I'm beginning to think that Microsoft is trying to pull a New Coke with Win11 except that's probably giving them too much credit.
Microblog Memes
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
Reminder that the Windows devs copied AppGet, even spoke with the dev of it, but refused to hire them. Reminder that just because something is legal with regards to FLOSS tools, it doesn't mean it is ethical. It's stories like this that I think people need to think long and hard about when making FLOSS stuff and whether you want to use a permissive license. A copy left license wouldn't have necessarily prevented this, but this is the competition. They don't play nice.
i used to prefer MIT and Apache licensing. now i feel very strongly that copyleft is the way. too many rugpulls all at once in the last 2 years.
MIT and Apache are nice for libraries. Not full-blown software solutions.
It is hilarious to see linux-scary-because-terminal heads and then this
Normies wouldn't know what to do with winget anyway. Somehow installing random executables downloaded from a browser is still considered 'easier' than using a package manager.
Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.
Year of the windows desktop is probably not next year; it's not ready for general use yet, it's too broken.
How can we trust the quality of code only incentivised with money and in a closed environment?
Microsoft won't fix it either because they're too busy adding AI features to every part of the operating system.
I wish I could upvote this multiple times
The cherry on top is the warning about the PowerShell team cooking up their own version of a download command with an incompatible syntax, but still calling it curl.
They don't do that anymore in new versions, but you still need to actually use the new version to get that behaviour. It's a bit of a pain since the "fixed" version is in the MS store, the broken one is a base system component.
It also hits the people who use the terminal the least, anybody who uses it regularly will just install the new shell at the same time they install the new terminal and always get the new clean behaviour.
Microsoft just set a system wide default alias in Powershell for Invoke-WebRequest called curl.
While I get their reasoning for that (I mean, they also aliased e.g. ls and dir to Get-ChildItem which is the same, but way more powerful than the OG commands the aliases hint at), the problem is, that in all those cases the arguments don't match. Something that plays in the favor of Powershell is that arguments are not case sensitive and do not need to be written in full, as long as they're distinct - e.g. -Force may be abbreviated -f as long it's the only argument starting with f. While dir or ls is somewhat likely to be called without arguments (or maybe -f) that's definitely not the case for curl.
Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power
Funny thing: judging by the styling, that text might be from the documentation for Ansible, the declarative configuration manager. Well, you can't run Ansible itself in Windows, you need a *nix vm, even if WSL — though you can control Windows machines via Ansible. Afaik the same is true for the popular alternatives Salt, Puppet and Chef.
(Though I couldn't find the screenshotted page.)
Can’t find it via web search 🤔 interesting it wasn’t published in that same form, feel it’s rare to come up empty on something like this
I generally have very mixed results with searches for longer text, these days. At some point, search engines overshot with synonyms and such fuzzy matching.
I'd say Win11 is a joke but its more like a slap in the face.
And a joke...Its still a joke...
i was forced to switch to Win11 and after three weeks my employer straight up apologized and allowed to switch work computer to Mint. And then much of the team also switched to Mint and it turns out your computer can still feel like the machine from the future when its OS is not a bloated spying mountain of crap
What!? You mean you don't see the advantage of the taskbar being locked in one spot and the volume mixer being many clicks away?
my employer straight up apologized and allowed to switch work computer to Mint
Are you hiring? I wish my employer was that kind
it's in Ukraine, pal. you get the possibility of fiery death as hiring bonus too.
You don't have to keep selling it!
just trying to be helpful, eh
Windows 11 is vibe-coded garbage. Vista was a better OS at launch than 11 is 4 years in.
Don't worry, Microsoft is going to let ai rewrite 1 million LOC from C to Rust per month per programmer and this will dramatically increase the quality https://www.thurrott.com/dev/330980/microsoft-to-replace-all-c-c-code-with-rust-by-2030
Finally, I will memory safe when I accidentally send a broken Invoke-WebRequest 🙂
sent this to a friend, his response:

Glad he went with Terry Davis and not Richard Stallman.
Note: This is posted in the same tongue in cheek manner as your image and not meant to conflate Bill Gates and Richard Stallman.
Yeah lol. Unlike Gates tho, Stallmann actually felt the consequences of his words, and was removed from the FSF. Later he said he had been educated and apologized for his previous statements, he's back at FSF now.
Winget is such a half-assed effort. Updating the terminal? Terminal shuts down and you need to open it and run the update again. Updating something else? Maybe it'll change the binary location and not update the path, just for fun (happened twice with LLVM stuff for me). This update failed for some reason? Try to run update again only to be told no updates are available.
You want even more shame here? They made Winget by basically copy/pasting a solo dev effort called Appget back in 2019 after stringing the dev along about a possible Microsoft job.
Then, during the annoucement of winget while they lauded other windows package managers, they barely mentiom his app they copied nearly 1 for 1.
Textbook Microsoft move. Thanks for the link, that was an interesting, if disgusting, read. I loved in particular that they were difficult about reimbursing his travel. You'd think a multi billion dollar company would be able to pay for however much a plane ticket and possibly a hotel stay was...
That's not the first time I hear something like that from a big company. I saw a talk by Matt Godbolt (compiler explorer) mentioning that NVidia took more than a year to pay him some contribution they said they would for the CUDA support. Can't remember the figure, but it was ridiculously low.
Winget is such a half-assed effort
And most of the time it just downloads the msi package or the installer exe and runs that, and you have to click through that. It doesn't actually keep track of what gets installed.
I would be interested to know when that version was current because that's extremely out of date.
Installing Scoop or Chocolatey isn't much easier either (Powershell permission system) but at least they work and arent stolen from Appget.
Scoop is such an excellent package manager for Windows in my experience. It makes the best of what it's given and it's usually as seamless as using Linux.
All Microsoft developer tools (and that is the target user for Winget) have felt so janky to me. Also, their documentation sucks most of the time.