My sentiment with windows (likely shared by most people here consciously using it) is that it's a good OS at heart somwhere. The core of it is very solid and has been for a while, and most of the crap parts that people complain about (see above) are "tacked on" to it and could fairly easily be removed/reverted if Microsoft wanted to (in fact they already have done, see IoT Enterprise LTSC and Windows Server), and it would still unmistakably be Windows.
I don't know much about MacOS but the same isn't really true of [desktop] Linux. Most of its flaws are not easily fixed in the same way and are much deeper architectural/social issues that require a lot of work to fix.
If by "conciously using it" means picking it over the alternatives and not using it while unconcious, then yes presumably that subset of people prefer it over the alternatives. That's pretty circular reasoning. Most people who actively choose to use linux also think that linux is a good os.
And I think most linux users would pretty strongly disagree that it's easier to fix windows, a user hostile, closed source operating system with far fewer options for every single user facing aspect of the OS than linux. You have that completely backwards.
> don't know much about MacOS but the same isn't really true of [desktop] Linux. Most of its flaws are not easily fixed in the same way and are much deeper architectural/social issues that require a lot of work to fix.
I'm not sure where you got this, but I've been a fulltime Linux user for near 2 decades, and I promise you almost everything is fixable. The biggest issues are drivers, but even then you're bound to find someone who has developed some drivers or if not, you can develop your own if you have the skill or pay someone if you don't.
I agree about Winndows, but increasingly feel the same way about macOS.
As for Linux, hard disagree, but only because I'm able to fix most anything that annoys me myself with enough elbow grease (same goes for Windows and macOS) except for application compatibility.
Then again, a lot of this comes down to the fact that all three have decent terminal applications, shells, tolerable programming interfaces, and the same choice of cross-platform browsers.
Mobile devices, on the other hand, are the real enemy.
Active Scripting is the technology you are thinking of, JScript and VBScript are just the frontends for it that are shipped with Windows. It's honestly a pretty cool idea on the surface (coming from someone that's never actually used it anyway), you could develop/obtain an implementation for your favourite language, access the same functionality exposed by ASP/Office/IE, and as script hosts they would be none the wiser as to what language was being used (of course, it gets less useful the more users you have to ask to install your plugin).
The closest modern thing that's like this I can think of is Godot and its GDExtension.
Somewhat unconventional (and i'm not really a seasoned reverse engineer so take it with some salt) but I started by hacking old video games (nes, gameboy, arcade.. that kind of thing). You could start with making basic action replay RAM cheats to e.g. give Mario infinite lives, then you can use breakpoints, the debugger, and a 6502 ISA reference to edit instructions and make ROM patches.
from then you can use things like Ghidra (which supports a lot of those old CPU arches) for more advanced analysis and make the game do almost whatever the hell you want if you have the patience.
I think a lot of the skills will transfer quite well (obviously not 1:1, you will need to learn some things) to the more employable side of RE if that's what you're interested in
Thanks! I have been "hacking" with games in the past (getting infinite lives and such) or bypassing some licence check (back then it was with OllyDbg).
I guess I'm struggling to transfer that to "real-life" scenarios. Like getting something useful out of reverse engineering (getting infinite lives is interesting to see that I can tamper with the game, but it's not exactly useful).
The network effect as seen in the other comments plays a big part, but also discord offers a useful service that really nobody else does well. there's a lot wrong with it but you can still create a community in a few clicks and you have text messages, photos, videos, gifs, voice chats, screenshare, a comprehensive permission/role system, tons of bots.. all for free and without needing to be too tech savvy, that's pretty damn cool.
it literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)
also developing an app is something you need to be quite tech savvy to do anyway. genuinely are there really people who have the skill and patience to do that and then get stumped trying to deploy it? clearly there are since stuff like this is so popular I just don't really understand
I think the free/cheap tier is what gets people kind of hooked... it's really easy to setup something like Dokku self-hosted and run a few dozen apps on a decent rented server... Even then, there's something appealing about not having to even worry about it. Why bother setting up your own server(s) and databases when you can run in Cloudflare workers with CockroachLabs or Turso?
Even with my own server, I've explored the option(s) just to avoid potential pain down the road regarding excess load.
Scale. You can monetize on the people that don’t pay the $200/month. Obviously I have nothing to prove this statement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscriptions are loss leaders.
Soooo youtube premium costs $13 CAD, You're saying that google would make MORE money off me if I cancelled that, turned off my ad blocker and just watched videos with the ads?
For things like LLM the inference cost is higher than it is to deliver a video.
What you just said was shocking to me. Absolutely shocking. Where can I find more information?
I don't know much about MacOS but the same isn't really true of [desktop] Linux. Most of its flaws are not easily fixed in the same way and are much deeper architectural/social issues that require a lot of work to fix.
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