The author of this article should strongly consider learning to write before sharing another

>If you want access to the model with voice cloning, go to https://huggingface.co/kyutai/pocket-tts and accept the terms, then make sure you're logged in locally with `uvx hf auth login` lol

I’ve tried the voice clinking and it works great. I added a 9s clip and it captured the speaker pretty well.

But don’t do the fake mistake I did and use a hf token that doesn’t have access to read from repos! The error message said that I had to request access to the repo, but I’ve had already done that, so I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Turns out my HF token only had access to inference.

On Windows this depends on webview2, which the installer attempts to download. No mention of this requirement in the readme. It's a shame this software isn't portable

knowledge for me but not for thee

It still puzzles me decades later how MS built the most functional, intuitive and optimised desktop environment possible then simply threw it away

It still is if you're an enterprise customer. The retail users aren't Microsoft's cash cows, so they get ads and BS in their editions. The underlying APIs are still stable and MS provides the LTSC & Server editions to businesses which lack all that retail cruft.

I'm an enterprise user and I find Windows 11 a complete disaster. They've managed to make something as trivial as right-clicking a slow operation.

I used to be a pretty happy Windows camper (I even got through Me without much complaint), but I'm so glad I moved to Linux and KDE for my private desktops before 11 hit.

If anything, right click is faster thanks to dumping the ability for 3rd parties to pollute it with COM controls that needs to be init'ed.

Everything after Win 2000 was a bad idea. Enterprise or not.

Windows 2000 was the last version where Dave Cutler was fully in charge of Windows.

Things started going downhill after that.

Windows 2000 was a bug riddled, poorly architected punching bag for malware.

Things definitely went up-hill AFTER Windows 2000.

What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release? It wasn't even a good release when it came out, and it definitely didn't stand the test of time.

> What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release?

An unsubstantiated insistence that a single human being is the bus factor for a thousand-engineer org?

I'm just as confused as you, everyone I've ever met who liked Windows 2000 went on to love XP SP3, usually with the W2K skin on it.

7 was pretty good. But I may be looking through the glasses of nostalgia and my love for the frutiger aero style

XP was arguably better.

Do you mean Windows 1x Pro/Enterprise?

Enterprise is not retail and is usually done via volume licensing, but probably without any additional configuration it might have that stuff intact.

But you can use group policy etc. freely. I don't know how Win 11 is though

FWIW, ChatGPT advised against LTSC or Server editions for a dev workstation and recommended Enterprise, as you do. However, I can’t find Enterprise from a reputable EU vendor. Do you know of any? Is Enterprise available to end users?

It's not officially, but nothing prevents you from buying licenses.

I don't use Windows anymore but iirc the easiest way is to get the E3 or E5 licenses. The volume licensing is "Contact us" pricing

LTSC is also Enterprise, but it's meant for e.g. computers attached to an industrial machine/line that rarely gets updated and such. But it's used by many prosumers as a way to avoid bloat and e.g. keep Win10 for longer

The problem with Windows after Windows 7 isn't really ads, it's the blatant stupid use of web view to do the most mundane things and hog hundreds of MB or even GBs for silly features, that are still present in enterprise versions.

Start menu search requires 7 web browser processes that consume ~350 MB of RAM to be constantly running.

In my day job, Explorer still freezes every second day, GUI interactions take several seconds and the sidebar is full of tabloid headlines and ads.

At least with regard to the last point, your enterprise admins must be doing a bad job.

It's quite common for a company to build a good product and then once the initial wave of ICs and management moves on, the next waves of employees either don't understand what they're maintaining or simply don't care because they see a chance to extract short term gains from the built-up intellectual capital others generated.

Idk why they use Electron for everything, they literally built the UI stack itself and C# is insanely good at building UIs if they stop trying to reinvent UIs in C# that is.

The pivot point was Windows 95.

Competition. In the first half of the 90s Windows faced a lot more of it. Then they didn't, and standards slipped. Why invest in Windows when people will buy it anyway?

Upgrades. In the first half of the 90s Windows was mostly software bought by PC users directly, rather than getting it with the hardware. So, if you could make Windows 95 run in 4mb of RAM rather than 8mb of RAM, you'd make way more sales on release day. As the industry matured, this model disappeared in favor of one where users got the OS with their hardware purchase and rarely bought upgrades, then never bought them, then never even upgraded when offered them for free. This inverted the incentive to optimize because now the customer was the OEMs, not the end user. Not optimizing as aggressively naturally came out of that because the only new sales of Windows would be on new machines with the newest specs, and OEMs wanted MS to give users reasons to buy new hardware anyway.

UI testing. In the 1990s the desktop GUI paradigm was new and Apple's competitive advantage was UI quality, so Microsoft ran lots of usability studies to figure out what worked. It wasn't a cultural problem because most UI was designed by programmers who freely admitted they didn't really know what worked. The reason the start button had "Start" written on it was because of these tests. After Windows 95 the culture of usability studies disappeared, as they might imply that the professional designers didn't know what they were doing, and those designers came to compete on looks. Also it just got a lot harder to change the basic desktop UI designs anyway.

The web. When people mostly wrote Windows apps, investing in Windows itself made sense. Once everyone migrated to web apps it made much less sense. Data is no longer stored in files locally so making Explorer more powerful doesn't help, it makes more sense to simplify it. There's no longer any concept of a Windows app so adding new APIs is low ROI outside of gaming, as the only consumer is the browser. As a consequence all the people with ambition abandoned the Windows team to work on web-related stuff like Azure, where you could have actual impact. The 90s Windows/MacOS teams were full of people thinking big thoughts about how to write better software hence stuff like DCOM, OpenDoc, QuickTime, DirectMusic and so on. The overwhelming preference of developers for making websites regardless of the preferences of the users meant developing new OS ideas was a waste of time; browsers would not expose these features, so devs wouldn't use them, so apps wouldn't require them, so users would buy new computers to get access to them.

And that's why MS threw Windows away. It simply isn't a valuable asset anymore.

Millions of total computer noobs hit the ground running with Windows 95. It was a great achievement in software design.

He was talking about user interface not app compatibility

He's mentioning Desktop environment, I assume he means all the parts, not just UI.

Is this really the case? I feel like most windows users just bought a laptop with Windows already on it. Even if all home users were running pirated versions they would still become entrenched in the world of Windows/Office which would then lead to enterprise sales.

> Is this really the case? I feel like most windows users just bought a laptop with Windows already on it.

This is largely true in North America, UK and AUS/NZ, less true in Europe, a mixed bag in the Middle East and mostly untrue everywhere else.

If you were able to wave a magic wand today and remove piracy, Microsoft would not remove ads.

Firefox had options for many things, until those options were removed

Disingenuous title and no mention of those directly responsible, Sam Altman/OpenAI. Once again Jeff is desperate for clicks

It's incredible the effort Windows 10/11 users will go to in order to reach a somewhat functional and reliable computing experience via third party modifications, yet Linux is somehow too much effort. Just look at the instructions on that page..

Every techie knows about Linux by now. Not everyone chooses to use Windows because they're foolish or don't know any better

why do they choose it?

i have a windows workstation because one CNC machine that we use needs it. only other reason i can see is gaming?

I have all 3 major OSs at home and, honestly, Windows 11 is stuff of nightmares to me

I've given some good reasons before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45858749

The "solutions" provided to me so far for my primary issue (using Ableton Suite DAW) has not worked. There is no practical solution that allows this software to function in a Linux environment successfully. I can open the app, but that's the extent of it. It's not usable.

> I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.

> The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch.

> Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.

Adobe products, for example. Or any of other of miriad of other products which have only Win/MacOS and no Linux support.

And, no, Wine cannot run anything.

You see, I don't need OS at all, I need applications. Some of these applications are "universal" (FireFox, for example), some has good equivalents, and some are unique to OS.

And, no, DarkTable, or RAW Therappe are not equivalent to Lightroom or Capture One. And no, there is no equivalent to foobar2000 among music players.

>And, no, Wine cannot run anything.

Wine may not be able to run the apps you need, but it can run plenty. The older the software gets the more wine becomes the only option to run it.

MPD + advanced clients pown foobar 2000 anytime. Also, Audacious, Strayberry...

Audacious with audacious-plugins could play anything (even video game music files) and it still has ProjectM plugins' support.

Nope, UI for mpd shows that there is 11093 albums in my collection, but first several screens of Albums is all sequences of `?`. Very useful. Number itself doesn't looks right, my estimation is at least half of this number, maybe less.

On the other hand same client shows only 6391 files, which is waaaay to small number if 1 file = 1 track. Ok, there is a lot of image + CUE albums, I wonder, is it 2 files or one?

So it is useless, unfortunately. foobar2000 allows me add folder / file set to playlist and start listening. With system "Artist/Year - Album" on the file system it is easy and convenient. Tags could be broken, but all mys music is here and I always know where to look for what I want to listen now.

When I've tried MPD last time (about 2 years ago, to be honest) it failed to play wv.iso format, and I have this abomination in my collection.

Also, it is not very good with broken tags, MP3 tags in local codepages (different for different albums!), etc.

You cannot imagine what can be seen in the wild when it is musical collection started in 1995!

Heck, I'm downloading mpd for windows right now and I'll try to add my collection into it. But I'm not holding my breath, all previous attempts to import my collection in any software failed for 15-20% of collection (different ones for different software).

You can run nearly any Windows app with winboat. Its not based on wine, it runs real windows in a container.

One reason is that Linux has no backwards compatibility and to maintain each piece of software in the repos, you need people. It is linear: more software requires more maintainers, otherwise the software stops to compile in a year or two.

Creative Cloud and DAWs. Those are my only reasons and basically the only reasons I ever hear from people. A Linux port of Photoshop would probably put a small dent in Windows' market share at this point.

Windows architecture is better. It is from the 1990s (ad was very advanced at the time), while Linux architecture is from the 1960s.

A foolish take, makes me believe you didn't really work in the real world. Because the entire global computer ecosystem is built on Windows-compatible software. Finance, accounting, medical, car diagnostics, and even HVAC software are built windows-compatible-only only.

Don't get me wrong, I use Xubuntu on my crappy old devices, Ubuntu on my secondary mini-pc, and switch between them with KVM while working. I tried to make Linux work for everything but missing industry software made it difficult.

Don’t bother. HN has a very hard anti-Microsoft bias, especially when it comes to Windows. At the same time will completely overlook many of the same warts or different warts that exist on macOS or Linux because they get a free pass for some reason.

Despite its flaws Windows still remains a very capable workhorse general purpose OS, and with WSL dev is a non issue. Hell, having actual Linux is better than the macOS Frankenstein Unix and homrbrew

I agree. You described my main pc. WSL + Ubuntu, VSCode with WSL plugin + Claude code. I can access Linux files and edit them with Windows while running local servers on different ports without dealing with XAMPP, Python for Windows, or similar messy Windows services. If I need to run any Debian software (so rare), I can run a VM if I am too lazy to turn on my other Linux system. All while I can use Windows-specific software on the side. All I am missing is the Gnome desktop, but who cares, I am already used to Windows since the 90s.

Some of us still rely on Windows applications that either don’t run on Linux, can’t run under Wine, or don’t have alternatives that meet our needs.

For some it's just fun. Changing things because we can. I was a huge tinkerer in the XP days, I'd test out every tweak and tool I could get my hands on and would reinstall the OS every couple months. I'd use Resource Hacker to change out the XP flag icons, put my initials on the start button, etc. It wasn't about making it more usable so much as it was just making it mine.

It makes me happy to see newer generations still doing the same stuff, granted its much more complex to do this work on Win11 vs XP.

"but he's sweet sometimes"

It's just an abusive relationship and eventually some of them break out of it.

Yeah, that effectively describes my experiences with desktop linux.

Linux isn’t hard, it’s just different. Better, but different. That’s too much effort for some.

Most of us are forced to use it because of corporate IT requirements.

In Linux such kind of hacking is impossible at all. You cannot make Qt4 to look like Qt3.

Windows 11 user here. I use zero third-party modifications. Some people are masochists.

Indeed, some people are :)

disallow? do they mean prevent or forbid?

The direct result of the newer, open CLAP format being objectively better in every way. Steinberg has gone to great lengths to force adoption of the trash that is VST3 and retain it's stranglehold on the audio world, including but not limited to, takedowns of distributors, takedowns of VST2.4 SDKs, constant threats of legal action against independent VST2.4 developers forcing them to remove purchases from customers, and funding particular plugin frameworks & daw developers to slow CLAP adoption.