I just verified. You can install Python 2.7 on an up to date Windows install as well as an up to date Linux install. Python 2.7 hasn't received security updates (or really any updates) in years, but that does not mean it can't still work on an up to date OS.
Yeah, it's been 5 years (almost 6) since python 2.7 stopped receiving security updates, but it does still run on modern OS's.
Looking at the list, I'm actually kind of surprised there aren't more CVEs for python 2.7, but if you're only running it locally or on an intranet I could see letting it ride.
Nothing like a full rewrite. I migrated multiple projects, but while there is a significant amount of work involved its a tiny fraction of what a full rewrite would require.
Did it a couple of times. Not something you can do with your eyes closed, but not even close to the nightmare of upgrading a JS application or upgrading a rails app.
Original 1984 critical hardware: the box has an EEPROM module, you swap it on the plane.
FMS (which requires monthly nav data updates) and all modern hardware: the box can be updated over the ARINC 429 serial bus or Ethernet (newer systems/planes), called dataloading
Dataloading had different methods. A320s through the 2000's, most airlines had a 3.5 floppy disk drive on board (Airbus FDDU), and a mechanic fed floppies in. It was slow. Evolution of that was a USB port that took a flash drive.
Most current planes of older models just got rid of on-board dataloading. The mechanic uses a laptop with a cable or purpose-built tablet and plugs into a port. The mechanic can download the software via Wi-Fi or cellular onto the device: https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/p...
Airlines can indeed buy a on-board box that connects to Wi-Fi and LTE at the gate which downloads software. This is standard for the latest models that produce more data (A350, 787), but optional for older models. The mechanic still needs to go to the plane and push the buttons to tell it to load.
Even if they end the grounding of the MD-11/DC-10 I'd be shocked if any airlines still using them will continue to use them.
Seems like the risk/reward just isn't really there for the few of them still in service, and if anything happened it would be a PR nightmare on top of a tragedy.
UPS and FedEx each have around 25 MD-11s, Western Global has 2 I think, the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital is an MD-10, some cargo airline in Botswana has one, and 10 Tanker has some DC-10 firefighting tankers.
Given that the report only mentioned a single other seemingly related accident in 1979 I am not sure that objectively this is a reason to discontinue flying these planes. The fact that these planes have been in service since the early 70s is a testament to their safety and reliability in itself. Of course public perception, especially with the videos of huge fireballs from hitting one of the worst possible locations, might put enough pressure on airlines to retire the planes anyway.
I agree on the end of an era. Hearing something else besides just Airbus- or Boeing-something always gives me a bit of joy. Even though MDs and DCs are of course Boeings in a sense now as well.
I managed to find some statistics on hull losses per million departures [1, p. 13]. Seems like indeed MD-11s have a highish rate of incidents by that metric compared to other types, even if they are not catastrophically less safe than other planes. That metric stacks the statistics a bit against cargo planes, which most (all?) MD-11s are now. These planes tend to fly longer haul instead of short hop, so you get more flight time/miles but less departures. There are also likely some other confounding factors like mostly night operations (visibility and crew fatigue) and the tendency to write off older planes instead of returning them to service after an incident. Plus these aircraft have been in operation long enough that improvements in procedures and training would impact them less than more modern types, as in they already had more accidents before these improvements.
The DC-10 had a number of other problems, but the MD-11 has always had a reputation of being an unforgiving aircraft especially when compared to the DC-10. It's less about training and more that the MD-11 was simply too many design compromises piled on to an old design.
The MD-11 had a pretty short service life as a passenger aircraft because it simply wasn't very fuel efficient compared to the competition, safety wasn't really the motivating factor. However fuel consumption was behind some of the poor design choices McDonnell/Boeing made. In broad strokes: McDonnell/Boeing shrunk the control surfaces to improve fuel consumption "necessitating" poorly designed software to mask the dodgy handling and higher landing speeds. This exacerbated a DC-10 design "quirk" where hard landings got out of hand very quickly and main landing gear failure would tend to flip the plane.
Yeah you can train around this but when something else goes tits up you've got a lot less leeway to actually recover safely.
I think that the Mad Dogs only exist as freighters (~or their derivative KC-10 tankers~-Edited to correct that they retired last year) these days. I think the last pax service for any of them was over a decade ago.
And air freight just gets a lot less public attention, I think they are going to keep flying them if they don't get grounded.
Yes, but there are many MD-11's still flying as freighters. There are four fire-fighting DC10's out of ~8 still flying, but there are 25 Mad Dogs (MD-11) at UPS, 38 with FedEx, and Western Global has 4, so there are plenty of MD-11F's around.
(Blancolirio points out that the DC-10 tanker is what they modernized to relatively recently -- before that they were flying even more dangerous WW2 airframes for firefighting.)
There were only about 18 aircraft of all types still flying at the time and none are dedicated passenger aircraft. Indefinite grounding is the most sensible move.
Now, Boeing, et. al. are trying to evaluate the deficiencies in existing D checks and put together an inspection regime (i.e., NDT) that would proactively identify fatigue that would economically permit continued serviceable operation. If this feat turns out to be impossible for technical or cost reasons, then and only then will the grounding will become permanent.
The only thing missing making Proxmox difficult in traditional environment is a replacement for VMware's VMFS (cluster aware VM file system).
Lots and lots of organizations already have SAN/storage fabric networks presenting block storage over the network which was heavily used for VMware environments.
You could use NFS if your arrays support it, but MPIO block storage via iscsi is ubiquitous in my experience.
Not really, that works if you want to have converged storage in your hypervisors, but most large VMWare deployments I've seen use external storage from remote arrays.
Shared across a cluster of multiple hosts, such that you can hot migrate VMs? I am not aware of that being possible in Proxmox the same way you can in VMware with VMFS.
It's not like VMFS (not a cluster filesystem), for Proxmox+iSCSI you get a large LVM PV that gets sliced up into volumes for your VMs. All of your Proxmox nodes are connected to that same LVM PV and you can live migrate your VMs around all you wish, have HA policies so if a node dies its VMs start up right away on a surviving node, etc.
You lose snapshots (but can have your SAN doing snaps, of course) and a few other small things I can't recall right now, but overall it works great. Have had zero troubles.
I have a serious question, not trying to start a flame war.
A. Are these major issues with cloud/SaaS tools becoming more common, or is it just that they get a lot more coverage now? It seems like we see major issues across AWS, GCP, Azure, Github, etc. at least monthly now and I don't remember that being the case in the past.
B. If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons? I can think of a few, but I don't know the answer, so if anyone in-the-know has insight I'd appreciate it.
Operations budget cuts/layoffs?
Replacing critical components/workflows with AI?
Just overall growing pains, where a service has outgrown what it was engineered for?
> A. Are these major issues with cloud/SaaS tools becoming more common, or is it just that they get a lot more coverage now? It seems like we see major issues across AWS, GCP, Azure, Github, etc. at least monthly now and I don't remember that being the case in the past.
FWIW Microsoft is convinced moving Github to Azure will fix these outages
> In 2002, the amusement continued when a network security outfit discovered an internal document server wide open to the public internet in Microsoft's supposedly "private" network, and found, among other things, a whitepaper[0] written by the hotmail migration team explaining why unix is superior to windows.
And 25 years later, a significant portion of the issues in that whitepaper remain unresolved. They were still shitting on people like Jeffrey Snover who were making attempts to provide more scalable management technologies. Such a clown show.
Microsoft is a company that hasn't even figured out how to get system updating working consistently on their premier operating system in three decades. It seems unlikely to me that somehow moving to Azure is going to make anything more stable.
I think it would be pretty hard to argue against that point of view, at least thus far. If DOS/Windows hadn't become the dominant OS someone would have, and a whole generation of engineers cut their teeth on their parents' windows PCs.
There are some pretty zany alternative realities in the Multiverses I’ve visited. Xerox Parc never went under and developed computing as a much more accessible commodity. Another, Bell labs invented a whole category of analog computers that’s supplanted our universe’s digital computing era. There’s one where IBM goes directly to super computers in the 80s. While undoubtedly Microsoft did deliver for many of us, I am a hesitant to say that that was the only path. Hell, Steve Jobs existed in the background for a long while there!
I wish things had gone differently too, but a couple of nitpicks:
1.) It's already a miracle Xerox PARC escaped their parent company's management for as long as they did.
3.) IBM was playing catch-up on the supercomputer front since the CDC 6400 in 1964. Arguably, they did finally catch up in the mid-late 80's with the 3090.
Yeah, I'm absolutely not saying it was the only path. It's just the path that happened. If not MS maybe it would have been Unix and something else. Either way most everyone today uses UX based on Xerox Parc's which was generously borrowed by, at this point, pretty much everyone.
If Microsoft hadn't tried to actively kill all its competition then there's a good chance that we'd have a much better internet. Microsoft is bigger than just an operating system, they're a whole corporation.
Instead they actively tried to murder open standards [1] that they viewed as competitive and normalized the antitrust nightmare that we have now.
I think by nearly any measure, Microsoft is not a net good. They didn't invent the operating system, there were lots of operating systems that came out in the 80's and 90's, many of which were better than Windows, that didn't have the horrible anticompetitive baggage attached to them.
Alternatively: had MS Embraced and Extended harder instead of trying to extinguish ASAP we’d have a much better internet owned to a much higher degree by MS.
A few decades back Microsoft were first to the prize with asynchronous JavaScript, Silverlight really was flash done better and still missed, a proper extension of their VB6/MFC client & dev experience out to the web would have gobbled up a generation of SaaS offerings, and they had a first in class data analysis framework with integrated REPL that nailed the central demands of distributed/cloud-first systems and systems configuration (F#). That on top of near perfect control of the document and consumer desktop ecosystems and some nutty visualization & storage capabilities.
Plug a few of their demos from 2002 - 2007 together and you’ve got a stack and customer experience we’re still hurting for.
Silverlight is only “Flash Done Better” if we had the dystopia of Windows being the only desktop operating system. Silverlight never worked on Linux, and IIRC it didn’t work terribly well on macOS (though I could be misremembering).
In fact all of your points are only true if we accept that Windows would be the only operating system.
Microsoft half-asses most things. If they had taken over the internet, we would likely have the entirety of the internet be even more half-asses than it already is.
What’s funny is that we were some bad timing away from IBM giving the DOS money to Gary Kildall and we’d all be working with CP/M derivatives!
Gary was on a flight when IBM called up the Digital Research looking for an OS for the IBM-PC. Gary’s wife, Dorothy, wouldn’t sign an NDA without it going through Gary, and supposedly they never got negotiations back on track.
I'm not sure I understand this logic. You're saying that the gap would have been filled even if their product didn't exist, which means that the net benefit isn't that the product exists. How are you concluding that whatever we might have gotten instead would have been worse?
And how does it follow that microsoft is the good guy in a future where we did it with some other operating system? You could argue that their system was so terrible that its displacement of other options harmed us all with the same level of evidence.
I'm not convinced of your first point. Just because something seems difficult to avoid given the current context does not mean it was the only path available.
Your second point is a little disingenuous. Yes, Microsoft and Windows have been wildly successful from a cultural adoption standpoint. But that's not the point I was trying to argue.
My first comment is simply pointing out that there's always a #1 in anything you can rank. Windows happened to be what won. And I learned how to use a computer on Windows. Do I use it now? No. But I learned on it as did most people whose parents wanted a computer.
The comment you were replying to was about Microsoft.
Even if Windows weren't a dogshit product, which it is, Microsoft is a lot more than just an operating system. In the 90's they actively tried to sabotage any competition in the web space, and held web standards back by refusing to make Internet Explorer actually work.
Been on GitHub for a long time. It feels like they're more often. It used to be yearly if at all that GitHub was noticably impacted. Now it's monthly, and recently, seemingly weekly.
Definitely not how I remember. First, I remember seeing unicorn page multiple times a day some weeks. There were also time when webhook delivery didn't work, so circle ci users couldn't kick off any builds.
What change is how many services GitHub can be having issues.
I suspect that the Azure migration is influencing this one. Just a bunch of legacy stuff being moved around along with Azure not really being the most reliable on top... I can't imagine it's easy.
However, this is an unexpected bell curve. I wonder if GitHub is seeing more frequent adversarial action lately. Alternatively, perhaps there is a premature reliance on new technology at play.
I pulled my project off github and onto codeberg a couple months ago but this outage still screws me over because I have a Cargo.toml w/ git dependency into github.
I was trying to do a 1.0 release today. Codeberg went down for "10 minutes maintenance" multiple times while I was running my CI actions.
> If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons?
Someone answered this morning, while Cloudflare outage, it's AI vibe coding and I tend to think there is something true in this. At some point there might be some tiny grain of AI engaged which starts the avalanche ending like this.
It certainly feels that way, though it may be an instance of availability bias. Not sure what's causing it - maybe extra load from AI bots (certainly a lot of smaller sites complain about it, maybe major providers feel the pain too), maybe some kind of general quality erosion... It's certainly something that is waiting for a serious research.
Looking around, I noticed that many senior, experienced individuals were laid off, sometimes replaced by juniors/contractors without institutional knowledge or experience. That's especially evident in ops/support, where the management believes those departments should have a smaller budget.
Github isn't in the same reliability class as the hyperscalars or cloudflare; its comically bad now, to the point that at a previous job we invested in building a readonly cache layer specifically to prevent github outages from bringing our system down.
Years ago on hackernews I saw a link about probability describing a statistical technique that one could use to answer a question about if a specific type of event was becoming more common or not. Maybe related to the birthday paradox? The gist that I remember is that sometimes a rare event will seem to be happening more often, when in reality there is some cognitive bias that makes it non-intuitive to make that decision without running the numbers. I think it was a blog post that went through a few different examples, and maybe only one of them was actually happening more often.
1/ Most of the big corporations moved to big cloud providers in the last 5 years. Most of them started 10 years ago but it really accelerated in the last 5 years.
So there is for sure more weight and complexity on cloud providers, and more impact when something goes wrong.
2/ Then we cannot expect big tech to stay as sharp as in the 2000s and 2010s.
There was a time banks had all the smart people, then the telco had them, etc. But people get older, too comfortable, layers of bad incentive and politics accumulate and you just become a dysfunctional big mess.
I think they're becoming more common because AI -> FOMO -> tighter deadlines on projects "since you can use AI to accelerate your work", which is often not how it works, and last 10% of reliability work is forgotten.
> Are these major issues with cloud/SaaS tools becoming more common, or is it just that they get a lot more coverage now?
I think that "more coverage" is part of it, but also "more centralization." More and more of the web is centralized around a tiny number of cloud providers, because it's just extremely time-intensive and cost-prohibitive for all but the largest and most specialized companies to run their own datacenters and servers.
Three specific examples: Netflix and Dropbox do run their own datacenters and servers; Strava runs on AWS.
> If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons? I can think of a few, but I don't know the answer, so if anyone in-the-know has insight I'd appreciate it.
I worked at AWS from 2020-2024, and saw several of these outages so I guess I'm "in the know."
My somewhat-cynical take is that a lot of these services have grown enormously in complexity, far outstripping the ability of their staff to understand them or maintain them:
- The OG developers of most of these cloud services have moved on. Knowledge transfer within AWS is generally very poor, because it's not incentivized, and has gotten worse due to remote work and geographic dispersion of service teams.
- Managers at AWS are heavily incentivized to develop "new features" and not to improve the reliability, or even security, of their existing offerings. (I discovered numerous security vulnerabilities in the very-well-known service that I worked for, and was regularly punished-rather-than-rewarded for trying to get attention and resources on this. It was a big part of what drove me to leave Amazon. I'm still sitting on a big pile of zero-day vulnerabilities in ______ and ______.)
- Cloud services in most of the world are basically a 3-way oligopoly between AWS, Microsoft/Azure, and Google. The costs of switching from one provider to another are often ENORMOUS due to a zillion fiddly little differences and behavior quirks ("bugs"). It's not apparent to laypeople — or even to me — that any of these providers are much more or less reliable than the others.
I suspect there is more tech out there. 20 years ago we didn't have smartphones. 10 years ago, 20mbit on mobile was a good connection. Gigabit is common now, infrastructure no longer has the hurdles it used to, AI makes coding and design much easier, phones are ubiquitous and usage of them at all times (in the movies, out and dinner, driving) has become super normalised.
I suspect (although have not researched) that global traffic is up, by throughput but also by session count.
This contributes to a lot more awareness. Slack being down wasn't impactful when most tech companies didn't use Slack. An AWS outage was less relevant when the 10 apps (used to be websites) you use most didn't rely on a single AZ in AWS or you were on your phone less.
I think as a society it just has more impact than it used to.
> B. If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons?
Among other mentioned factors like AI and layoffs: mass brain damage caused by never-ending COVID re-infections.
Since vaccines don't prevent transmission, and each re-infection increases the chances of long COVID complications, the only real protection right now is wearing a proper respirator everywhere you go, and basically nobody is doing that anymore.
There are tons of studies to back this line of reasoning.
One possibility is increased monitoring. In the past, issues that happened weren't reported because they went under the radar. Whereas now, those same issues which only impact a small percentage of users would still result in a status update and postmortem. But take this with a grain of salt because it's just a theory and doesn't reflect any actual data.
A lot of people are pointing to AI vibe coding as the cause, but I think more often than not, incidents happen due to poor maintenance of legacy code. But I guess this may be changing soon as AI written code starts to become "legacy" faster than regular code.
The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.
I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.
> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.
And backwards compatibility.
They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.
Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux.
This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.
Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.
Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.
It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.
Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.
Binary applications do not include drivers. I only mean applications, drivers do not transfer cleanly between versions of Windows.
To answer your other question though; Any GDI that is not accessible through DirectX- The Contacts API, Timers API, BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service), The inbound HTTP server API, NDF (Network Diagnostic Framework), SNMP.
AllocConsole and ReadConsole are gone, NamedPipes (something I used to use extensively) are gone. Toolbar and Statusbar APIs are gone and direct manipulation APIs for the Desktop.
You are describing limitations on sandboxed UWP apps, but Windows still supports regular Win32 just fine, and everything that you describe is available there.
I still run 30 year old games on Windows and write new software using WPF and WinForms even, and it all "just works", much more so than similar attempts at software archeology on Linux.
It's really too bad that Microsoft is hell bent on shoving ads, AI, and dark patterns everywhere in what could otherwise be a decent boring "it just works" OS.
Surprising amount of drivers do transfer between versions of Windows, even if not officially supported. But yes, most break at some point.
I'm able to run binaries compiled over 20 years ago on the latest version of Windows most of the time. They do require enabling compatibility mode and sometimes installing legacy features.
I don't know, if APIs you mentioned are available in compatibility modes, but at least named pipes can still be enabled.
But Windows is going downhill lately, so backwards compatibility isn't what it used to be. Improving backwards compatibility for running old binaries would make Linux adoption easier. I hope that Linux PCs market share keeps improving to cross the threshold where it becomes an economically viable platform for most of commercial software.
> Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux. This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.
Every Windows release I compile code straight from a Windows programming book from the 90’s. The only changes I made last time was a few include statements and one define.
They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.
I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.
That's not a lack of backwards compatibility, that's an app purposefully self-destructing itself!
What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.
I used some software called Project 5 from Cakewalk back in 2006, as well as VST plugins. I can still install it and use it on Windows 11. Meanwhile, basic plugins from that time stopped working on Mac OS X Lion.
That detail is definitely true, I just think that in practice the frustration with behavior like this from MS will trickle down(/up/whatever direction). Like the benefit of Windows as a regular user or power user was also that after the pain of dealing with whatever shit MS decided, you could configure it more-or-less however you wanted and it would not change. It will be delayed in the corporate world but it will happen.
Since M$ is doing away with simple free apps (such as Mail) and forcing users to move to cloud-based expensive apps, you can use FOSS (Free and Open Source) alternatives -- especially the Portable ones (e.g., apps from PortableApps.com) that don't need an install, they can run off a USB drive, and app+userdata can be easily backed up without fuss.
I tried Thunderbird first, but unfortunately it was kinda heavy and was fairly unreliable, which kinda tracks with my experience before (at least on Windows). Mailspring works fine and is also open source.
Couldn't find a decent minimalist calendar program that integrated well with Windows. People say they like OneCalendar but I refuse to use the Windows Store, I even got WSL set up without it lol
Try Vivaldi. It's a "kitchen sink" browser in the same vein as Opera used to be back in its days of glory, so it comes with an email and calendar client that can be optionally turned off:
Vivaldi's email client is kinda clunky as well and has no way to show just my "inbox" (mail without any labels) from Google as far as I can tell, just one big unread chunk. And the calendar seems to just be a column on the left of the browser.
Either way, MailSpring works fine for email, and I've recently discovered Fantastical for a straightforward calendar program.
But it's absurd that I have to do this at all. At a minimum, if I buy a laptop, Microsoft should not be able to actively break it without refunding me 100% of the purchase price.
Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.
Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. While Linux will probably run on most hardware. It doesn't run well. Like you may just immediately give up half or more of your laptop battery life if you switch from Windows to Linux on a particular machine, even if you use a lightweight and up-to-date environment and use TLP and whatever else to tweak kernel settings. I used Linux on my personal laptops for many years. No amount of tweaking could make it perfectly smooth and have comparable battery life and cooling.
New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.
> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support.
I once had to patch uvc to support a webcam that wouldn't work natively on Linux. It would advertise one version of the API but implement another. That didn't affect windows which probably already knew and had proper patched drivers for it.
We can all but wonder why, but my guess isn't that there is some sloppy dev there and windows is just making up for it. It all seems very deliberate to undermine Linux. And it's plausible given Microsoft's bottomless pockets.
So it wouldn't surprise me that these companies are actively hindering Linux compatibility. So much for a free market with open competition.
I believe that Linux is just a low-priority target. There are so few users on Linux that it's not worth investing in Linux support unless you specifically target Linux crowds.
If you start thinking about a conspiracy, the first thing you should do is ask yourself how much effort it would take to keep it under the lid without anyone leaking.
> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support
My experience has been that I can generally just install Linux on a machine and pretty much everything will just work straight away, but with Windows, I have to go and find the relevant Windows drivers to get things like iSCSI working.
"I had to patch drivers to get the dot-matrix printer working, and it didn't play nice with the PS/2 used by my mouse (the big one that goes on the nice mousepad)"
I have plenty of printers that have stopped working on Windows over the years, my current Brother laser doesn't have drivers that Windows will allow to be installed anymore. Its fine with Linux, so I just print share it as a generic so the Windows clients can connect.
My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster.
How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?
So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.
I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.
I wonder if it was losing Jim Allchin that did it. He retired after Vista and I'd say he was in charge of Windows during its golden age. 7 was basically Vista SP3, and then things took a different direction.
But, to every coin there are two sides:
"I consider this cross-platform idea a disease within Microsoft. We are determined to put a gun to our head and pull the trigger."
I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.
Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies.
I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.
My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel.
I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
> "My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel."
There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel.
Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?
Linux has won on phones (Android) and on the server side. I don't think Windows Server is seriously used for anything but Exchange/AD these days, outside of hosting specialized or legacy apps.
Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.
So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.
Even if you consider running on tightly locked down devices to support a monopoly a win, the adoption of the Linux kernel for Android has the same basis as it does for server adoption: people love getting the hard work of others for free. It's basically buying market share. I mean, if Microsoft also started giving away Windows for free and took a bunch of market share away, would you consider that a legitimate win for them?
There was also the whole "web apps are coming and they run everywhere" thing. Which actually did work out exactly as people expected it to, although it took longer than most predicted - but your average casual PC user spends most of their time in the browser these days.
However, while those web apps might run on Linux (or not, if it uses DRM like all those streaming providers), they increasingly only run in Chrome.
I don't see that making much sense, honestly. Windows kernel is super solid and well architectured. There are thousands of drivers for every peripheral on the Earth. And I don't believe that Microsoft spends that much on kernel development to be incentivised to cut it.
If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.
I disagree. I think the end of the “world revolves around Windows” era of Microsoft has been hugely beneficial to the OS. Microsoft is way less hostile to other platforms now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.
It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.
WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.
I disagree that Microsoft benefits the end user. Their IoT which took over the Embedded version of Windows is completely bloated in 10 and higher. Version 7 allowed for only installing necessities where their successors force XBox and other built in forced features. Windows 11 IoT is also forcing the creation of a Microsoft account instead of allowing an local account. IoT / Embedded does not mean it is connect and often air gaped. They are also often used to host products and should not have a Microsoft account assigned.
Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.
Niche distribution has nothing to do with quality of distribution. The user base are passive users versus active users like daily office and game users.
The quality has gone done hill. Windows Embedded / IoT is often used to run your ATMs or some form of industrial automation. Windows actually has a real-time OS (RTOS) mode for just this.
The company I work has planned to replace Windows with Linux for future products and even moving active products to support both Windows and Linux during the transition. Only products that will stay on Windows will be legacy that are near EOL.
Personally, I would never use Windows OS for future products and solutions in these environments. Nor would I use it for network / server based solutions.
> now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.
Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.
One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive?
I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.
At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.
I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware.
Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.
> I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0.
The price of the windows license has been included in the price of PCs for literally decades now. Every computer you buy with windows preinstalled nets Microsoft a couple dozen dollars.
None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.
Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.
Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business.
I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.
While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software.
Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.
It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.
The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s
time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.
Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.
I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.
> Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things.
Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.
On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.
I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.
I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.
It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
> I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud
Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.
A lot of this isn't very relevant to my personal use case and/or has not been my experience.
- I have had my Microsoft account connected since early in the Windows 10 days so that I can use my Xbox library. For my personal use case it doesn't really bother me that I have to login. Sure, most competing commercial OSes don't straight up force you to login, but as an example I never really used my Mac laptop without the Apple ID logged in because it has some pretty clear benefits and essentially no discernible downsides. It has some downsides that mostly boil down to what-if scenarios and thought experiments. To me, Microsoft forcing you to login with an account is not a big deal in the context of commercial paid software with a paid license. I can certainly understand why it might be a big deal in a different context. I can certainly see why my own Linux laptop is more appealing to not have this requirement. However, I specifically use Windows for a lot of commercial stuff - Steam, Xbox, etc. Being logged in was going to happen anyway, at least for me.
- As far as being nagged to pay, use Edge/Bing, or buy cloud stuff from Microsoft, all of that has been extremely easy to dismiss permanently. I have not needed to use any power user tools or scripts.
- It's an outdated notion that OneDrive is tossed in the menu bar forever. In Windows 11, OneDrive can be uninstalled entirely like a standard app. When I open my Start Menu and search for "OneDrive," nothing comes up besides an obscure tangentially-related system setting. It's literally not there.
- Sure, various new things have been presented to me along with new updates, like Copilot and the like, but I have been forced into none of it. When I visit Settings > Apps > AI Components, nothing is installed. When I type "Copilot" into the Start Menu, nothing comes up besids Windows Store search suggestions (apps I have not installed) and a keyboard key customization setting. Copilot is literally not there.
- I think there’s actually a good argument that upsells like OneDrive/Copilot (again, in my experience easy to dismiss once a year and uninstall permanently) that solve complicated problems for the median user (secure backups, document storage, AI assistant) is a decently tasteful way to fund a commercial operating system. All of that stuff is optional, and I can just say no, while paying for annual point releases (e.g. Mac OS X) kinda sucked.
Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.
Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker
Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive.
Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.
Yeah, this is the only Microsoft application I am aware of that does this, and I actually think that most Office users want to save to OneDrive and that it makes sense in this context.
The median Office user is using it at work and your employer doesn’t want you saving documents in places you will lose them.
Ditto for universities and schools that provide 365.
I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.
I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services.
For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.
Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.
It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.
> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.
In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.
[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.
I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.
one thing to remember is that window servers are deployed with GPO pre-configured, so you don’t usually see these unless admins leave them at their defaults. plus enterprise/education can turn off tracking using the same mechanisms
Nuantrix distributed a version that was still Apache licensed and merely failed to disclose they had made changes.
This is after MinIO asserted that Weka had also stolen their AGPL-licensed code, showing that they extracted binaries from the distribution. They forgot that that 3-month old (unmodified) version was still Apache licensed though.
MinIO generally don't seem to consult lawyers often. They haven't even set up copyright assignment / CLA immediately after switching the license, so technically they are also incapable of selling AGPL license exceptions just like everyone else.
I've done my best to keep MinIO away from most infra I manage, not because of legal concerns but because it was kind of obvious they'd eventually go full scorched earth and either drop images or the source code distribution all together. Maybe now we can all move on to a fork, or SeaweedFS, or Ceph, or literally anything else.
They don't consult lawyers. The CEO husband and wife team get really angry and fire off threatening letters, but I've never seen them consult a lawyer before sending a letter like that or accusing a company of violating a license publicly.
That just means the fork would also need to be AGPL licensed, and the owner of the fork wouldn't be able to also sell a proprietary version with additional "enterprise" features. And IMO that would be a good thing.
I think it is unlikely a single entity would do that. But a coalition of current MinIO users might get together to create such a project, perhaps under the Auspices of a foundation such as the Linux Foundation. Although, I think that scenario would be more similar to OpenTofu than Valkey.
I am definitely not a lawyer, but as a thought experiment, would Amazon be able to take the AGPL Minio source code, turn it into a managed service, and resell that to customers?
Was under the impression that the answer is yes, they could - with the caveat that they'd have to release the modified source code of whatever backend services are also tied into the Minio source code. For example the AWS control plane that would launch customer instances of Minio, monitor it, etc would also need to be open sourced?
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