+ The current state of software is utterly ridiculous
+ Johannes Olzem
+ May 15, 2023
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+ First off, I want to say that this is not an informative blog post. It's simply a rant on how modern software is increasingly slow and bloated.
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+ Not too long ago, I, as an avid gamer, decided to play a racing sim game with my racing rig. As this is not something you can do, or something I have spent the time figuring out how to do on Linux (another negative aspect of modern software, but something I have come to accept), I booted into my Microsoft Windows 11 installation.
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+ It should be mentioned that this install is on a separate HDD from my Linux installation. After selecting Windows from the GRUB bootloader, I walked away for about 2 minutes to do something else. When I came back, I was, as expected, greeted with the Windows 11 login screen, or rather, the time on top of a pretty landscape picture. At this point, my first frustration started:
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+ After pressing the spacebar to load the login prompt, the digital clock went away as expected. But guess what didn't appear? The login prompt. As a few seconds pass, the digital clock reappears, and I try again multiple times. After about a half-minute to a minute, before starting my last attempt, something else, in addition to the digital clock, spawned on the screen. It was a series of small details about the randomly picked background picture and other details, which I obviously didn't read. So not only did I not want these details, but they also prevented me from logging into my system. In addition to that, I don't know a single person who reads, likes or wants these details at all.
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+ So what's your solution, you might ask? It's incredibly simple: make it a feature, not a bug or a piece of bloatware in this case. Let the user toggle it on if they so desire, but please don't make it a burden for slower systems like mine. (A quick side note: I wouldn't consider my system slow as a whole. I have a 5th Gen Ryzen and 16GB of RAM, but as Windows 11 is installed on an HDD rather than an SSD, I assume most of its slowness comes from this)
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+ After I successfully logged into my system, it took around another minute to be fully usable, but I was already used to that. During this time, I noticed that the Oculus Updater Program had auto-started. As I had recently sold my Oculus VR headset and the program was probably only slowing down my computer, I decided to uninstall it. This brings me to another frustration with the Microsoft Windows operating system: the fact that you cannot uninstall something without a million registry entries and files being left on your system. To my knowledge, it is currently impossible without third-party software to uninstall something completely and remove all traces of it. Using an uninstallation program, however, which in itself is a major piece of bloatware, I was able to remove what I assume is most of the program and its files.
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+ All of this just contributes to my opinion of free and open-source software. The free aspect is actually somewhat important in this case, as sensible solutions can only be found or created by an entire community, rather than one person or organization publishing their code and another person having an idea for improvements to that code. When big tech companies are the only ones in control of their software, they tend to not only roll out necessary updates but also completely useless features and then completely ignore their communities feedback. The best example I can think of in this case is Youtube: they disabled public dislikes and received a huge amount of negative feedback from creators and other users. And instead of listening to what is essentially their main revenue stream, they kept them disabled. In this case, the community was able to evade that change by using a browser extension specially developed for this issue.
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+ I completely understand that companies want to generate revenue with their product, but by intentionally ruining it for some or even all of the users, they are only achieving the opposite. Maybe there is something in the corporate world doing the exact opposite of what I just described, but I, as a mere end-user, cannot think of such a thing.
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+ TLDR I am frustrated that software, especially the Windows operating system, has moved from being a tool used to interface with a computer to something that has to look pretty and could probably be used by a three-year-old.
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