<story><title>Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35251484</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rms_returns</author><text>&amp;gt; Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago.&lt;p&gt;Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users&amp;#x27; needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers.&lt;p&gt;Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn&amp;#x27;t a top-priority for developers, but merit is!&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And they&amp;#x27;re still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.&lt;p&gt;All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t like the spyware &amp;quot;features,&amp;quot; but I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I&amp;#x27;ve come to depend on.&lt;p&gt;Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn&amp;#x27;t have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don&amp;#x27;t see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).</text></item><item><author>agentultra</author><text>I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.&lt;p&gt;While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I&amp;#x27;m tired of each device being an island. I like handing off calls from my phone to my laptop when I&amp;#x27;m at work. It began frustrating me years ago when I couldn&amp;#x27;t just flick a few files off of my e-reader to a friend&amp;#x27;s phone despite the prevalence of available networks.&lt;p&gt;Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. It&amp;#x27;s simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they&amp;#x27;re still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t like the spyware &amp;quot;features,&amp;quot; but I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I&amp;#x27;ve come to depend on.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m hopeful that people will find ways to invest in its development and find a way to introduce a competing product that is both secure, in the control of the user, and a delight to use -- able to integrate with a plethora of devices and, for the most part, &lt;i&gt;just work&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item><item><author>dantillberg</author><text>I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence&amp;#x2F;collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice.&lt;p&gt;Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple&amp;#x27;s continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX&amp;#x2F;Windows&amp;#x2F;Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some tweaking and setup and a bit of command line hacking, but it&amp;#x27;s really awesome to have all my machines doing my bidding -- I tell them what to run, when&amp;#x2F;what to update, and I&amp;#x27;m in control of synchronizing settings&amp;#x2F;files between them.&lt;p&gt;With Windows&amp;#x2F;OSX (and Ubuntu to a lesser degree, which I&amp;#x27;d used previously), you can only kind of hope that it does what you want, and when it doesn&amp;#x27;t work, you kind of bang on it a bit to try and get it to change its behavior. All the while, the computer is doing a large number of things you don&amp;#x27;t really want it to do (what are all these processes? why is it connecting to x.y.domain.net? what data is it sending? why does it insist on trying to get me to log in to XXCloudY? I don&amp;#x27;t want to use that), but which you&amp;#x27;re kind of powerless to stop (aside from e.g. blocking connections with another physical network device), even if you knew what was happening. But you don&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krick</author><text>&amp;gt; Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn&amp;#x27;t have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.&lt;p&gt;Woah, really? There are plenty.&lt;p&gt;Photoshop &amp;amp; Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really &lt;i&gt;substitutes&lt;/i&gt; them, unfortunately.&lt;p&gt;AutoCAD &amp;amp; ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don&amp;#x27;t really need that last one).&lt;p&gt;Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn&amp;#x27;t possess. That&amp;#x27;s why free stuff available sucks or even doesn&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.&lt;p&gt;OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.&lt;p&gt;To put it shorter: pretty much any software which isn&amp;#x27;t trivial to write or requires domain knowledge. The only decent examples of these in the FOSS world I can remember are Blender and Krita.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35251484</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rms_returns</author><text>&amp;gt; Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago.&lt;p&gt;Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users&amp;#x27; needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers.&lt;p&gt;Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn&amp;#x27;t a top-priority for developers, but merit is!&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And they&amp;#x27;re still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.&lt;p&gt;All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t like the spyware &amp;quot;features,&amp;quot; but I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I&amp;#x27;ve come to depend on.&lt;p&gt;Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn&amp;#x27;t have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don&amp;#x27;t see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).</text></item><item><author>agentultra</author><text>I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.&lt;p&gt;While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I&amp;#x27;m tired of each device being an island. I like handing off calls from my phone to my laptop when I&amp;#x27;m at work. It began frustrating me years ago when I couldn&amp;#x27;t just flick a few files off of my e-reader to a friend&amp;#x27;s phone despite the prevalence of available networks.&lt;p&gt;Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. It&amp;#x27;s simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they&amp;#x27;re still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t like the spyware &amp;quot;features,&amp;quot; but I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I&amp;#x27;ve come to depend on.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m hopeful that people will find ways to invest in its development and find a way to introduce a competing product that is both secure, in the control of the user, and a delight to use -- able to integrate with a plethora of devices and, for the most part, &lt;i&gt;just work&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item><item><author>dantillberg</author><text>I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence&amp;#x2F;collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice.&lt;p&gt;Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple&amp;#x27;s continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX&amp;#x2F;Windows&amp;#x2F;Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some tweaking and setup and a bit of command line hacking, but it&amp;#x27;s really awesome to have all my machines doing my bidding -- I tell them what to run, when&amp;#x2F;what to update, and I&amp;#x27;m in control of synchronizing settings&amp;#x2F;files between them.&lt;p&gt;With Windows&amp;#x2F;OSX (and Ubuntu to a lesser degree, which I&amp;#x27;d used previously), you can only kind of hope that it does what you want, and when it doesn&amp;#x27;t work, you kind of bang on it a bit to try and get it to change its behavior. All the while, the computer is doing a large number of things you don&amp;#x27;t really want it to do (what are all these processes? why is it connecting to x.y.domain.net? what data is it sending? why does it insist on trying to get me to log in to XXCloudY? I don&amp;#x27;t want to use that), but which you&amp;#x27;re kind of powerless to stop (aside from e.g. blocking connections with another physical network device), even if you knew what was happening. But you don&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PuffinBlue</author><text>&amp;gt; Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn&amp;#x27;t have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.&lt;p&gt;Yes. Photoshop and Lightroom.&lt;p&gt;And before you all jump in and slather me with suggestions of Darktable, Shotwell, GIMP, ASP, RAWtherapee et al please know that NONE of these are a true substitute for Lightroom and Photoshop.&lt;p&gt;Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it&amp;#x27;s slow. Particularly for wedding photography as there&amp;#x27;s just nothing that can offer the same level of speed AND quality that you get from Adobe&amp;#x27;s programmes. Running them on WINE is hit and miss and very slow for me, and the newest CC versions don&amp;#x27;t seem to be supported as far as I could see.&lt;p&gt;I ran Linux Mint for the last year and switched to Windows 10 a few days ago. I absolutely love Linux Mint and would switch back to it immediately (especially as Windows seem a lot more long-winded in terms of &amp;#x27;developer&amp;#x27; stuff so far) if I didn&amp;#x27;t need Lightroom and Photoshop but I just couldn&amp;#x27;t get a fast enough workflow together.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a massive Linux fan, and I&amp;#x27;d literally jump back to it this evening if someone can show me in the comments below a workflow that can match what Lightroom&amp;#x2F;Photoshop offer. But the reality is there are certain types of requirement that Linux just can&amp;#x27;t provide yet and, tough as it is to swallow, that&amp;#x27;s the truth of it.</text></comment>