So…yeah. Seems MS, in their endless wisdom has decided to rename their virtual desktop software, called before as “Remote Desktop” (and good luck trying to find issues with that that are not related to the old RDP tool MTSC.exe) to… “Windows App”. Perfect. Now everything will look like everything, and there’s no way to ever try to search for help for it. Next in line, I guess they can call it just “App”. I’m sure that will help everyone.
Next in line, I guess they can call it just “App”.
Saw this yesterday which is relevant
Is that Steve Jobs with a Butthead mouth? Beautiful.
It definitely made me think of Jobs when I saw it. Not sure about the mouth part, but if thats what you see, its probably what was intended.
It’s about time that someone cleaned up that stupid mess on the left.
Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
I remember Noam Chomsky talking about this a number of years ago. It’s true. We don’t want technocrats, but worthless dumbfucks are also quite scary.
Thank you so much for posting this. I already liked Ed’s work but this one was a cut above and it’s going to be marinating in my head for the foreseeable future.
zitron is godly
This started a few months ago across the board. It’s the dumbest realignment of their application stack ever … With that being said, I think it’s clear that the future of Microsoft is going to be them attempting to move the entire OS experience into the cloud no matter how misguided or unwarranted that approach may be.
Mainframe for the home user, with all files on their servers and, thus, controlled by them. That’s always been their goal, but the tech just didn’t exist until recently.
Ahh windows. How I don’t miss you.
Had been windows 10 user since 2015 (no pc before that), installed linux mint a month ago and was surprised how smooth everything was!
Sorry windows but Im never coming back.
Are they doing this on purpose? Why would they even do something like that?
Having worked on products that are renamed to something equally ambiguous, I’d say they are trying to make it more difficult to find because they are trying to redirect customer attention to other places, and are deliberately making it difficult to talk about or search for. Unfortunately this is a very successful strategy. It’s also very user hostile, and product engineer hostile. My heart goes out to any engineers that work in this product.
So they dont want people using remote desktop? What would they even get out of that, just making windows even worse to use. I guess its one less thing to maintain. Well, windows becoming worse is good for linux userbase so this is kind of good news in a way.
Probably another case of too many bean counters (and marketing majors), and not enough software developers. Windows hasn’t innovated in forever. Seems like they’re the Walmart of operating systems, just cheaper and easier for most people.
I don’t want my OS to innovate. I just want it to be reliable. I can say this for MS, I haven’t seen a blue or any other color screen of death for, God, a decade? I’m pretty happy with Windows these days.
I’ve had the opposite happen since switching to Windows 11. Multiple BSODs a week on both machines. Super frustrating.
If you have the Pro or Enterprise variant of Win11 you can delay feature releases for a year. Makes it way more stable. Here is a link. The anchoring might be off a bit(it was for me). I had to scroll down a bit further. You still get security releases, it’s just all the ‘features’ that get delayed so you can figure out how to work around them.
Awesome thanks for the info on that.
Makes sense, the CEO was just saying the other day that 30% of their code was written by AI
I’m going to name a game I’m making “a game”
could it be that i already lost the game?
Impossible to pirate. Money printingachine
I didn’t believe it until i verified it. This shit is true. Wtf! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/windows-app-to-replace-remote-desktop-app-for-windows/4390893
Am I reading that wrong or is it just saying the Windows Store version (which was terrible) is going away. It tells you to use the normal remote desktop function that has existed in Windows until they put that new stupidly named app in the Store.
So if you run RDP (can’t tell if that’s actually mstsc.exe now) it should function as normal.
People should just be able to create their RDP shortcuts as normal and go on with their day by simply ignoring the Microsoft store like most enterprise users have been trying to do all along.
Though I could be wrong, I don’t have a windows computer around me to try it on at the moment. I moved my machines at home to different flavors of Linux when I didn’t want to figure out comparability work around for 11
I actually just deployed this out at my company and Windows App (or the non Windows Store Remote Desktop App) is required to access AVD and W365 devices. Windows RDP is still present and works for accessing domain joined Windows devices, and both Windows App and Remote Desktop have that functionality as well.
I wonder if that has to do with them trying to integrate access for zero client type setups. If 20 people are remoted into a VM setup but they all are coming from the same rack, the IP/Hostname would be the same in theory, so if you try to RDP to it, the protocol doesn’t work properly, it would want to kick all the other users off their instances to let them sign in. Been a bit since I’ve had tonl manage virtual instances though, so maybe I’m forgetting something.
Can’t be worse than using the letter “x”.
try googling “cannot connect to windows app” instead of “cannot connect to windows remote desktop”
MS hasnt improved for the user in about 20 years, not a surprise.
Hey that’s not fair, they recently added tabs to their file explore. I mean sure it has a shared history, so if you open a new tab and navigate, then return to the previous tab back takes to you their useless ‘home screen’, but still, there are tabs kinda!
I mean sure it has a shared history
Wait, you serious?
no, that’s… just not how I remember it. the tabs worked well except you couldn’t tear them (drag 'n drop them into another file explorer window) and i wasn’t able to make it open new file explorer windows as tabs in my time
On the phone (well, teams call): “Just open the windows app…”
Opens notepad.exe
This… this one?
starts car
how about now?
Is this year of the Linux Desktop?
No
I’m morbidly curious where the line is for a global shift. So far it’s invisible.
I doubt it will even happen though. Microsoft’s forcing AI on everything already and yet it hasn’t moved the needle. Microsoft has to do some wilder shit to even move people to Linux. Influencers and awareness don’t really help that much as shown by PewDiePie’s video about him moving to Linux.
I’ve been on the brink for a while but learning a whole new OS is going to be hard with a dissociative disorder. though I did just find out game compatibility is way better than I thought, so that’s one roadblock down.
im usually the most tech savvy of my friends and no one I know is already using it. That’s kind of the situation I assume most people are in. no one they know is using Linux and for whatever reason they don’t have the ability or time to learn it themselves.
People aren’t in the habit of thinking of computing as an inherently a political choice, but it is.
Computing is a tool, not a thing you merely consume or use for consumption. Yet the tech industry is very motivated to get us thinking of it that way, while positioning themselves as the middlemen. That’s probably the real reason they’re so excited about AI, it’s a way to turn computing into something you rent.
you’re probably right. isn’t that pretty much what they tried to do with cloud computing and storage?
Good luck even opening it without signing in to a Microsoft account.
“Fuck you, sign in.” -Microsoft
At this point i’m pretty sure most windows users have a degradation fetish they’re too ashamed to admit.
