> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX
Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good.
The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes.
IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
> There are still several 2% cards that don’t require Apple Pay, although I don’t know of any with no foreign exchange fee other than maybe the Fidelity one.
The Bread American Express is a 2% card and no FTF. Fidelity is still the best overall card, but sometimes the AmEx can be nice.
I have a very similar setup, but using gnus, mbsync, notmuch, and afew. All mail stays on the servers (including a self-hosted dovecot server on my home network). I manage about 10 email accounts with very little effort. It's easy to get extremely customized behavior by overriding defaults with elisp. Previously I was using Thunderbird, but I feel my emacs setup is much more productive.
Discovered Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC edition recently. It's great! It is supposed to get security updates through 2032. It doesn't have Cortana, OneDrive, CoPilot, Edge, etc. (Which is a good thing IMO.) Nor does it require a cloud account to use.
Are there any limitations with this to be aware of? Are Hypervisor/Docker/WSL2 all supported?
I'm trying to decide if I want to transition my work computer to Linux or Windows 10 LTSC. Most of my day is spent working inside of WSL2. So, it kind of seems like I should just get on with using Linux native, but several decades of sunken cost have kept me on Windows. I don't think I have a desire to 'upgrade' to Windows 11 and Windows 10 Pro is just about EOL.
The only mid level hurdle you'll encounter is no Microsoft store. It was only an issue for me when gaming, but steam was fully supported. Same for Win 11 LTSC.
Not sure if this still works, but you used to be able to run "wsreset.exe -i" to install the Microsoft Store. The command kicks off the process in the background, so there's no progress indicator, but the Store app just appeared after a few minutes.
Yes, LTSC is literally missing parts that are standard on a Windows install - it's an operating system designed for ATMs and kiosks that run exactly one tested application, it is not a general-purpose operating system.
If you happen to not need those pieces, and you don't care about running super out-of-date software? Sure it might work. But it's not a Good Idea in general.
That's not a fair take. The only things I noticed that were missing out of the box are the MS Store and some Dolby codecs. Both of those can be installed easily.
I estimate that 95% of people would be fine with Windows 10 21H2 LTSC. The 5% might miss some 3rd party software that requires version 22H2 to run (just because it's the latest, not for any technical reasons).
Thanks for mentioning WMR. I was genuinely struggling to remember why I didn't install LTSC previously and that reminded me. Half the reason I'm stuck on 10 even if I wanted to go to 11 is WMR. LTSC would be perfect for me if it wasn't for that little caveat (and a few more if my memory serves correct).
Awesome that they created and then gutted a standard that just bricks my $400 device that they barely even seem to care to support on launch. There's patches that exist for 11 but they're just that, patches, and my WMR experience is already very jank. Nvidia also seems to be the target for most development so I'm not sure where I'll go once this all settles as I have my gaming PC in a nice position where I can just hop on after work and everything just works with no interruptions or issues currently.
11 is a hot mess and I already know that linux/proton simply won't work for the games I tend to quickly hop onto with friends.
Other limitations are that modern Adobe products will no longer install on Windows 10 LTSC as it is based on a too old version (but there are workarounds).
WMR situation isn't great but there are ways out. If you have a NVIDIA GPU then you can use Oasis on Windows 10 LTSC (AMD GPUs require Windows 11 24H2 for Oasis). Also on Linux, support for WMR devices has improved markedly via Envision / Monado, but some tinkering is required and it is still behind Windows.
Nested virtualization is a problem for systems with AMD CPUs I think, Windows 10 Hyper-V supported nested virtualization on Intel only. Since Windows 11 it is supported on AMD too.
It is purchasable only if you have access to business sales for Microsoft. You need to buy at least 5 normal licenses before being offered the LTSC upgrade option. It is quite pricey.
Unless it has changed recently you need to have a minimum qty. license purchase. Any good reseller will sell you the one license of LTSC and pad the rest of the order with the cheapest qualifying license in the catalog. (In the past it was DVD playback licenses at a couple of bucks apiece, for example.) I was able to get licensing for my father's sole proprietorship DBA from a big name reseller w/o furnishing any kind of business-related docs and paying with his personal credit card. (In his case it was Windows Server and CALs, but the premise is the same for LTSC.) You'll probably have to talk to a sales gerbil but it's imminently feasible.
I'm going to keep it real with you bro, I don't remember how it works, but the video below has been saved in my YouTube watch later for a few months and I think it's what I followed when I tried (I eventually moved onto Linux anyway):
Overly-anthropomorphised dialog boxes (such as pop-up offers on web sites, not so much on operating system controls) bug me in the same way. Instead of "Yes, please" and "No, thank you" buttons, I would prefer simply "Yes" and "No". I'm giving orders to a machine not talking to a person!
The one I hate is the error message that simply says "Something went wrong." maybe with a frowning cat icon, but with no other diagnostic message that could be used to determined what exactly went wrong and what corrective action to take.
This annoys me so much, and it's another reason I hate phone apps, because they do this all the time. Usually ANY error resolves to "something went wrong". I'm not expecting a stack trace, but they're too scared to show the user ANY tech jargon at all, and it's another reason why young people are computer illiterate. At least I can access the developer console on modern webshit when using an actual computer.
I had to logcat an app recently which failed with no error at all incidentally, to find out it was overzealous DNS blocking that prevented it from talking to its api endpoint. I don't to Android development, but I'm guessing apps would be aware of name resolution failures, and should be able to tell the user about it, without using fucking logcat.
> error message that simply says "Something went wrong."
Actually, are there HCI guidelines for communicating inexplicable internal errors to the user? I definitely write assertions that really should never ever fail - if they do, we are in a completely unanticipated state. Either there's been a truly massive logic bug, or maybe even a memory error flipped a bit, but in either case, I have no idea what state the program is in or what caused it to get there.
What would a good tech writer tell the user in this situation? I can't think of anything all that much more helpful than "something went wrong". Maybe "There is a serious bug in the program, totally our fault, please help us by reporting it"?
I'm not a user, but to me the problem with the empty "something went wrong" is not that it that it obscures the error details but that it obscures the failed action. What exactly went wrong? Should I retry my last action? Is my data safe? Is it safe to close the program/app without saving?
If the user is to report a bug, then any additional information would be better than "Something Went Wrong." "Something Went Wrong" is the equivalent of the guy who calls into the IT helpdesk and says "My computer isn't working."
Surely, somewhere in the code, there is an if() statement, and you're displaying the "Something Went Wrong" dialog in the else() clause. You could at least add some context that the user can copy down, so that the bug report that will come later helps you find the bug.
Steve Summit liked to tell the story of an early Mac application with a distinct UI flourish: for dialog messages indicating success, the label on the button to dismiss the dialog would be changed to "Yay!"; for error messages, it would be changed to "Damn!".
Just another item on the long list of Things Done in the 80s That We Couldn't Get Away With Today.
> My point is less about where the money goes and more about not subsidizing cheap Chinese shipping.
FWIW, most of the packages I've bought from AliExpress over the last 6 months have been delivered by private couriers (like OnTrac for packages from China or UPS for packages from the US).
I have a hunch that AliExpress hasn't been using USPS shipping for a while now.
Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good.
The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes.
IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
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