sell me for daily use (yet... it’s getting there though)

The fucking forced updates (yes I consider a random bsod due to a system interrupt, then as it reboots magically has updates awaiting... a forced update) are starting to get to me, the fucking thing half crashing and not responding due to a network transfer of files (the fucker was 5GB)

If it wasn’t for my gaming needs and someone can show me a very good alternative to MS Visio (I haven’t really found one yet) then I would swap over and just adjust to the not so great (imo) desktop environments.

he: checkout my crazy FUD hack (a token stealer which turned out to be far more malicious than i anticipated)
me: executes it (yes in a VM)
windows defender: lemme delet this
he: ooh i forgot the word stub in there. microsoft detects that lemme fix that sends new file
me: here we go aga..
ms defender: nononono virus 117% delet this
he: i forgot it still!!

later i deactivated ms defender and analysed the traffic of the vm. in addition to stealing my fake tokens he also tried to read my Firefox/chrome history, IP.
when i asked him (2 days later) what this was all about in his "educational only" "token stealer" he threatened to
a) publish my IP
b) publish my browser history and with that my real name and address
b.0) when i asked him for proof he said he knows that my real name is "Roman Gräf" and i live in Frankfurt. (btw i do live in Frankfurt and that is in the profile of the discord server where he found me and i have the same username on discord as i have here)
c) to kill my machine and all my projects
got bored, blocked him, shut VM down.

!rant
Starting from today, I officially love windows and ubuntu equally .

Now I can game whenever I want without switching OS.

I think bash on win is all I ever wanted and I really thank MS for it.

First day out of 10 exam days today! Have to use windows which I'm obviously not a fan of but oh well I'll manage.
But really, at first it didn't recognize my headphones (regular headphones input). Fair enough, after the admin fiddled around for half an hour we got it working.

*lets install Firefox and chrome*
The installers wouldn't launch at all, bit of fiddling around aaand it works.

*lets use Ms word again then*
Every time I try to save a file it gives shit tons of errors.
Found out that it does save but only with those errors.

*alright let's open up some pdf files*
"Error: no permission to use this application*

Oh come the fuck on just work I've got important stuff to do with a lot of time pressure!

I DON'T MIND USING IT ONCE IF I HAVE TO BUT COULD THAT COCK SUCKING PIECE OF SHIT JUST FUCKING WORK?!

The worst part, I wasn't the only one with trouble, multiple people still don't have the jackplug thing working :/

My first contact with a computer was in 1997, I was close to 9.
My parents bought it together with a 17" screen and a color inkjet for about 6000.- CHF if I remember it correctly.
It had Windoozle 95, Pentium 2 233MHz, Radeon Rage 128 something.
At first I was not allowed to use it, but after watching them write documents for some time, they allowed me to draw random stuff in MS Paint and use Word.

It did't take long until I figured out to do more stuff on the system.
I think I crashed Windows a few times by installing some random demo software or shareware and execute just anything to see what happens.

When I turned 10, my godmother gave me Age Of Empires 2 as a present (I wished it so badly) and since this gift, I was somewhat addicted with computers and gaming.

My mother forbid me a lot of times to use the computer for weeks. 😄

But it all made me know computers better and even start programming with Quick Basic! (later VB, C++ and C#)

Windows 10 loves to freeze... especially when I wrote more than 200 lines of code and I'm pointing the cursor on the Save icon!

Thanks MS, you know how to give me a heart attack.

DISCLAIMER: I don't remember this, my parents told me the story

So, when I was 3, my father brought a computer back home and I instantly loved it. It wasn't our computer, he brought it home to fix it. It had Windows 95 on it. After he fixed it, he oppened up MS Paint, or something, drew a line and handed me the mouse, where I proceeded to draw.

Mundane and boring, yes, but a week later, my parents bought our own PC, and explained how to install Win98, a process I actually understood 13 years later.

Wtf Microsoft ?!?
Clean install of windows 10 pro, got everything set up, now Microsoft Store does not work because I need an app to open ms-windows-store ?!?
Common answers found on Google does not solve the problem -_-

Love my computer.
Opened edge(chrome was not responding).
In 2 seconds it crashed and windows killed the process.
❤❤❤

It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.

Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.

It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.

God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂

When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back.

Fuck windows. Fuck windows and their stupid old OS.

Sure. I want advertisements on my start menu.

Nope, don't mind getting a vague description of some update and having to wait to restart my machine. Don't need to know what your changing.

What better way to upgrade an OS than to DL 6 gb of stuff that's probably mostly unchanged code.

Bing. I'll take 2 please.

How come stuff on mac and linux is always different than the way windows does it? Fuck those OSes! Visual Studio is only like a 50 gig install and I can develop iOS apps on it... plus it has C# AND F#.

No viruses with windows defender. I upload my personal files so MS can scan them just to be safe thou.

Got a job as a database manager, they wanted me to update their sql server and some of their .net apps. Turns out their sql server had no databases and all their data was stored in an ms access 2003 applications that was using windows for workgroups security!!! It also had no interface, hundreds of tables and queries and there were multiple access db it was connected to. To make things worse the person who built all this stuff used acronyms for everything he did, table names, variables, queries and even bloody window folders!!! It was hard as hell to figure out what anything ment. Oh and the .net apps were asp sites that heavily used dll for storing his code and no one knows where the original source code for them are. Did I also mention there were no comments for any of the code, no database dictionary, no notes or anything.

So apparently I'll be rebuilding everything from scratch and transferring over the data to sql server. AND NO MORE F**KING ACRONYMS!!!!!!!

I do like Windows, it is a quite good OS nowadays, but for FUCK SAKE, what does it take to fix that CLUSTER FUCK that you call search? You don't have enough people MS or what? Just show me the BLOODY ITEMS that actually contain the words that I typed in!!! While you are at it WOULD YOU MIND LEAVING ME THE FUCK ALONE WITH THE FUCKING WEB RESULTS???

I googled - "What does refresh from windows right click menu do?"

I got a reply - "Search instead for why the hell it is there in first place"

Why does MS need to be such a scumbag with Windows updates?
Every now and then, this unskipable blue setup screen appears and forces the user to make some decisions.

"Do you want to set Edge as the default browser?"

"Do you want a 360 subscription?"

The usual crap.

But it‘s not skippable!

You have to make a decision and the UI for "fuck off" is different for every decision.

You can‘t just press the Nope button every time.
It‘s fucking deliberate. They want you to spend time on reading their shit and force it down your throat.

And let‘s not forget about people who don‘t know computer stuff very well and are confused by this. Then call us because "the computer isn‘t working again."
And you can‘t tell them to skip this slimy rotten vomit of a marketing weasel because you need them to tell you what the options are for each fucking decision screen.

😫

It's ironic how I could seem to get ms Silverlight working on windows 10 and now I got it working in Linux through wine
Seriously anyone who uses Silverlight in his websites or web applications should burn in hell

And this is one of the reasons why MS Windows is an unusable piece of crap.. Been 40 mins here and still updating.. Like I have all the time in the f*ckin universe..

What if I told you : you can use whatever the fuck OS you want, whatever the fuck stack you want ?

And IF you take a job in a certain stack, don't like it ? Quit your job !

Stop beeing whining bitches. Don't like current job ? Find a new one.

You think your app is revolutionary ? TRY and push it (And fail)

You think that at 16 you know better than people who are 30+yo ? prove it by actions.

It's easy. You have full control of what you can do.

Stop bitching, start coding.

windows, linux, mac, MS-DOS. Noone cares what you use. As long as you do the job.

"Make a 3D cube using the skew and size functions in Microsoft Paint on Microsoft Windows 7"
I shit you not, this is a genuine task you can allot in the school-leaving exams(maturita) at my school.
A 3D FUCKING CUBE! IN MOTHERFUCKING MS PAINT!
I mean it would be a kind of an easy task if MS Paint did the math correctly but for some fucking reason when you skew something in MS Paint it also magically shrinks! It is not MS Paint, it's M$ Pain.

Just reinstalled Windows to an SSD, so I'm reinstalling​ MS office. Office 365 is helpfully provided by my university. I also use Visio a good bit, and again my University helpfully provides Visio 2016.

Install Office 365.
Download 2.2GB Visio iso.
Mount Visio iso, run setup.exe.
Get this message.

🖕

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

*Now a days*
We don't need viruses ☣ or malwares to slow down MS Windows 💻,
Two Tabs of Google Chrome does it delicately. 😂😂😂😂😂

Windows 3.1, MS-DOS and Paint.

<rant>
I really don't enjoy visual studio

Is not bad but it's not worth the disk space it takes up..

Also, if your disk is starting to fill up and vs is filling the most space, YOU CAN'T <swearword> UNINSTALL IT FROM YOUR PC

To remove the shit, I had to upgrade to Windows 10 (our school PC's are not allowed to have Linux) and delete my whole fucking disk, just to get it removed

Fix your shit ms

</rant>

So, i short circuited a fuse on my laptop (accidentally) and...

MS windows is running much better now. 😐 What even.

It hurts if you see this on Google Analytics for a Windows 10 UWP app!!
Google, I know you hate MS. Why do you have to show it on me??!!😢😢

I saw a rant about some department still using win98, and it reminded me, when I was in school the school library used MS-fucking-DOS, windows 10 was already out by that time...
The librarian lady was really surprised I even knew what it was, which meant she knew it was fucking ancient

VsCode.

I have been on a journey with editors, all the way back to using edit.exe in Windows 95, to notepad, MS FrontPage, Adobe Dreamweaver, PHPDesigner, vim, nano, then out to Eclipse, Atom, Brackets, notepad++, back to Atom, then VsCode.

And by far, vsCode has given me the most productivity and customisation of them all to not care about what project I open, what language it's written in, or what frameworks are working behind it. I can switch with workspaces and everything is setup to go, yes it's a pain in the ass to setup, but it's a ducking dream to just open and jump in.

Now being able to use VsCode for Salesforce has dropped any requirement for me to keep eclipse around.

The Windows SDK was failing to install because the version of vcredist was newer then it needed.

The setup simply failed without saying anything about that. I had to see the log and find out that vcredist failed to installed with error code 5100 and find that out from Google how to fix that.

Why is MS like this? Why not just say that your vcredist version is too new for this program? Just unistall it and it will be fixed?

I just wasted 2 hours behind this. If my work never needed it I would never even think about using this.

Win 10 on ARM will not make it. Here's why:

- The devices are ridiculously overpriced.
- Performance is abysmal with emulation.
- Native ports are rare because nobody buys the devices.
- MS doesn't get it.

Instead of addressing the chicken and egg problem, MS even fucks up more: Win 10 S, which is usually pre-installed, can only run shit from the app store. Yeah MS, you think just because Apple gets away with this crap, so can you? Newsflash, Windows isn't iOS, and you aren't Apple.

Even VS 2019 doesn't install the ARM toolchains by default. Because, why would MS entice devs to address ARM64 as conveniently as possible?

MS will just keep gawking at Apple like a pig at a clockwork, and Win 10 on ARM will go down like Windows Phone.

Microsoft seems to get progressively worse every year. My work transitioned from google products (email, drive, chat) to Microsoft & it was a humungous step backwards. Everything crashes & doesn't save. Edge sucks. Windows 10 sucks. IE always sucked. Office 365 sucks. One drive sucks. MS Teams sucks. 😑

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

In the latest version of Windows 10...way to go MS you're an awesome speller! :P

Hey... I've been selected for Microsoft as an SDE :)
Am I allowed to work on a Macbook at MS instead of a windows notebook?! 🤔

Today, in the course of my job, I said...

FFS. I HATE WINDOWS.

It has begun.

Took me five minutes to ssh into the Linux EC2 and get the Jenkins agent installed, configured, and running. Half a fucking hour for Windows Server 2012.

1) Can't ssh to it, so I connect via AWS console... Which means I have to install MS Remote Desktop. WHATEVER. FINE. It's not like ssh is quick and easy or anything.

2) Can't just use the command line, run the .jar &, cntl-z, and bg then log off. Noooo. I have to install the unpacked binaries as a fucking SERVICE. FINE. WHATEVER.

I'm so glad we have a Windows guy that does most of this shit. I can't stand it.

yet another Microsoft bashing rant...

I'm trying to get `Visual Studio`
You use your Windows 10 VM, use Edge, use Bing and search for `Visual Studio`.
First fucking result:
A Visual Studio alternative - A powerful C & C++ IDE - CLion
-- from jetbrains.com

Like... WTF, you not even promoting your' own stuff ?

But then for when you search 'firefox' w/ bing+edge a thick fat banner: 'Promoted by Microsoft': There's no need to download a new web browser.\n MS recommends Edge for fast ...

Documenting. Starting Microsoft Word to fill in a preconfigured template. It contains two numbered lists, but the numbering incorrectly continues from the first list to the second. Right-click > numbering > Set Numbering Value > Start new list. Bang! MS Word fucks up the complete formatting, margins, tabs, paragraph spacing... But the list numbering still continues from the first list to the second.

I SO FUCKING HATE MICROSOFT WORD FOR WINDOWS!!!

Linux or Windows - still a problem for inexperienced computer users.
I was an IT professional for 35 years but haven't looked at a line of code for 10 years. And it certainly looks different today -
I have trouble using my smart Phone. I have always disliked the intimidation tehniques practised by Microsoft over the years. When
I was running OS2 in the 90's I couldn't get any software for it because MS had persuaded the developers not to release any OS2 versions until Chicago (AKA WIN95) was released. I was forced to use Windows for years until I finally decided to try Linux. Linux
is a great answer but unfortunately unless you are a current programmer there seems to be some situations that force you to maintain a version of Windows (setting up devices, Printers and developed software). Now that UEFI has been introduced as the standard in new PCs it is very difficult just to install and run Linux. So as WIN10 (the most invasive and slow running Windows to date) is the only "Valid" OS - MS is still dictating what we can and can't do. I decided to sell my new PC and pick up an old BIOS PC so that I could run linux and Win 7 to accomplish
my needs. How long can this go on? When will Linux be a "valid" Operating System. And when will a non-programmer be easily able to setup his hardware and find necessary software to run on Linux.

Can anyone help me choose an antivirus for Windows ? If it is free it would be great !!

I am a full time linux lover, but I have to set up a windows pc for my parents, possibly win 7 on Intel NUC with atom processor.

The requirement is just ms office and similar applications.

Anyone else enjoy "uncropping" images embedded in MS Office documents? People cropping out other windows/tabs from full screenshots... I've seen some weird stuff!

It's not unusual to be sent documentation / screenshots saved as MS Office documents (Word, PowerPoint etc.). Kinda annoying but whatever.

You know what, I think the USA government just had a Windows Update, oh no wait, their versions of Windows are too old, they ain’t attacked by MS anymore.

So, when hovering on that element in the bottom task bar in Windows 11, it shows those two icons (wifi and sound) grouped together.

Left click anywhere on that button and it opens the same menu.

But if you right click, now it suddenly depends if your cursor was on the one or on the other icon. It opens different menus!

Great UX! Good job, MS!

I don't usually bash on any operating systems, but if I wanted to search for "how to get help in windows 10" on fuckings Bing, I'd do that myself. I'd rather have F1 do something useful.

This was probably MS customer service's idea to make their life easier.

Bruteforce programming about which I've already ranted earlyer and also let's implement everything in our ms access database and regularly open the DB using the Windows task skeduler.

What I'm doing now, writing a JS library for a simple kitchen timer (like, something that can be wound up, is ticking, can be paused, etc). Here's a list of neat stuff I've learned:

Polyfilling as a lib author (I decided against it).
Packaging the lib (using Rollup, ES6 modules are totes cool).
Using flow to add static typing in strategic places (started appreciating types in JS since reading up on functional programming).
Modelling state and transitions using an explicit state machine. (Fucking finally. There's usually an implicit state machine somewhere, only spread out all over the app...)
Using mostly side-effect free methods, being very explicit about when and why things are mutated).
Test-first/TDD (ish) using Jest and the awesome Wallabyjs.
Freeing up mental capacity by letting Prettier format my code for me (it was hard to let go but totally worth it).
Started using git.

Did all work on Ubuntu after pretty much a lifetime of Windows (initially to separate work from gaming) and finally swapped MS Visual Studio for Atom.

When it's finished I'm going to publish it on GitHub, which will also be a first for me. Might try out some CI platform while I'm at it.

tl;dr: wrote some js, felt good

So on top of my Windows update frustrations, I just found out that Microsoft has been scamming me out of money for two years!
I bought an android tablet in 2016 which came with a free 1 year subscription to Office365. They demanded credit card info, so I made sure to pre-cancel it to avoid getting charged when the year was up.
Today I find a line on my bank statement that just says 'MICROSOFT', and I think to myself: 'What the hell is that?!?'
It takes some digging for the email adress I used and trying to navigate various MS sites until I realize that those bastards have auto-renewed the subscription twice now!
I missed it last year, but luckily since I caught the latest one within 30 days I can get a full refund.
Will contact their support tomorrow to get the rest of it back. Too tired right now to deal with their support jungle of circular links and virtual assistants...

Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.

Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.

Thinking how this feature came to be....

1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!

I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.

**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.

Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.

IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....

Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...

New job, new laptop, which happens to be 2k euro MS surface crap.
It comes with win10 S which only allows store apps to be installed, so yeah no making bootable linux for me untill windows drag my ballsack through 2 hours of updating to a pro version.

Wanted to do a nice sweet new debian on it - nope, keyboard not supported in the installation.
I restart...and the fucker completely denied me untill it does another update, which is taking an hour..for now.

And wtf only one usb and mini dp port? In such an expensive laptop?
Cant even plugin my display untill my dock arrives.

Guess I'll have to suck it up and get used to windows for developing for now.

Thx microsoft

So I'm trying out docker and see how I can make use of it, current setup:
1. Ubuntu on VM and Mac for Asp.Net core development
2. Windiws for MS only stuff like SQL Server
3. Ubuntu Server on VM and is running docker images: MS image for SQL and Ms image for dinner core.

What I did so far one script which will handle updating SQL Server database on windows with the changes done on docker SQL image
Then publish website from Mac or Ubuntu to docker image. I have yet to find a way to execute scripts remotely on a docker image using bash script from a remote

What should I do next? And for home setup go for Ubuntu server or CentOS? Any recommended packages for server administration? Workflow ..etc.?

What the hell is WRONG with Windows 10. Why does it need so much storage space? I get to only use 219+38.6+13.8 GiB and Windows gets to use 564 GiB of data to piggyback on data and storage space to push nonsense updates to user who do not want them. Use your own fucking servers, MS. I wish this fucking OS burns in hell.

In a recent venture, I had to use an office suite and a photo editing software regularly. As a Linux user, I tried using Libreoffice and gimp. But that was just a mess. My other project partners were using MS office. Format, image alignments, fonts.. everything was messed up. Same happened wih the gimp. I know Photoshop, learnt while studying. Gimp was just no match to that. I was forced to go back to Windows. And I was surprised that the latest MS office and Adobe Creative Cloud were excellent. MS office was smoother and faster than Libreoffice.

I love linux. I have tried all the major distros and I love all of them. But I would still say that Linux is not the best option for day to day non-dev tasks. Whatever Richard Stallman and the Open Source Community say, Linux lack good softwares, at least some good document, photo, audio and video editing softwares.

I have to maintain a system for a financial institution that only works with Windows XP and Ms Access 2003. All VBA code, security is handled using a workgroup file. Can't upgrade anything because client doesn't want to pay for it.

The nostalgic feeling you get when you find an old PC running Windows XP, and you start going through the accessories and games start menu folders, always have to start up the good old MS Paint :3

Was anyone else disappointed when you saw that Cortana was not the hologram from Halo in Windows 10?

I think MS completely missed the boat on that feature. I would have loved to have had a moddable Cortana hologram to interface with on searches.

So, at the very day I've been expelled, the university cancelled my MSDNAA account as if they thought they would punish me. (They got Office, Windows and everything Microsoft for students for free there)

It's sad but half of the students have no idea what MSDNAA is and how to use it. Then there is the other half who would still feel like they've been stolen from even if they got a MS product for free.

And then there is me. Because of math which is significantly impossible, I've been expelled. Fuck.

You know this amazing Windows feature where you can log in with MS email?

Q: Guess what happens if you have flaky WIFI at home and boot up windows10.

A: the boot process takes at least half an hour. Still waiting for the login window to appear...

Just got a lovely update on Windows 10. It pops up on login and informs me of this great new browser called edge. Then it fucking takes over the screen and gives me one fucking option: "Get Started". I cannot escape, I cannot close the app, I cannot right click the app icon on the toolbar and close this POS. My only option is to fucking ctrl-alt-del and kill this piece of garbage. You also cannot uninstall this shit either. I even found a thread where the MS guy was trying to help them uninstall, but the end result is that you cannot on newer Windows 10. So I have this POS thing that keeps updating flash and other shit periodically that is nothing but a security hole. Now I never want to ever run this garbage.

The irony is this. I have read a lot of good things about Edge. I was considering it as an alternative to Chrome for specific use cases. Now I absolutely no longer want to run this fucktard pos software. This one experience has now tarnished any gains MS has in the browser arena. It is just more overbearing malware being pushed by assholes. Tech these days is defined by assholes. Apple is assholes, Google is bigger assholes, and MS is still the classic assholes.

Microsoft LET ME FUCKING JUST WORK! Is this not the pro version or what?

Fuck you edge and your pos os.

Now I feel better!

Edit: That was a rendition of the evil caption Kirk from episode 27.

So I got the examn project, which is nice. But then I saw the line in the picture:

"The programming language has to be C# using Windows Forms in MS Visual Studio"

I've added an emoji that expresses how I feel about it. Or in other words, SEND HELP.

Recently I wondered why so many people complained about Windows 10. I had no issues, no crashes, and no bluescreens. Everything was fine.

Then the "anniversary update" installed. After days of restoring partitions, reinstalling, boot repairs and blue screens I realized Windows 10 is now incompatible with my PC.

Well, good thing MS extended support for Windows 7...

Today I investigated how one could build a Windows 10 VM.
We have an Azure subscription in our company (which is expensive enough), which gives me access to their new interface where it looked like I could build a Windows 10 VM. I was so happy that MS actually made this feature for developers, until I got redirected to the MSDN front-page telling me that you would need ANOTHER FUCKING SUBSCRIPTION to do that. This is fucked up. You pay for access to Office 365, then you pay for Azure and THEN you pay for MSDN just to pay for another Windows 10 license so you can test a simple Azure feature on Windows 10. How about nope.

*use windows, ms office, vsc, skype probably code in ts, ... *
*rant about microsoft buying github*
I'm not a microsoft fan either, but thats the sad truth.

Bash on Windows is incoming soon! As a dual boot win10/Ubuntu user I am pretty psyched. Curious as to what you all think, and opinions from insider program participants.

I just hope it isn't half-assed.

Night mode is now available in Windows natively.

<3 you MS

I hate those microfucktards!!!!

I have a brand new usb flash with 125GB capacity and ~ 115GiB.

I wanted to install a bootable Windows 10 installation onto the flash and downloaded the fucking recommended windows 10 install tool from the ms fuckpage.

And? This dipshit of a "tool" created the windows installation and partitioned my flash into two partition's. One is 30GB and the other....

90 GB that is not assigned!!!! Fuck you.

I mean....why the hell does this stupid tool formats my flash to fat 32? And why there is no option to use exfat? I'd don't get it.

Ouch - got my first Windows blue screen in years! (Lacking a picture of it, I stole this one from the interwebs)

Cause: The LITE-ON SSD cache drive. So, can't blame MS for this one, but BSODs are great flamebait regardless of cause.

The SSD was 3 years old, which seems a very short life span for an SSD, unless it's an OCZ.

I fucking hate the modern tech stacks that are forcing to use their products and workflows. Fucking Microsoft. Used to be good but now it's shit.

I had to email the written homework. After finishing it, I attached it and sent it to my professor via email (Outlook on Web). I did not pay much attention.

5 hours later he replies to me saying that he cannot accept this form of submission. I was confused because he mentioned that he wanted it only as attachment via email.

Turns out, Outlook did not attach the PDF. Instead, uploaded it on OneDrive, and embedded a private link on the body. It was 11:55 PM, I was working for 10 hours straight with that assignment and didn't pay attention at all before sending. Fuck this. He was generous enough to accept the submission after the deadline.

I am glad that I went away from Windows 5 years ago. I don't want to touch any MS product anymore. Hopefully they do not fuck up GitHub and implement it with their other half-assed products.

In my grade 3 first exposed to computer and uses MS Paint in Windows 95

Really missing that 😭

Bought myself a new graphics card as my old one died. After i got my system runnning again ( Linux Mint 17), by fixing the video drivers i concluded that i may want to get into gaming again.
I have a free Windows 10 Pro licence lying around so lets try to get dual boot running.
Hmm seems like i cant install windows after linux without installing grub2 again through a recovery disc. Well okay wanted to try out mint 19 anyway.

Downloaded both Isos. Linux mint is 1,5Gb and Windows 10 is 4,3Gb. MS what are you doing ?!
Only have a 4GB USB-Drive and dont want to buy a new one. GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MICROSOFT.
So at a forum i found a software to remove packages from windows isos and now i'm sitting here removing windows bloatware for 4 FUCKING HOURS, JUST TO INSTALL WINDOWS.

Ofc that tool was only windows specific so i had to install windows in a vm first.
Fucking tired of this shit.

Can we just for a moment recognize how absolutely fucked Windows update is?

I have done everything, EVERYTHING, outside of booting from a live Linux OS and permanently deleting the windows update executables. All this to stop windows from force updating and rebooting my system while it's locked.

I've killed services, schedules, edited the registry, changed group policy. I even set my wireless connection as metered. Fun fact about that, if MS deems the update to be "priority" they'll download it anyway and reboot, so fuck your data-cap.

I wouldn't have a problem with it IF they would put everything back the way it was before, but those fucking cucks can't even be bothered with doing that. But you bet your fucking sassy ass they start up all the bullshit services I disabled last update are all running.

I don't even know WHY I even try.

Doesn't matter anyway, in a few months I won't even be able to use half the tools I use on Windows for work due to licensing issues 🤷‍♂️

At that point I will give a big fucking finger to Windows 🖕 and use a VM for all the fucking work related bullshit.

Fuck you Microsoft, I would say it's been fun but you're a god damned disaster. I wish that I could send a message to the entire MS board on how much they have failed, but unfortunately I rather like my freedom and it's frowned upon sending rotting roadkill in the mail.

Fuck you Microsoft for adding so many unnecessary fetures that nobody Needs/wants to use and which also slow down my pc.
I am specifically talking About that sily history-feature which is present for a few months now.
Guess what? I don't need it! Why? BECAUSE I DON'T USE EDGE SO THERE IS NO HISTORY TO LOAD. I DON'T USE (NEITHER I WAN'T TO) YOUR SLOW PHOTOS APP TO SEE IT IN THE WINDOWS HISTORY. I DON'TUSE ANY OF YOOUR SILLY INBUILT UWP APPS.
Since the update which added this feature, my pc is like 2 times slower, because it loads the whole last-5 months history.

Hey, thank you for nothing!

Microsoft is always at it.

Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.

So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.

Windows 10 users, do this:

Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....

How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?

I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.

Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?

But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)

So needless to say she needs help. All the time.

So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.

I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.

Wanna know why?

Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:

- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer

Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe

And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.

So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!

So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.

I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.

I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!

However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.

The reason I don't use Linux on my desktop is its hobby of saying “fuck off” spontaneously and without warning when I need it the most.

A designer friend shares his After Effects project and asks to export that to Lottie? Fuck off.
Your Android phone decided to brick itself with an OTA update (yep, happened to me, thanks Sony), and you need to unbrick it? Fuck off!
A musician friend wants to connect his audio card (that of course has no Linux drivers) and record some bass riffs? Tell him to fuck right off mate.
Your boss suddenly asks you to check an MS Access file for him as he's en route to an important meeting? Yep, you guessed it — fuck off.
Your government now requires your tax papers to have digital signatures? Fuck off, it only works for Mac and Windows.
Want to connect an old digital camera? Would you please fuck off?

I know I'm gonna get heat from Linux fanboys, especially on this platform. After all, a designer should know how to export to Lottie if he's a real designer, you should've bought a better phone, your friend should've had his laptop with him, your boss should've used open source tools instead of MS Access… Wait, he was tasked that from above? Then his boss should've used open source tools! Government mandates digital signatures? Well, tell them to port that to Linux! Start a riot! Get a better government! Move to a better country! Digital cameras? Who uses them in 2024, especially old ones! Are you some kind of hipster?

I know preparing for corner cases is bona fide premature optimization, but that's the whole point — with Mac or Windows, you don't have to prepare at all. You always have options. With Linux, your number one option is to have Windows handy if need be.

Linux works perfectly on my server, but not on my laptop.

I am really thinking of switching my main computer over to linux. I’m getting pretty tired of windows bugs and I keep finding myself wanting to use linux commands. The only reason I haven’t switched is MS Office products and video games, but I suppose I could make a new windows image just for that and dual-boot...

I hate LibreOffice. I truly despise it. I have one page with an article containing an image with a caption and on the next page is another article with some tables. I have to save it in the piece of shit Microsoft docx format, because everyone in the world uses Windows and MS Word. But everything's fine so far. Now let's try to save, close and re-open. Ok, cool, cool, cool. And what do we see? The captioned image has glitched into the next page and fucked everything up. I've tried re-saving four or five times already and it keeps glitching back into the next page in various and new ways. Fucking piece of garbage software. I hate this so much. End me and my suffering, please! I hope I never have to write documents ever again! Of course that's naive - the rest of my life will probably require a million more garbage documents. I don't want to dualboot into Windows with MS Word. I fucking hate Windows too. It's slow, it's weird, it doesn't have a normal shell (ok, there's WSL, but that doesn't count, that's just a wrapped Linux). P.S. AAAaaaaa!11A1!!

Your copy of Windows can literally break down to an unusable mess, make your cat explode and burn your house down - and still the first solution of MS TechNets support guys would be to run "sfc /scannow".

tldr; Fuck Windows networks

I do some first level support for a befriended architect when i got some sparetime after regular work. Its nice and easy extra cash most of the times but not today.

We decided to ditch the money thiving IT admin that did not care about doing his work. And instead of taking over his pile of shit i adviced to redo the whole network, drop the massive server that did idle 99% of the day and update all PCs some of them did still run IE8 and had no active anti virus, yeah that dude was real shit.

Anyways i proceded with the whole process today and everything worked expect the fucking windows network, that fucking domain controller setup blocked the fucking internetconnection even though DNS and DHCP where set up correctly. Why does fucking ms need to make it so difficult to set up fucking network accounts....

I will have to finish this shit up tomorrow and this on a weekend...

Fucking windows update.. after the spring update the mobile driver is broken or somehow it doesn't recognized my mobile. Fucking cunts.

I got a new computer. Ended up getting a Sager Laptop. I also ended up getting Windows 10 Pro. I had forgotten how shitty Windows 10 has gotten. My biggest gripe are the start button (fixed using open shell) and the creation and adding users. Microshit goes out of their way to trick you into getting a POS MS account. I knew the trick when my PC first started to stay offline so MS could not force a MS account. However, I added a user later and again they are fucking with you to force a user account. Figured out which non-descript place to click to just add a local account. This is shitty behavior of an OS. Especially one that claims to be Pro. This is not how to win customers. It just aggravates people that know what they are doing.

The bright side to this is could take out my frustration after I moved my Fallout 4 setup to the new computer. Mod Organizer 2 makes it easy to move everything at once. Configured one config file and boom I can now run it on Ultra settings. Explode a few skulls and reduce a few more to radioactive ash/goo. Frustrations are gone. lol

Also on the bright side with running Pro. I can select Update control via group policy. This doesn't seem to work on Home.

I honestly think it is not that bad that github is now acquired by MS...
I ve read various articles that explains MS has saved github from 'extinction due to lack of leadership' ..
As long as they dont affect the base thing and are planning to sell wrappers around github, i think it is a good thing for business..Because i always think that an open source project is more stable , when a leading company makes a lot of money providing its wrapper .. The company would make all steps possible to make sure that github doesnt become obselete ( which it will if MS makes it bloated with its extensions ) Example Redhat for linux..

By seeing many posts here, i only see hatred towards Windows and IE , not fear about MS acquiring github.

Recently started computer science course at college. Linux user since 3 years.
Started to learn MS-DOS yesterday.

Teacher: To create a file use 'copy con <filename>'

Me (thinking): WTF, DOS doesn't have a seperate create command like 'touch'

ms paint on windows xp.

This might be controversial, but hear me out. I actually really like Windows 11.

I know needing an MS account, telemetry data, TPM, etc... are disqualifiers for some. I get that. And, I'm not suggesting that I'm going to blow out my Linux systems to install it at home.

But, being forced to use Windows on my office PC - I much prefer the feeling of 11 to 10.

Also, the "new" terminal is actually really nice.

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

Back to windows
Reason: ms office

As we all know we have Apple, MS and linux fanboys & girls here. I myself am strongly MS oriented however I like and use Linux too. I have never tried running a virtualized Win10 pro on Linux though. Anyone ever did that? And if so, what did you use to get it working and did it work well? Since my last 2 clients I always work on a VM so that I have a windows VM specifically setup for my client so their config and apps don't mess with my personal dev needs. So I curently run Win10 pro inside hyper v vm on win10 pro. I'd like to experiment and run win 10 pro vm on linux so any suggestions etc are highly appreciated.

Windows just activated TPM on my Windows 10 computer on first of february 2024.
The main reason I stuck with Windows 10 was the sole reason of not wanting to upload my hardware-fingerprint to MS.
Well, guess they just got it themselves and now, disabling the TPM comes with a lot of downsides, as it is now holding my certificates hostage...

I just love Windows apps on Mac OS lol, this morning MS Word hung for a long time, was completely unresponsive and then I had to 'force quit,' the thing.

Lo and behold, the MS crash reporter opened and it hung for a long time, was completely unresponsive and I had to 'force quit'. How the fuck do they even get through testing?

!rant

Yesterday I have to do something I never thought I'd need to. A little background: I dislike PHP and MS SQL Server; however, they pay the bills.

So yesterday in order to get work done I had to install in my Linux machine a Windows 7 VirtualBox with SQL Server on it and had to compile the php mssql modules by hand and... everything worked flawlessly. It was pretty awesome.

Kudos to VirtualBox and the team behind the open source php mssql modules.

Oh mighty how I hate Windows 10
1. It will run that "antimalware" malware killing your CPU
2. Fucking shit will auto restart for updates so if you run some 24h process you are doomed, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, unless maybe deep shit digging in MS god only knows registry values
3. Will be your fucking daddy showing you blue box, "oh we detected you may be a pussy, so we prevented this exe from running, please click 50 times to allow it because we care about you by creating virus prone OS in 1990 and we continue to do so"

NO Microshit horsefuckeers stop developing this garbage OS, let it die and force the world to use Linux, yes harder at first for every day Joe, but once learned it's state of the art OS, even your Azure cloud runs of Linux so for fuk sake stop develping WinDOS!
Or let the user to configure "fuck off mode" I don't want your virus scanner I don't want your protection, just fuck off and let people to whatever the duck the want!

Urgh.. the amount of things you have to know as a developer.. it can get stressful and frustrating sometimes when (in-depth) technology knowledge is demanded from you (for instance, for a job position)..
It's like being a doctor, being a lifelong student.

A few examples of what I had to know during my career:
Java, .NET, Python, PHP, JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3, Sass/Less, Node.js, ReactJS, AngularJS, Vue.js, Cordova, Ionic, Android, design patterns, SOLID, databases (design, implementation, administration, both NoSQL and relational,..), deployment tools (Octopus, Jenkins,..), VCS, CI/CD, HTTP, networking, security (OAuth2, CORS, XSS, CSRF,..), algebra, algorithms, software testing, profiling, Linux, Unix, Windows, MS Office (advanced mail filtering,..), ITIL, IT Law (licensing and its implications when choosing a product, distribution right,..), server architecture,..

Sure yeah, I know, I've studied all that at university but.. it's been too long (almost a decade now). I have to revisit that knowledge.

Is there good monospaced font for windows? specially android studio, i don't know who the hell is choose this shits for MS..
MS your fonts are sucks, believe me :)

Tux paint on MS windows vista

As promissed.

Day #1 on THE other project. Nothing fancy, just setting up my dev env. Got a decent pc with all the required network permissions. And this time I got w10 [last year I was working there on w7 pc via rdp from another w7 laptop. Dont ask...]
of course no localadmin rights to set shit up. Downloaded all the installs, found someone who has admin rights to run them. I even managed to get admin powershell!

Ran all installers, enabled long paths support, env vars, tweak here, tweak there,... Installed git bash to at least have a taste of shell. Decided to try out wsl. Enabled the feature, didnt reboot right away.
Rebooted. 2xclick on ubuntu setup and I get an error claiming wsl is not ebabled. Wtf? Did I do it wrong? I see bash command is there now so I must have done it right. After some googling I found out that even though I can enable wsl, it doesnt work on my version of windows. It's too okd they say. Yeah, tx MS, that's very intuitive and user friendly!

Allright, my hopes to habe a decent sub-os died. Git bash it is :( but I miss tmux soooo much. Then I came across smth that caught my eye. Msys2 it's called. Apparently it's based on cygwin and has a pacman package manager! ´pacman -S tmux´ -- hippee-ka-yay motherfuckers! It's not the best terminal emulation, but it works quite allright and it has tmux. And netcat!

Banished to mouseclickerland still managed to find a good enough shell. Yayy!

So there it is. My first day's ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries.
If you know a better shell I could set up on w10, please, share

I installed a linux distribution it's called Zorin, i installed the latest one (Zorin Core 17) for a client since Windows 7 was giving him a headache, it was a very old machine with 4GB RAM with a celeron cpu if i remember, i suggest i will install linux and you won't have more issues with wifi and the printer he said okay, I installed everything, printer was recognized immediately Libre office was installed wifi is connected, security updates are done

After 2 days, he sent me a voice message telling me hey what is this zorin? Zorin everywhere, it's like if I'm using someone else program,I have nothing to do with the espionage things, I want windows back, i was crying he made me laugh for a week, i enjoyed listening to his voice messages on WhatsApp, whenever i get upset i listen to him and get excited hahahahhaha espionage? Do you think he let it go? Every 2 days i receive a voice message complaining about Zorin and how i was spying on him hahaha I explained over and over how secure linux is and how Microsoft knows everything he does on his machine, after giving me a headache i sent a friend and he installed ms 7 back and i never heard of him again

How can not one, not two, but many many things JUST be so wrong!? like..
Windows. (Yes. THE OS). Why? well... we begin with the garbage, right? the BLOAT.
cortana
mspaint
internet explorer <- wh..WHA?! wh?!?!
ms edge <- okay.. (I saying okay as in a figure of speech I would like to remove it honestly)

why can't I remove internet explorer, and they make another internet explorr called microsoft edge - you guessed it - I can't remove ms edge either.
What's next?! :D
bloat umbruella version -0.1? :D <- a new internet explorer. for 2042.

Cortana. <- some might say "that's not Sooo bad tho". It might not be, but if if it is for me - I would like to remove it.

Okay. okay. moving onto the software.
`V`-Yeah you guessed right. on the first letter.
VISUAL STUDIO.

my face: 😲
I compare visual studio to windows xp to internet explorer to windows overall. they share so much in common...

forced updates,
fixes,
BLOCKS you to compile programs because of NUMEROUS REASONS LIKE..
comment out "CRC303030 whatever" to ignore this message.
you need the build tools vx.x.x.y.x.y.x.t..z.z.z.(100 billion digits later)..x.x.Z OR alternatively you could re-target your solution by (...) (and now today I had enough, I dont see the retarget solution - And I am sure, WHEN I SEE IT - it will just be another problem..

... 💥

I am surprised how windows can run so fluently, with all this crap. Fluently as in actually being running. I am a fan of linux instead though but..
(question to me would probably be why you use windows not linux then?) sometimes I code on windows.. 🤦‍♀️

and it is a pain.

workloads,updates,options,BILLION OF OPTIONS, BILLION OF BUTTONS, stuff I never ever use, takes time to reinstall,install,remove, - windows also needs to restart after each simple thing.... (!?)

sorry. this was nice to write this rant. PHEW! thank GOSH this site exists! 😘 😍

Dad brought home a i386 based desktop with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 back in 1993.

Learned how to use basic command line to run video games like Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, Kilo Blaster, Wolfenstein, Doom, Raptor. All the classics. Good times.

I think we still have the computer somewhere.

That's like… every fucking browser in the world including the one you made, MS... wtf?

Microsoft Partner Center (aka Windows Dev Center) is a fucking joke.

It seems like very version of Ubuntu I use at work has jank. Ubuntu 18.04 would have file managers that just die. After locking/unlocking the screen it would move windows between monitors. One window would seemingly cause other windows to have discoloration and I would see phantom objects text overlaid with what looks like transparency. This was all Gnome. Lots of little quirks that I just got used to.

Now I am running 22.04 and while a lot of jank went away I am getting new jank. Every once in a while if I move a window or bring a window up after hiding the window. The window will oversize across the screen like I zoomed in. Noticing this with Firefox. It goes back to normal size real quick. But it is kind of wild. Jank that stayed is my external monitor I have attached through hdmi takes its sweet time to reactivate after being asleep. This might actually be a weird hardware issue. This is also Gnome.

I just find it wild that this jank is there and we are like: "Oh well. At least it ain't MS Windows jank..."

just had a bluescreen in win 10 killing my newest project and reducing it to ashes😡
for no reason
not even an error code
fuck windows and its update policies. my laptop is way slower and more instable since the new fall update. it killed some software i had to reinstall and ms changed the options for advertisement again. ive had enough of windows
im finally switching over to Linux and im going to bann win 10 on a vm

After couiple of hours (Yes, apprently it's insane how hard is to add a new NIC to a linux machine and make it start on boot), I finally got my connexion working !

Story :
Server has original MB 1Gbits card. Internet connexion is 1.1 Gbps. So 1Gb card only picked at 940 Mbits download

I bought a 2.5 Gb card (new nic)

Pluged it in : Nothing
Couple of ifconfig -a etc, bring device UP : Yeah working !
Reboot : Nothing

/etc/interfaces : nothing

And why it's not eth0 and eth1 etc as before but some thing cryptic like enp3s0.

Well, at least now everything working (Apperently there is a new "network plan" config file in yaml... what a waste, DO FUCKING JSON YOU RETARDS)

Ping is awsome tho ! Same cable on windows Machine, I get 5 ms.

Microsoft have recently announced two things that are related to each other:
1. Windows 11 will be equipped with a built-in Copilot that will "see" everything the user does and store it locally (at least so they say).
2. A new PC, redesigned from ground up with AI in mind, called CoPilot+ PC, will be released in June.

I'm not sure if any of this is good news. It's disturbing enough that MS Word interfers with my work by displaying "friendly" pop ups about how Copilot can assist me. And there seems to be no way of turning the damn thing off. I don't want to use Word anymore, but at work I'm forced to use Microsoft's shitty office applications. So now I'm resorting to WordPad, which has a much cleaner interface and hasn't yet been infected with M$ Artificial Idiot CockPilot.

!rant
anyone got any experience with Samsung Dex? I still keep Windows as dual boot on my laptop since I sometimes need MS Office with full functionality and not only the limited online/mobile version. I heard that one could install full MS Office on the Dex since at some screen size Microsoft requires that or something...? No idea. Any experiences?
Since if it is possible I'd get that instead of the dual boot.

I was a bit confused when my supervisor told me to use Windows VM through Vagrant for testing environment. AFAIK each VM should be treated as a single machine, so it requires a Win license.

There are several criterias for us to be able to use Win WM legally.
One of them is Qualified Multitenant Hoster (QMTH) Program from MS, it authorizes qualified 3rd-party hosting service providers to host customers’ Win VM. Other option is to check if we have on-premise dedicated use rights.

I don't know if we fulfill any of the criteria. I don't want to cause any trouble so I am not gonna ask my supervisor about it.

What's your favorite editor for Web development? Using Coda on the Mac and good old UltraEdit when on Windows (with custom theme). Tried Sublime and MS Visual Studio Code but they never stuck.

1) Starting long running process on a Windows test computer.
2) Switching back to working computer and coding.
3) Switching to the test computer to see how the long process is doing and sees the Win10 reboot screen saying "We are getting a few things ready for you..."

Just gotta love it when MS decides when it's a good time to reboot. :-(

tldr: Deleted Win10, turned out for better
---------
**This happened a few months ago**
---------
So one day I decide I have had enough of Windows 10 and wanted to go back to Linux (A long time ago I had dual booted Ubuntu, but messed it up changing video drivers). So I create a Mint installation USB and get to work. I boot up the installation and delete the old partitions from the Ubuntu install. I install Mint and boot it up, everything works fine and dandy! I decide I want to get back on Windows to get back a few files that I wanted copies over. I turn off the computer and *try* to boot up Windows. I get an error message that I am UNABLE to boot. WHAT! After further checking, I realize that I had deleted the MBR partition of Windows. Pretty sure I could remake it if I tried hard enough, but I am starting to realize that it feels good to be totally MS independent! Now I am using all open-source software available to Linux and have no need for Windows. I do miss some of the games though...

PS: No files were lost due to backups. Save Lives, Do Backups!

When starting primary school, my parents got me a low-spec Pentium 4 with Windows 98. I was fascinated and started learning many things in MS Office. This led to small adventure-like games in PowerPoint.

I quickly found the limits of PowerPoint and started to dive into C++ at around 10. I never made a game, but only because I experienced how unlimited the possibilities are you have when you know how to write software and this realisation kept me motivated to learn more and more things.

1 of the many windows rants i will make since i have to use that on work's laptop.

Let's start.
20GB for an IDE? what a joke.

Seriously MS. Are you fucking retarded? You have a fuckin retarded windows store, and i need to open it 3 times for it to be functional? Fuck you.

I want to change the default browser. YES I FUCKIN WANT TO CHANGE IT, STOP FUCKIN ASKING ME 500 TIMES IF I'M SURE ABOUT IT AND DO THE THING I TOLD YOU TO DO. Fuck you.

2GB on startup? Thanks, appreciated. Miss my 250MB on my linux laptop. FUCK YOU.

Did i fuckin tell you i want to sync the onedrive? I clicked that shit to disable it and you decided to sync the fuck out of it? Fuck you.

Candy crash and other retarded games? LOL, can't say anything. The laptop is from the job, i won't bother uninstalling that shit. In any case MS would reinstall them again. Fuck you.

Fans at 100% for no reason and battery draining like it's a cold drink that drinks someone who is thirsty? Thanks MS, very helpful. Fuck you.

Powershell? Well i leave that. Whenever i remember how slow it is i want to throw the laptop of the window. Fuck you.

Notifications? Thanks, it's very good thing to spam them for no fucking reason. Fuck you.

Skype? Who the fuck told you to install it? Fuck you.

Well i won't say anything about their fuckin updates. Every one knows how retarded and piece of shit they are.

Everything is shit and I have to work drive thru till 11.15pm.

Everything appears to require js at one point or another (though kotlin requires groovy which, in the intellij IDE, the template it COMES with is fucking broken from the start)

c# could work (and microsoft shop jobs are plentiful) but fucking VS code is a headache and microsoft seems intent on locking everyone into VS and making everything they touch turn to shit, like the king midas of diarrhea (thanks MS, monodevelop is source only on windows). Also c# for android (xamarin) requires apache cordova to do anything, which means...TADA, FUCKING JAVASCRIPT and all the other shit it brings with it.

Java seems like an option, lots of jobs available, but I need netbeans for desktop (javafx) and Android Studio
separately in order to do anything. And Android Studio now uses, of all things...FUCKING GROOVY.

*cocks gunfinger and points in mouth*
why must every fucking thing be it's own DSL and make everything about the fucking ceremony of configuration over
fucking convention?

Haven't any of these fucking cocksuckers heard of MAKE? Or do they just masturbate over how intelligent and smart they are for having reinvented the god damn WHEEL?

I'll see you at the drive through. Will that be all for today?

Outlook irritates the heck out of me with its distracting notification bar that's recently begun popping up almost every time I start the god damn shitty application. What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this annoying crap. Our support technicians are unable to solve it, so I wrote feedback to Microsoft. I don't think they are ever going to answer, though. They haven't even responded to another problem with Outlook that I reported nine months ago! Microsoft are reallly inconsistent, to say the least. Some of their products, like Visual Studio, VS Code and Microsoft Flight Simulator, are excellent! But, more mainstream software, like MS Office and Outlook, suck. Windows (I'm using Windows 10) is so so. It works alright if you know your ways with the registry editor. The same goes for the support. If you're lucky, you can get hold of a real, flesh-and-blood person who patiently guides you through the cumbersome process of, for example purchasing and installing Minecraft (believe me, it isn't easy, took almost an hour for the support person to solve. Creds to him). Sometimes, like when activating an old Windows license, you get to talk to a bot and that, surprisingly, works very well too. However, if you report any bug or feedback to Microsoft through an application's help section, you 'll never hear from them. They just ignore it.

The whole windows server + ms sql server ordeal is the biggest fucking joke I've ever seen in my time being a dev.
The ms sql dashboard uses a hidden user to access files and stuffs, so I spent 1 hour trying to make the dashboard's explorer to find the database dump file, only to find out that the file need to be owned by the hidden user. So
I spent about 1 hour trying to set the correct owner of the dump file, but to no avail, the explorer still couldn't pick it up. Then I spent another hour to set the correct owner for the containing folder. Finally, a 6 years old answer on SO point out that I should just put the fucking .bak file in their default folder, and voilà, the fucking thing works like a charm.

I can't get why Microsoft has to go out of their way making permission management on their os so fucking convoluted. The fucking usernames are a fucking mess, you have to go through a bunch of form to change just the owner of a file (please don't start me up with that running some command on powershell bullshit, I would rather deal with bad GUI than a badly designed CLI)

If I were to being positive though, Microsoft is actually one of a few tech companies having a good technical decision of moving their shits over Linux.

Windows 11 is here. And there is a bug that prevents it from being installed 🐞

I got "incompatible" error so I downloaded MS compat. checker and it says: need TPM

I go to BIOS and enable TPM. The tool now says YES, compatible. But the Windows update panel still says NO, not compatible.

Bottom line, Microsoft does NOT want people to install Windows 11. If they did, then they would not have silly bugs, such as this one. All they had to do is to clear the compat. flag cache after restart

windows 10 update is the last straw that pushes me to get a mac. Just spent 2 hours trying to download an undownloadable update and unstuck a stuck update without luck. Seriously dealing w ms product is the most frustrating thing in the world ever

I used to be able to connect my Windows laptops to any TV with HDMI and duplicate the screen for presentations, watching movies, etc. But since about 6 months ago I can’t get ANY TVs to work with ANY Windows laptops. Everything I’m reading says it’s either out of date drivers (nope) or something to do with a crap update from MS. I’m going with the latter. It can’t be coincidence that ALL my updated machines suddenly can’t do this basic function.

My Windows Computer is crapping out more and more with each "update".
Currently, it often hangs when shutting down or restarting. Completely out of the blue!
Like, I remember it updated itself a few days ago and now I have random problems, crashes and a few more bloat-/spyware apps that I didnt order.
Also, windows added a few more cryptic services to my OS that now phone home to all countries all around the world.
This is a nightmare!

I use GNU/Linux.
Roommates use MS/Windows. Virgin slanders.

So I was wondering what was going on with Recall. Heard it would take screenshots without permission and send to MS. No idea if that is completely true. This continues to confirm that Windows 11 is a complete shit show. As I was looking I found a discussion of copilot being forced on users. Huge threads at Microsoft support saying it is a piece of shit (and that was a one of the nicer comments). So even before Recall comes out copilot is destroying the desktop experience. Is this the end? Will this force users to Linux or Mac? I am actually in shock how incompetent Microsoft is becoming.

I run games and support clients with Windows 10. I absolutely do not ever want to run Windows 11. It just keeps getting worse and worse.

Question to you all, do you really think you own your computer or system/data when almost all sites/services out there state very clearly in there ELUA(Fuck yes ours) that they might use your data how they feel fit, now this does not stop with websites, Mac, Windows and some Linux Distros also do this.

I for one stop thinking that I own data but I just change a few bits to make it look different these days, everything on your computer is not yours, we its and hardware, read the ELUA/TOS many hold the right to recall, revoke and so on use of the items to the point you paid for it they will take it back.

Items now sending keylogs, data usage and apps usage data to MS, Apple, some big linux distro, and YES this happens don't fool yourself Apple and MS both admit this happen and both US and UK now requesting these companies to let the have full access to this data, if it was not there they wouldn't want it.

This wont stop me from messing with code and loving tech but do you really feel you own anything anymore?

I don't :P

Just installing Node.Js on my windows machine. I try to be loyal and show good faith in MS by using Edge. It fails, hangs or resets every fucking time. What a useless piece of shit browser.

Oh well, Chrome it is then....

Installing windows 10 with an unlabeled disk is not a good idea. During the whole installation process you never know which version it is. Only later when creating an account you notice that you are unable to login to your company ms account.
Upgrading from home to pro is also a bad thing. Needs three reinstalls or so. I don't want this...
I remember times when computers were easy

Okay, I hope a few people can help me with this; what are the benefits/reasons to use MS technologies? I'm talking about .NET, ASP, Windows Server, Powershell...

I've never understood it. I love Nodejs because you don't have any packages unless you ask for them. Alpine Linux is amazing! It runs on 8MB of RAM from fresh and doesn't need much more space to install.

You want .NET core? 140MB download. You're configuring database connection strings? Feel free to type in whatever you like, it'll parse and replace with some magic variables that have come from some other random file.

I was using Powershell recently, needed to set an env variable. Bash is happy with "export name=value". You want to do that in Powershell? I just googled it and found an entire 40-minute read discussing how to set env vars. Why?! It should be one command, and I don't know who thought that "Get-ChildItem" was _obviously_ referring to env variables.

It seems to me that everywhere MS has got their hands on development-wise, it inherits the typical sales bullshit. No no, you can't call them "websockets", they have to be branded "SignalR" and add tons of overhead. You can't say "disable notifications" it has to be "focus assist". I'm really surprised something as simple as a keyboard hasn't become a "varied user input device" or something of the like.

Am I alone in thinking this?

Linux vs Windows (vs AnyOtherOS) | The Age Old Question

The short answer: It depends. And probably isn't even up to you to choose

The long answer:
No one's forcing you to choose. And you have more than 2 options. (The 3rd being... both. (Unless you're running out of hardware))

You have to mentally replace "Which is better? Linux or Windows?" with "Which one gets me sooner to a completed task that more closely matches the end-user's expectations"

If it's something you're developing for yourself, then use whatever the hell you want, because you know where you want that "finished product" to be used, and in what manner.

But often, everyone around you and their cats are not using what you're using

Have to write a document? Oh.. there's this blue program thingy (no one talks like that), I think it was called "Microsoft Word"

Oh, you don't have that?? How the hell do you edit documents then?
~ Some employer still using MS Word 2009

"I'll send you the PSD", "Make it a PSD", "You need the PSD file for reference, right?"

psd? More like PTSD at this point

It's like Photoshop is suddenly the only way to edit images, oh.. and Paint.

* Use paint. I don't care. If it gets the job done, do it.

Hate Photoshop? Love Gimp? Too bad.

When that god forsaken PSD is emailed to you, you better have a copy of Windows and Photoshop just in case it looks like garbage in.. OR OUT of gimp..

Bottom Line:
Don't use what people use. Just have everything ready in case your boss still uses MS Word 1839 and you want to ENSURE, it'll look the same on his screen

*It's wrong to limit yourself to just ONE SINGLE OS