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posted by n1 on Wednesday October 21 2015, @09:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-put-a-man-on-the-moon,-but-we-wont-do-that dept.

Microsoft's telemetry features in Windows 10 are a privacy advocate's nightmare. Now that Microsoft is trying to back port these "features" into existing versions of Windows, it seems like many of us have no future upgrade path. Sure there is Linux, but I have some older Windows software that I still want to use. ReactOS is still out there, but does not look like there have been any updates in a while.

Does the Soylent community believe it is possible to get this project going full steam to producing a useable alternative for existing Windows users?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday October 21 2015, @09:24PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday October 21 2015, @09:24PM (#252925)

    Lets look to the history books for similar projects.

    DOSEmu finally shipped a 1.0 in exactly one RedHat Linux (Pre RHEL/Fedora) release before being dropped as obsolete.

    WINE can run a few games but few more serious applications reliably after about two decades of effort.

    ReactOS leverages Wine for much of the top of their stack so they can concentrate on the kernel and low level issues. Meaning they will be less complete than Wine by definition.

    If there were a major push to flee Windows and a few deep pocketed corporations put some of their money into it ReactOS could probably entirely replace Windows XP in three years, WIndows 7 in five... by which time both would be out of support and of no interest. Only a committed effort would ever hope to chase Microsoft's taillights and would always be years behind.

    No, you want to end this madness you have two options.

    1. Stop playing their game. Embrace the penguin.

    2. A broad swath of Industry, Government and a few universities could come together and standardize a Windows conpatible API/ABI and demand all purchases be compliance tested against that standard instead of whatever Microsoft ships. That would freeze a target long enough to catch it and make it worth catching.

    There is no third option. So pick one or shut up and obey.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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       Insightful=2, Interesting=2, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Total=6
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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @09:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @09:27PM (#252927)

    A broad swath of Industry, Government and a few universities could come together and standardize a Windows conpatible API/ABI and demand all purchases be compliance tested against that standard instead of whatever Microsoft ships. That would freeze a target long enough to catch it and make it worth catching.

    Ha! That's a good one.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @10:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @10:14PM (#252948)

      I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by unzombied on Wednesday October 21 2015, @10:20PM

    by unzombied (4572) on Wednesday October 21 2015, @10:20PM (#252954)

    WINE can run a few games but few more serious applications...

    If by few you mean lots (13 000 or so [winehq.org]), then yes.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @11:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @11:40PM (#252986)

      And those are only the ones where people cared enough to get an account, log in, and fill out their form. There are at least 20 apps I've used just fine with WINE, but could not be bothered to fill that in.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @04:36AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @04:36AM (#253095)

        Self-deprecating? Yes.
        Slothful and willing to admit it? Yes?
        Informative about the incompleteness of the database? Yes.

        Flamebait? I don't get it.

        -- gewg_

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Lunix Nutcase on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:00AM

      by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:00AM (#252995)

      Of which nearly a 1/3 have a "garbage" rating. And nearly half of all apps fall into the lowest two ratings.

      • (Score: 2) by unzombied on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:54AM

        by unzombied (4572) on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:54AM (#253017)
        Only 6000 apps then, which is apparently "few" to some.
        • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:01AM

          by jmorris (4844) on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:01AM (#253021)

          No, go count how many are Gold with -no- notes. You can get rated gold and still have showstopper bugs like no printing, broken networking, can't use required hardware, etc. By the time you really get down to the real world usability of non-trivial applications the number is low. And you just write off from the beginning -all- of the applications that are brought up in the first breath when you suggest just migrating to Linux. Internet Explorer (i.e. ActiveX plugins for internal use), Office, Photoshop, etc. None of those work.

          • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday October 22 2015, @10:55AM

            by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday October 22 2015, @10:55AM (#253159) Homepage
            > Office, Photoshop, etc. None of those work.

            That's weird. How come my g/f's been using MS Office in Wine (Crossover Office's version) for nearly a decade. Every day. As $DAYJOB, in fact. OK, she's running an old version of Office, but she works in fields where the documents *are* the product (academia, legislative, media/press, etc.), and in those fields *noone* likes the modern gimicky versions of Office, and they're actively avoided. (Not true about all academia, as of course the youngsters come in and all they know is the latest lamest version of the suite. However, the journals themselves actively favour the continuity of using the older versions.)
            --
            Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @04:42PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @04:42PM (#253283)

            Internet Explorer (i.e. ActiveX plugins for internal use),

            yeah, those dumbass companies deserve what they have coming.

        • (Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:45AM

          by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:45AM (#253058)

          You falsely assume those 6000 apps work flawlessly. That isn't even remotely the case.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @10:20PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @10:20PM (#253421)

            Why do you hold Wine to the standard that the programs have to work flawlessly when a lot of them don't work flawlessly in Windows proper?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:27AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:27AM (#257049)

              Working flawlessly in WINE should really be interpreted as working as well as it does in Windows.

        • (Score: 1) by Zappy on Thursday October 22 2015, @08:04AM

          by Zappy (4210) on Thursday October 22 2015, @08:04AM (#253123)
          It's a LOT worse than that.

          If you select Platinum rating and limit it to the last few versions of wine you get 115 applications of which 85 are in the Games category.

          So while I applaud the effort, and having ran some applications with some level of success in Wine myself it is nowhere near a universal solution for running Windows applications.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:13PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:13PM (#253206)

            If you don't restrict to the last few versions of Wine, then you get 4051 Platinum ratings.

            Now this could mean that newer versions of Wine broke thousands of applications. But much more likely is that for most of those it's just that nobody bothered to explicitly enter into the database that those applications actually continue to work on newer versions.

            • (Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:32PM

              by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:32PM (#253213)

              If you don't restrict to the last few versions of Wine, then you get 4051 Platinum ratings.

              Which isn't really meaningful. You're including versions of wine that haven't been actively maintained or in use for years and you're also including in development versions which major distros like Debian and Ubuntu are not shipping. On the other hand, Debian testing [debian.org] and Ubuntu 15.10 [ubuntu.com] use Wine 1.6.2 (latest stable) which has only 153 platinum apps or not even 2% of all applications in that DB.

              • (Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:37PM

                by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:37PM (#253214)

                And of those, 92 are games. So that leaves us only 61 non-games that have a platinum rating in the stable version of Wine. Of which only 11 are productivity apps, none of which are major applications like Microsoft Office or Photoshop.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:16AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:16AM (#253000)

      Just because it's in that list doesn't mean it actually runs or runs well.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:55AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:55AM (#253037)

      Nothing I've ever ran through wine in the past 5 years worked properly out of the box except for really barebones self written programs, those things that do work will suffer from various anomalies that wont manifest themselves immediately.

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:29AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:29AM (#253008)

    2. A broad swath of Industry, Government and a few universities could come together and standardize a Windows conpatible API/ABI and demand all purchases be compliance tested against that standard instead of whatever Microsoft ships. That would freeze a target long enough to catch it and make it worth catching.

    You've got to be kidding. You can't even easily prevent Microsoft from forcibly "upgrading" your computer to Windows 10 any more. Having a standardized Win32 API/ABI isn't going to solve anything, because your system will just get "upgraded" to the newest Windows (which breaks the standard) whether you like it or not.

    The only way to deal with a hostile OS vendor is to simply not use that vendor's products.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:50AM

      by jmorris (4844) on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:50AM (#253062)

      You missed the point. If all purchasing is based on a Win32 Standard that Microsoft's product is only one compliant implementation of, you no longer have to run 'Windows applications' on Microsoft Windows. Whether you actually move all OS installs to a competing product doesn't change that reality, the option to do so forces Microsoft to change the way they behave. It also redefines the relationship between Microsoft and ISVs since they no longer chase Microsoft's ever shifting APIs and instead implement to a Standards document and reference implementation and test suite. Microsoft becomes a dominant but not sole supplier of 'Win32' OS software. Hopefully with tighter standards than the POSIX fiasco where even source level compatibility between supposedly compliant implementations could get into a mass if conditional compilation. Why do you think the UNIX world needed GNU Autoconf?

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 22 2015, @11:37PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday October 22 2015, @11:37PM (#253440)

        Won't work. They tried this with OOXML, and it's still impossible for anyone to implement a completely compatible alternative to MS's Office. As long as MS is dominant, customers will consider their implementation "the standard" and if yours doesn't work, it's not MS's fault, it's you. MS is not going to change their behavior as long as people keep pouring money into their coffers.

        • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday October 22 2015, @11:58PM

          by jmorris (4844) on Thursday October 22 2015, @11:58PM (#253447)

          OOXML was a scam. I'm talking about an actual Standard with a real published set of complete ABI/API documentation and a test suite to judge conformance against. In that sort of scenario Microsoft Office in it's current form would probably be ruled non-conforming and off the approved purchase list. I'm proposing nothing short of seizing the power to define what is and isn't conforming from Microsoft's control, that it is the whole point. OOXML did none of that, you can't even implement a conforming implementation from the so called standard and there is no conformance test suite other than 'does MS Office load/save it?'

          • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday October 23 2015, @02:18AM

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday October 23 2015, @02:18AM (#253487)

            No, OOXML was an actual standard with a real published set of complete documentation too: the ISO even says so. The fact that MS screwed with the ISO's process is beside the point.

            You really think MS wouldn't do the exact same thing with a Win32 standardization effort? That's seriously naive.

            Or do you think they should just get a neutral standards organization to make up the standard? Like, oh, ISO?? Oh wait...

            I'm proposing nothing short of seizing the power

            Seizing it how? You're not going to get the US government to do this (and even if they wanted to, they probably wouldn't be able to legally).

            And finally, where are you going to get any alternative OSes to actually implement this standard? It's not like there's a bunch of software companies out there large enough to pull of such a big project, and who have the expertise to make an OS. We already have something sorta-close with WINE (implements Win32 API/ABI on Linux/x86), and it doesn't work half the time because the Win32 "standard" is such a mess.