If you want to know how serious to take this, just look at this gem:
> Enhancing Search: [...] Clearer and more trustworthy results, with results from content on your device easy to understand and clearly distinct from web results
So yeah, you still get web results in your search bar, a feature absolutely zero people want and which is just there to fake Bing success, just with a little divider now next to the applications the search failed to find.
Not just me then? Those integrated search features have been around for so long, and always irritating. I use macOS. Same problem. Searching your computer or searching the web are fundamentally different tasks. I'm curious if anyone actually approaches them the same.
I don't like that default on mac either but in their defense it's super easy to customize. I turned off all but applications and my documents folder for spotlight search.
I think most computer users dislike this but I see a ton of normal folks do this, they don't have the same conceptual boundaries folks on this site do (myself included).
Yeah, but is that a good thing? I think the lack of those conceptual boundaries are exactly why computers are so difficult to learn for some people. Access to web services, and the services themselves, still aren’t reliable enough to support this idea of a completely transparent computer experience where you don’t need to know what machine a file is on.
How? I feel like every time I do my ~1 yearly Windows reinstall I need to google it and then alter half a dozen registry keys and a bunch of group policy settings, and some of them are the "old" settings now replaced with something even more vaguely named (probably on purpose).
Mine was from websites 7 days I think. Randomly stopped booting a month ago (bsod after updates).
Switched to cachyos - I've spoken with at least 5 people who have had the same bsod after updates situation in the last 6 months. If windows at least embraced proper update techniques like with immutable Linux - and enough polish to make the random bsod loop after updates impossible to accur without hardware damage id likely go back for my gaming rig at least - but right now, it feels like garbage ngl
I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.
The computer I'm writing this on, the earliest things showing in Control Panel were installed in February 2012. It's not a rarely used clean machine, it's a daily use home computer/plaything with a lot of stuff installed/removed over the years from application suites to dev environments and esolangs, to editors, viewers, inspectors, emulators, hypervisors, browsers, chat and streaming clients, game stores, networking tools.
That's not a reason for why I didn't need to wipe and fresh install Windows in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, which was what qingcharles was claiming he had to do.
If you need to reinstall Windows so frequently, have you considered giving Linux a shot? I switched 16 years ago and haven't looked back. Until recently, I used Ubuntu and I think I had to reinstall twice in 15 years, one of which was when I got a new laptop.
Last year I switched to NixOS and while my impression is that it's going to be much more stable even than Ubuntu, installation also only takes me 5 minutes. That is, 5 min until my system is in exactly the state I want, including installed software, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, desktop wallpaper, GUI theme, etc.
I'm not sure what you think happens if random programs are lying around - they affect nothing except waste a miniscule amount of space. I cleaned up the context menu once, probably the autostart once upon a time, search indexer is off and use Everything instead, antivirus is off ...
Of course I'm still on Windows 10 and will be for the foreseeable future.
My desktop running windows 11 started life as windows 7. Has been used on different hardware both amd and intel. Has been cloned multiple times. And the only problem was a recent windows update that beefed security so i couldn't access shared files on an older clone running on another hardware because of using same sid
Not the person your were talking to but at work the Windows machines have a bunch of MDM garbage on them that screws up the OS and requires reimaging every few months. For that reason I have a Powershell script to automatically set up a machine.
Honestly I should. Registry and stuff gets cluttered. Programs don't uninstall cleanly, or they change settings I can't find. On one machine I somehow set it up as a wifi print server or something and for the life of me couldn't find a way to turn it off. But it's such a hassle to setup a computer.
Unclean uninstalled programs also don't impact performance. Unless it really isn't uninstalled and still runs in the background, but that can easily be fixed by a person competent enough to reinstall Windows once a year.
Settings you don't find, will still be not found after reinstalling Windows.
In my case it's not about performance, it's about usability and disk space. And again, that time I somehow started a WiFi access point and couldn't find anything online to turn it off. That laptop also at some point had the new folder option get removed from the right click menu. I had to copy/paste one. There are a lot of weird things that can happen over the years.
What are the practical issues with "cluttered" registry? But also, you can use special apps to track installations and do advanced uninstallations for ~clean uninstalls. Likewise, you could even spend time tracking settings.
So yes, still a hassle, but nothing comparable to setting/reinstalling everything from scratch, that's just pure waste
Maybe I shouldn't have said cluttered. More like programs mess with things and don't always put them back. There are a lot of Microsoft support forum posts that had to reinstall Windows to fix weird issues that only started after the install
It's been a while but from what I remember the easiest way to block this was by disallowing outbound network requests from search/the start menu in the firewall settings. It worked across all versions of Windows I tried it on.
Click Start, type something to bring up search results, click the kabob in the top right (...), click "Search Settings", disable "Show search highlights".
Ha! This is the first time I've even tried the Win10 Search bar in months after constant disappointment from it, and it doesn't even load for me nowadays:
Transferring to a new Android phone without depending on Google cloud is a total nightmare. It doesn't help that there's a ton of outdated information in the net on how to do that. You can see it in this very thread: lots of people saying "do a local Whatsapp backup, transfer the backup manually": this USED to work but does NOT anymore. There is a decryption key in /data/data/com.whatsapp, which of course you can only access on rooted phones (maybe there's a way to approve the transfer when the old phone is still working, not sure).
To the best of my knowledge, it is basically impossible to fully transfer applications locally to new phones without root access.
- do a FULL backup of the apps you want to transfer, that means it must also include "device protected data"
- restore apps on your new phone
If you'd like regular backups of apps: create scheduled backup with NeoBackup to a local folder and sync them with whatever tool you want to external storage. Good luck with that, you'll need it.
> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.
This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.
I tried the exact same thing a few weeks ago with a de-googled phone and it did not work. I had to transfer the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder as well via root access, then it restored the chats (the display of the old phone was dead and hence I couldn't initiate any kind of account transfer to a new phone).
Weird, for me it worked fine. I didn't need to transfer the root parts. Nor did I do anything else on the old phone. I just signed in on the new one with the backups in place.
I don't use Google services or an account either, though I do have Google play installed.
While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.
Out of interest, how is that relevant? Are we not able to criticize a FOSS maintainers response unless we run a project of scale ourselves? The maintainer is clearly engaging and knows what the problem is but stalls on the "last mile" which is issue creation. Do you agree?
wolfSSL also sells commercial licenses so it's not like they're going uncompensated for their work. Regardless, we shouldn't put people on pedestals because their title is "FOSS maintainer"
You know a social movement went full circle when a criticism that is so scathing, you couldn't have possibly come up with it and make it trend before, even if you gave it your all, is now a motto and a point of pride for those who follow it.
This is happening at the same time where hundreds of millions of regular variety consumers are being fed propaganda daily about how it's "finally time to switch to Linux", because it's so much better for them, the individual. If only they knew it's apparently not actually about them, never has been, and never will be.
When exactly is 'before'? Before Github existed to put front and center your code and its issues? Before it became an expectation to have a a rich Github profile when you're considered for a job position?
Of course I wouldn't have been able to come up with this statement because the perverted view of OSS devs owing free work to the users of their software was not so pervaisive.
On your edit: a bit rich saying the calls for switching to Linux propaganda, especially with the downturn of UX of windows and macos... Also why just hundreds of millions.. Go for hundreds of billions if you're just going to pull out numbers. Apart from that - even if Linux is not about the users, it is in many cases better for them as-is. Funny how that works with no conflict.
> Also why just hundreds of millions.. Go for hundreds of billions if you're just going to pull out numbers
You see, that would be because I did not just pull out an arbitrary number. "How many Windows users there are" is a reported fact you can just search for, and even the total is not "billions" (plural). I know, I was surprised too. From the horse's mouth: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/06/24/stay-...
My first comment on this site pointing out that a FOSS user sounds entitled is from 2021. I've been saying it outside the site for 10+ years, spanning back to the time when it wasnt cringe to have a Github sticker on your laptop.
I maintain several FOSS projects, although none as popular as wolfssl and if I want to make a new issue to make it more clean, I usually do it myself, because then I can write it the way I want, and include the information, and only the information, that I think is important. If I ask someone else to do it, there's a pretty good chance they won't write it the way I would like, if they write it up at all.
That's actually impossible to answer. I maintain or contribute to or have contributed to several FOSS projects whose number varies depending on how you want to count them, and neither myself nor anyone else who contributes to any FOSS project has the faintest idea how many people use them, especially if they're included in widely-used distros where the number is anything from zero to $number_of_distro_users.
Again: the maintainer does not say there is no bug. He says: please open a new issue, with a proper title and description for the actual underlying problem. Is that seriously too much to ask? Instead, the guy writes a whole blog post shitting on the project. Does anyone still wonder why people burn out on maintaining FOSS projects?
For both of them! Since both of them are aware now, either one could open that ticket. If the maintainer has very specific ideas about how a ticket should look, maybe they can do that themselves quickly, now that they are aware of not complying with the RFC. Then the ticket will perfectly match their expectations.
The maintainer is usually also the one who has to trace the root cause, which in this case the issue reporter did, which is certainly more work than creating an issue according to the formatting and other requirements the maintainer may have. So in that light, the reporter of the issue already did a big chunk of work for the maintainer or the project. I wouldn't really call them acting "entitled" after that. Clearly they put in effort more than could be expected already.
Exactly, that's all his PR had to be. The history of finding the issue could be an interesting story (I bet it involves Elixir!), but in places it reads as almost malicious. If I received a PR anything like that on something I maintained, it would be received very poorly. The author comes off as overly aggressive toward the maintainers and far too sensitive to their response.
> Many of us believe on automatic memory management for systems programming
The problem is the term "systems programming". For some, it's kernels and device drivers. For some, it's embedded real-time systems. For some, it's databases, game engines, compilers, language run-times, whatever.
There is no GC that could possibly handle all these use-cases.
Why would you have to switch languages? There are no languages with 'no GC', there are only languages with no GC by default.
Take C - you can either manually manage your memory with malloc() and free(), or you can #include a GC library (-lgc is probably already on your system), and use GC_malloc() instead. Or possibly mix and match, if you're bold and have specific needs.
And if ever some new revolutionary GC method is developed, you can just replace your #include. Cutting-edge automatic memory management forever.
Except there is, only among GC-haters there is not.
People forget there isn't ONE GC, rather several of possible implementations depending on the use case.
Java Real-Time GC implementations are quite capable to power weapon targeting systems in the battlefield, where a failure causes the wrong side to die.
> Aonix PERC Ultra Virtual Machine supports Lockheed Martin's Java components in Aegis Weapon System aboard guided missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill
Look, when someone says "There's no thing that could handle A,B,C, and D at the same time", answering "But there's one handling B" is not very convincing.
(Also, what's with this stupid "hater" thing, it's garbage collection we're talking about, not war crimes)
It is, because there isn't a single language that is an hammer for all types of nails.
It isn't stupid, it is the reality of how many behave for decades.
Thankfully, that issue has been slowly sorting out throughout generation replacement.
I already enjoy that nowadays we already have reached a point in some platforms where the old ways are nowadays quite constrained to a few scenarios and that's it.
> Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't?
As someone who considered it back then when it actually stood a chance to become the next big thing, from what I remember, the whole ecosystem was just too confusing and simply didn't look stable and reliable enough to build upon long-term. A few examples:
* The compiler situation: The official compiler was not yet FOSS and other compilers were not available or at least not usable. Switch to FOSS happened way too late and GCC support took too long to mature.
* This whole D version 1 vs version 2 thingy
* This whole Phobos vs Tango standard library thingy
* This whole GC vs no-GC thingy
This is not a judgement on D itself or its governance. I always thought it's a very nice language and the project simply lacked man-power and commercial backing to overcome the magical barrier of wide adoption. There was some excitement when Facebook picked it up, but unfortunately, it seems it didn't really stick.
I think people forget this. I know a lot of folks that looked at D back when it needed to win mindshare to compete with the currently en vogue alternatives, and every one of them nope'd out on the licensing. By the time they FOSS'ed it, they'd all made decisions for the alternative, and here we are.
FOSS: DMD was always open source, but the backend license was not compatible with FOSS until about 2017. D is now officially part of GCC (as of v6 I think?), and even the frontend for D in gcc is written in D (and actively maintained).
D1 vs. D2: D2 introduced immutability and vastly superior metaprogramming system. But had incompatibilities with D1. Companies like sociomantic that standardized on D1 were left with a hard problem to solve.
Tango vs phobos: This was a case of an alternative standard library with an alternative runtime. Programs that wanted to use tango and phobos-based libraries could not. This is what prompted druntime, which is tango's runtime split out and made compatible, adopted by D2. Unforutuntately, tango took a long time to port to D2 and the maintainers went elsewhere.
gc vs. nogc: The language sometimes adds calls to the gc without obvious invokations of it (e.g. allocating a closure or setting the length of an array). You can write code with @nogc as a function attribute, and it will ban all uses of the gc, even compiler-generated ones. This severely limits the runtime features you can use, so it makes the language a lot more difficult to work with. But some people insist on it because it helps avoid any GC pauses when you can't take it. There are those who think the whole std lib should be nogc, to maximize utility, but we are not going in that direction.
The greatness of human accomplishment has always been measured by size. The bigger, the better. Until now. Nanotech. Smart cars. Small is the new big. In the coming months, Hooli will deliver Nucleus, the most sophisticated compression software platform the world has ever seen. Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And AIDS.
Back in... I don't know, 2010, we used Jenkins. Yes, that Java thingy. It was kind of terrible (like every CI), but it had a "Warnings Plugin". It parsed the log output with regular expressions and presented new warnings and errors in a nice table. You could click on them and it would jump to the source. You could configure your own regular expressions (yes, then you have two problems, I know, but it still worked).
Then I had to switch to GitLab CI. Everyone was gushing how great GitLab CI was compared to Jenkins. I tried to find out: how do I extract warnings and errors from the log - no chance. To this day, I cannot understand how everyone just settled on "Yeah, we just open thousands of lines of log output and scroll until we see the error". Like an animal. So of course, I did what anyone would do: write a little script that parses the logs and generates an HTML artifact. It's still not as good as the Warnings Plugin from Jenkins, but hey, it's something...
I'm sure, eventually someone/AI will figure this out again and everyone will gush how great that new thing is that actually parses the logs and lets you jump directly to the source...
Don't get me wrong: Jenkins was and probably still is horrible. I don't want to go back. However, it had some pretty good features I still miss to this day.
My browser can handle tens of thousands of lines of logs, and has Ctrl-F that's useful for 99% of the searches I need. A better runner could just dump the logs and let the user take care of them.
Why most web development devolved into a React-like "you can't search for what you can't see" is a mystery.
> Enhancing Search: [...] Clearer and more trustworthy results, with results from content on your device easy to understand and clearly distinct from web results
So yeah, you still get web results in your search bar, a feature absolutely zero people want and which is just there to fake Bing success, just with a little divider now next to the applications the search failed to find.
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