Just blocking access to internet for this one app is not enough. It can use intents or a shared local storage with some other app to send the data out.
I use an app called BuzzKill on Android for achieving this and many more things.
I usually keep my notification bar at an absolute minimum when it comes to the number of notifications, but this app allows me to set rules for notifications based on their content.
By default, all apps that I use have notifications turned off by default and they also get into deep sleep mode. So I'm sure they are not even running after a while. Only apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Signal can receive notifications. And by using the rules on Buzzkill, I am also able to automatically discard marketing notifications and useless notifications from these apps as well.
For an app like Google Maps though, I completely turned off notifications because there's really no need for me to have them. If you go into the notification settings through the Google Maps app, it's a big shitshow because it has some 40 categories that you will have to manually manage and I'm sure this was designed for the very purpose of letting users become tired after looking at them and then leave things as is.
Similarly, I do think the vast majority of the apps that we use don't need to send us any notifications at all. Thanks to Android for adding this feature to block all notifications from apps some four years ago, I guess.
Glad there are other options! Before Buzzkill I used another app that stopped being maintained and then stopped working on newer Androids. I had to deal with notifications for a year before I found Buzzkill.
I have never been a fan of GitHub and their entire system, always felt Bitbucket or GitLab were superior in terms of the tooling and included features across all plans.
However, my experience with GitHub Actions was really poor. Some build that would run perfectly on my local machine and any other servers we have hosted would always time out on GitHub runners. I went back and forth from small runners to large runners and the result was always the same. Then I found that there are third-party companies just offering replacement runners for GitHub Actions at less than half the price for an amazing reliability and cost. It was a night and day difference.
Now... this move by GitHub is almost unbelievable. Charging folks to use their own machines
Signal seems to work alright for me, although I felt the desktop app gets a bit annoying because of too many frequent updates happening to the app, which I believe is based on Electron.
But besides this, there is really a strong need for a web client, just like Telegram or WhatsApp. If only the protocol can be extended in such a way that it allows for integrating into a web app, that would be incredibly great.
Which is pretty odd as WhatsApp allegedly uses the very same E2E encryption and has no problem implementing a web client. I really don't see the point of Electron if it doesn't allow you to provide a web client.
I love! how Github, as a corporate company now owned by Microsoft, is directly tied to GoLang as the main repository of the vast majority of packages/dependencies.
Imagine the number of things that can go wrong when they try to regulate or introduce restrictions for build workflows for the purpose of making some extra money... lol
The original Java platform is a good example to think about.
That's the collective choice of the authors of those packages. A go module path is literally just the canonical URL where you can download the module.
The golang modules core to the language are hosted at golang.org
Module authors have always been free to have their own prefix rather than github.com, even if they host their module on Github. If they say their module is example.com/foo and then set their webserver to respond to https://example.com/foo?go-get=1 with <meta name="go-import" content="example.com/foo mod https://github.com/the_real_repository/foo"> then they will leave no hint that it's really hosted at github, and they could host it somewhere else in future (including at https://example.com directly if they want)
Another feature is that go uses a default proxy, https://proxy.golang.org/, if you don't set one yourself. This means that Google, who control that proxy, can choose to make a request for a package like github.com/foo/bar go to some place else, if for whatever reason Microsoft won't honour it any more.
Golang builds pulling a github.com/foo/bar/baz module don't rely on any GitHub "build workflow", so unless you mean they're going to start restricting or charging for git clones for public repos (before you mention Docker Hub, yes I know), nothing's gonna change. And even if they're crazy enough to do that, Go module downloads default to a proxy (proxy.golang.org by default, can be configured and/or self-hosted) and only fall back to vcs if the module's not available, so a module only needs to be downloaded once from GitHub anyway. Oh and once a module is cached in the proxy, the proxy will keep serving it even if the repo/tag is removed from GitHub.
"The original Java platform" had no package management though, that came with Maven and later Gradle, that have similar vectors for supply chain attacks (that is, nobody reviews anything before it's made available on package repositories).
And (to put on my Go defender hat), the Go ecosystem doesn't like having many dependencies, in part because of supply chain attack vectors and the fact that Node's ecosystem went a bit overboard with libraries.
I checked out crystal. It's a nice little language, but it has a very, very long way to go. IDE support is still quite shaky and the developer community is not large enough yet. There are some few good packages and frameworks that work very well though.
I think it's still not supported on Windows as of today.
Windows is not really just a gaming OS, at least after WSL was launched.
Development experience using Windows Terminal + WSL has been pretty great when I did it 3 years ago - I can only imagine it being better today.
Also note that the cost of Windows machines is half the price of their Mac counterparts, even with the specs doubled.
For many folks Windows is an all-round multipurpose platform (gaming included) and they wouldn't want to invest in other machines just for doing development work, so they stick to it as their main OS. Yes we know of the horrible bloat, tracking and privacy invasion that the OS does to us, but many people tend to just ignore it and move on.
> Yes we know of the horrible bloat, tracking and privacy invasion that the OS does to us, but many people tend to just ignore it and move on.
Or in the case of enterprises, Windows gets controlled and managed by a (hopefully) competent IT team or enterprise desktop group, and with LTSC versions Microsofts give them the tools to strip the bloat, tracking, and most of the privacy invasions (to then be replaced with corporate privacy invasions in a lot of cases).
Point being, Windows as an enterprise user desktop is a whole different beast from Windows on the laptop mom and dad just bought from Best Buy.
HN lives in a macOS/Linux bubble, but outside of SV it's a Windows world still. So much of the world runs on Windows in places that you wouldn't even expect to see Windows. And with enterprise purchasing agreements, you can get some good deals on bulk laptop purchases that you aren't getting from Apple. $1,000 or less per 32GB of RAM laptop, depending on how many you are buying. I've seen bulk purchases as low as $700/laptop for enterprises that buy thousands at a time for scheduled refreshes. You're not going to be able to buy everyone a MacBook Pro for that pricing.
Windows remains one of the best general purpose OSes for generic office worker productivity, and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless Microsoft really fucks it up with whatever Copilot garbage they are doing.
My work laptop is Windows and IT have removed the bloatware but the desktop is still a shitshow. Clicking on a window in the taskbar doesn't even reliably bring it to the front.
I've noticed it seems windows aren't allowed to foreground themselves/each other anymore, which seems reasonable (anti click jacking?), but this includes VS not being able to foreground my diff tool when I diff something, and Outlook not being able to foreground itself when I double click the new mail envelope in the notification area.
I also enjoy going to grab a maximised window by its title bar and somehow grabbing the window behind it.
Yeah, windows is pretty aggressive with the focus stealing prevention (I believe GNOME on Linux is also working on something similar, hopefully with a better implementation).
It seems to struggle with differentiating between what's a user initiated focus-steal and what's automated/originating from the app without user action.
I'll take that over what existed before, which was any app could just open a window and give itself focus at any time.
The quite sensible reason is that LTSC doesn't contain the windows store, and as a result a bunch of driver apps don't work because they moved to using UWP apps (eg. realtek audio console). Not to mention that you'll eventually get weird compatibility issues because you'll eventually be running a windows version 5-10 years old, whereas most devs assume you're using be using the normal versions which are at most 2 years out of date. All of these issues can be worked around if you're sufficiently technically inclined, but people who are hiring "Microsoft consultants" probably aren't.
I recommend LTSC for terminal services environments like Azure Virtual Desktop, where driver issues just aren’t a problem.
Windows LTSC has semi annual updates, the same as Windows Server. Speaking of which, that’s essentially what it is: a cut-down version of the Server Desktop Experience with pretty much the same defaults and capabilities.
Microsoft could implement App Store support for LTSC (and Served), they simply choose not to. It’s telling that this isn’t a problem in practice.
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 25H2 2025‑09‑30
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 24H2 2024‑10‑01
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 23H2 2023‑10‑31
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 22H2 2022‑09‑20
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, version 21H2 2021‑10‑04
Microsoft "consultants" are are usually just license auditors in disguise. We ignore them, and I suggest everyone else do the same. They "helpfully" reach out and offer to optimize your infrastructure and spend. That 'optimization' is actually "let's make sure you bought all the CALs you were supposed to, and when you inevitably didn't, because we make our licensing confusing, we'll charge you extra and threaten legal action for non-compliance"
Better to find a reputable VAR and get your licensing through them and don't ever deal with Microsoft directly.
Sadly, the one problem with WSL(g) is graphical rendering. It can't handle DPI scaling properly at all (yes, even with experimental settings) and the result is blurriness, gigantic mouse cursor, clicks not registered where the cursor appears to be, or itty-bitty icons and UI that you can barely see.
I can't stand that they haven't fixed it in all this time.
It has gotten better. The `vmmem` hyper-v process would regularly freeze up and require a reboot on my Windows 10 work laptop. I’ve successfully run WSL for days/weeks without issue on Windows 11. As a tradeoff, I’ve had the Weston container freeze up and be unrecoverable without restarting WSL.
Now spec it with 32GB of RAM, and try to get a bulk discount for ordering 1,000 of them. Try to get the price of said 32GB M4 Airs down to ~$700/laptop or less.
Not going to happen with Apple.
No company that's big enough is paying sticker price for windows laptops.
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Now spec it with 32GB of RAM, and try to get a bulk discount for ordering 1,000 of them. Try to get the price of said 32GB M4 Airs down to ~$700/laptop or less.
Not going to happen with Apple.
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Exactly. Thanks for explaining this.
Also one more point to note is Windows machines go on discount sales very frequently. It's usually way too easy to find one with 32GB and 1TB, with the latest Ryzen or Intel mobile processors.
Bonus when you find one like Lenovo Legion which allows you to buy and shove-in extra RAM/storage as you need them.
But then you just ignored everything else, build quality, webcam, speakers, sound, SSD speed, keyboard, battery runtime, screen quality..
With business line for comparable build quality/durability you are not getting half price anymore, and I have not yet seen any laptop speaker/webcam not on a MacBook with comparable quality.
I do not have access to bulk discounts, but you are more then invited to post some samples.
For me personally? Yeah, I care about build quality, webcam, speakers, etc. Which is mostly why I still use a macbook.
But for bulk purchases the business is buying for the average office worker, no, none of those things matter. The only thing that matters is RAM, CPU, and does it have a 3/5 year warranty (whatever the lifecycle of the device is). Otherwise, it's spending 8 hours a day hooked up to a docking station, lid closed, and users use headsets for meetings.
That's largely why it's so hard to find/buy a non-mac laptop with equivalent price to performance & build quality. They largely aren't made for individuals who are choosing their own hardware.
>vast majority of people care more about RAM, SSD and CPU
The vast majority of people do not know what any of this is, and they do not care at all, they want a fast machine for there usecase.. and for most people that is the equivalent to editing a word doc and listening to Spotify.
After watching a review if the LG gram, yeah, I am not convinced that comes anywhere close in regards of speakers or keyboard.. and the durability seems.. questionable
It also seem to be around the same price point of a MacBook air with more or less the same specs on super duper black Friday sale
Isn't that what RAM, CPU and SSD are all about?
The average user doesn't care much, but at the end of the day if your machine cannot keep up several open apps due to low RAM or cannot store a lot of data because you only have 256GB, that's a problem right?
I recently got into self-hosting Seafile and successfully set it up on my dedicated server. Had to think backup and security strategies quite a bit and ultimately I set up a bulletproof backup mechanism. Tested it pretty rigorously.
Seafile took me by surprise in terms of how quick it was at picking up new files and changes - syncing works incredibly well too. I moved all my files from my Google Drive into my Seafile instance and I'm now using it on all my devices as my main cloud storage solution.
Man...... when did these press companies get so out of touch with reality that they wouldn't even pay respect to the fact that people are actually dying here.
So sad.
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