Ask Paul: April 6 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here’s a weighty set of questions to help us kick off the weekend a bit early.

A quick site and AMA update

We’re gearing up for a major overhaul to Thurrott.com that should solve the problems you’re experiencing and add some long-awaited new features. This update will happen in phases and is expected to begin in late May. And tied to that, I’ll be hosting an AMA with our web guru, Nick Tirrell, who will be on hand to explain what’s happening, and when, and to answer your questions. This is very exciting for me, as I’ve waited literally years for this to finally happen, and I’ve been as frustrated as many of you about the issues we’ve experienced in recent months.

The AMA will be held in a little under two weeks, on May 19 a 12 pm ET/9 am PT. It will be live, but you’ll be able to view it at any time if you can’t make it, and I will of course summarize the news in a separate post.

Thank you, and thanks for your patience.

—Paul

WFH, hybrid work, blech

bschnatt asks:

All our esteemed tech leaders seem hell-bent on pushing us into a virtual world where everybody just stays home and we all interact with silly looking avatars. I think Americans are sick of being penned in and we want our freedom to roam and interact back. How much of a pushback to this dehumanizing technology do you think there will be? I don’t think there’s as much fear of pandemics (past or future) as our tech leaders think there is.

I feel like this is very much a case-by-case basis. You can look at anything pandemic-related—vaccines, mask mandates, etc.—and find people who are all-in and people who are violently opposed. I’m looking forward to not wearing a mask on a plane, myself—though I’ll have to next week since that’s an international flight—but I understand the concerns of people who are high-risk who need/want to fly and they’re freaking out about a plane full of people not wearing masks. Generally speaking, the real issue, I guess, is basic respect and finding a middle ground. And that is decidedly lacking in America these days. And probably elsewhere, I feel less qualified to say.

With regards to working from home/hybrid work, I see a mix there as well. Some companies have seen the benefits, with reduced costs and less need for dedicated office space, while others fear that fewer face-to-face meetings are less efficient. And here, again, I see both sides. I’ve been working from home for decades, and for the type of work I do, that’s ideal. But I also cherish(ed) work trips, where I could interact with real people in real life, and I feel like those moments were far more productive, at a company level, than were the past few years of all-remote meetings. Which are tedious.

Looking at this logically, COVID isn’t going away, but it also seems to be less virulent/dangerous/deadly than before, and hopefully, those trends continue. But there are long-term health costs related to COVID that I don’t think we quite understand yet. Many will be mental health-related. And that’s another trend that won’t go away anytime soon. A lot of us are basically going to have PTSD.

Yes, some people wanna keep working from home, but not because they’re terrified of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate. Others, like myself, don’t mind interacting with, you know, ACTUAL PEOPLE, and being forced to stay home is too Orwellian to stomach…

Again, it depends.

From an anecdotal perspective, what I’ve seen is some friends who always had to go into an office every day. They commuted, some by car/train, some by car, often for long periods of time, and there is time, effort, and expense tied to all that. They were gone all day, Monday through Friday, and they were never going to have the kind of lifestyle that I’ve had for years. Then the pandemic happened, and they had to work from home. And most of them grew to really like that. And then the pandemic started calming down, and now their workplaces are asking for different things, which can be frustrating. In some cases, they’ve been asked to come back at least part of the time despite the fact that they can do their jobs remotely. In some, they’re home for good for the most part. Most of these people seem to prefer staying home, but this is person- and job-specific. It depends on who you are and what you do.

But overall, most of the people I know don’t want to go back to an office, certainly not full-time. (This excludes people with jobs that need to be done at a certain location, obviously.) And I think that’s what “the great resignation” is partially about, people who are now being asked to come back who feel they don’t need to.

What you’re describing is the other side of things. I don’t really see that in my own little world, but I guess the option here is to simply look elsewhere if a job is requiring you to stay home and you do want to go to an office or whatever location. If anything good can come out of this, flexibility is hopefully part of it. The flexibility to decide where you work, based on your needs/wants as a person. But not every company will allow this.

Why not Mac?

will asks:

What would Apple need to do to macOS, in your opinion, to make it something that you would like to use? I ask this not to get you to change to a Mac, not at all. However, more of what would be the top items that Paul Thurrot would like to see macOS implement/adopt/improve on? I also ask this because IMO Windows 11 right now looks to be a group think project from a select few at Microsoft, so I wanted to ask you about the other side.

If you know me well enough, you can probably imagine the crisis of faith I suffer every time that Microsoft makes some boneheaded mistake with Windows or whatever. And I do have options, and I do spend time every month using alternative platforms. None ever stick for various reasons.

But the Mac is unique in that it is a high-quality, well-supported, and powerful OS platform that technically rivals Windows. Macs are high-quality, barring a few mistakes in recent years like the butterfly keyboard (which is now gone). The integration between the Mac and other Apple devices is incredible. And so on. It seems like the obvious fallback.

The thing is, every time I use a Mac, I’m immediately reminded of the frustrations I have. These are not big bucket items for the most part, thanks to the maturity and capabilities of the system. They’re picky, Paul-specific things related to my workflow and the way I do things, years of habits that are hard to change, and hard to replace when there’s no alternative. I can make transitions like dealing with the keyboard layout and shortcut differences—Ctrl + C on Windows vs. Cmd + C on the Mac, for example—but I find other small differences harder to deal with.

The first ones I always run into are, however, keyboard-related. And by the time I hit a few of these, which happens quickly, I’m ready to jump ship.

The first is that where Windows is fully navigable with the keyboard, the Mac is not. If you bring up any window or dialog in Windows, basically, you can tap Tab to cycle between highlighting every single control available and then hit Enter or Space to select them. On the Mac, this is never the case. And more frustratingly, it’s inconsistent, where you can only access some controls in any given window or dialog. You have to use a mouse/trackpad.

The second is related to window management. With Windows, I can Alt + Tab to any open window, so if Word, or Chrome, or whatever has multiple windows, each is available via the same keyboard shortcut. On the Mac, this isn’t the case, and Cmd + Tab will only take you to one (the first/main) of an application’s windows. And then you need to figure out different keyboard shortcuts, which can vary by app, to get to the others. This is like hitting a wall.

The third is also related to window management. I am very familiar with the keyboard-based ways to minimize, maximize, and restore windows in Windows, but on the Mac, these things are inconsistent and often don’t even work. In most Mac apps, you can type Cmd + H to hide the current window, but this is sometimes a different shortcut or just unavailable. Apple has commingled maximize and full-screen in recent macOS versions, which can be maddening. I can’t launch a Finder window without first switching to the Finder, whereas in Windows I can type Winkey + E at any time to open File Explorer. And so on.

I could go on, as there are many more, but I usually don’t get too far before running into all of these, and it’s just frustrating and makes me less efficient. Were I to use the Mac full-time, I’d figure out things I don’t know—you can type Ctrl + F2  to select the system-wide menu, for example, which I had to look up—even when those things are literally easier or more logical (Alt + F) in Windows. But in many cases, the Mac isn’t just different, it’s just not as complete. If that makes sense. Some things literally aren’t possible with the keyboard.

There are also many other things about the Mac I don’t like. Software updates are an anachronistic blast from the past, and this is an area where Microsoft has done a much better job than Apple. Any software update, from a minor OS update to a major OS update to even an app update takes forever to install. (This is true on iPhone and iPad too.) it’s a disaster. But I rarely get that far before I can’t take it anymore. I’d love it if that’s all I had to complain about.

Windows 11, the Star Trek III of Windows versions

crunchyfrog asks:

I realize that Windows 11 is the current version of Windows that is shipping but the more I read about it and its shortcomings which are related to being rushed out the door too early, I can’t help but think that this is the ‘Off Version’ of Windows that the next version will have to fix. In keeping with the tradition of, “Every other version is crap”, is Windows 11 the Me, Vista, Windows 8 of the product line?

For all the complaining, I don’t think Windows 11 is quite that bad. It’s not Windows 8 bad. It’s not even close.

What’s unique about Windows 11 is that the changes mostly impact more experienced users. Most people—“normal,” non-technical people, like my wife—don’t have complaints, and I suspect many like the prettier new look. (As do I.) Windows 8, by comparison, confused everyone. And angered many.

What’s not unique about Windows 11 is that Microsoft is making a show of listening to feedback, but it is very clearly not listening to feedback. We’ve moved into an era of almost 100 percent reliance on telemetry data, and so we run into issues where only some tiny percentage of people ever moved the Taskbar, so there’s no reason to support that feature anymore. But that kind of thinking—that lack of thinking—places as much weight on those who don’t care, which is most people, and those that do, and those people are influencers who will help normal people make decisions. If you lose them, and Microsoft is in danger of doing so, you could lose a bigger audience. To the Mac, Chromebooks, or even Linux. This is a mistake.

The good news? Windows isn’t serviced like it was back in the Windows Me or Vista days. Back then, the OS was the OS, and if you wanted to make major changes, that was coming in some future new version. And those upgrades are unreliable and dangerous, and most people simply waited until they got a new PC several years down the road. Today, that’s not the case. Microsoft could ship garbage and fix it in small ways via minor updates in the following months.

Of course, that didn’t happen with Windows 11, though it could have, and it doesn’t look like it’s happening in Windows 11 22H2, based on what we’ve seen in the Insider Preview and on Microsoft’s public commentary about what a great release Windows 11 in their eyes. And so we, as enthusiasts, will need to do what’s right for us. Wait it out and hope. Try to fix niggling issues with third-party utilities. Stick with Windows 10, for now. Or maybe even get a Mac or whatever.

Since Windows 11 isn’t quite the disaster of Windows 8, and given that even Windows 8 didn’t make me jump ship, I guess I’m sticking around. But every time there’s a new affront, like that freaking Start menu video, it’s a moment to reflect and rethink. If Microsoft was serious about Windows, there would be less cause for that. This is on them.

VPN

justme asks:

Why would Microsoft tie a VPN to Edge instead of the OS – which is where, to me anyway, it would be more logical to put it? I think adding a VPN of some sort is a good idea IMO and far more useful than some of the other…stuff… Microsoft has done with WIndows 11, but there is more that goes to the internet from your machine than just what goes through your browser.

I am with you 100 percent and have been wondering the same thing. I like the idea of a VPN in Edge but then I think, why not the OS? I don’t know. And because I can’t access this feature yet in Edge Canary for whatever reason, I can’t even look at what they are doing. I hope to write about this soon.

Are you still experimenting with Zorin? How are you finding it?

Yes. I have kept Zorin on a physical PC and try to use it each week. It’s mostly fine, but there are workflow issues (not Zorin-specific) tied to services I rely on, like OneDrive, and applications. I can get away with writing in Notion, for example, which works fine from the web in Linux. But other apps are more problematic.

Safe travels to Mexico – and best of luck with your home purchase.

Thank you. I’m stressing over this and would like to put it behind us. So I can start stressing about the next steps, of course. 🙂

It can only get better. Right?

lewk asks:

It was surprising to see the latest Windows insider build roll back a taskbar regression to the way it worked before, especially with the blog post stating they did this based on feedback. Specifically the system tray icons where they were trying to force them to be only configured from settings, instead of letting users drag them around, functionality available for decades. Do you think this is a sign Microsoft have finally woken up to the overwhelming negativity of their unwarranted restrictions? Or is this a potential “Just kidding” moment where they’ll reintroduce the regressions and restrictions of the system tray icons in the future when it’s more polished?

Brad and I ended up discussing this a bit on First Ring Daily this morning. This week’s build is the second one in a row where Microsoft, literally at the last second from a development perspective, removed a feature that was expected in 22H2. (This week it was the new system tray interface, last week it was the new tablet-optimized Taskbar). This is concerning. 22H2 is already kind of bland from a feature update perspective, and that’s weird given how incomplete Windows 11 is. I figured they would have spent these past several months fixing regressions and making it better, but there’s not as much of that as I’d have liked.

I don’t think Microsoft will ever admit to or acknowledge the mistakes it made here. Instead, we will see feature additions down the road where they will tout how they’re responding to some really popular feedback rather than noting that we’ve been complaining about this being wrong since the first version. This is the way they do things, sadly.

I want to believe they’re finally giving into just reason and re-introducing functionality from previous Windows versions that the feedback hub is being sunk with a staggering amount of feedback on. But I can’t help but think this is a moment of it wasn’t ready but we’ll ship the regression in the future.

I hope so, but I see no evidence of that. If you think back to Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1.1, those releases were silent apologies for the sins of Windows 8. We need something like that for Windows 11. But that’s not what we’re getting. At least not yet.

Security and trust

helix2301 asks:

Was listening to some episodes of security now from late last year and Steve was talking about spinrite. He uses Github for most of his projects but he insists on keeping spinrite on his own servers. Leo asked him why and he said he still has an issues with putting proprietary code out on GitHub one because of security breaches but also you never know who or if at Github or Microsoft are looking at these private repositories. I know you have talked about TRUST many times with Microsoft but I was wondering your thoughts on this matter.

A couple of thoughts here.

When it comes to security, we should all trust Steve Gibson more than me, full stop. He understands this topic more than I ever will, and lives it in a way I’d find tedious.

That said, Gibson is also on the insane side of the spectrum when it comes to security, in the same way that I can be on the insane side of the spectrum when it comes to Windows. Maybe insane is the wrong word. We care. Maybe a little too much.

GitHub is proprietary, not open-source. GitHub, as you may have seen, is finally going to require 2FA, which is overdue. Microsoft has been a good steward for GitHub, in my opinion, and I don’t think there have been any episodes since the acquisition to trigger any “I told you so” moments from the anti-Microsoft crowd. I’m not aware of any viable GitHub alternatives, open-source or otherwise; I don’t mean there aren’t any, just that there is no Burger King out there to GitHub’s McDonalds.

Whether Microsoft is or can “look at” source code on GitHub falls into an uncomfortable conspiracy theory area. I cover Microsoft for a living and all of my work-related data, including all of the secret communications I’ve had with sources at Microsoft, are stored in Microsoft’s cloud services. Am I worried that Microsoft might look at this data? Honestly, no. I’ve considered it. And don’t worry about it.

But Gibson knows more about security, as I said, and this is his code, his livelihood. My livelihood is out in the open, and anyone can read it. But source code is different. If that got out, and was stolen by Microsoft or others, it could materially impact his business and his earnings. So I kind of get it. I suspect there are many companies that think nothing of putting their proprietary code in GitHub and some that never would. And I doubt the addition of 2FA will change anyone’s mind either way.

Also, would Apple or Google or some other third-party be acceptable to Gibson or the open-source advocates that don’t trust Microsoft? I doubt it.