Ryan's Journey Away from Windows 10

Ryan Purvis  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in their field story from the frontlines, the problems they face and how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with the digital workspace inner workings.

Heather Bicknell  0:30  
Hey, Ryan, how's it gone?

Ryan Purvis  0:32  
Frustrating, frustrating. So I, I still struggling with my camera. there we go got working slightly. And now I can't get my microphone to work. So I've built a new laptop using Kubuntu, which I mentioned teams onto one side console One Drive, which is not essential, but I just like to synchronize things locally. And find a good email client. I think I'll start switching over. Yeah. So its nice is quick. Anything I lose is my fingerprint recognition. So you can't log in with your fingerprint. You can see the cameras frozen again. 

Heather Bicknell  1:12  
Yeah. Yeah, I

mean, interesting to try this with the, with the Linux.

Ryan Purvis  1:20  
Well, he's only recently I don't know how it is the recent is issued a lonex. client, and I have to confess, like, if I look at my essential I need teams. Mm hmm. laptop, I'm going to try Libra offers for everything else. I always gets the most out of my breath. But I'm really feeling at the Kubuntu distributions a lot more stable than Windows 10. Mm hmm.

Heather Bicknell  1:47  
So what's the main What are you getting? What's what are you getting up with that move? Is it mostly just, you know, software and hardware compatibility is, you know, less than Windows?

Ryan Purvis  1:58  
Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's the biggest issue. So my frustration is what when I say the performance of Windows 10 is definitely slower and slower daily. I noticed things like when I try to put my calendar in Outlook, it takes a good couple of seconds, it's not a minute to to load the calendar. And, as I say, really tiring issues. So what up? What I've noticed, in comparison, is that the Linux version boots a lot quicker, maybe because the new machine credited if he doesn't have any lag, okay, if you haven't got the cocoon and running, it's like to see how that works. But it's about apps, what apps do you need this windows only a look at what I use a slack. P teams. I use Office products. So those all have Linux equivalents. And the things I'll need to figure out will be some dev tools like SQL in Visual Studio, but I think that those now exist. So these are this, this will be a junior element parallels to begin with, and then as I find something I'll move that over and say, yeah, this doesn't work is to go to an apple laptop. So I think my journey with Windows journalism forced to users, because it's at the end. So

Heather Bicknell  3:30  
yeah, a lot of struggles. Yeah. I saw I haven't read it yet. But there was a one of those IP news sites that don't remember, but an article about how IT admins want the updates to go down to one a year. I don't know if you've ever had like what your feeling is about the sort of Windows as a service, evergreen it frequent patching, if that's ever caused you headaches from like it,

Ryan Purvis  3:57  
yeah, it doesn't mean your last year was a lot better. It's just gotten worse, much worse. I think it's, there's too much variety of hardware to be supported for Windows to be rolled out as quickly as they want to be. And I think the only really, this is gonna work. And that's maybe why web is so top of mind for everyone is that that is a controlled environment where you can roll it out, you know, weekly, monthly, whatever it is, because it's known entities. And I would agree, I think if you are if you go to real estate, calm and return a couple thousand laptops or physical workstations, you don't want to keep patching these things with major updates, as regularly as marshals push them out at the moment because it could cause a low overhead and full vertical value. I mean, the stupidity of this 2004 release, it didn't work with any drive it was encrypted. So the minute you had a BitLocker or whatever thing on top of it, you had to decrypt the drive to run the install Hmm, you know, what's the point? Yeah. Mazda format device. So, yeah, I think I think that's the route is gonna end up with the marshals gonna have to listen to their customers and go to once a year, Bachelor was really trying to speak, you know, I think for you to close the pre release every two year basis. And in web we'll be having a rapid, rapid iteration environment.

Heather Bicknell  5:29  
Yeah,

Ryan Purvis  5:30  
we'll see a few times. I mean, this is another podcast, I was doing windows weekly. Nice. We'll make the same sort of rumblings that, that there's a lot of pain being experienced. And it seems like the only the only solution is web for this thing. Yeah. And I'm not saying critical updates shouldn't happen. And I'm not saying, you know, security

Heather Bicknell  5:55  
patches. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis  5:56  
But I'm saying functionality changes like we're doing right now. Slow. I mean, I lost the whole week last week, because I'm trying to, I'm still missing this laptop through the week. But I find a face to face call with anybody. It's what you see now frozen face trading.

Heather Bicknell  6:14  
Yeah, definitely. Specially in a, you know, when your remote workspace is your whole workspace, though, you know, the only face to face you're gonna get with anybody is through your laptop camera. So

Ryan Purvis  6:30  
you know, when you set up your whole workspace to be driven from the single laptop, and the laptop is your single failure point. Because it's running Windows, and Windows is gone. Listen, this table does frustrate you because now you would have like, carried on moving or worse. It's like leaving your desk, you know, it's full of stuff, all those sort of stuff. And go to new desk music, you know, all those drawers, which is a good exercise you should do more often but but you don't want that's an ominous, it's like, not so much I've got enough to do in my life, you'll learn to do that as well. So that's where I am now. So that's why I've installed a new laptop. And I'm slowly moving stuff across the needs to move across. And that's why I'm relying a little bit on OneDrive, because I'm putting it on OneDrive and unhappy and synchronizes across. And then it's not as big a video for some of the setup. Rely quite heavily on LastPass for my password management, and everything else. But it is it is a it's a lot of slack to do it. Yeah. So the other thing I want to talk to you about was was the book I just finished reading called losses of doom.

Unknown Speaker  7:44  
Masters of doom

Ryan Purvis  7:46  
mostly masters of doom you know the name of the game do

Heather Bicknell  7:50  
yes, I don't know much about it. But

Ryan Purvis  7:53  
yeah, guys, different generational thing. Growing up so this will be an 80s and 90s Doom was the big thing I really got into gaming to an extent when when quake three came out when I do walking style and I played Duke Nukem when they came out of Africa, which was a little behind Eros in the world, but but these were you needed to have a, you know, a forensics processor with a graphics card to play quake. And you know, back in the day when all that stuff was, you know, very resource intensive. I mean, you could probably run most of these games on a on a Raspberry Pi now. And, but it was quite fascinating to read how these guys started off I mean, they're really developed. It was two John's john Carmack and john Romero. They really bought these games when when there was nothing around like there was no graphics engines it was they were using 16 bit color and then two to six colors and now now in millions and millions of cars. But you know how they got shading and light pointing new lights and thinking how that led up into you know, virtual reality and augmented reality that you know, this is the precursor games have been the precursor they're almost been like Formula One is America's games lead the way in generating computers, you can do things and that feeds back into normal work compute me Bobby gaming machine, so that you can play games, but it's better. It's also because you can write code and you can be work effectively with your knowledge of stuff. Mm hmm.

Heather Bicknell  9:37  
Yeah. So it's just it's just a story of what it took for them to build the game.

Ryan Purvis  9:43  
So it's not just a guess so they I mean, this is this is follows them over a probably a 20 year journey. So how did they start off being you know, what they were like as kids to john Carmack is a very like how We'll say the Steve Wozniak type character very kinky very, very open source everything that kind of person. And then Ramiro, how would you say to Steve Jobs like as he's a bit more mental than that, but but he's the visionary he's he's the union Yang to each other in the sense that como can deliver the coma, Corrado can deliver these things, technically, and your mirror can keep changing the game and pushing him to, to test his or drive better technical solutions. And then basically go from Doom how there were a bunch of bunch of kids in the house, and they were basically a lot of bits of dirt, regular diet coke, and worked all hours to deliver this stuff. And how they sort of navigated making and, you know, moving across the US from one city to another to to satisfy themselves by by partnering so they end up with being shareware to deliver the product. I mean, this was, you know, in those days, it was still about, you know, using floppy disks, and, and mailing them out using Ziploc bags and and that sort of stuff. to then be net releasing Doom via a university labs connection to the worlds you can download them. And then how they know how they basically slow from each other, because they had even visions. You know, Romero wanted to be this, build an empire, and calm I was fortunate to go videogames, but keep it, keep it tight and share the technology like other stuff and how they basically went a different ways. And then came back together, then it just tells you all the politics and all the rest of it. But what I find interesting from it, from my point of view is you had sort of these two schools of thought where one was keeping teams small and structured, to deliver on a vision, and you had no arena just throwing resources and money with no vision and was expecting magic to happen. Hmm, and then the sort of delay and there's these big events where where there have to end. And Karl Marx engine and his game looks great. And Romero because this little now is trying to show his thing that he's hyped up, and he's thrown millions of, you know, incentive at 90 people working on a lot of stuff. And there's nothing it's like this anticlimactic demo that hardly works. And it's how they you know, it's just the story really well told. But it is how you can see some project will fail because you throw more resources at the wrong time. Or you try and you think the Bible lots of resources are made if you haven't have a product and you don't you know, constantly about prioritization and keeping, keeping focus and all that kind of stuff. And, and you see it often we project or take on too much, or they're just too many different agendas. And they fail to deliver. Hmm.

Heather Bicknell  13:04  
Have you seen the show Silicon Valley?

Ryan Purvis  13:07  
I started watching but didn't go into it.

Heather Bicknell  13:09  
Okay. Just sounds like something that would happen on the show.

Ryan Purvis  13:13  
Very, very possible. Another little bit interesting trivia on this one, I actually think I'm gonna read it. I've read it as it's mentioned in the book. Oh, yeah. As I mentioned, we checked with Channing on LinkedIn, we try to figure it out. Russian heritage? Hmm, interesting. No, that's, that's a good book that I've just finished. And I'm rereading the goal at the moment, which is also quite a good book for product delivery. And I'm sure you've heard it. Also, it also story for the story for a fictional story this time. And we tells the story of a factory owner and how he factories under pressure to you know, funds or things on three months to be closed down. And he's got this crazy physicist mentor basically helps him see the the real problems and solve them. And that's basically the core is that he's trying to teach the law of constraints. You can only deliver how much you can earn based on what you've got, and you need to figure out where your bottlenecks are, and then correctly, organize your priorities based on what your bottlenecks can cover and then deliver you know, what your what your what your priority needs are. So, your customers within the case of the factory, the order that the oldest fit needs to be dealt with and to the youngest, but it also based on West what skills or resources you have so very much a product delivery book. Is it

Heather Bicknell  14:49  
more on the you know, illustrate illustrate the theory then like technical side

Ryan Purvis  14:57  
it's a bit of both it's appeared that the theory It's actually funny sex I was reading again, some of this morning I said this, we said, Give me just a theory. And we'll give you the whole story cuz I've read the book before. Now, this is my second or third time reading it. He tries to articulate the story, or the theory through the story. So, for example, this thing about sequencing, the main character, Al takes his son on a on a scout hiking trip for the weekend. And he got all the kids walking in line. But because of the way that the kids are ordered, the fastest kids are way ahead, and the slowest kids were at the back. And there's a big gap between everybody and yes, to realize it to this whole process that you need to put the slowest kid at the front, which means no one can walk faster than the slowest resource. The narc can finish, you know, faster than the slowest component that has to be built. And so that's how you sort of articulate the theory or whatever, which is quite a nice way to do to to articulate the being a factory is a very different, like I'm struggling at the moment of time that they're there to, to building software. And that's what I think someone did mention to me, there's a cartoon for a comic version of the tweet, it's actually delivered. It's how you deliver software using this little constraint that he defined it. Kind of around now.

Heather Bicknell  16:24  
Just a shortcut.

Ryan Purvis  16:27  
Yeah, I mean, the story is good for color. But But I'm, what I want to I want to apply at the moment. So I need I need the shortcut. Yeah, the side of the bridge version. Yeah, I just put a link into the slack thing, which is a it's came out today on the Guardian, newspaper, it's a survey it was done from the UK. And to say that basically most it's changed into good basic, most office workers don't tend to go back to five days a week in the workplace. When this COVID thing is over, now, that will be over. Okay. But it kind of, you know, confirms what we've been saying for for a good month or three, that it'll move to a two to three days break, you know, when you are we are quite interesting. I think he points out of the generational differences, you know, young employees will see definitely the old employees because they, the younger ones are still trying to build the relationships and have more ambition. And also don't have the facilities at home to work from home. Whereas the older generation will probably have already got the network's has already got a good set up at home and at work from home a lot easier.

Heather Bicknell  17:47  
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think home homeownership and the comfort of working from home probably go hand in hand a bit.

Ryan Purvis  17:56  
Yeah. No. Anyway. Good to go.

I thank you for listening today's episode. Hey, the big news producer editor. Thank you for your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW w podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends and colleagues.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai