Windows Phone as a product wasn't that bad. Even it had some good features which were way ahead of its time. They took some bad decisions and pulled the plug too early.
I loved the the interface design to be honest despite it being a closed OS just like Apple. Window Phone and Firefox OS going down the drain were the biggest disappointments.
I've been extremely happy with my windows surface book, which I got over a decade ago, still use regularly, and I can even still develop on it without a huge headache. I think visual studio is the best ide I've used. Vscode has replaced pretty much every other basic text editing tool I use (windows based, at least). I'm not a big fan of windows adding more and and tracking shit to the os, but I can't remember the last time ive had a bsod, and even then I was fighting with hardware problems.
They definitely have their crap and shit that drives me nuts, and like all the big companies they are trying to slurp up as much data as they can get, which is enough reason for many people to move away, but this idea that they "suck at everything" is just circle jerking.
I’m seriously shocked your surface is still running. I’ve never seen one last more than a year, and they usually required a lot of troubleshooting to keep them going that long.
Funny. I have a buddy who bought his around the same time as I did. I remember talking about it. I saw him a month or so ago and he was still using his. He's got a ton of money (well paid, no kids) and in tech so I figured he would have at least upgraded, but he said there was no need.
Although I just looked it up and they have bad reliability ratings, which is surprising to me based on how good mine has been with decent usage.
I had a Microsoft Tivo competitor that worked with DirecTV in the early 2000s that I really liked. Visual Studio and VS Code aren't bad for what they are. The Zune was pretty awesome. I have had some good times on all generations of XBOX.
I guess what I am saying is that despite my hatred for MS, they haven't been completely awful. Definitely not in the Comcast and various phone companies (I would like to single out Verizon for being particularly scummy) tier of hatred.
Visual Studio is pretty miserable lol. If I had to chose between VS and using a terminal editor like Vim I'd choose Vim in a heartbeat and I'm a JetBrains (of Intellij fame) guy.
I use VsVim when I use VS, but I do most of my code development in Vim. I use VS for a particular product that I support. It works well enough that I can't complain to much, but someone else much more knowledgeable about the tool set it up for me.
My primary development environment is a centos7.3 virtual box with various options (Eclipse). I mostly just use raw gdb because I have been using it long enough that I don't have to think about it too much and it's pretty portable knowledge.
Talking about a tool that for every 10 hours of work saves you 6, but costs you 5.5 extra because of the buggy implementations
It's very visible that new features are added without even once looking at edge cases. Anytime anything goes even a small percentage beyond a very small set of expected things, it makes an enormous mess
I had to reboot my Windows 10 desktop because the software I have to manage my wallpaper wasn't working (and still isn't), and had to unplug my second monitor during reboot otherwise the Steam overlay won't work. After rebooting, I had a different software prompt me to update and the save file location window froze the browser for 3-4 minutes, while discord was freezing in the foreground. The taskbar disappeared until I restarted Explorer.exe, some telemetry process I had never heard of before was eating up 92-100% of the CPU and I had to go into the scheduler to disable it.
This is an average day with Windows nowadays. I didn't even mention the myriad of perpetual issues I've been having.
Of course on my Linux laptop Chrome wouldn't update automatically either through the browser or from the command line (and I have to use Chrome because Google Drive doesn't work right on Firefox on Linux).
Your Linux distribution (which?) does not package Chrome properly. What about Chromium or any other Chrome forks? I notice your beef is about a proprietary product not working properly which you need for a proprietary service. Perhaps ChromeOS would support it better.
Of course on my Linux laptop Chrome wouldn’t update automatically either through the browser or from the command line
Can you be more specific? What are you running on the command line and what is the result? Normally, you would install Chrome via a package manager, and that package manager would be responsible for updating it.
Imma disagree since they’re part of that top 3 shuffle for most valuable companies on the planet BUT I still don’t like them lol
I did try the windows phone though when those were a thing. It was solid but lacked app support so I caved before the 30 day period and returned it.
I don’t know. Them being successful to me sounds like saying kidnappers can get girls. Might technically be true, but misleading. Microsoft managed to kidnap the modern economy by having had a good product previously. If we were to reset things, nobody in their right mind would go with any of the modern Microsoft products. They’re all objectively worse than their counterparts. But due to economic reasons and probably something to do with Stockholm syndrome and laziness, people are trapped in the Microsoft ecosystem.
You call it kidnapping but they’ve just done a good job at making partners and compatible software for 30+ years. That didn’t happen over night and that success wasn’t handed to them. Again, I’m not a fan of theirs and I boot into Linux whenever my day allows for it but it sounds like you’re putting your personal taste before logic.
I very reluctantly put a new mac mini on order last Sunday. I didn't feel great about it but I was feeling done with Windows for a bit at least for home use.
Excel is the one I don't hate, all alternatives suck way more. Active Directory is also ok, but you have to click more than in a moba game, it can become annoying.
Eh, I legitimately like Google Sheets more than Excel. Yeah, it doesn't have all the features, but it has a lot of features, way more than I actually need. My main issue is that it's run by Google, so I'm looking for alternatives (trying to switch to LibreOffice Calc, which is painful).
Excel definitely has its flaws though. For example, in science, it will mangle your data in its attempts to be helpful by reformatting the file if you so much as open it.
The genomics committee had to change their naming scheme for some genes because excel kept converting them into dates (for example, you had a MAR-10 gene, it'd be converted into a timestamp or 3/10) and destroying the names, even if the file wasn't saved.
Allegedly another company has licensed the designs forom Microsoft and we're supposed to start offering them later this year... Although there isn't exactly much runway left this year and the only articles talk about the announcement so in January so who knows.