Seriously folks, Users *do* remain in complete control! I can prove it.

When I installed Windows 7 Pro 64 bit on my game machine a couple years ago, I disabled the Windows Update process in services.msc. Bam! One easy step and I've had no issues whatsoever with unwanted upgrades being forced on me, no nagging, no ads, nothing! Piece of cake, and total control!

Good thing I don't use credit cards, don't use banks, pay for everything in cash, order stuff online using proxies, am not in any "rewards programs", block the hell out of advertising, cookies, and scripting online, and just use facebook to post philosophical rants and Bernie Sanders memes. lol

Yeah.. terrible.. that's why I've been running Win 7 Pro with it disabled for the last 2.5 years and not had so much as a malware show up, even without active antivirus...

..except I don't see any fuss being made about a Clinton campaign staffer impersonating a precinct captain, and being caught on video perpetrating shenanigans...

I'm just wondering what kind of "support" Microsoft has had to offer to "old ass insecure software". I ran XP for years, and once I went into services.msc and turned off all of MS's fucking useless "features", 95% of my security problems disappeared. I didn't even run realtime antivirus or a firewall. Just a once a month series of scans and clean routines with a couple free programs. Very rarely did I wind up catching anything.

Windows 7, same deal. Gut all the bullshit "features", Run noscript and adblock+ on a non-microsoft browser, Disable windows update, and in the year I've been running it, Zero infections on any of the same once-monthly scans.

Seems to me, the biggest *disservice" Microsoft does to end users is "supporting old ass insecure software".. Their products work just fine when you strip all the crap out of them...

Personally, I'd love to work for somebody like Linus.

I'd much prefer working for somebody with a severe allergic reaction to stupid shit, even my own, who demands competence and isn't afraid to hurt somebody's feelings, even my own, if they do something completely boneheaded, than somebody who tolerates braindead behavior that yields sloppy results because they're trying to manage with kid gloves.

It may just be that I share some of those traits, and don't get bent out of shape if somebody rips me a new asshole publicly when I do something dumb... And it also may be that I've had far too many bosses that took the opposite approach and turned the entire organization into a barely functioning clusterf*ck because they didn't want to be a "bad guy".

In my experience, the "ideal medium" between the two extremes is so rare anymore as to be up there with winning a lottery or finding an honest politician who is also sane.

Yup. This. The only reason I own a Windows box is gaming. If I could get away from it for the titles I want to play, I'd wipe that box and put some Linux variant on it.. Till that can be a thing, well, I'm stuck with a shitty OS on my game rig.

.. and has been for a long time now.

I was fairly early to the whole "World Wide Web" thing. I remember when AOL opened for business and the collective IQ of the web dropped by 80 points overnight. You know, back in the days when you could have an actual intelligent conversation with a total stranger in an unmoderated public chat room.

I remember when most websites were run by just ordinary people who had interests in things and wanted to share information about those interests. The computer hobbyists still wrote their reviews of whatever new widget they had gotten their hands on, people still swapped recipes and stupid cat pictures.. there were blogs (even though they weren't called that yet..)

Companies had their websites too. Granted, they didn't have much functionality.. but if a company had a website, you could often times look up information about their products, or find contact information to get ahold of someone.

And maybe, just maybe.. there would be a text link, or a banner at the top of the page as advertising. Usually just to another website, but occasionally an image promoting some sale at a brick and mortar place somewhere.. Then came the "banner exchange" programs.. rotating sets of banners that'd swap out..

And then the professional marketing companies jumped aboard, smelling profits.. and there was an explosion of commercial filth that no amount of eye-bleach could get rid of. First it was more and more ads being packed into pages... then it was pages that were almost content-free, but crammed with horrible ads.. blinking, flashing, retina-searing color contrasts..

Then the ad-men hired some unscrupulous nerds to code up ads that launched new windows full of ads.. sometimes so many that it would crash your system... and it became a game of how fast you could click the mouse to close windows before the script driven popups killed your box and forced a reboot..

All because one parasitic industry decided it had a right to make vast sums of money hawking products and services nobody actually wanted, and damn you for denying them that opportunity.

Ad-blockers came into existence not because people inherently object to respectful, reasonable, non-intrustive advertising. They were invented precisely because the advertising industry itself is predatory and abusive and knows no bounds when it comes to forcing shit you don't want onto you.

You pay $2.50 for a bottle of asprin. $0.25 of that $2.50 is the cost of the actual asprin. Perhaps a penny is the cost of the bottle and label. Another penny for the box. Another $0.25 to deliver it and stock it. And then $1.98 for all the advertising to convince you that you want to buy it.. When all that really motivated you to buy that asprin was the hangover you had this morning from too many beers last night.

The vast majority of advertising is simply a giant scam in the first place. False claims repeated ad-nauseum till people don't bother to challenge them anymore. Coke spends over half a billion dollars each year on advertising in the US alone. Does anyone honestly believe that there's a single human being in the US that doesn't know Coke and thus needs informed? Are people really so stupid as to think that a commercial is why someone buys Coke over Pepsi? If I want a Coke, I buy a Coke. If I feel like a Pepsi, I buy a Pepsi. And it doesn't have a bloody blessed thing to do with the millions spent at the Super Bowl or the logo feces that is smeared over the entire environment. And yet that bottle of Coke probably costs twice as much for me to buy because an industry has been pushing that lie.

I eat at McDonalds because they're cheap, quick and everywhere, not because of some irritating bullsh*t commerical that tries to be "hip" or "trendy".

If you offer a good product or service, one that really fills a need, you don't particularly *need* much advertising. Some, sure, to get the word out. But 99% of what is advertised is either redundant or duplicitous BS that's just trying to sell some substandard crap that should have never existed in the first place because of how lousy it is.

Starve advertisers to death. Block everything. They're just a giant mass of tapeworms infesting the body of human society and leading to weakness and disease.

To be honest.. I cannot think of a single time where advertising has been "helpful" to me in any way...

for you technologically superior folk..

"Can I completely gut Windows 10 so that it basically just functions like Windows 7 with DX12?"

I own one Windows box. with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit running on it. It is used for exactly 3 things.. Playing Minecraft, and playing various Steam games. Also occasionally downloading mods for those various games from one or two very specific trusted websites.

I have an older box running Arch for everything *else* I want to do, because I'm not stupid enough to trust Microsoft with anything that might potentially have importance.

In the past, before I took the leap into Linux, Whenever I would set up a Windows box, I'd always pop into services.msc and disable a crapload of services.. usually using Blackviper's service guides.. And IE would only get used once to download a real browser, which I would then kit out with adblock and noscript plugins before doing anything else.

And this generally seemed to work pretty well. Even with no always-on antivirus, no security updates (I'd disable Windows Update completely), shut down windows managed firewalls and not replace them... all the things you're generally "not supposed to do".. I'd very rarely run into any kind of problem. (The exceptions being when I'd do something deliberately stupid and risky, fully knowing I shouldn't.. just because my brain went dead for a brief time.)

I found once you gut most of Windows, the security risks drop dramatically. More than enough for me to find tolerable for a dedicated game machine, anyway..

With Windows 10 being the obvious transition to "Software as a Service so we can just keep billing you for renting our product".. (which is where I forsee this going, ultimately..) is it still "old Windows" enough that it can be properly gutted?

I have no use for a sexualized version of Clippy... I have no use for "Edge". I have no use for really any "feature" of Windows 10 besides DX12. And I have a lot of reluctance about some of the features, even when it's only on a machine I use to play some games. So, to free up system resources.. I'd like to rip all that stuff out.. or at least permanently disable it.

Anybody tried playing around with that sort of approach to see if it is still doable? Like disabling Windows Update entirely?

No, Lobbying *is* evil, and it has nothing to do with "domain experts explaining an issue" to someone who isn't an expert.

It has everything to do with purchasing influence.

An industry or special interest group has far more resources at its disposal than the average citizen, and thus can hire people to do nothing more than promote their interests. So much so, that they routinely employ people to do nothing *but* promote their interests 24/7/365 to anyone in a position of power that might make decisions affecting those interests.

There is no responsibility for being truthful, or accurate, or recommending a "best policy" in this lobbying.. The responsibility is solely to "convince the lawmaker to do their employer's bidding."

A lawmaker relying on such a "domain expert" is not remotely going to have "good data" from which to make decisions. Garbage in, Garbage out.

Further, an "Elected Representative" has a limited amount of "influence time". They can either spend that paying attention to their constituants, or they can spend it paying attention to the lobbyists who are paid to suck up to them, and who often are bearing gifts and other, more subtle, enticements.

This undermines the basic premise of democratic representation. The voices of the individual citizens are drowned out amongst the clamor of a sea of yes-men and suckups bearing bribes and false "experts" pushing agendas. And with a nod and a wink and a round of golf, the "interests of the public" disappear never to be seen again.

No. It should be made a felony to pay someone to speak to an elected official on your behalf, or to receive money for such "service" on behalf of someone else. If a representative needs an "expert" on a subject, there are *plenty* of sources that can be tapped without the contamination of lobbyists.

... since I don't really know all that much about them. (Yes, my nerd-fu is weak.) I can, however, give some features and behavioral descriptions of what I'd like to see in a "FrankenOS".

"Userspace Stuff:"

1.,"It just works". Really good hardware detection and a set of generic drivers that will at least grant basic functionality for all essential hardware.

2. Robust documentation and error messages. When something breaks, I want to know what happened in real language, even if it's just an approximation, not some string of gobbledygook that I need a degree in CS to begin to parse. I also want clear documentation on what every part of the OS *is*, and does. Configuration options, running processes, services, threads.. the whole bit.

3. Windows level gaming capacity. Dx-whatever-the-latest-and-greatest-is.

4. A "no-bullsh*t" UI. I don't want any fancy-schmancy crap like transparent windows and animations, or retarded nonsense that tries to make my desktop look and act like a phone. No stupid behaviors like if I drag a window up to the top of the screen, it changes the size/orientation of the window.. none of that. Just let me set a picture as a background, and give me good configuration options so that other things could be added in as "plugins" if I should ever, for some godforsaken reason, decide I want them. Just make them easily unpluggable for when I come to my senses. Multiple desktops are reasonable.

"Under the Hood:"

1. Native multi-level sandboxing with encryption. "The issue isn't whether you're paranoid, but whether you're paranoid enough." Nothing that accesses the internet should get within 2 layers of the core OS. Options should exist to lie to the "internet layer" about every aspect of what the system is, does, is running, etc. from window size to OS version. Nothing accessible by a browser should remotely be able to see anything outside the box the browser is contianed in, inclduing memory spaces and the like. Ability to handle encrypting everything from file systems to memory to the bootloader. I don't care if it slows things down a bit. I want "paranoid about privacy" function.

2. Modularity by design. Components should be compartmentalized, and as independent as possible. I should be able to strip out, or not include, any element of an install that isn't explicitly necessary for the funtionality I require. Do one thing, and do it well, but that's it.

3. The ability to set hard memory limits on a per-application basis, and a really nice memory management system that polices those looking for crud and cleaning.

4. Comprehensive versioning management relative to the OS itself, and the ability to "roll back" updates that make a mess due to being broken. Similarly, an in-built VM that lets you test out any prospective updates in its own sandbox prior to them being allowed to go live.

5. The ability to "hard kill and purge" any app that is found to be misbehaving. As in "immediately brute force stop it from doing what it's trying to do, and completely flush the memory space." Preferably by some keystroke combination that doesn't involve needing to have some kind of task manager always running to execute.

6. A good, intuitive, logical/physical drive management system for all OS functionality and components. Specify what drives/segments are used for OS files, swaps, temporary files, sandboxes, etc.. each with versioning control, journalling, etc.

7. Specific update management sorting. Deliberate blocking of "schedulers" and "auto-update tools" and the like.. permissable only maybe in certain areas of sandbox nests. It's manual and requries explict user enaction, or it doesn't happen, period. Same with "helpers" or any other of these bullsh*t "always on in the background" programs that companies love to infest systems with these days.

"Ideological Stuff:"

1. "Free as in Freedom, not necessarily as in Beer. But beer is good too if it can be swung."

2. "F*ck DRM"

3. "F*ck advertising and tracking anything, and f*ck companies that support such evil."

4. "The system belongs to me, and it does what *I* tell it to, not what some asshat from some big company thinks i ought to want to do with it."

Yes, I realize that this will probably wind up being bloated, slow, and crufty... but I'd gladly pay for more powerful hardware to handle functionality like this.

And if they can't do that, they simply collude with a prosecutor who is bucking for high conviction rates to win a judgeship to railroad some innocent schlep by abusing the system, and then the "public' thinks the matter is settled and the pressure to actually find out truth goes away.

No, US cannot.

Not because there are no ways to do it.. there are plenty. It's a pure corruption issue. There is no political will to do *anything* to reign in the abuses of the corporate oligarchy. None. Because 99% of people in politics are completely bought and paid for by the giant corporations that make up that oligarchy. It's pointless and stupid to even ask the question.

Our "political leadership" does as it is bidden by their corporate masters, and pay no attention to what is best for the population. For the simple reason that it is impossible to build a functional democratic political system on top of an authoritarian economic system. Economic power beats political power in any endgame.

When "regulators" and "Industry insiders" play the "revolving door jobs game", no, there's no legitimate oversight ever.. and we do ourselves a disservice by pretending that the system "works" in any way. It doesn't.

What we need to do is figure out how to fix *that*, not blather about nonsense that ignores the functional realities.

There's also a *slight* slice of demographic that doesn't fit so neatly. For about 7 years, I was "that guy in the corner".. I was *waiting* for a serious Linux Gaming happening. I finally broke down and installed Win7 on a box just to be able to play a couple games I'd been waiting for *years* to see if they got a proper Linux port. I'm still waiting, really.. despite having a Windows gaming pc..

But besides being "That One Guy".. I know probably close to 100 people who have a console, but really don't want to *play* on consoles... ("PC Master Race" sort of thing).. but who also really really *hate* having to run MS products to get any kind of decent PC gaming experience.. They're like me, except I don't have a console, and don't want one either.

Their gaming is kind of.. grudgingly done. Now, I can't actually *prove* this.. but with the amount of b*tching I hear about both Microsoft and Consoles from them.. I'm fairly convinced that were they to find a honest to god "Linux Gaming Solution" that had the support of the AAA's..They'd not only switch to it, but *ALSO* increase their general expediture on games as a side effect.

So there may be at least some people who would increase their consumption simply due to being happier with the environment they consume in.. like someone ordering more at a restaurant because the decor or service is especially pleasant to them. I am one of those. Nothing would make me happier than to be able to say goodbye completely to MS again, and still be able to play awesome games. I can't do that on Linux yet. At least not the awesome games I want to play.

Now, if I could do that on Linux.. my last reservation about "going heavy gamer" goes away, and significantly more of my income would get routed that way because I'm not hesitant about getting f*cked by MS down the line.

Just a thought though.