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German authorities are waking up to a Windows 7 headache, with approximately €800,000 required in order to keep the elderly software supported a little longer.
Microsoft had long been warning users, both enterprises and individuals, that the end of support was nigh - 14 January - and made available various ways of keeping those updates flowing.
Alternatively there is always the option of a migration to Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) with three years of free-ish support (because, y'know, you still have to pay for those Azure resources).
Finally, customers that had ponied up the cash for an E5 subscription could also be entitled to an extra year of Windows 7 security updates, through to 2021 (assuming the subscription stays active).
Blighty's very own NHS is an example of just such an organisation, having splashed the cash for some E5 goodness.
The position in which the German government now finds itself might raise a wry smile somewhere in Seattle.
(Score: 3, Troll) by barbara hudson on Friday January 24 2020, @05:17PM (20 children)
Today, half the distros fail to install from a USB stick, none of the others support the console if it's not on your laptop screen even when you've set your external screen as the main screen, most don't work with laptop sound cards, printer support is dicey at best if you have a newer printer, screen readers don't work even on distros supposedly made for the visually handicapped, and there's even more fragmentation.
And the quality of open source software is not great. Need text-tospeech? You're stuck with festival - the core of which stopped being maintained the previous century. Need speech-to-text? I had both back in the Win 3.1 days on a 286 with no network connection needed. 386 with 4/8 meg. And it didn't sound like Stephen Hawking or drsbaitso from DOS.
The default file manager in Ubuntu is a joke, even compared to win 3.0. Only allowed a single instance , and only one pane of files visible at a time because tabs instead of side-by-side display. And my isn't installed by default, because it's not a GUI app. Even though it beats the crap out of their stupid file manager.
4 different ways to install software because consistency isn't important. And don't even bother with in-place upgrades - because you'll be left with having to reinstall your previous one from scratch .
FreeBSD has the same problem with sound and printers, text-to-speech, etc. I'm glad I was able to resurrect a deskjet 9800 because my colour laser didn't have support for many features.
What good is free software if its only free as in cost, and not free to do what you need to do because it's shit? Even if the cost of your time is zero, it's still too expensive for many people because it can't do the jobs they need to do.
If someone were to ask me today to install Linux for them I'd flat-out refuse. There will never be a year of Linux on either the desktop or the laptop. And the stream of Linux phone announcements are a joke - the latest was a Linux phone that can't send text, can't make phone calls, has no sound, and costs twice as much as a cheap tablet with a bigger screen and sound.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: -1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @08:39PM (3 children)
Sounds like you should just stay with Microsoft and quit complaining
HAVE YOU EVER CONTRIBUTED TO LINUX OR DO YOU JUST BITCH ALL THE TIME?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 24 2020, @11:20PM (2 children)
I noticed you continue to fail to address the problems I point out - that's a pretty tacit admission that you can't attack them because they are real and neither you nor anyone else is addressing them.
And the reason is the fundamental flaw of free software - only the big players can afford to pay people to fix bugs, and nobody enjoys fixing bugs even when paid, never mind doing it for free.
Either address the problems I continue to point out with both the flawed development model and the buggy software, or fix the problems. Your whining about how it's somehow unreasonable for people to point out the many problems is tedious. No wonder you don't log in - you're a moron.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:40AM
Sounds like you are looking in a mirror ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:45AM
I dont use windows or OSX and dont complain or care about them.
I use linux and contribute where I can.
As if this argument means anything -- "only the big players can afford to pay people to fix bugs"
How is all the pay that MS is paying working out for you?
I will just filter you out from now on -- waste of time ...
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday January 25 2020, @01:02AM (4 children)
I guess my experience is different. There's tons of Linux distributions out there so maybe you're right that half of them won't install, but pick out a popular distribution like Linux Mint, and it just works. People like to bitch about systemd and while I don't like it either, it's not given me any grief on my laptop. Neither did Manjaro either. Even Slackware just works, though with Slackware you do need to know what you're doing so it's not the most noob-friendly distro - but if you know what you're doing with it, it just works.
I might have been with you if you said Linux is less ready for the desktop than it was 10 years ago, mostly thanks to some of the "modern" window managers, like whatever the heck it is that Ubuntu ships with it. But with Linux, you have the freedom not to use that, which is why I use XFCE on all my machines that have a gui installed.
I guess I can't speak for speech-to-text software, and really to be frank about it, Windows is probably still the best as accessibility goes. Printers is another problem, but the main issue with new printers that new printers have moved all the "smarts" into the driver, so it's not just a matter of figuring out how to talk to the printer if the manufacturer won't supply one - you basically have to reverse engineer and reimpliment the whole thing. Same issue as with winmodems 20 years ago.
I agree that the open phones so far have been disappointing, as we really need something to break the duopoly in the phone market, Linux or not (I'd even welcome Microsoft back into the market!). But if you want to be technical about it, Linux dominates the phone market. I don't really consider Android to really be Linux, even though it does run the kernel, as it's not open and locked down. But hey, if you're going to say the only Linux laptops are Chromebooks then you're getting called out on it.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @01:31AM (2 children)
I would pay for good software and operating systems ; I used to spend thousands every year before open source became a thing , and I never had the wasted time and frustration of the last decade. Much of the former ecosystem is gone, and we are all poorer for it.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:55PM (1 child)
so you buy some closed, evidently obscure, sound chip and it's linux's fault it doesn't work?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:41PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:16AM
Not only that, all the major players let you run a live version off a CD or USB before installing, so you can test if everything works beforehand.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:11AM (10 children)
Ubuntu, there's your problem... egads. Ubuntu and Gnome make Win10 seem good. Gnome is basically cellphone for desktop.
Forget if we discussed this before but have you tried Knoppix with Adriane? the screen reader was pretty good when I messed with it a couple years ago, other than I couldn't figure out how to turn it off.
Win10 makes my eyes bleed, and made me go distro-trawling again, and ~150 ISOs later (thank ghod for Easy2Boot, no damned burning of CDs anymore) had settled on PCLinuxOS (a Mandrake descendant) with KDE. Five minute install, full-featured, everything Just Works, and runs well on ten year old hardware. Only thing that's been a persistent fail is playing nice with the Windows network, tho I admit that may be that I have only half a clue about networking. (It'll usually see Windows; it doesn't let Windows see its preciousss files.) I still poke at other distros as they come down the pipe, but none have stolen me away as yet. Frankly it's the first one that's given me an enthusiasm for linux, and I've been messing with it since 1998.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @05:16AM (9 children)
Gnome has been crap since 2.0 (at least). KDE was okay , then with 4.0 a total "how come nothing works" garbage that finally got sorted, but provided Pottering the entry point to start destroying Linux from the inside.
Opensuse would fail to install multiple times the last couple of years, knoppix no longer supported sound and the version rolled out specifically for the visually disabled also lacked sound, and didn't work on other hardware that sound worked on because the screen reader never got integrated into the version of the applications that it was supposed to support, a half dozen other distros, even good old Slackware, wouldn't even boot, and this was after letting them format the entire disk and accepting the defaults. I swear, it was easier back when I had to install from a stack of floppies. It's not like I NEED a GUI.
No distros ever worked properly with my colour laser printer. Scanning? Plug a USB memory stick into the scanner, press the scan button, move the USB stick to the computer to copy the files. What garbage. Stuff like that made me regret wiping Windows, when it got paired with all the other problems. Strange because after win9x, I switched to Linux with no problems.
I'm pretty much done distro hopping after this computer dies. Honestly, I'd rather not have a computer than put up with this crap. Open source is a failure because it keeps on trying to reinvent the wheel, and each iteration has more flaws. It lacks the discipline of the marketplace. And now that people are starting to realize that the big players have co-opted it, maybe we can get back to an economic model that actually works for developers in general, and not just the big players.
There will never be a year of Linux on the desktop. Nor a year of bare Linux on phones, or laptops, or tablets. The dream is dead. Clinging to it is preventing us from creating the next big thing, whatever that may be. But whatever it is, it won't be open source. Developers need to eat. They also need to be paid to debug, because nobody likes maintaining code. Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes "great day today - I get to fix other people's mistakes. Oh joy!"
The old model of selling software to customers still works with business. It still works with gamers. It still works for Apple and Microsoft. RMS says closed source is evil and antisocial. I say it's evil to brand someone that way just because they want to earn a living instead of being like him, begging for a room every few months on his website. His sense of entitlement because he once used to be a somebody has finally worn thin, just as the flaws in his proposed business model have also pretty much been beaten up by the school of hard knocks.
I'll be branded a troll yet again, but that's what happens when people don't want to admit there are serious problems. Even when the near monopoly of browsers stares them in the face and the governance of the Mozilla Foundation is more intent on doing stupid stuff nobody wants rather than concentrating on the browser, their core product. Nobody wants the add on services they're trying to create to make money.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:12AM (4 children)
Can't argue with any of that. The whole free-everything works just fine so long as you've got an endless supply of other people's money. Not so good when you don't. I don't know how they expected that to work outside of the server market where support is 90% of your expected costs, and enterprise is the only place people will pay enough to support a 'free' ecosystem. As you say there's no way it works on the desktop beyond the hobbyist level; if it could, Dell and HP would be all over it, if only to save themselves the $30 a head Microsoft tax (or however much it is nowadays).
I've had similar problems with linux all the way back (my first was RedHat6 in 1998), where one damn thing or another didn't work, or was creatively broken, or looked nice but wtf, or was missing entirely, and by damn if Windows did it this way, we'll do the opposite, because contrary. And if it ain't broke, change it til it is, cuz old and boring! It's only in the past 3 years or so that I've started finding distros up to XP's standard of Just Works and Completely Functional out of the box. Not willing to spend a bunch of time on it anymore; either it works right off, or it goes on down the road. Aside from not going to pay the hardware tax, I loathe MacOS, so that's not an option. (I have a Hackintosh. It's more stable than a real Mac. Nothing else about it agrees with me.) I've had no luck with the BSDs.
And then about the time KDE got nicely re-functional, they done did that Plasma thing, and broke it all again. Okay, so now it finally all works, but lordy it's fucking ugly (that brutalist-style desktop with its micro-controls and featureless plains of flat white are precisely why I hate Win10!), and lost 90% of its configurability. The day Oxygen is no longer available is the day I give up and go back to Trinity, even tho it's not as stable.
At least, when I need something more 'modern' than XP.
Anyway, I do like PCLinusOS with KDE (so far...) and it's been very stable (and we joke about how every update is boring), but when I try other distros, 9 times out of 10 it takes about two minutes to go into the permanent Nope pile. And my requirements doubtless aren't as demanding as yours.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:11PM (3 children)
"Oh but we're protecting users from their own haste" is not a valid rationalization unless you're a fricking control freak nazi.
It was simple - ENTER meant ok without having to actually select a button, and ESC meant cancel, again without having to select a button. But no, mere users too stoopid to be trusted with such "power-luser shortkuts."
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:08PM (2 children)
BINGO! Did they really think Windows (before 8/10, anyway) got where it did by randomizing stuff so it wouldn't be too foolishly consistent?? Yeah, that was what I actually liked about KDE: I didn't have to relearn everything I knew from Windows; I could just tweak a few things and life went on as before. Windows-like? Who cares, so long as it works well, which includes not annoying the crap out of normal users who aren't zealots.
And care to guess what's the first thing I noticed about OSX after setting up that Hackintosh?
The damn scroll wheel is upsidedown. Windows and the whole rest of the known universe goes this direction, so by damn we'll do the opposite. There's no other explanation.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:20PM (1 child)
That explains the hockey puck mouse - they think we're a bunch of hockey pucks.
It can't be hard to reverse the two wires that go to the scroll wheel ... maybe there's a market opportunity for "fixed" ("neutered"? "spayed"?) mice? "Mail in your mouse and we'll send it back with scrolling fixed for $10."
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:26PM
LOL, I said something like that about the hockey puck mouse that came with my Mac G4 (given to me, wouldn't have paid for that thing.. pretty to look at, but embarrassingly low-end inside) ... one button because we can't count to two, and an 18 inch cord because if it were longer, we might wander away from the computer and get lost!
Mouse rewiring, now there's a market made for Macs :D Given that Hackintosh got a normal PC mouse, it's obviously done in software, and what can be done in software can be undone in software.... maybe it's their new way of forcing you to buy a Mac mouse...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:57PM (1 child)
why the fuck do you keep bitching about software not installed by default. all you have to do is run "sudo apt install mc" and it's installed in a minute or less. i'm starting to believe the troll label.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:48PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:08PM (1 child)
sounds like you were trying to install openSUSE from the live discs even though the download page for the live discs say not to use them for install.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:29PM
Why are there still distros that separate Live from Install ISOs?? all that does out here in userland is create a needless PITA. Seriously, if there's a good technical reason for it, I'm listening.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.