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Search - "windows 10 style"
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1. I wish that people start taking back their device ownership. Right to repair is an extremely important thing. Like that Nexus 6P that I've recently repaired by jamming another battery into it, now it's at 110-ish% health according to AccuBattery. And it cost me.. €10 or so? All the while if I wasn't able to get in there, it would've been a €120 paperweight (and that's not even considering the €300-ish (? Someone please fill me in on that) price it retailed at back in 2015 when it was a flagship).
(edit the so many'th: according to https://express.co.uk/life-style/... the base model was apparently £449 at release, haven't been able to verify it though.. point is, a paperweight at such prices would've been quite a bummer, I mean for me it was even one given that it failed a mere few months after purchase for €120.. €40/m for a phone ain't nothing :/)
Right to repair is an extremely important thing, and the ability to do so shouldn't ever be impeded. Users should become able again to service the devices that they own.
2. I wish that people start caring about their privacy again. Google and Facebook and the likes are large companies, but at the end of the day, that's all they are. Large companies. And they're hungry for your data, not because they're selling it, rather because they're collecting it to an extent which they shouldn't. Over at DDG (https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckg...) they explain a very much viable alternative revenue model pretty well. Additionally, there's several tools which you can use to limit the amount of data that's being collected about you. These include but are not limited to Firefox, NoScript, ad blockers (I personally use uBlock), a trustworthy VPN (ideally one of your own), and Tor.
3. I wish that software would become less inefficient. It really pains me to see that applications with functionality that could be implemented in a couple of MB at most come at a size of several hundreds of MB. 1% efficiency, even the inefficient as fuck tungsten light bulbs weren't that awful!!! Imagine what could be done with all the hardware we have available nowadays, if every piece of software would be around 80% efficient as is a common norm in electronics. Just looking at Linux which is still in many ways convoluted, modern desktops with a couple hundred MB of RAM usage? You've got it! So why can't OS's like Windows (although I have to say, huge improvements have been made there over the last few years) and browsers like Firefox and Chrome be more like that? I really don't understand.
There's several more wishes I have of course, but those are the most important ones.. hopefully I'll be able to see at least one of them come true during my life.10 -
(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).
Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).
Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:
* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.
* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.
* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.
* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.
...and more.
Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.
Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.
I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.
I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.19 -
Currently on the train to work:
*Guy pulls out his laptop
Me: *Oh nice. Dell laptop. Oh wait, shoot, that’s a Dell XPS 15. 😎Sweet!! Looks super clean. Get it boss, I salute you. Anyway, it’s probably running Windows 10 as expected. It’d be super cool if it run Ubuntu though.
*Guy lifts laptop lid.
Me: *Ahh, look how clean it is too. No fingerprints or smudges on the screen or keyboard. That’s my style. I like this guy. We can definitely share laptops.
*Guy powers on laptop
Me:*Woooooohooooo, no way!!! Gets a little tear of joy in my eyes. I want to hug this guy. This guy rocks. Oh mann, I want to start a conversation with him but can’t because another passenger is standing between us.
*The laptop run Ubuntu! 😍😱😁17 -
Okay guys, this is it!
Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.
So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)
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So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?
1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.
2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.
3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁
4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!
5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.
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For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?
1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...
2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/
3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...
4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/
5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...
6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/
7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...
9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/
10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...
Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?
1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/
4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/
5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/
8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/
That's it, folks.
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No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.
But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?7 -
While messing around with the Windows WM_NCPAINT message, I forced the WindowProc to return without calling DefWindowProc.
This resulted in interesting effects when pressing mouse buttons down on the right hand side of the title bar. This is on Windows 10.
Bottom part of the image is when I clicked on things and is Windows 9x-XP style. Top part of the image is when the window was deactivated and is Vista/Windows 7 style. Once they appear, the buttons behave as they did (visually - e.g. highlighting) as they did on those versions of Windows.
Just found it funny to see older bits of the Windows UI still hanging around behind the scenes!3 -
I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.
It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"
I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".
- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.
And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.
About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.15 -
How to piss off a developer?
1) Make your SDK bundled with an IDE and provide no way to update only the SDK, forcing them to loose all of their IDE settings and customizations.
2) Make GNU tools bundled in the SDK that are compiled 10 years ago and haven't been updated.
3) Provide a Linux version of the SDK, but only save all files in Windows-style line endings.
4) Provide SDKs that introduce bugs and break builds.
5) ???
6) Profit!6 -
No I don't want your updates every single day, Windows 10. Maybe I don't want to be so edgy with your updates. May be I like it XP style when updates didn't used to bug me with every single boot up and power down. It has become even worse. Who thought defering updates to the next boot up was a good option? It fucking interferes with the flow of work. They were like -
"You know what, let's update till 35% and then fucking update the remaining 65% at next boot"
"But users will be frustated"
"We'll show the update screen with clean font and a nice background. It will calm them down"
"Okay, so let users choose when to download the updates"
"That's not a fucking option, mate"
And if you are going to force updates down our throats please fucking mention what is being changed as a short description instead of showing a 'KBxxxxxxx' update number! If not that, at least hyperlink the thing to your update docs page! OR Mention a version buff if not it! I HATE seeing 'Update for Windows 10 Version xxxx for x64-based Systems' EVERY. SINGLE. TIME I see an update ready to be downloaded.
And no I don't play Candy Crush, or other games that are pre-installed as soon as I re-install fresh Windows or go on Xbox App. I hate to do this ritual of turning off auto download from Windows Store every time. So please don't pre-configure anything for me. Keep it fucking raw. That's why Linux distros win.
I'm just saying, Service Packs were a great thing with a need of little improvements. You guys ruined the whole experience, Microsoft.2 -
Coding on windows 10 was a cancerous experience and now i am switching to manjaro kde plasma using this style https://youtube.com/watch/...6
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Oracle while trying to install their database on Windows 10 (both, at least, only inside a VirtualBox): sorry, but the path containins space character. Which is because either your UI dialog failed to properly escape or your installer failed properly handle a native file path, Oracle! Nevermind totally ignoring the OS's UI style and cropping your own error message in the second line.1