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richlind33: I said no such thing, so perhaps you should take a look at your own honesty and intelligence.
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JMich: True, you said pick the OS, not install the OS. Apologies.

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richlind33: The crux for me is whether or not someone has *chosen* to use the OS, not whether or not they installed it themself.
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JMich: Does using the OS their computer came with mean they chose to use that OS or not?

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richlind33: And I see you've deliberately misquoted yourself
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JMich: Possible. What was the misquote?
Pre-post edit: Ah, saw it a bit lower. Thank you. Wasn't done deliberately.

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richlind33: which is another indication that you should take a look at your own honesty and intelligence before casting aspersions on anyone else's.
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JMich: I don't claim to be an intelligent person. I do try to be honest, and will apologize when I say something incorrect, as well as thank the one who corrected me. And I do also assume the others to be intelligent.

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richlind33: What you actually said was, "I got my parent/sibling/child/friend a computer with Linux...", not "parent/sibling/child/friend who had someone install Linux for them to use".
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JMich: So Linux got on that computer on its own? I am not a smart man, so I do have trouble following this train of thought.

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richlind33: No need to confirm that your nose is out of joint, m8. o.O
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JMich: I honestly have no idea what you mean by this. Nor can I find a possible explanation, unless you think I'm angry or upset, which I'm not. I'm actually enjoying myself quite a bit.
1) Fair enough.

2) I think that should be determined over a period of time sufficient for someone to decide if it is a good fit for them, so perhaps they should be considered "trial users"?

3-4) Fair enough.

5) Why does that matter when my point pertains to the learning curve re *usage*, rather than installation?

However, If someone isn't up to installing linux, isn't that a good indication that they're likely to find it frustrating in general?

6) Fair enough.
Post edited November 12, 2017 by richlind33
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richlind33: 2) I think that should be determined over a period of time sufficient for someone to decide if it is a good fit for them, so perhaps they should be considered "trial users"?
And how long should that period be? And do they automatically move to "OS user" at the end of that time period or only when they decide they like or not like the default OS?

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richlind33: However, If someone isn't up to installing linux, isn't that a good indication that they're likely to find it frustrating in general?
From the comments of all the Linux people in various "Should I install Linux on my machine" threads, I'd say no. They claim that Linux is easy to use, and that they do install it for the subgroup of people I mentioned before. Ease of use is not correlated to ease of installation, so one should be able to use an OS that they don't know how to install.
And yes, you will be getting people that can use an OS, are happy with that OS, not find it frustrating yet are unable to troubleshoot basic problems, be it "Install directplay" or "apt-get python".
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Jemolk: Yeah, well, that to me kinda sounds like the same thing that caused the massive uproar here about bundling Galaxy in with games and making it opt-out.
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JMich: Even though GOG handed the whole thing messily, I still believe most of the uproar was from people who think Galaxy has cooties. HereForTheBeer (I think) is the only one who had a complain that I view as legitimate, since the 120 extra MB meant about half an hour extra download time for him.

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Jemolk: I seem to recall you weren't nearly as pissed as the rest of us, even those of us like me who do actually double-check options every time.
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JMich: I am one of those that double-check options every time. Which is exactly why I wasn't pissed (at all).

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Jemolk: Especially with how they handled the "upgrade" where people actually had to download third-party programs to remove their prompt
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JMich: You are aware that you didn't need any third-party programs to do that, right? All those third-party programs did was make it "one-click" for you. Question is, what did those programs get from those that used them.
1. You say "messily." To be perfectly honest, though, we shouldn't have to double-check options all the damn time, and strangely enough (not), the only time I actually have to do that is when it's coming from a corporation. FOSS projects never actually make me do that. I don't even begin to wonder why; no profit motive involved. Just one more reason it'd be better to not deal with for-profit OSes.

2. I am as well. Still an unnecessary nuisance that could have been avoided but wasn't. I seriously don't want to have to be fucking paranoid all the goddamn time about things I paid for.

3. If by "one-click" you mean you didn't have to spend a few hours delving through all sorts of registry crap screwing with extremely sensitive stuff if you didn't want to be an unpaid beta tester for Win10, THEN you could be right, but to be perfectly frank, that sentiment should be universal. MS very deliberately made it extremely difficult to remove, and there were a shitton of people, especially programmers, who were not remotely happy with that. It's called the bleeding edge for a reason. As for what the programs got from those that used them -- goodwill. Because various programmers wrote them for themselves so they wouldn't have to manually go through that process on every Win7 PC they owned, then uploaded them to the net because why the hell not.
Post edited November 12, 2017 by Jemolk
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Jemolk: the only time I actually have to do that is when it's coming from a corporation.
You mean like GOG? Or is GOG not a corporation.

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Jemolk: FOSS projects never actually make me do that.
Glad to know you never used Sourceforge then.

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Jemolk: 3. LMFAO! If by "one-click" you mean you didn't have to spend a few hours delving through all sorts of registry crap screwing with extremely sensitive stuff
No, I meant "Click here" instead of "go to registry, modify key X to value Y". Finding out what key to modify would take some time if you had no idea, but all those 3rd party programs did was to modify the needed registry entries. Something you could do through the system yourself.

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Jemolk: if you didn't want to be an unpaid beta tester for Win10
No, the unpaid beta testing happened about a year before said solutions were released.

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Jemolk: Because various programmers wrote them for themselves so they wouldn't have to manually go through that process on every Win7 PC they owned, then uploaded them to the net because why the hell not.
Yes. So they'd have a "one click" solution instead of having to modify the registry themselves.
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Jemolk: the only time I actually have to do that is when it's coming from a corporation.
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JMich: You mean like GOG? Or is GOG not a corporation.

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Jemolk: FOSS projects never actually make me do that.
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JMich: Glad to know you never used Sourceforge then.

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Jemolk: 3. LMFAO! If by "one-click" you mean you didn't have to spend a few hours delving through all sorts of registry crap screwing with extremely sensitive stuff
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JMich: No, I meant "Click here" instead of "go to registry, modify key X to value Y". Finding out what key to modify would take some time if you had no idea, but all those 3rd party programs did was to modify the needed registry entries. Something you could do through the system yourself.

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Jemolk: if you didn't want to be an unpaid beta tester for Win10
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JMich: No, the unpaid beta testing happened about a year before said solutions were released.

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Jemolk: Because various programmers wrote them for themselves so they wouldn't have to manually go through that process on every Win7 PC they owned, then uploaded them to the net because why the hell not.
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JMich: Yes. So they'd have a "one click" solution instead of having to modify the registry themselves.
1. Yes, I do.

2. Hmm. Perhaps Sourceforge is a problem in some ways. Github has never made me jump through hoops, though.

3. Yeah, and if you made a mistake, the entire system could be rendered inoperable. Not something for the faint of heart. The Windows Registry is honestly no small part of the reason I despise Windows. I had to reinstall the OS multiple times because doing so was less of a hassle and less dangerous than figuring out what had gone wrong with the registry and fixing it.

4. Win10 was buggy as shit for the first few years after release at the very least. Being an early adopter for any software is effectively being a beta tester. Again, it's not called the bleeding edge for nothing. If you're on that edge, you'll bleed.

5. Yeah, because even the programmers found it less of a hassle to create a program to do it for them than to do it themselves more than once. Think about the implications of that for a moment. This isn't one-click versus three or four clicks. This is one click verus at least 5-10 minutes of taking extreme care to make sure you fix the problem without breaking your system even for experienced programmers. That generally isn't the sort of environment in which "one click" carries the same derisive connotation as it sometimes does with clients for everything. Partly because the clients take up extra computational resources to run things, whereas something like this can be downloaded, run and deleted, and partly because clients just don't save you the same level of hassle that something like a simple executable to modify the registry in the required ways does.
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Jemolk: 1. Yes, I do.
So you are actually double checking the options of GOG installers, and were double checking them before they introduced Galaxy installers as well. Good to know.

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Jemolk: 2. Hmm. Perhaps Sourceforge is a problem in some ways. Github has never made me jump through hoops, though.
Sourceforge was the default place for open source projects for a lot of years. Github started getting the huge influx in 2013, when developers started ditching Sourceforge due to its DevShare program.
So yes, even if you are using FOSS, you should still double check the options to avoid having surprises.

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Jemolk: 3. Yeah, and if you made a mistake, the entire system could be rendered inoperable. Not something for the faint of heart. The Windows Registry is honestly no small part of the reason I despise Windows. I had to reinstall the OS multiple times because doing so was less of a hassle and less dangerous than figuring out what had gone wrong with the registry and fixing it.
Which also means that whatever 3rd party program you use would have to be written properly. And in case of a FOSS program, you should also have enough info on how to reproduce it.
So what you are basically saying is that you do not trust yourself to follow a recipe, so you'll trust someone else to follow that recipe and give you the end result. Works, but it still remains something you could do yourself without any 3rd party.

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Jemolk: 4. Win10 was buggy as shit for the first few years after release at the very least. Being an early adopter for any software is effectively being a beta tester. Again, it's not called the bleeding edge for nothing. If you're on that edge, you'll bleed.
Can't recall any issues, which probably means my memory is faulty. But again, the bleeding edge wasn't that Windows 10 build, but the one from the Insider program. The Insider program did have access to Win10 a year before it was released, and when Win10 got released, they got access to the next build. So you are basically saying that updating your Firefox to its current stable is going to the bleeding edge, while the nightly build is that edge.

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Jemolk: 5. Yeah, because even the programmers found it less of a hassle to create a program to do it for them than to do it themselves more than once.
A friend of mine used to say "If the time needed to automate a task is up to twice as long as it takes to do it, automate it. Doesn't matter what the task is". That is the reason to make a program (or script), that it will eventually save you time, not because it's more secure or less risk prone. And depending on one's level of expertise, a C++ program may be easier than a .reg file or a powershell script or a group policy script.
But in all cases, those 3rd party programs just automated what the system could already do. They didn't do anything you couldn't do yourself, though you would need to read quite a bit to know what to change.
for those who hate the win 10 interface you can download and install "classic shell"

it emulates previous windows with the classic menus, I've used it since I've installed windows 10 and have had no issues.
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Jemolk: 1. Yes, I do.
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JMich: So you are actually double checking the options of GOG installers, and were double checking them before they introduced Galaxy installers as well. Good to know.

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Jemolk: 2. Hmm. Perhaps Sourceforge is a problem in some ways. Github has never made me jump through hoops, though.
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JMich: Sourceforge was the default place for open source projects for a lot of years. Github started getting the huge influx in 2013, when developers started ditching Sourceforge due to its DevShare program.
So yes, even if you are using FOSS, you should still double check the options to avoid having surprises.

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Jemolk: 3. Yeah, and if you made a mistake, the entire system could be rendered inoperable. Not something for the faint of heart. The Windows Registry is honestly no small part of the reason I despise Windows. I had to reinstall the OS multiple times because doing so was less of a hassle and less dangerous than figuring out what had gone wrong with the registry and fixing it.
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JMich: Which also means that whatever 3rd party program you use would have to be written properly. And in case of a FOSS program, you should also have enough info on how to reproduce it.
So what you are basically saying is that you do not trust yourself to follow a recipe, so you'll trust someone else to follow that recipe and give you the end result. Works, but it still remains something you could do yourself without any 3rd party.

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Jemolk: 4. Win10 was buggy as shit for the first few years after release at the very least. Being an early adopter for any software is effectively being a beta tester. Again, it's not called the bleeding edge for nothing. If you're on that edge, you'll bleed.
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JMich: Can't recall any issues, which probably means my memory is faulty. But again, the bleeding edge wasn't that Windows 10 build, but the one from the Insider program. The Insider program did have access to Win10 a year before it was released, and when Win10 got released, they got access to the next build. So you are basically saying that updating your Firefox to its current stable is going to the bleeding edge, while the nightly build is that edge.

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Jemolk: 5. Yeah, because even the programmers found it less of a hassle to create a program to do it for them than to do it themselves more than once.
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JMich: A friend of mine used to say "If the time needed to automate a task is up to twice as long as it takes to do it, automate it. Doesn't matter what the task is". That is the reason to make a program (or script), that it will eventually save you time, not because it's more secure or less risk prone. And depending on one's level of expertise, a C++ program may be easier than a .reg file or a powershell script or a group policy script.
But in all cases, those 3rd party programs just automated what the system could already do. They didn't do anything you couldn't do yourself, though you would need to read quite a bit to know what to change.
2. Hmm, yeah, sometimes, but you really don't need to be nearly as paranoid, at least in my experience. Maybe my experience is extremely skewed, though, that's always a possibility. Perhaps it just depends on what kind of program you're looking for. Dunno, I can't really speak to that one.

3. I absolutely trust myself to follow the recipe, at least with competently written recipes. The problem is that with the Windows Registry, the recipe is frequently difficult to follow because of how deliberately obscured everything is. With Linux it tends to be much more straightforward (in my experience at least). My complaint is less general than you seem to think. It's merely that one of the most fundamental parts of Windows, namely the registry, is extremely badly designed from the standpoint of any end user who has a problem, and this very much extended to removing the "upgrade now" prompts. It doesn't have to be this way, but with Windows, unfortunately it is.

4. My impression is that the release of Windows 10 was much like the release of a Bethesda game. Less buggy than what was officially called the test version, but basic functioonality was broken all over the place. I remember complaints of having to install 3rd party software just to get the start button working. It didn't happen for everyone, and most people had real trouble figuring out a pattern to the breakage. As I recall, it drove some people absolutely nuts.

5. Yup. And it took much less than twice the time to fix the registry than to automate the task. That's because the registry is a pain in the arse. If MS wasn't deliberately trying to make it a pain to remove, it could have been as simple as clicking a button that said, "No, and don't ask me again" to get Windows to stop pestering you. That they gave everyone the runaround instead is very telling IMHO. And again, one major reason it's time-consuming is that tinkering with the registry can be dangerous as all hell, and you have to be extremely careful. If it were a simple task to identify the key and make sure that changing it didn't break anything else, and also to make sure that you were in fact changing the right key (it's not always obvious even when you know what the right key is, and I suspect this is by design), then it could be simple to follow step-by-step instructions to deal with it in less than 30 seconds. The registry exists in its current form only to obscure information MS doesn't want you to access, and in all honesty, I have my suspicions that the only reason they let you edit it at all is because not doing so would cause such massive PR problems with programmers that it would cost them their majority market share almost overnight.
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Jemolk: 3. I absolutely trust myself to follow the recipe, at least with competently written recipes. The problem is that with the Windows Registry, the recipe is frequently difficult to follow because of how deliberately obscured everything is.
Ignoring checking for specific updates for the moment (I can give you the list, as well as how to uninstall them), the commands to disable the update were (run from an administrative prompt)

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx /v DisableGwx /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate /v DisableOSUpgrade /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
Do tell if those are obscure or hard to understand, whether you use the registry editor or the prompt.

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Jemolk: It's merely that one of the most fundamental parts of Windows, namely the registry, is extremely badly designed from the standpoint of any end user who has a problem, and this very much extended to removing the "upgrade now" prompts. It doesn't have to be this way, but with Windows, unfortunately it is.
The registry was designed as a centralized place for programs to store information the end user wouldn't need to access during normal use. Unfortunately, developers of windows software tend to think that the old practices are still the best, which does lead to huge amount of issues. When told to use the registry, they just dumped everything there, whether the user should have access to that data or not.
Microsoft does usually document their practices quite thoroughly over at MSDN, but it does take a bit of digging to find the stuff.

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Jemolk: I remember complaints of having to install 3rd party software just to get the start button working.
The complaints were "I don't like this modern UI crap. How do I get the old one back", not "the start button isn't working". It's similar to saying "This keyboard doesn't have a numeric keypad, how am I supposed to enter numbers now?". Functionality was there, depending on who you ask better or worse, but some people just wanted the old start menu back. Had a colleague who wouldn't upgrade from Vista to 7 because Vista supported the XP style start menu while 7 didn't. Similar to the Win10 start menu case.
Edit: There was also an issue if you had more than a certain amount of items in the start menu. Can't recall if it was 512 items or 2048, but it was something like that. So yes, you may recall that issue correctly, though I think the number was identified and patched relatively soon (but my memory may be off, off to look for that).

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Jemolk: 5. Yup. And it took much less than twice the time to fix the registry than to automate the task.
I can link you a few pages that show what those 3rd party programs do. Let's say a couple of hours reading to understand what they are going to do, then 30 seconds to paste everything on a .bat file and another 30 seconds to run it.

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Jemolk: one major reason it's time-consuming is that tinkering with the registry can be dangerous as all hell, and you have to be extremely careful.
Yes. One could say it's similar to modifying the Unix kernel. You need to read quite a bit before starting to mess around with it, but you can mess around, as long as you know what you are doing. Or you trust the one who promises to mess around with it for you.

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Jemolk: If it were a simple task to identify the key and make sure that changing it didn't break anything else, and also to make sure that you were in fact changing the right key (it's not always obvious even when you know what the right key is, and I suspect this is by design), then it could be simple to follow step-by-step instructions to deal with it in less than 30 seconds.
Again, for that specific task (preventing Win7 and Win8 to automatically update to Win10) the commands do take less than 30 seconds. Identifying the entries on your own would take quite a bit longer, but that is why there are people who can tell you what to do (provide the recipe) and/or offer their own tools (cook you the food).
Post edited November 12, 2017 by JMich
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Zoltan999: Hey SV, nice to see you pop in here again. Missed your posts bro. You back again for a while? IIRC, you had some hand issues that you mentioned were causing some gaming problems back when. Things any better on that front?
Hey man! No, no real issues I just kind of burned out and switched all my hobby attention to movies. I got more and more ready to come back the last couple months though and in fact just ordered some PC upgrade parts, so I should be posting way too often again sometime soon. ;)