Whenever I read something this insane, I wonder whether the person posting it is a paid asshole or a useful idiot.

Agreed - I'm also a light user of KDE and exactly the same as I said about the Mac applies to KDE. The Mac improved a lot, although it's still more flexible to use 3rd party stuff. I'm not aware of any extra window management available in KDE although as stated I'm only a light user of it really (my gaming box is a Bazzite install with KDE).

People switched to Google because it had a nice clean white page with a single search box, while AltaVista was going the 90s fad portal route. Clean interface and simplicity was thee key,

There's lots of talk about how Google's search algos were better than AltaVista but honestly, at first, they weren't. They were close and they improved, but the loading speed and simplicity advantage that Google had over AltaVista is what bought them time to improve. Remember too that one reason AltaVista was better was that people optimised to be found by it, and not for Google. As time went on, more people learned what Page Rank was (long since gone) and started to optimise for that instead, thus speeding up the switch.

Lesson: Don't go complex. Don't go shoving extra stuff at people that they haven't asked for. Give them the simplest thing possible, and they will use it.

I did comment on the _kernel_. I did not comment on Weyland (which IMO is a really bad idea and I will avoid it as long as possible). I certainly did not comment on the fuckups behind systemd, that clearly show there are prominent people that do not get KISS or IT security in the Linux space as well.

As to MS, yes they do not care or are fundamentally incompetent regarding security. They push defective patches. They have ridiculous vulnerabilities. They had their cloud hacked several times now, always due to abjectly stupid mistakes. There is a reason that they claimed "security is our highest priority" several times now, always after they screwed up massively. MS cares about security exactly as far as they think they need to in order to stay in business and not one bit more.

Thank you.

As I wrote in 2001, with a plea digital public works -- like self-driving AI software funded by government dollars which I had seen in action at CMU around 1985 -- always stay open and free if funded by government or charitable dollars:
https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
        "As a software developer and content creator, I find it continually frustrating to visit web sites of projects funded directly or indirectly by government agencies or foundations, only to discover I can't easily improve on those projects because of licensing restrictions both on redistribution and on making derived works of their content and software. ...
        The non-profit collaborative communications ecosystem is polluted with endless anti-collaborative restrictive terms of use for charitably funded materials (both content and software) produced by a wide range of public organizations. These restrictions are in effect acting like "no trespassing -- toxic waste -- keep out -- this means you" signs by prohibiting making new derived works directly from pre-existing digital public works. The justification is usually that tight control of copyright and restricting communications of those materials will produce income for the non-profit, and while this is sometimes true, the cost to society in the internet age in terms of limiting cooperation is high, and in fact, I would argue, too high. ..."

Sad that is still an issue a quarter century later -- especially in the case of AI.

AI could bring so much abundance for all -- or it could be used to enforce artificial scarcity or all (or worse). Making any sort of AI in a for-profit competitive fashion is much more likely to produce the latter than the former, as implied in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Building AI in an open and socially-responsible as-safe-as-feasible way was essentially the whole original core thesis of the founding of OpenAI (as reflected in the name).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly" ... In its founding charter, OpenAI defined its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) "benefits all of humanity", and stated an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available, but later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns. ... OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." ..."

How do you know they exist in the first place? Start menu is a copy of the Apple menu as enhanced by an ancient shareware utility called "Hierarchical Menus". That add-on does exactly what the start menu does, allowing shortcuts to be grouped in folders etc. and for nesting of folders. It predates the Start menu by a few years.

One of the points was to be able to organise by category. I might not know what the thing-to-set-up-a-disk-partition is called, but it's probably in a menu hierarchy called "Utilities" and I can go look. It's discoverable, and it should be there.

Pinned things? Probably a set of defaults that are easily removable would be my preferred answer (which is what they do), but I could also settle for none until you put it there. But I very much disagree that nothing at all should be in the Start menu except your own choices.

I mean - the Apple's "Microsoft - Start Your Photocopiers!" definitely applied to the start of the Win 7 era. It was pretty much a straight lift of Aqua, ironically (given this post's subject) with more flexibility on positioningthe task bar vs the Dock. Certainly Windows didn't introduce pinning apps.

By the end of it though, I thought that Win7 had better actually window management than the Mac did, and even with the split view stuff etc. that's been introduced since I still feel that in order to get the same flexibility of window management that I get in Windows I need to install 3rd party stuff on the Mac.

Admittedly I haven't sat down and done a feature-to-feature comparison for a while there, but yep: will definitely give MS the edge of the ability to re-arrange your windows on the screen.

Yeah, but I heard exactly the same thing about Windows 7 (although admittedly never about 8). If you're using Windows, you will eventually move for something. Whether it's hardware, or some new app you want...can't predict it. Just that looking at the pattern over many years, you will.

I have an install of it. I don't use it, I'm Mac for my main platform and Linux for my gaming. But I still have a Windows partition, and it's Windows 11 too, mostly to handle odd manufacturer firmware update programs for external hardware. Even I moved to 11, and eventually people will do need to do so if they want to stay on the Windows platform. In my case, even if they don't want to stay on that platform in fact.

I would think that China has that access. I know of several large corporations and one smaller state that have this access.

What a dumb statement. If you are trying to defend the indefensible (Microsoft), try at least to sound a bit plausible.

So? The Linux kernel folks patched within hours or days. And these vulnerabilities are unlikely to crop up again. You are comparing apples and oranges. Also note that building a big, bloated KISS violation of a "kernel", as Microsoft does, certainly counts as "not caring about security". The only way to get good security in software, and even more so in kernels, is by simplicity. Microsoft certainly knows that. But raking in the dollars is far more important to them.

So ask yourself: Why are you defending Microsoft with invalid arguments?

There are also other master's degrees besides the clearly negative-value MBA. For example, you can get a STEM one.

This is also the users that tolerate this crap and ask for more, at least some of them. Yes, MS has no honor, integrity, decency or skill, but they are getting away with it because they do not get called out.

And a rather large part of it is user incompetence. Not much of a surprise.