Useless Windows 10 Features - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/437942/all-the-useless-windows-10-features-microsoft-should-remove/ <comment><USER3> I honestly think that the new tab/news/spam page in IE/Edge is (and has been, forever) the single biggest factor driving people to Chrome and Firefox. Every time you open it you're greeted with all this complete junk, making the whole experience stuttering and slowing down your flow. I dread having to open IE on systems with no alternative just because it's always so bad. Edge might actually be pretty good, but I will never know it because the initial experience is just so bad.

<comment><USER4> Edge lets you turn that off - on the New Tab page, click on the cog symbol (Customize) and you can choose from New Tab page display settings: Top Sites & My Feed, Top Sites, or Blank Page.

ChrEdge Beta can hide the news feed if you choose Focused view, but currently all they do is put it after the page fold, so you see it if you merely scroll down. I've sent a Feedback request saying that's something that might keep me using Firefox as my default, and supposedly that's a feature they're working on.

<comment><USER5> > Edge lets you turn that off - on the New Tab page, click on the cog symbol > (Customize) and you can choose from New Tab page display settings: Top Sites > & My Feed, Top Sites, or Blank Page.

I shouldn't have to turn off whatever spam they build into a paid for product. It should also be in the browser settings, not a confusingly placed and easy to miss hieroglyph. For me I don't even get those options, it's just a toggle to turn the news feed on or off, off leaves you with just a search bar, and bing is the only option builtin.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately Microsoft are the ones who decided to make Windows 10 a free upgrade for Windows 7/8 users, so we all bear the awfulness of them needing to sell sponsored spots in the OS to compensate for that loss of revenue. At least if the OS basically makes money on its own on an ongoing basis, we won't need to ever pay for Windows updates again? Still, ugh.

edit: I'm agreeing with you guys here. I'd spend more on an "ad-free" Windows license if I had a choice, but that doesn't exist unless you're a volume license customer (LTSC) I wish they'd find some way to let people avoid the ads, like having them in Home and disabling them in Pro, as most laptops (even my Dell XPS) ship with Home. (They did try "Windows 8.1 with Bing" once. I guess it didn't work out?)

<comment><USER7> For every previous version of windows you typically bought a new licence only when you purchased a new PC. The fact that MS allowed upgrades to Widows 10 on old machines should not have affected their revenue to any great extent, those machines were never going to have a paid upgrade anyway.

<comment><USER6> I may be completely off-base since Microsoft surely has some numbers we don't that justify their choice of licensing model, but from my perspective, and from a few real experiences helping family and friends, people figure their PCs were at the end of their life and needed an entire replacement. Installing the free Windows 10 upgrade changes their mind - now they think their computer is perfectly up to date, at least for a few more years. These are machines with specs that look like Core 2 Duo or 1st gen Core i3, 250 GB spinning rust drive, 4 GB RAM. Those specs are especially prolific in decommissioned office PCs sent to recyclers who give them a fresh 7 or 10 license. They're cheap, plentiful, and come with warranty, so plenty of people go for them.

Another thing to consider is volume licenses weren't able to take up the offer - the company had to pay for their Windows 10 upgrade. Enterprise licensing is the Microsoft money maker.

<comment> crooked-v That should be _plenty_ for the basic 'grandpa wants the internet and Word' use cases, though. If it's not, I blame Microsoft.

<comment><USER8> Not using Windows, but I have some machines with similar specs and they are quite useful even for browsing many if not most websites. But, you must have NoScript and ad blocking.

So to be fair to Microsoft, at least some, if not all of the blame must go to web developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with this article, but I think it can be summed up as, "People need the option to buy the LTSB release of Windows 10". Microsoft refuses to sell it to consumers. It is an enterprise only option (unless that has recently changed and I am not aware of it).

I have one windows 7 machine for playing WoW and it will stay on 7 until I can get the LTSB release of Windows 10 and the ability to turn off 100% of the telemetry, for real. If Blizzard would build an unsupported 64 bit ELF binary for WoW, then I would not even have windows. I'm not using wine.

<comment><USER10> Anyone can buy LTSC for a few hundred dollars.

I cobbled together a post last year on acquiring it:

[https://tinyapps.org/blog/201811300700_windows_10_ltsc.html](https://tinyapps.org/blog/201811300700_windows_10_ltsc.html)

However, it does require a willingness to enter into a VL agreement with Microsoft.

<comment><USER11> I recently found out that people are selling legitimate keys on eBay for a few bucks: [https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=windows+10+ltsc](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=windows+10+ltsc)

According to people who have purchased from there, they're VL keys that can be used many times (e.g. 2500 times), so they just sell the same key over and over to multiple people:

> ...sellers on eBay are probably people that work for companies that get GVLK > and MAK Product Keys from MSDN/Microsoft and then just sell 'em off because > the companies they work for more than likely would never even notice? I > mean, with MAK Product Keys having from 2500 to 5000 activations per key, at > least if they still work the same way they did in Vista/7 days, most > companies that pay for volume licensing never ever actually use anywhere > near that many. [0]

> after about 3 hours I got a mail with a key and a link to download > "LTSCX64.2019.ENU.JAN2019.iso" from googledrive. I did not download the ISO, > so I cannot comment on that, but I typed the key into VAMT and its > description is "Win 10 RTM EnterpriseS Volume:MAK" and the key had 50 > activations left. I tried it on one of my LTSC 2019 installations and it > worked fine. I assume that the remaining activation count will decrease over > time, even when I do not use the key on my other installations, as I suspect > that the seller sells the same key to more than one buyer.. [0]

> so, after about a week all 50 activations of the key I got are gone. since I > only used 8 activations, one can be sure that the key was sold to multiple > buyers. business as usual on ebay.. [0]

It's probably against some contract somewhere, but IANAL.

[0] [https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/windows-10-enterpri...](https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/windows-10-enterprise- ltsc-2019-can-one-actually-buy-a-unique-key.79241/)

<comment><USER12> They are pirating windows. They could be fined anywhere from hundreds of dollars to 150k per installation.

They are also participating in a commercial piracy endeavor that the company who was issued the key AND Microsoft have an interest in shutting down. Ms because such endeavors attract customers who could otherwise trivially be converted into buyers. Companies because they could get audited and fined.

This is as illegal and higher risk than torrent sites.

<comment><USER13> Depends on the country. I think the EU declared the resale of Windows licenses legal a few years ago. Microsoft trying to fight that doesn't make it illegal.

<comment><USER12> When you bought a physical item in a store you have a right to resell it be that a computer or a disk.

Even if you can resell a key as part of selling a copy of windows you paid for you can't sell your employers property, can't sell part of a contract, can't sell more than you actually paid for.

If the company purchased the right to have n machines at their company run windows and each key can be activated n * x times nobody sold you the right to sell n * x copies of windows to everyone on the internet.

Like it or not those agreements aren't sales and the keys aren't a physical item you have purchased they are just a technical measure to constrain users from sharing a single ISO file to their million closest friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most of these are similar manifestations of the same root evil (not specific to Microsoft): Users don't want Feature X but Company wants users to want Feature X. They release Feature X to the world. It's a failure—nobody uses it. The PM or developers who invested in that feature need to justify the investment. So they make Feature X enabled by default. Users disable it. So they remove the disable option. Users ignore it. They add flashing notifications begging users to use it. They're ignored too. They give Feature X a prominent, always on button right on the main screen. They add more keyboard and mouse shortcuts so there are more ways to invoke Feature X. They add dedicate hardware keys/buttons to invoke Feature X. They add full-screen reminders to remind users Feature X is so cool! They even make it so it's easy to invoke Feature X by accident. While these things may slightly juice Feature X's usage metrics, it just never takes off because users fundamentally don't want it and nobody wants to admit failure.

Look at the software your company makes and I bet you can quickly find an example of this. It's everywhere and it's shameful.

<comment><USER15> Are you talking about Cortana right now? Cuz it sounds like you're talking about Cortana.

<comment><USER16> I actually wanted to like Cortana and really tried, but between the service actually being down, somehow not being available just from my device other times and the phone assistant app straight up not being available in my region it was just never good enough to like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've installed Win10 on dozens of machines and I've never seen ads on the lock screen, in the taskbar, and in notifications like the article talks about. Maybe because I always say "no" to all those creepy tracking/advertising ID type options on the initial config screen and I always say no to Cortana at the same time. What I heard (and it seems reasonable) is that MS included games like Solitaire and Minesweeper in 3.1 as a soft way of training the enormous user base who were using PCs for the first time in mouse functions like click, drag, right click and click precision. I guess now that everybody knows that , MS sees no practical reason to keep those games free.

<comment><USER18> Same here, but maybe the difference is that we install Windows 10 Pro whereas the author is a Windows 10 Home user? The article doesn't seem to state the version they are using.

Most annoying is that there are a large number of little bits of functionality that phone home or send information out into the ether: Windows Defender and its submitting of samples, searching via the Windows button, Task Scheduled telemetry items, a plethora of Control Panel privacy settings, etc. etc. etc.

Also annoying on Windows 10 Pro is that _the same windows builds_ have slightly different functionality --- even if the machines have the exact same hardware.

For example, the Search History and Permissions is sometimes named Change the permissions and history of search, even for the same Windows 10 build. It's bizarre.

Also, don't get me started on the intellisense typing when the windows menu is open. (Really Windows, when I press the Start button and then type in Update, you search the web and show me Wikipedia information? And it takes like 5 seconds?)

Don't forget the lame This PC icon...

Sorry, this turned into a cathartic listing of Win 10 grievances. :)

<comment><USER19> > maybe the difference is that we install Windows 10 Pro whereas the author is > a Windows 10 Home user

No, every installation of Windows 10 Pro I've seen had a start menu that was mostly ads (links to Candy Crush, Spotify, Office etc.) - I've also had the OS nag me about giving Edge a second chance.

This is in Germany, in case the region matters, and I always deny all spyware as far as possible using the GUI.

<comment><USER20>
        Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage

This is the first thing I run on any Windows box I am forced to interact with.

Removes all the junk in the Start menu in one command.

<comment><USER21> I just take all the ones I want form this list and you can copy/past them in PowerShell and they execute one after the other.

I would not do what he suggests as that will remove every app.

        To uninstall 3D Builder:
        get-appxpackage *3dbuilder* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Alarms & Clock:
        get-appxpackage *alarms* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall App Connector:
        get-appxpackage *appconnector* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall App Installer:
        get-appxpackage *appinstaller* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Calendar and Mail apps together:
        get-appxpackage *communicationsapps* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Calculator:
        get-appxpackage *calculator* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Camera:
        get-appxpackage *camera* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Feedback Hub:
        get-appxpackage *feedback* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Get Office:
        get-appxpackage *officehub* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Get Started or Tips:
        get-appxpackage *getstarted* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Get Skype:
        get-appxpackage *skypeapp* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Groove Music:
        get-appxpackage *zunemusic* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Groove Music and Movies & TV apps together:
        get-appxpackage *zune* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Maps:
        get-appxpackage *maps* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Messaging and Skype Video apps together:
        get-appxpackage *messaging* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Microsoft Solitaire Collection:
        get-appxpackage *solitaire* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Microsoft Wallet:
        get-appxpackage *wallet* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Microsoft Wi-Fi:
        get-appxpackage *connectivitystore* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Money:
        get-appxpackage *bingfinance* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Money, News, Sports and Weather apps together:
        get-appxpackage *bing* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Movies & TV:
        get-appxpackage *zunevideo* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall News:
        get-appxpackage *bingnews* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall OneNote:
        get-appxpackage *onenote* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Paid Wi-Fi & Cellular:
        get-appxpackage *oneconnect* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Paint 3D:
        get-appxpackage *mspaint* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall People:
        get-appxpackage *people* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Phone:
        get-appxpackage *commsphone* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Phone Companion:
        get-appxpackage *windowsphone* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Phone and Phone Companion apps together:
        get-appxpackage *phone* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Photos:
        get-appxpackage *photos* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Sports:
        get-appxpackage *bingsports* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Sticky Notes:
        get-appxpackage *sticky* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Sway:
        get-appxpackage *sway* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall View 3D:
        get-appxpackage *3d* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Voice Recorder:
        get-appxpackage *soundrecorder* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Weather:
        get-appxpackage *bingweather* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Windows Holographic:
        get-appxpackage *holographic* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Windows Store: (Be very careful!)
        get-appxpackage *windowsstore* | remove-appxpackage

        To uninstall Xbox:
        get-appxpackage *xbox* | remove-appxpackage

<comment><USER22> Most of those you can right click on and select uninstall now. It takes longer, but it feels safer to me because I have to take a second for each to think if I want it or not.

<comment><USER8> I think being forced to think about ads for Spotify and Office is exactly what he's trying to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How about all the ways windows goes out of its way to hide the home folder, and then is now generating multiple places it calls "Documents", "Pictures", etc so you're never really sure where anything is?

<comment><USER24> I think this is godsend. Before they do this people litter their files all over the filesystem. These magic folders reside in a user's home folder by default anyway.

Most Windows users don't really have much clue about the filesystem like everyone here does.

<comment><USER25> And is that desirable? Why do we want users to know less about how their computer works? Is it really a problem to know that you have a user directory with a bunch of other directories inside that hold certain classes of information by default?

When I open a command prompt (yes, I'm not the average user), I'm in my home directory, and if I create any files or folders, they'll be there by default. To access those files/folders, I used to go through the root of the filesystem (Users -> <username>), but I eventually just made a link in the file explorer to my home directory. Why doesn't that link at least exist by default? I've used enough GUI tools that default to that directory (i.e. WinSCP IIRC) that getting to it should be easy.

I think the reason that "most Windows users don't have a clue" is because Microsoft wants it that way for some reason. People were able to figure out DOS, yet these days giving them a link to their home directory is "too complicated"?

<comment><USER26> The modern developer mindset is that users are cattle. Explore pretty much anywhere developers hang out and ask them why things are the way they are and they'll tell you it's because users are morons. Developers used to want to actually help users make better use of their tools. Hell, computers used to boot into BASIC. Now developers just want to force carefully crafted single- purpose appliances on people so they have total control over what they do with it and can track everything for the purpose of making money. Then they lament that they are "forced" to do this. Jackasses.

<comment><USER27> As time has gone by, more and more people are starting to use computers. Before, only technically-minded people that were willing to invest in a learning curve would buy and use computers, but now even toddlers are users. People need computers, but they have other work to do, other things to learn. They don't want to have to invest time in learning how to use a computer, and I believe that's what's driving the dumbing-down of user interfaces. I don't think this was initiated by developers, and in that sense, they are forced to comply to market forces.

I still hate developing GUI apps on Web technology. Most of the stuff I program would best be used on a CLI. It would be simpler to program and would provide much more productivity benefits to an experienced user. However, it's not really an option, when most users don't even know how to make a bookmark or have little notion of what files are, much less how to use a terminal.

<comment><USER26> There's a difference between making things easier to understand and turning them into a nigh-useless playschool-brand version of themselves. The original Macintosh is what the former looks like: coherent metaphors, expected behavior, simple design. Today's "apps" are what the latter looks like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's hard to believe how despite all the telemetry, Microsoft still manages to be so out of touch with their users' actual needs. It's almost like there's a hidden agenda somewhere.

<comment><USER29> If the telemetry says that many people use these features, are Microsoft out of touch? These are features we don't use. But other people might.

My dad rang me once said that when playing solitaire it kept playing ads. I said he can buy it so the ads go away or find another app that doesn't have ads. He's like "ah what ever I'll watch the ads". He's happy and content. Just wants solitaire.

<comment><USER30> > He's happy and content. Just wants solitaire.

Would he not be happier without the ads, then?

<comment><USER29> Sure, but he doesn't want to pay and doesn't want some other app. So just accepts it.

<comment><USER31> I wouldn't call it being content, I'd call it being stuck in a situation that sucks.

I mean, if I gave you a script that would patch up Solitaire executable to remove any and all ads and telemetry with a single click, wouldn't your dad want it if you offered?

<comment><USER8> There's almost certainly a free app for Windows that's even better than the Microsoft version. He said his dad doesn't want "some other app," for whatever reason, but he's not stuck if they are available.

Hell if push came to shove you could probably get GNOME's solitaire running which at least has the advantage of supporting something like 100 different solitaire games.

Lastly I was curious how much the Microsoft solitaire costs and OMG. They want you to pay an ongoing subscription for it. Wow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Standart folders, does anybody really use them?

I upgradet one Notebook at home to from Win7 to Win10. Besides of other things I couldn't believe the added Candy Crash in my Start Menu. In a home edition maybe .. but on Win Pro, serious?

I played back on the Win7 image pretty quick.

I'm anyway mostly Linux, but I don't think I'll ever move any machine to Win10.

<comment><USER33> > I couldn't believe the added Candy Crash in my Start Menu. In a home edition > maybe .. but on Win Pro, serious?

Are you surprised? The file search on Windows XP Professional used an animated cartoon dog. This is just what Microsoft does.

As Steve Jobs once said, "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste."

<comment><USER34> At least the dog was cute and not an advertising vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The most critical useless feature (as it is now) is actually the Windows Store. What is Microsoft doing wrong that makes nobody use it? It could be a revolution (selling + updates).

<comment><USER36> I think the only thing I've used it for installing Windows Subsystem for Linux

<comment><USER37> Also the beta version of the new Windows terminal

<comment><USER38> Yes! And Python.

<comment><USER39> What's the advantage of the store version of python over the normal installer?

<comment><USER40> Auto Updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How about giving us back the features we lost with Windows 10?

Like if I want a desktop shortcut to Notepad in W7 I open the Start menu, begin typing Notepad, and when it shows up in the search results I drag the icon onto the desktop or right click on it and hit "send to desktop". Neither of those work in Windows 10. Clicking and dragging does nothing, and right clicking doesn't let you make a desktop shortcut either. You have to add it to the Start menu, then drag it to to the desktop, then delete it off the Start menu.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, they keep making trivial things harder to do for no reason. You used to be able to right-click the icon and go directly to the classic control panel. Not anymore. The whole start menu is a failure and they need to overhaul it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Windows 10 has more built-in advertisements than Google's Android and Chrome > OS do.

It's still hard to believe that after paying a few hundreds of dollars for a new OS you will be treated with advertisements, as if it were freeware.. I'll never buy that shit.

<comment><USER42> > It's still hard to believe that after paying a few hundreds of dollars for a > new OS

I haven't checked, but are the ads in the enterprise versions? Otherwise, I'd guess that the vast majority of home consumers have an OEM key that came with their laptop or PC (or upgraded from Win7), and they didn't pay hundreds of dollars for. While the price of Win10 is included in some way in the price of the device, it wouldn't be nearly as much. Also, from what I remember, 1903 has gotten rid of most of the ads on a fresh installation, so it seems to be improving.

edit: Actually, I didn't realize there were actual ad notifications at all in Win10. Never seen them before. Maybe region/setting dependent? I only meant the games and other third party stuff that show up in the start menu.

<comment><USER44> As a freelancer, I'm not some home consumer, but someone with a business laptop. A business laptop I need to take to meetings. I need to show my business partners what is on my screen. This is not the time for some bloody Candy Crush ad popping up. And this is not the time to realise that last night's forced update borked your presentation.

As a freelancer, however, I cannot get the enterprise version of Windows 10 unless I buy at least n instances of it. I'd rather use that money to buy a real business laptop like a Mac Book Pro. No ads. No work ruining updates. Professionally maintainable without having a Windows Server sitting next to it. Backups that work. Real UNIX underneath.

I also was very happy with a Thinkpad plus Ubuntu LTS. Professionally maintainable, UNIX like underneath, smooth updates. I set up backups myself, but at least I had full control over it.

I had to settle on the Mac because of the availability of MS Office. I got tired of having to run that using a VM inside which I, yet again, had to maintain a Windows.

I tried Windows 10 for a while. At first I was pleasantly surprised, but then all the problems piled up. Fighting shitty drivers just to get sound working properly, constant updates, ads popping up again and again in the start menu and even on the lock screen, fighting to get at least a semblance of a usable command line.

<comment><USER42> I think you misunderstand. I'm not defending them at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> In other news, I still cannot disable Windows update on the home edition. I've spent hours and hours and virtually every solution I can find other than giving MS more money to upgrade.

Updates keep failing on my machine, which means it just tried again the next day and forces a restart, closing everything I have. Fails day after day after day. I'm not sure why, I frankly don't care. Just ridiculous how impossible it is to disable.

<comment><USER46> > Updates keep failing on my machine

By any chance did you run some script or random "de-bloat" tool someone linked? Half of those break Windows Update and cause it to keep failing (either via setting permissions, host file changes, or registry alterations).

<comment><USER45> No. I think it's related to my full disk encryption that uses a custom boot loader or whatever

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Wait, what? There are ads in the OS? That's insane.

<comment><USER48> The entire consumer oriented line of Windows 10 feels like a bad trip to a US strip mall. It's preinstalled with loads of junk you can't remove easily. For a while I spent some time putting together a small workflow to clean up Windows 10 builds for a project I was working on. If your hand is forced and you need a minimum amount of tools to get rid of as much bloat and telemetry there are two tools you need:

1) Geek Uninstaller [0] 2) O&O Shutup10 [1]

Both are free. Maybe there's better options now, but... They helped tremendously a short time ago.

[0] [https://geekuninstaller.com/](https://geekuninstaller.com/) [1] [https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10](https://www.oo- software.com/en/shutup10)

<comment><USER49> Great post. I don't use windows but my girl does. Her compi (Win 10, SSD, 8 GB Ram, i7) has become unusable slow. She does not much besides watching Movies, surfing and using Word. I installed a free reliable antivirus (Avira) when she got it. I will have to look into this problem soon.

Any further suggestion? I will definitely try your recommended programs.

<comment><USER50> I say this in all seriousness, Linux is probably a better experience if that's all she does. Give something like Ubuntu or elementary os test run with a live version and see if she's missing anything you'll either find out she needs Office specifically or it will probably work for her. Linux right now is in a great spot for people who need little customization and people who really love to tinker. If you're in the middle of that group is where friction lives. If linux won't work for you then the suggestions above are great.

<comment><USER51> Manjaro comes OOTB with MS Office 365, and it's super easy to install, easier than Ubuntu if you're doing Nvidia drivers. I personally can't comment on how well their Office works as I avoid anything Microsoft makes, but it's an option.

<comment><USER52> > Manjaro comes OOTB with MS Office 365

Huh?

<comment><USER53> They include wrapper apps for office online. You can just use the web apps in any browser on any OS though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've tried to change my video settings the other day. Bam! A nice guy with a big smile on his face filled my entire screen selling me Xbox and other junk. I've told my girlfriend I'm feeling like shopping in the mall while using Windows 10.

</comment><comment><USER55> Windows 10 Debloater is a pretty cool script which strips a tonne of cruft from Windows. Worked very well for me: [https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater](https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater)

</comment><comment><USER56> Worst thing in Windows is still search, it doesnt work unless you type the exact letters in order.

<comment><USER57> I still laugh whenever I can't remember the exact name of my bittorrent client and Windows has no clue what I'm looking for when I enter "torrent" or "bittorrent".

It's called qbittorrent.

<comment><USER58> Microsoft research is still perfecting the "substring search" technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I encourage everyone unhappy with Windows 10 Start menu to give Open Shell a try: [https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu](https://github.com/Open- Shell/Open-Shell-Menu)

It replaces native Start menu with Win7/8 lookalike that's highly customizable and much faster. Search works better, too.

</comment><comment><USER60> Nobody mentions:

"Hi, I'm Cortana. A little sign in here, touch of wifi there..."

Not now. Not ever.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/comments/a36m6j...](https://www.reddit.com/r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/comments/a36m6j/a_little_sign_in_here_touch_of_wifi_there/)

<comment><USER61> The first time I saw in the win10 update screen with "don't worry, your date is safe", I panicked thinking I had got some ransomware. The opposite of the intended effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> In case people are really ambitious or adventurous and want to avoid all of this stuff completely, what Linux distro (or other open source OS) is currently trendiest/most useful/relevant? Is it still Ubuntu?

<comment><USER63> I would strongly vote in favor of Ubuntu for your first distribution. It's still wildly popular, and despite some mishaps, Canonical tries pretty hard to make sure it's a smooth installation process, and has enough standard applications installed to be useful right away. If you just want to get your feet wet, and especially if you'd rather not mess around with the command line unless absolutely necessary, Ubuntu is great.

Depending on your needs, Fedora is also quite usable. It leans more in the FOSS direction, and while it is fairly bleeding edge with regards to Linux specific tooling, it is somewhat more hesitant to include non-free software, which may include device drivers and firmware. Last I checked, Ubuntu still had a higher degree of Just Works(tm) than Fedora for this reason. Fedora is very similar to RedHat and CentOS, so if you're looking for a business-focused distribution, this is a strong contender. Might not be as useful as a casual desktop install though.

Linux Mint is also wildly popular. It's Ubuntu-based, but it leans much less in the pure-FOSS direction, and is willing to include more grey area tools like video codecs and non-free device drivers. It also uses the Cinnamon desktop environment, which may feel a bit more familiar if you're coming from Windows. Some of my colleagues swear by it, so I think it's worth checking out.

Of course, take this with a grain of salt. I run Arch Linux and am perfectly happy to tinker around with the deepest guts of my system when needed. I wouldn't actually recommend that to a new user though, while I enjoy the absolute freedom to dive that deep, it can occasionally be quite frustrating.

<comment><USER64> My experience has been that Fedora does better at "just works" than Ubuntu, over the working life of the installation. Ubuntu may install easily, but it builds up weird stuff over time - thing randomly crashing, stuff not working in weird ways after updates. Fedora just keeps on trucking.

+1 to Cinnamon - AFAICT it's the best way to preserve a classic desktop-style desktop, rather than having a desktop which is trying to be a giant mobile phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Has someone a clue why Xbox Game Bar app cannot be removed with a Windows 10... __pro __?

</comment><comment><USER65> Haven't used Windows for over 10 years and I'm surprised to see how far it has fallen.

It's weird to me that the author thinks of these problems as mere annoyances. To me it's utterly ridiculous to have any of these features be part of an OS.

It's like I bought a big advertisement machine.

Tried it out recently and was greeted with the usual endless automatic updates and messing up my dual boot.

What's with the "people" tab? This is the kind of half-drunk idea I've come to expect from Microsoft. When I want to talk to people on Skype, I open Skype. It might be a nice abstraction at a very high level mentally (these are apps I use to talk to "people"), but it seems pointless to have this in software.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm deliberately trying never to update to Windows 10 because I think Windows 7 had everything I could ever need from the OS.

I wish the hardware drivers weren't so restricted as for my latest laptop no driver exists for Windows 7 so had to be forced to install Win 10 nightmare.

One tip for you guys is that if you want to get rid of most bloat that comes bundled with Win 10, I found this freeware software to be pretty effective:

[https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager- windows-10?&amp...](https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager- windows-10?&ampcf=1)

So far I haven't witnessed any issues in terms of stability after removing almost all bundled crap.

<comment> Const-me I once needed to test and debug my software on Win7. The app uses hardware video encoder, virtualization doesn't work, so I had to install Win7 on a hardware PC.

The hardware drivers are there. It just takes some time to find them, and then some time to integrate into Win7 ISO so the installer doesn't fail.

I liked Win7 very much for the first couple of days. However I've reverted to Win10. Too many things are broken on Win7 in comparison: high DPI support, usability features like Win+arrow keys, no MS Edge.

<comment><USER42> I genuinely think Win10 has made huge leaps in many areas compared to Win7. It's just that they make so many bone-headed design decisions across the OS that detract from it. I wish I could recommend Windows 10 wholeheartedly, and generally I do recommend upgrading to it, it's just a ... problematic OS.

<comment> Const-me Could it be MS deliberately trying to train users to read and understand messages, especially long ones, before clicking "I agree"? I think you can opt out of many problematic features if you pay attention where you click during the OS setup. The licenses are checked online in Win10, so you can download an ISO from Microsoft.com, do clean install, and if you've installed same edition on the same PC it will be activated.

<comment><USER42> No, I don't see it. I'm utterly annoyed with Windows 10 even after declining any and every ridiculous request from Microsoft. It has nothing to do with 'training users to read' that the start menu is terrible or the new control panel is an abomination. And their asking for permission to track you has nothing to do with want to train users. They just want to track you. And even _if_ you decline everything, there's plenty of telemetry that isn't disabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I use windows at work, on 3 screens.

One thing pisses me off to no end: When you drag a window and accidentally make a small "left-right-left" movement, everything on your screen is minimized to the tray. There is no button to restore this.

f*cking retarded features.

<comment><USER68> You can actually just grab the same window and make a corresponding "up-down- up" movement and it'll bring everything back. On personal machines I turn it off but if I'm doing something for someone else, this is a good thing to know.

<comment><USER69> Hrm, is there a keyboard shortcut for that restore action? Win+M will do the minimize-all thing but I never could figure out one for restore-all.

EDIT: Ah, of course, Win+Shift+M :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I would also add lock screen which is shown before login screen. It makes sense on mobile devices but I never understood the use for it on my desktop and laptop. Especially when my laptop and desktop does not have any bio authentication.

<comment><USER71> Oh, that's what that is supposed to be! The same thing is in CentOS. You literally click and drag the mouse upward to get the login screen. New users often think the computer is broken.

<comment><USER72> Any default GNOME environment does this.

> You literally click and drag the mouse upward to get the login screen.

Yeah, you can, but hitting a space bar before typing in your password is so much easier. I _think_ any "normal" key (as in letters, numbers, space) would work, but I'm not near a system to check.

<comment><USER73> You can just start typing your password, it'll automatically unhide and put what you typed in the password field. Or you can press Esc to just unhide without starting to type your password.

<comment><USER74> If your password starts with a space, then you have to either tap an extra space, or hit escape as you mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Still using windows 7 for as long as I can. Pretty livid that they're discontinuing support and forcing people to 10 soon, I have 10 on another machine and it really feels like losing control of my PC. Very locked down, filled with ads and interruptions, affiliate software and marketing junk. Seems like one of the last bastions of autonomy and privacy in the computer world, the desktop OS, is jumping fully onto the surveillance capitalism bandwagon now. Pretty depressing. Would switch to Linux but it's pretty much a nonstarter for game dev.

<comment><USER76> At work, I have been using Windows 10 Pro for a couple of months now after holding out on Windows 7 for a long while.

I have to say, I am surprisingly happy with it. It has native SSH, WSL, performance is decent, and our admin no longer installs 3rd party AV software on Windows 10.

Now if only Microsoft could get their act together when it comes to updates - it has been a mess a for a long time, but I got the feeling it has gotten much worse ever since they decided to bundle all their updates into single large packages, and especially with Windows 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> > They all have one thing in common: No one wanted them. Who wants a Windows > PC that can't run standard Windows applications?

People who want a tablet experience. Surface Go is tablet first, it can be used as a laptop substitute, but only a substitute. I can imagine there are many people who would be satisfied with a Windows S only device, using only the Microsoft Store apps.

<comment><USER61> Even on the surface go the first thing I did was unlock it so I could run apps like Firefox, OpenTTD and Steam.

<comment><USER77> So did I. But more casual users would be completely content with Edge, Netflix and Facebook apps. And they'd get longer battery life too in exchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> This might seem minor in the scheme of things that Windows 10 has regressed on (compared to even Windows 8.1) but has anyone found a cure for the atrocious way Win 10 does the "Show windows side by side", now.

Previously it would just evenly split the existing windows into equal sized ones spread across the width of the screen. It worked beautifully! If there were two windows they would neatly fit into each half of the screen, fully sized respectively.

Now it does this strange quarter-stacking of the said windows on top of each other, squeezed into ONE HALF of the screen and leaves the other HALF EMPTY (exposing the destop) !! This absolutely drives me nuts. There are Chrome extensions ("Tab resize") to cure this but its a pointless added series of steps where you individually tweak each open window to the size you want. Its bonkers.

I don't get who in the right mind would come up with this as an enhancement when the previous one worked just fine !!

Please reverse this.

</comment><comment><USER79> Surprised to not see Albums included. Every time my camera roll updates with photos from my phone or compact there's another notification about this new album that Windows created for me.

I. Never. Look. At. Their. Albums.

Writing this makes me wonder if there's a way to turn it off and why I've never thought to look...

</comment><comment><USER80> Completely left Windows 10 (after several parallel years with Linux based systems such as openSuse/Ubuntu) for macOS.

I get a workstation that has sensible defaults and gets out of my way 99.999% of the time. I get why others prefer Linux systems in development but within my ecosystem I am simply happy I don't have to configure my fan speed and install fourth party drivers to get WLAN to connect after the machine sleeps.

The only things that Windows really excels in are gaming and office. Open source office suites are simply many levels below MS Office, and no I won't use LaTex at work although writing my thesis with it was indeed amazing. The macOS office variants (by Microsoft) are also severely lacking in comparison...

But other than that if you're not tinkering with .NET stuff...

<comment><USER81> Even if you ARE tinkering with .NET stuff. I work for a .NET shop on my MBP and the only things I remote into my Windows workstation for are some of the old .NET Framework projects we have that I still need to touch periodically and generating dacpac files from data projects (which is being worked on macOS so I'm really looking forward to that day). Many things (Docker is a huge example) just work better on macOS, and overall I find myself more productive. I feel that macOS is just a more "terminal-first" environment than Windows, and I'm more at home there. It's a shame.

I actually don't hate Windows, I used it for decades and still switch over to it as needed. But I really love macOS. I just wish they'd fix some of their hardware lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> It has been about a decade since I used Windows (XP) as a daily driver, and I am _shocked_ , and seriously disgusted, when I see my friends or co-workers using it.

Can I ask why anyone is _paying_ for this pile of crap?

There are literally no improvements from Windows 7 vs. Windows 10, that could convince me this level of built-in telemetry, and, God forbid, built-in _advertising_ is worth an 'upgrade'.

For God's sake, they are in the freaking _start menu_ , and slow down several of my friends older computers who were force-upgraded.

And before you tell me what I already know, that you can 'opt out' \- _we should not have to opt out of advertising on an operating system we pay for_ , especially one that did not have advertising before.

As far as I'm concerned, for all the talk about Apple's 'walled garden,' folks are so addicted to Windows x86 and x64 apps, and so locked into _that_ walled garden, they are now willing to accept being tracked, and to literally have a slower OS due to the baked in advertising.

The failure, and massive financial deficit, that occurred from Windows RT should be more than enough evidence of this. Without its history of apps, Windows isn't Windows.

Knowing that, Microsoft can pack whatever bullshit it wants, including, but not limited to, tracking and advertising, and we _still_ buy.

The only inherently worse-for-the-user OS out there is Android. I will no longer use Google services, even by request. I'm literally trying to ween myself off YouTube, reporting a post on HN yesterday that was merely a YouTube link to a guy talking about how his wife left him that had somehow snuck it's way onto the front page.

I pray one year, we will have that 'year of Linux,' and Microsoft can go back to creating a quality product, instead of focusing on new ways to get information out of users.

Edit: I also pray for, and would even contribute code to, a _meaningful_ third party mobile OS solution. I'm worried Apple will realize they are the last company to respect user privacy to even a reasonable degree, and get greedy.

However, there are so, so many issues with a new mobile OS, between devices, carriers, a bootloader compatible with said devices, licensing, and such, that at the moment, I am not seeing any of the projects in the works as feasible. To be honest - the world of commercial operating systems has never looked so grim.

<comment><USER83> >>Can I ask why anyone is paying for this pile of crap?

Because for certain areas of programming, Visual Studio is still king and if you want to develop for Playstation/Xbox then Windows is the only choice.

And of course playing video games in general requires Windows - it's less true than it was few years ago, but there's still plenty of games which give you very poor experience on anything but Windows.

<comment><USER82> You've contradicted yourself by displaying a pleasant alternative to Windows gaming - consoles.

Even as a game developer, for home brew like the Sega Saturn, as well as various Unity projects, I use a Windows XP VM maybe once a month for some obscure utility.

I never play games on PC's. I buy a console, it's good for ten or more years. I still play my Saturn and Dreamcast, whose emulation leaves much still to be desired.

If I want to purchase a game, I don't have to worry about if my video card is compatible, or if I have enough RAM, or, even if my OS will run it! I just play it.

You are part of a niche developer system, that, granted, you require Windows 10 for your very, very specific case.

Similarly, I am required to use a 2017 MacBook Pro with a touch bar at work, as I am an iOS developer. I would _never_ , on principle alone, purchase such a unit. I use a Mac at home, but I use a 2012 model I have chosen to stick with for a number of reasons. I'm running the newest MacOS because it's actually offered me reasons to upgrade.

This has nothing to do with my personal preferences, or my point.

I'm not talking about the use of Windows itself, when I say 'why would anyone pay for this crap' \- I'm talking about the "upgrade".

Windows 7 still more than meets my needs and the needs of most consumers.

Windows _XP_ still more than meets my needs and the needs of most consumers, though it has security issues that make Windows 7 a better general option.

Windows 10 has added nothing, as far as I can see, beyond leaving behind some of the UI/UX disaster of Windows 8, the result being a slightly less usable Windows 7 (especially to the average Jane or Joe) - with baked in advertising and tracking that they _know_ Jane or Joe, who got the OS pre-installed on the Asus they bought from Best Buy, is not going to disable.

In fact, they're counting on that.

When we _pay_ for services, we expect no advertising, especially on services that did not contain it before. Cable television is an exception to this - what we pay for in that instance is more selection.

But can you imagine if Apple Music just suddenly started shoving ads in their stream? They'd lose two million subscribers overnight.

It baffles me that people have Stockholm Syndrome enough with Windows to stick with it through such obvious distaste for the users themselves.

Since 98SE, we've got a pattern of every other Windows release simply being an unmitigated disaster -

98SE - good / ME - awful / XP - good / Vista - awful / 7 - great / 8 - awful / 10 - at least not as shit as 8

What this shows me, is that Microsoft seems to not learn from mistakes until an entire version number later.

There have only been a handful of releases in MacOS/OS X's brilliant history since OSX came about in 2001 that have been shit. Since Tiger, we've praised virtually every release - and they are still adding meaningful and impactful features like dark mode. Now it's their laughable hardware options that is the issue.

<comment><USER83> >>You've contradicted yourself by displaying a pleasant alternative to Windows gaming - consoles.

But games aren't interchangable like some other media is. If a game that I want to play is only available on Windows, then I will put up with whatever bullshit Microsoft throws at me to play that game, I won't go "oh well, I'll just play something else on the PS4 instead".

And yes, Win10 is a disaster - but you can't use certain things like the latest GamePass subscription without it, or adjust your settings for the Xbox Elite controller without Windows 10.....sticking with Windows 7 forever is not the solution(as much as I would like it to be).

I'm both a consumer and a developer, and use windows for both - it's just the right choice for what I need at the moment. If those needs change then the operating system will change as well.

<comment><USER82> Exclusivity for games has always been the case, except for those who choose multiple platforms. When I was a kid, you had a Sega or a Nintendo, and so you had Mario, or Sonic.

IMHO the selection of games for consoles is much broader, and, overall, seem to generally have less initial issues. Furthermore, we don't get the awful DRM that causes us to go find a crack on launch day anyway, just because of the annoyance.

Microsoft's attempt to lock me into an OS I would never allow within ten feet of any of my computers, or any developer's, just means I won't use their software. No game title is worth having an awful experience with the rest of my OS, that's what dual booting is for.

Furthermore, Microsoft even offers its own console! If I want to use GamePass or an xBox controller, why am I not just using an xBox One (Pro?) - <USER2> lifespan of consoles and the length of time games will still work and be released for them, is far greater than the upgrade paths I had to suffer through with my PC growing up.

Microsoft is removing its own reason to use Windows as a gaming platform. I'd happily buy an xBox, but if I can't play a title on Windows 7, I'm just not going to purchase it.

If the developer doesn't care, and isn't willing to support it, sucks for them.

With tools like Unity and Unreal Engine, we have very, very little reason for anything but the biggest AAA games, which require seriously custom engines, which will have console versions anyway - to be Windows-exclusive.

Could you, off the top of your head, name five, significant PC-exclusive titles from the past five years that did not have a console equivalent? Not a rhetorical question, just genuinely curious. I've not heard of a single, standout Windows-exclusive title on any of the tech or gaming blogs I obsessively follow.

In fact, I've seen Microsoft make it even easier to directly port your games to xBox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> After switching to Archlinux and putting Windows 10 in a Qemu VM my life got way easier. One is driven by the corporation behind it to form and change user behaviour in order to make more money, and the other is made by like-minded hackers.

<comment><USER25> I just keep a crappy Windows laptop next to my desktop and use that whenever I absolutely need Windows for something. I don't need heavy software, just sometimes a program to reproduce an issue a consumer has. I have a Windows VM, but it stays off most of the time, and I have a separate disk in my desktop running Windows in case I need something more serious than my laptop can handle (I boot to it once a month or so to run updates).

I've tried making WSL work for me, but I just find Windows gets in my way more than it actually helps. I'm a little sad that I can't use Visual Studio (the number of times I've had to hack together a CMake build to make small change is way too high), but it's not worth the pain of using Windows. How to do X on Linux is usually much easier to remember and faster than the equivalent on Windows, and I spent enough time on WSL/git bash that I just stopped bothering.

Now, if I can get a hackintosh VM going, my life will be complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Why Microsoft expects me to voluntarily move from Windows 7 to this OS is beyond me. I will however be moving from Windows 7 to Windows Embedded POS Ready 2009, which due to contractual obligations will be supported a few more years.

After that? Either pure Debian KDE if I can stand to jump the gap from RPM- based to Apt-based linux, or Fedora Lxqt if not. (IMO -> if 'Linux' could just not be split down the middle between the two big families of Debian/XLUbuntu/Peppermint and RHEL/Fedora/CentOS/Manjaro we could get more grannies as it were)

I am the master of my computing fate, not Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER86> Let's face it. These stuffs are not only useless shit: these are deal breakers.

having been successively into Linux and macOS these last 7 years, I find the amount of junks produced by Windows staggering.

</comment><comment><USER87> Interesting how butchered my setup is, out of all those things I've only seen the 3d objects folder.

</comment><comment><USER88> They removed the good solitaire classic and made it non-free.

There are clones, but I find this really to be a dick move.

</comment><comment><USER62> If you want a completely opposite alternative to Windows that has none of this, take a look at OpenBSD [https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html](https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html).

</comment><comment><USER89> This all feels to me like Microsoft is getting desperate - it's the usual experience when the money in a niche is drying up: aggressive upsell and every damn thing trying to squeeze another dime out of you.

Have their revenues been tanking?

<comment><USER81> Nope, they just set an annual record and beat analysts expectations last quarter[1]. Azure is helping them a great deal and just overtook their PC division (which includes everything from Windows to the Surface laptop).

[1]: [https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-trumpets-record- year...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-trumpets-record- year-126b-annual-revenue-14-quarterly-profits-beat-estimates/)

<comment><USER89> Odd, so why the huckster impression?

<comment><USER90> Android and Google Docs are overtaking their main turf, even if it is for regular consumers as of right now, it is still a huge change. The Azure stuff is recent and can't attempt vendor lock-in yet, maybe never, at least not to the extent Windows and Office were able to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I agree but honestly it takes 30minutes to disable all of these

</comment><comment><USER92> Timeline is bewildering to look at when crammed full of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER93> Almost none of these are an issue with Windows 10 LTSC

</comment><comment><USER94> windows 10 itself is useless. I miss Windows 7.

</comment><comment><USER95> The dumbest windows feature? When you accidentally touch the top of a window to top of screen, it maximizes. On Mac it's sort of the opposite: you can't relocate a window to another screen if it's maximizes. It "helps" you by force partitioning the screen.

<comment><USER29> Huh, how is that 'dumb'?

Resize a window and drag it to the top will increase total height of screen.

Drag a window to the top and it maximizes.

Drag to left to dock to left side. (repeat for right side)

Drag to top left to dock to top left corner. (repeat for all corners)

Win+Arrow (Up) to full screen.

Win+Arrow (Down) to un-full screen. Down again to minimum.

Win+Shift+Arrow (left/right) to change screen.

Win+Arrow (left/right) to move between docking left/right.

On a mac you cannot even maximum a window properly, and works differently in different apps. Window management is terrible on a mac. The only window management it does right is the way it handles the virtual desktops. Cos that still sucks on Windows.

<comment><USER96> >On a mac you cannot even maximum a window properly

Indeed, to actually maximize a window on macOS, you have to purchase a third party app (BetterSnapTool). I think it's hilarious.

<comment><USER97> I'm not quite sure what you mean by this - my windows seem to maximize just fine

<comment><USER98> It's a fairly new thing. [https://www.addictivetips.com/mac-os/how-to- maximize-a-windo...](https://www.addictivetips.com/mac-os/how-to-maximize-a- window-in-mac-like-you-do-in-windows/)

("fairly new" in this case meaning over five years but still)

<comment><USER29> It doesn't work in every app. It doesn't even work in a lot of apples own apps... you hold shift and click in 1 app, it works, try it in another app and it only resize vertically and not horizontally.

<comment><USER97> I suppose I've never really felt the need to "maximise" a window as opposed to putting it in fullscreen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> I disabled the allow Microsoft to send application history to their servers. They still do it. They just ignore the fact I have disabled it explicitly. It should be reason for me to be able to sue but I don't know where to start.

<comment><USER44> Out of interest: How do you know they send the application history? The connections to their servers are encrypted. So the only options you have are the MS information tool for telemetry and low level forensic tools.

<comment><USER99> You can view the history online on their privacy dashboard at privacy.microsoft.com There I could see all the applications I launched even though I had denied them that permission. You should be able to do the same if you linked your Microsoft account to your Windows installation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I feel deeply sorry, for those poor consumers who are unaware of other OS's. It should be a duty if you're in tech, to advise your fellow holoi polloi about Ubuntu since it's the most consumer friendly distro. Everything now days is done in a browser so that shouldn't be a problem. & at those who work at capitalistic corporations push for electron apps or apps that can be easily bundled and installed e.g snap apps / flatpaks.

</comment><comment><USER101> shame on you windows team.

<comment><USER102> Please don't do this here.

<comment><USER101> do what? there are only 3 legitimate choices when it comes to operating systems (the thing that underpins every single computer). with that comes real social responsibility. this thread is evidence that microsoft is showing no regard for that responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> You can buy win10 pro for 12 bux on many sites, office 2019 professional for 40. Those keys sites do ads on linus techtips.

<comment><USER92> You don't need to buy Pro as you can simply run it unactivated for years. I've done that without incident.

<comment><USER104> Wow, I had to check that it's already been "years" since Windows 10 was first released --- a little over 4, to be precise. No one I know actually likes it, the closest has been "tolerate". MS has done a great job of dragging its users through the mud and beating them into submission.

<comment><USER105> I love it, tried to go back to 7 and couldn't, it just feels so awkward and unrefined now.

<comment><USER28> Windows 7 is unrefined? I have the opposite experience. Windows 7 feels like a finished product, that in addition is designed to help me _work_. Windows 8+ feels more like a Linux distribution in comparison, with inconsistent features & UIs everywhere, as if they were just a mash-up of random packages made by random open-source developers with no leader nor common goal. Actually the only thing that can be compared to a goal is that all the features are in some way or another designed to get in my way, waste my time, compromise my privacy, and just in general prevent me from doing actual _work_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> morten-oddvar "All the Ads. So, So Many Ads"

Seems odd to see complaints of many Ads in an OS--analogous to buying a car and having advertisements show up in the instrument cluster when stopped or not being able to exit the vehicle until watching an Ad.

Haven't used Windows in recent memory (probably since these Ads appeared or I just didn't notice them).

Is it as bad as the article describes?

<comment><USER76> At work, I have been using Windows 10 Pro for a couple of months now after sticking with Windows 7 for as long as I could. I cannot remember seeing any ads so far.

<comment><USER106> When switching default browser, it will ask you one more time if you really don't want to use Edge.

Gaming ads will be seen in the start menu.

Ads for Onedrive will be seen in file explorer.

If you ever start skype, don't be expected to be able to log off or even shut the app down unless you kill the process or uninstall it entirely.

With every update, it will ask you again to put tracking on, making the ads be more vigilant.

Just a few of the stuff I find incredible annoying with ads in Windows 10.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some rite-of-passage style projects for programmers? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I'm trying to compile a list of projects, algorithms and maybe data structures that I feel every well-rounded programmer should have implemented at least once in their career. I'm hoping this list can then function as a guide for programmers to challenge themselves and maybe fill gaps in their knowledge they didn't know they had.  So far, I've come up with the following list:<p>* Data structures - Linked list - Hash map - Several types of trees<p>* Algorithms - The common sorting algorithms - Dijkstra - Graph-traversal algorithms<p>* Projects - Ray tracer - Parser/Interpreter - Compiler - Virtual Machine - Small kernel - Neural Network - Web server<p>The algorithm and data structures section I believe should be covered by any decent computer science education (but may be useful to self-taught programmers). The projects are slightly more advanced and may take up to several weeks to implement completely.
I realize this list is far from complete, so that's why I'm turning to you: do you have any projects that you've worked on that turned out to be very educational and made you a better programmer once you completed it? <comment><USER3> Odd list. You can have a very successful developer career without ever needing to write any of those ever. I'm a little over 20 years in now, and have never needed to do any of that.

Maybe in the 90s, I might have actually built a linked list in C for whatever reason, and I guess you could define graph traversal to include walking a tree pulled out of a database. But the rest are things that _The Universe Provides For You_ (tm), which one would only ever reproduce in School, a Job Interview, or a Poorly Chosen Hobby.

As to actual rites of passage? Ship Something that real people actually use. Build an entire _thing_ , be it a piece of desktop software, video game, web application, mobile app, etc. from bottom to top and send it out in to the world fully formed. That, in my mind, is what we're here for.

<comment><USER4> > You can have a very successful developer career without ever needing to > write any of those ever.

You write this, but then you go on to mention job interviews, which are becoming more and more algorithmic each passing year. Software engineers are _frequently_ asked to write these during interviews. If you've missed the experience of being asked to implement a hash table or linked list in an interview, or at the very least asked to write a function somehow manipulating some data structure, you've either been lucky or else stayed in the same job for a long time (not a bad thing, but not typical).

I highly recommend _all_ software developers practice implementing data structures (linked lists, hash tables, trees, graphs) and algorithms (sorting, combinatorics, etc) on a regular basis. If you fail to master these, and to understand their underlying rates of growth (ie, "Big O"), you'll be forever pigeon-holed as a lightweight "webdev" forever, even if you have the programming chops required to build complex, reliable, and useful software.

Plus, they get really interesting the more you study them, and the math behind them.

<comment><USER5> > You write this, but then you go on to mention job interviews, which are > becoming more and more algorithmic each passing year.

It's been the opposite experience for me in SF, actually. More startups are realizing that they want people who can build good products quickly, and with more people coming from non-CS backgrounds, they'd rather test for that than see if they can whiteboard a breadth-first search.

I took enough CS coursework to learn the stuff you mentioned, but I've worked with a number of developers who don't know any CS theory. Several of them are stronger engineers than me and have had very successful careers, and I'd rather work with someone who can communicate well and solve hard problems than someone who's read through CLRS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some real world rites of passage... * have your project cancelled * get outsourced * build the same thing twice (billing system, e-commerce, etc) * underestimate a project * get promoted to management....realize you hate it * hire a net-negative * implement a cms

We could totally make career bingo outnof this...

<comment><USER7> \- Stick long enough at a job that the product becomes a social network.

\- Attend the same convention twice in a row for different jobs.

\- Work with an ivy league MBA.

\- Eventually settle on a Java or C# job.

\- Build a wonderful product that people won't use. For whatever reason...

\- Burnout and dream of working in construction...

<comment><USER8> > _\- Eventually settle on a Java or C# job._

why is Java considered "settling"? relatively inexperienced here

<comment><USER9> They've got the reputation as being kind of boring, corporate languages, among some people. Neither one is usually in the list of things that people would get very excited about using.

<comment><USER8> what's an "exciting" language in your opinion?

<comment><USER7> I know the answer was not meant for me, but I'm very excited about Verilog. It allows me to build my own chips with FPGAs (not that I'm doing any at the moment). Plus that means I can build my own language around a custom chip architecture.

<comment><USER9> I've considered that. At the very least, it would be cool to have an OS-less piece of hardware with known performance characteristics that I could program as a custom coprocessor. I feel like I've got so many projects on my hands that I don't have time to learn hardware design on top of the software stuff I'm already working on, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My rights of passage:

1\. your own MVC framework You should do this to appreciate why developers of other frameworks make the decisions they do. I gained so much wisdom from this.

2\. Parsing HTML with regex (see here - [http://blog.codinghorror.com/regular- expressions-now-you-hav...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions- now-you-have-two-problems/))

Seriously, just DONT DO IT(tm) -- but if you do, you will eventually learn why you don't want to do it this way, and you might get pretty good at regex expressions

3\. Your first mobile app published to the app store Publishing apps to the Apple app store has given me a deeper appreciation for paying attention to the little details. Also, making native apps is a completely different paradigm than web apps because shipping code with logic errors has such a high cost and delay to fixing them.

4\. Port an existing library to a new language I long time ago I ported a recipe parsers from Ruby to Python for a paid gig. It was such a good learning experience because I had a perfectly functioning reference implementation, which allowed me to go deep on getting the details right.

I had to replicate test cases, documentation, scaffolding, and the code itself while being aware of the gotchas of Python.

<comment><USER11> >Seriously, just DONT DO IT(tm)

Yes, you'll learn that this task is literally impossible, as well as why:) I think we've all used regex in a spot where it's impossible to do so correctly at some point.

<comment><USER12> Well, considering the PCRE regexes are nearly Turing complete, you can parse (well formed) HTML.

Someone better versed than I: [https://nikic.github.io/2012/06/15/The-true- power-of-regular...](https://nikic.github.io/2012/06/15/The-true-power-of- regular-expressions.html)

Of course, the money quote is: Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should.

<comment><USER11> I had never seen PCRE regexes. I was thinking about the plain ones. This was pretty cool, thanks for sharing:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Snake. Can pretty much pack all of CS 101 into that one little game ;)

My "hello world" for learning new languages and platforms. Integer based or floating point. 2d or 3d. Sound effects, sprite animation, physics, procedural particle systems, global leaderboards, digital skins and so on ad infinitum. Allows you to experience nuances in packaging and deploying WebGL vs Android vs Steam. Continue polishing it, and you may end up with something fun that others will love!

Can also be refactored into a full Tron Light Cycle style simulation. Which is a great way to learn AI. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER11> For me, it was writing my own Lisp. I'd __strongly __recommend giving it a try -- you 'll learn about tokenization, parsing, garbage collection, and a bunch of little software development lessons.

<comment><USER14> Useful for getting started: [https://github.com/kanaka/mal](https://github.com/kanaka/mal)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me, it was implementing a large bit of the C standard library. I had just blown an interview at Microsoft in 2001, where I stumbled over a whiteboard implementation of strtol, and I thought that I needed a serious upgrade of my understanding of library implementations and the algorithms that are used in them.

Every developer should also implement all the basic data structures and algorithms -- and then never write their own again! The process, however, definitely improves your chops, helps you understand the trade-offs inherent in choosing among data structures and algorithms, and gives you an appreciation for what's going on "under the hood."

<comment><USER15> Also, writing a compiler covers a lot of the list above. Even a simple language like Brainfuck (my choice for this rite of passage) can teach you a lot. It also gets you into the world of assembly language, which it seems that fewer and fewer new devs are exposed to these days.

(Yep... I'm officially old now. I just played the "kids these days" card.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe compiler-related stuff. Create a small dummy language that compiles down to JVM bytecode and things like that (learn about tokenizing, parser, abstract syntax tree, type checking, operator precedence, code generation, etc...).

</comment><comment><USER17> The classic one I always heard of was a shell. You learn about input parsing, fork/exec, and usually some syscalls. Lots of features can be added on, like running processes in the background, autocompletions etc.

Writing a shell in C (you can use Readline if you don't care to learn much about parsing) teaches you lots of stuff about the operating system you're working on.

</comment><comment><USER18> This may be colored by me being self-taught, but aside from interviews, why algorithms?

Seems to me that the best way to test your well-rounded skills as a programmer is to build and launch a product. Even if you don't aim to be an entrepreneur, the holes you find while taking an idea from inception to launch are much bigger holes than you'd find building this tree vs that tree.

<comment><USER19> Building fundamental data structures and implementing classic algorithms is a phenomenal way to learn about unit testing. How else are you going to make sure your doubly-linked list is doing the right thing?

It's much more difficult to learn about unit testing when you have the complications of a project stack: databases, front ends, etc. The fundamental data structures are self contained and their behavior down to the last detail (the spec) is fully described. That's an ideal way to learn about writing good unit tests.

<comment><USER20> Unit testing is not the be all and end all of writing an application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Common ones from when I started writing video games in C in the 90's -

* Write malloc() and free().

* Write a gzip decompressor.

* Write a triangle rasterizer and use it to draw a spinning cube on the screen.

Each of those is a decent but manageable amount of work for a new dev and will teach you a variety of useful low-level skills.

</comment><comment><USER22> The phrase 'rite-of-passage', to me, carries negative connotations - <USER2> you _have_ to do, something _tedious_ , something _necessary_. In truth, there are no such projects.

However, in terms of projects popularly considered to be commonly implemented by newer programmers that do hold benefit, in network programming, I would say a traceroute implementation. Server-side, I'd say any multi-node cluster system, preferably diskless. Any embedded system. An RDBMS system. A NoSQL system. An open source intelligence system. Any computational linguistic system. Any i18n/l10n heavy project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, the context/connotations of rite-of-passage might have been lost on me as English is not my first language. Thanks for your suggestions though!

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's a language thing. To many the notion of an ordeal endured or an adventure undertaken in order to pass into manhood or womanhood (or whatever) is still appealing. "Rite of passage" does not have a universally negative meaning in English, it's just that many of us today are... well, yeah.

<comment><USER24> I think you might be confusing a "Rite of Passage"[0] with a "Hazing Ritual"[1]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazing_ritual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazing_ritual)

<comment><USER23> I cannot imagine why you think so. Or why you believe the links you shared support such a statement.

<comment><USER24> In retrospect, I think I misread your posts

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b 1\. Backtracking algorithm 2\. Any kind of NP hard problem really 3\. A recursive decent parser 4\. An expression evaluation library 5\. A plugin mechanism 6\. Fixing memory leaks 7\. Speed optimization

</comment><comment><USER25> Quine - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_\(computing\))

</comment><comment><USER26> Learn enough sql to write an application entirely in the db, except presentation layer, of course. Use OO concepts to hide data, provide accessors, etc. Write a wrapper library for accessors in your front end language of choice (CLI, Web, GUI, whatever).

You won't often see a big project structured this way, but it is very effective for a first hand experience of data driven design.

<comment><USER27> I assuming you mean writing all the business logic in stored procs and functions. Every time I've seen this, it ended up horribly. I use the database for storage and data validation only. I write a middle tier for the business logic, and of course the front end layer.

I'm not saying it can't been done well, but it poses enough problems that are difficult to avoid, like calling an external web service inside a stored procedure, and the general mess of maintaining a bunch of chained stored procedures, functions.

It also guarantees vendor lock-in.

<comment><USER26> I should also mention, I found it common and well-received to use this pattern for sustaining development on an enterprise app. Some logic _has_ to be in the database anyway.

<comment><USER20> In my experience, keep the logic in / close to the data model and the application code becomes very clean and easy. If you have a crap data model, then lots of implicit rules start appearing at the application level, bugs start to appear and no one knows exactly what the application should be doing, as all the rules are tied up in some crappy crufty code.

Like Linus said, bed programmers worry about the code, good programmers worry about the data and its relationships (or something to that effect).

<comment><USER26> That experience is why I propose pushing as much business logic down into the data layer as possible as a matter of implementing a rite-of-passage code. For organizations, this puts a premium on db programmers, but it also protects their data from less-skilled programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On the web:

1\. Build your own CMS

2\. Build your own framework

3\. Performance tune SOMETHING intensely so that you can observe the bottlenecks and their causes across the stack

Just off the cuff there.

</comment><comment><USER29> 1\. Anything involving two different forms of encoding, one of which should preferably be something obscure like ShiftJIS.

</comment><comment><USER30> * Projects - Ray tracer - Parser/Interpreter - Compiler - Virtual Machine - Small kernel - Neural Network - Web server

Among these, do the ray tracer and neural network seem way easier than the competition to me due to my math background or are they just weirdly chosen? Those two are essentially algorithms, not "projects".

</comment><comment><USER31> Go to an interview and get asked an algorithm question after another realizing you've never had to implement a meaningful algorithm from scratch since you graduated College, because there's a library for (almost) everything.

</comment><comment><USER32> To learn web security and encryption, Strip CTF2 ([https://stripe.com/blog/capture-the-flag-wrap- up](https://stripe.com/blog/capture-the-flag-wrap-up)) is fabulous.

</comment><comment><USER33> Encryption, so you learn something about how it works.

Some kind of game.

Edit: Something that uses an API.

<comment><USER25> The problem with learning encryption by writing it yourself is that you will _not_ know if you got it right or totally wrong.

For most types of problems, the feedback is clear - if it works and gives you the expected result, then it's (at least mostly) correct. For implementing cryptographic systems, a passing test suite doesn't mean anything, you'd need extensive expert review to tell you where you went totally wrong, and without it you'd just likely learn untrue things.

<comment><USER24> > and without it you'd just likely learn untrue things.

I prefer this to the more common 'Just don't do it', as you actually state _why_. The reason is something I knew intuitively but couldn't really (And had actually never devoted any time to) put[ting] it into words. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> not really an answer to your question, but it could give some guidelines: [http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should- know/](http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is awesome. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Code something in an afternoon that makes your friends go "wow" the next day!

</comment><comment><USER36> Project management application.

</comment><comment><USER37> anything involving concurrency.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that concurrency is a nearly essential skill nowadays, but would you have any concrete projects or implementations that use concurrency? There's quite a difference between writing a parallel merge-sort and say, a whatsapp back-end clone.

<comment><USER38> Write an IRC bot with sockets. The program needs to listen to multiple networks inputs (the connections to different IRC servers) as well as respond to user input (or at least signaling). This is a great playground to try out different models such as thread per connection, your own busy waiting or sleeping event loop, and OS event loops such as poll.

If you want to do more parallelism rather than just concurrency, you could have some inputs make the bot start doing some work (like computing the billionth digit of pi) and queue the work up into a threadpool. If you really want to get into parallel programming, you could write a multiproducer- multiconsumer queue to allow the IO threads to communicate with the pi computing worker pool.

Hope this is a good concrete project! I did the first part (multiple connection IRC bot) a few years and it definitely helped me understand concurrency and network programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A timesheet application

</comment><comment><USER40> Dive into someone else's imperfect at best code and make it work. After finishing the final project for my 2nd programming class, I helped someone else make their's work. In the context of what could run on a PDP-11/70 running Version 6 UNIX™ with 24x80 CRT terminals, it was rather neat, a semi- real time air traffic control simulator game, with planes coming from the upper corners and crossing paths as they went down to the catercornered runway.

Great idea, better than mine, but the code was awful, had three global state variables X, XX, and XXX ... plus U, UU, and UUU for the UFOs he'd added to make the game more fun ^_^.

I helped him reduce the complexity by removing the UFOs (it was still quite challenging enough), and getting it to work in general. This prepared me for the many future jobs I took working on the code bases of others (one of which, for example, taught me red-black trees for real), and which soon enough led to the extremes of software archaeology when you can't even ask anyone about the code.

Not that you necessarily want to seek out such work, it's hard and often thankless, but at its best it's also what paying down technical debt is about. And code you've written long ago can also be rather foreign when you come back to it....

</comment><comment><USER41> Find a personal itch and scratch it. In my case, I knew little about reverse engineering closed source bins and drivers but had some hardware I was not yet ready to toss out. I learnt a lot about writing new device drivers based on the specs I managed to gtok from poking and peeking and analysing the original ones.

</comment><comment><USER42> Looking for a job as a fresh graduate. With no work history it is all bullshit multi-day interviews, giving presentations, showing you have 'people skills', rediculously high applciation to interview and interview to offer ratio.

My favourite was a small company that told me they 'like to get girls in for interviews' on the phone and then I stupidly still went to a face to face (I was desperate) and I got rejected - the reason was I used a loop to implement something but didn't suggest I could copy and paste the loop innards 10 times, and therefore was 'holding things back'.</comment>


AWS documentation is now open source and on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-documentation-is-now-open-source-and-on-github/ <comment><USER2> Brilliant. Let unpaid volunteers fix and update the documentation for your proprietary systems so you don't have to pay someone to do it.

Can someone explain to me why people will inevitably put in countless hours of free labor for Amazon here?

<comment><USER3> Why is it any different than documenting open-source code for free, or answering a stack overflow question?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's kind of like wondering why someone would make an open source project better when the person that owns the repo gets all the credit. Or all the competitors they might be inadvertently helping out by improving the project.

Sometimes it's nice to just make things better.

<comment><USER2> With an open source project, I can fork and use the code for myself and contribute back to the project.

But if I spend a bunch of time fixing AWS docs, it's not like I have any need to fork it and use 8t as documentation for my own AWS-like service.

<comment><USER4> Improving an open source project's docs aren't likely to help you, either.

Intro-level documentation changes are the most common pull requests I get on any of my projects. And the people making them are not the ones being helped by intro-level docs.

It's a clear case of experts helping beginners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Azure says come in in, the water's fine.

[https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure- docs](https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs)

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/contribute/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/contribute/)

<comment><USER6> I know it's been a while, but I still cant get over the azure outage that lasted almost a full day in 2012.

<comment><USER7> Thats a very long time ago in cloud computing years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I for one, welcome this change.. assuming I can grep for what I'm looking for in the repos. Or maybe Dash will integrate the docs so I don't have to browse around on metered LTE networks.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is.. Odd. AWS is notoriously a black box. Their services aren't open source and on github; who would have the insider view necessary to work on the docs outside of their own employees? Is this easier than having an edit suggestion feature? Will PR's cause clashes with their technical writers?

<comment><USER4> You don't need system insight to improve docs. On one end of the spectrum, docs just need people to improve the language like typos, grammar, and sentence flow.

Also, docs map out the black box but end-users use the black box. They are in a position to find disparities between what the docs say and what the black box does. Like noticing the example response doesn't match the actual response.

Or that if you provide a stream to the API, you must provide a content length, yet this relationship is only marked as optional in the docs.

Maybe an engineer would have to double-check the code to verify the behavior, and that's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like at least some of the guides are licensed Creative Commons BY-SA.

For code samples do they do something similar to Mozilla?

Mozilla MDN:

"Code samples and snippets

Code samples added on or after August 20, 2010 are in the public domain (CC0). No licensing notice is necessary, but if you need one, you can use: "Any copyright is dedicated to the Public Domain. [http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"."](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/".")

</comment><comment><USER11> On a lark, I just forked the repo for the AWS CLI user guide and added some commits that introduced subtle and not-so-subtle errors. Let's hope my fork never shows up in search results. Otherwise, people are going to be making curl requests to r/tacobell to download the AWS CLI Bundled Installer.

If this collaborative-documentation initiative were launched as an Amazon- hosted wiki, editors or mods could shut me down. But since it's open source and under a Creative Commons license, Amazon has essentially no control over how much I vandalize the content.

Fortunately for AWS, I'm not really interested in vandalizing the content or misleading people. But the fact that someone can create a knock-off site riddled with errors, and Amazon can't claim copyright infringement if the site plays by the Creative Commons rules, is concerning, isn't it?

Edit: I know, I know. It's already possible to make unauthorized copy-pasta sites. But at least Amazon would have the ability to threaten the site's owner or hosting provider with copyright infringement claims. That option disappears when you release your official documentation under a Creative Commons license.

<comment><USER12> > Edit: I know, I know. It's already possible to make unauthorized copy-pasta > sites. But at least Amazon would have the ability to threaten the site's > owner or hosting provider with copyright infringement claims. That option > disappears when you release your official documentation under a Creative > Commons license.

You misunderstand trademark law.

Trademark law is meant to prevent confusion, and would kick in here.

Nothing is different with respect to creating a confusing fork; before they wouldn't claim copyright infringement before either, but trademark infringement.

<comment><USER11> Nominative fair use should cover that. Otherwise, no one could write an "Unofficial Guide to ..." any technology or service with a trademarked name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> shady-lady I would reject that PR.

Something like that change should have a message explaining why that change is proposed.

Unfortunate that the blogpost itself can't be forked :p

<comment><USER13> I wrote it -- do I need to make a fix??

<comment> shady-lady well, it depends on what type of comments you guys find acceptable & would want to see when you're deciding whether to merge the changes in.

imagine down the line somebody submitting changes & the message isn't the _reason_ why those changes are there[0] but instead a copy paste of the changes[1]

[0] e.g. "remove fuzzy language"/"update intro to more accurately reflect addition of new services"

[1] not denying that sometimes this makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Gah, choke, barf.

Crowd-sourcing is _not_ the right way to document a big complex software suite.

The right way is to use special software to compile or extract the documentation from the underlying source code. The documentation generator should be conceptually similar to a Jupyter Notebook or a Mathematica Computable Document.

Furthermore, the documentation generator should run actual code that throws an error if there's a mistake. For example, in this document:

[https://github.com/awsdocs/aws-cli-user- guide/blob/master/do...](https://github.com/awsdocs/aws-cli-user- guide/blob/master/doc-source/cli-dynamodb.md)

The CLI operations should be lifted from some other file, and that other file should get run as a test by a CI tool, so that when there's a change to the CLI, it's automatically flagged for correction.

<comment><USER15> While for docs which are very close to code, you're right, good documentation has a lot of things at much higher level than code, and a lot of times teaching people how to do things unrelated to the actual implementation, ie "how to expand a linux file system after you increased an EBS volume". Your comments are a bit reductionist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting that they mix markdown and restructured text. ReST is clearly the superior formatting language, but markdown is so much easier to pick up and use.

<comment><USER17> Just curious, I've never actually heard of "ReST" as a format before now... I wonder if you might be able to explain what makes it superior to markdown?

<comment><USER16> ReST is really big in the Python ecosystem, thanks to Sphinx (docs generator), and the read-the-docs website.

The main advantage for ReST is that it is well defined and consistent. It's a bit heavier than .md, but I think it will pay off for large projects.

Here are some articles about it: [https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/restructuredtext-vs- markd...](https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/restructuredtext-vs-markdown-for- technical-documentation/) [http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use- markdown-f...](http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for- technical-docs/)

I've written docs for personal projects in markdown, but now that I work on larger collaborative projects I feel like ReST is the way to go.

PS: If you're using Sphinx, you can actually support both .md and .rst in the same project, and slowly transition from one to the other, see [https://github.com/ivanistheone/ricecooker/blob/docs/improve...](https://github.com/ivanistheone/ricecooker/blob/docs/improve/docs/conf.py#L447)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Uh oh, looks like my tech writing career is under threat (so of course I'm posting with a bit of bias here). A wise move on amazon's part though, offload your work on to users who will improve the docs for a couple of reasons:

1\. They can add their contributions to their resumes. 2\. They use the software and more than likely reference the docs, and so are already stakeholders that desire the content to be correct and so will happily fix it given the chance so that they can save themselves headaches in the future. 3\. The general concept of 'open source' is very enticing and is almost always has a positive connotation, so very few people will see that this is a clever way to cut costs and net free labor and not really the virtuous public gesture of transparency and good will a lot will perceive it to be.

This would be different if, like actual open source _software_ others could pull the thing and conceivably make a better version of it and _compete_ , but since this is necessarily bound to a product that's not going anywhere outside the organization, it's de facto always going to be free labor for amazon and never going to promote potential forking out of modified versions of the project, further securing the companies foothold in the market as well--after all, if you no longer have to pay folks for all the extra bits like documentation, support, and maintenance of internal libraries, you can have nothing but a horde of devs working on the user-facing product, and ensure all of your money goes toward nothing other than squashing the competition. Sure you could argue it's still technically _possible_ for someone's fork to gain bigger traction than the official amazon repo, but cmon now, the project is so massive and is so bound to the company that such a scenario is highly unlikely. On the plus side, open sourcing is a boon for archivists were the main content to ever disappear (unlikely).

I realize this sounds a little bleak, and I'm sure amazon also has good intentions with this move, but I can't help but see the potential for future markets where a lot of free labor is snagged under the banner of 'open source' simply because people are shortsightedly seeking resume boosts and not realizing that contributing labor freely will more than likely hurt the job market in the long run.

Not saying you shouldn't contribute to open source, nor is the idea of open source a bad one, but I think the lines get a bit blurred when it comes to open source projects owned by private (massive, in this case) corporations who are then gaining from the work of outsiders without needing to compensate them. Sure, helping out looks good on your resume, just as unpaid internships do--but at some point we need to take a look at these practices that can be, whether intentionally or not, ways of sidestepping the proper dispensation of wages and compensation for labor.

They may still need to pay somebody to green light merges, but that's a lot less costly, I imagine, than paying a team of writing professionals.

<comment><USER19> I'm curious. What makes contribution to this docs so special that adding it to the resume has been mentioned a few times in this thread? I mean, is it not just another repo you have contributed to in your github profile?

<comment><USER18> It may just be another repo at the end of the day. Point is, contributions to open source are sometimes considered when selecting job candidates, so it remains an incentive for folks that may be strong enough for it to nudge them to do work for Amazon. I.e. even though it's technically free labor, I _potentially_ benefit in some way thus I'm content. The problem is potential edge in future job searches is a far more ephemeral form of compensation for your time, is not concretely measurable, and is not actually provided by the company the labor was completed for. In the end the company ends up with a tangible product which they can use to compete in a market and the open source contributor ends up with, at best, a potential benefit should she ever need to apply to some job that will actually pay her for her work in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool! How does aws translate their docs?

</comment><comment><USER21> Finally. Been asking for this for years.

</comment><comment><USER22> Now if only they would open-source the AWS Console...</comment>


The start-up project - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=332245011 <comment><USER2> I plan on going to this

</comment><comment><USER3> ill be there.</comment>


A Little Less Conversation - By Joel Spolsky - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/a-little-less-conversation_Printer_Friendly.html

<comment><AUTHOR> What is interesting to note - the date of the article is "Feb 1, 2010". :) I guess Inc. released the article earlier than planned.

<comment><USER2> Déjà lu: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062730></comment></comment>