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Project Cortana: Day 1
I have seen a lot of people switching to Linux or other services to get away from all the data collections. It makes a lot of sense as no one would want their data to be sold without their consent.
But I am going to do something different. My aim is to integrate with Microsoft apps as much as possible and review the experience. So here is what I have done so far:
* Use Cortana in desktop and mobile (Android)
* Use Microsoft launcher in mobile
* Outlook as primary email provider (I was already using them as my default provider)
* Use Microsoft To-Do and calendar to keep track of things
* Use OneDrive to store all my files (I am moving them from Google Drive)
* Use the default Mail app on the Windows 10
* Use Onenote (I was using Evernote before)
* Use Edge on desktop and Mobile
* Use Skype instead of Hangouts
It's day one but I think I have already found it quite useful. For example:
* Adding reminder is much easier. I get them on both desktop and mobile which is nice.
* Mail app has been really useful. Especially the focused inbox really helps to get rid of the clutters. Also, I can immediately add a mail to the calendar (like Inbox by Google) which is really helpful.
* One of the features of edge that I have found really useful is that you can send web pages from mobile to desktop in one tap. That is extremely useful.
So far I am loving it.
Also, I tried to make sure that I am not sharing my data with third-party apps as I have turned off "relevant ads" feature.43 -
Project Cortana: Day 56
*What I liked*
Here is the rant where I described the project: https://devrant.io/rants/962190
Time for a review. The biggest advantage I have found was the productivity. Let me explain:
1. Cortana: It's useful as fuck if anyone is willing to use it all the time. It really helps to get reminders and notifications everywhere (PC, Laptop and Mobile).
2. Microsoft Launcher: An underrated gem due to the hate towards M$. Thanks to it's transparent theme, it looks absolutely gorgeous. The most useful part is the "Feed" where you get all your emails, recently edited documents, recently used apps or contacts all together. I was quite surprised to see the level of customization if offered considering it's M$.
3. M$ Office: I probably don't need to talk much about it, it's the most productive tool you can get. Outlook is fucking brilliant on mobile. Other office apps, while they are great on mobile, are probably more useful in tablets. And the "Focused Inbox" is the best thing happened to outlook.
4. M$ To-Do: Holy fuck, this is sick. I know that there is many alternative with more features. But this app is the perfect example of a todo app. Simple, has the exact right features and has a really smooth, beautiful UI. This really helped me to be productive.
5. OneDrive: Didn't find much difference compared to Google Drive.
6. People: Something that I discovered later and found it really useful. You can pin contacts in the taskbar and see emails, calender items associated with that contact in one click. Found it really useful considering I was chatting with my Supervisor and lectures quite frequently.
7. Windows Mail App: While I really like it, I have mixed feeling about it. I would really love to have HTML signature. Not sure why M$ is not implementing it. But the "Share" in the Context Menu is really useful while sending attachements.
Finally, the "Fluid Design" so far is beautiful. Loving the effects.
I will write what I didn't like in the next rant.14 -
Dev of 15 years here. All my career historically started and evolved/revolved around Microsoft in one way or the other, so was my exposure to only DOS and the Windows as a child and growing up.
Like already discussed in multiple rants here, I was one of those naturally Windows -favoring ppl through all my life. That is not to say I didn't try Linux here and there, for hosting of personal projects, as one usually does. But it never quite stuck with me as a personal daily driver, mainly because all I ever needed for personal use was a browser, discord, and Steam/GOG/Epic Games store for gaming (work-wise I always had and still have company provided laptops which are OF COURSE Windows powered)
Anyway, maybe you can see where I'm going with this... I recently gave Nobara Linux a go (Glorious Eggroll's Fedora flavor, with some custom kernel patches) and I have to say, not thinking of going back to Windows at all.
Just a few thoughts on comparing two sets of experiences with Win vs Nobara
- Win definitely feels more sluggish
- Nobara's default desktop env was Gnome 42 with some extensions pre-enabled. I dove right into hacking/customizing it to my tastes and it looked glorious. Never would have achieved this customization with Win
- I was using RDP to remote into my work laptop from my personal desktop setup with Windows and I still successfully do so with Remmina now in Linux
- A week ago I dove deeper and installed Awesome window manager as a UI and mh boy does this feel intimidating at first. But then the allure of having nice window managing experience was too strong, and 15 years of coding do help with just seeing a new language and kinda feeling at home instantly (Lua language for AwesomeWM customization/themes). Fast forward a week and now I'm sitting happily with 3 monitor setup, one of them vertical, all properly auto aligned with arandr on startup, variety+wal for wallpaper auto circling and applying a theme out of main wallpaper colors every so often (+wrote a script to put those main colors into my RGB peripherals via OpenRGB)
- Gaming. I still game, Steam Deck from steam gave me all the confidence to set up Linux gaming that I needed. I think I am now properly versed in all things Wine/Proton/Lutris/Bottles/Heroic Games Launcher, you name it. Recently finished Cyberpunk 2077.
ANYWAY, thank you for coming to my Linux appreciation TED talk. It's amazing. -
I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.
MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).
- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.
Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.
- 2 app info pages?
Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.
The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.
Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.
- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app
It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.
- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken
Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?
They really, REALLY want to be Apple.
Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.
Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.
They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card
If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:
- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM
What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.
So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.
11 -
!rant
So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.
To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).
I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/
I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.
I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.
But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).
I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.
What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!
Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.
I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.
Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.
What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/
Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.
To Summarize a bit.
It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.
So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.
I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..5 -
How to breathe new air into your 2yo phone: install and use a new launcher. Just installed the one from Microsoft and looks and feels awesome23
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