Something smells off about this. The author pulled an old laptop from under their desk and was able to install windows 11? Not likely in my experience.
How did the author even get a windows 11 install since they claim they have not used windows since version 8.
Will any win8 laptop even support an upgrade to 11? I doubt it.
Why not get linux running on the old laptop. Mint likely installs just fine.
I'm not saying win 11 is great and frankly none of the systems I have will even install it as they do not meet the requirements just that I find the set up to be sus.
I'd say though that the complaint about having TikTok preinstalled, plus the trashy tabloid news, plus the endless begging for you to use Teams does ring true and it is something that Microsoft needs pushback against.
I think there's some ambiguity re Windows 11 hardware reqs. I was unable to upgrade an older laptop, with it labeled as "not supported" (Older Surface Pro), but I was able to do a clean install from USB.
> The author pulled an old laptop from under their desk
The blog post doesn't say it was old. Did you misread So far, I have only used it a couple of times to debug old software I wrote long ago that needed some fixes ?
Sure, my misread of what they said. However they as you say stored it in a drawer under their desk and only used it to debug software written long ago. They also said the last time they used windows was version 8.
I think it perfectly reasonable to conclude the laptop ran windows 8. Otherwise if it ran windows 10 the author would have said the last time they used windows it was version 10.
The OP didn't say it at all clearly, but reading between their lines they had used Win10, but since Win8 had moved to MacBooks and MacOS as their preferred daily platform:
> Win8 was the last version I used daily. It was when I moved from web development to mobile development, which wasn't (and still isn't) possible to do without a Mac when targeting iOS. One day I decided it would be worth making the switch as I had developed an aversion to the new Metro UI of Windows [8] anyway.
> ...never looked back since. I stopped buying new laptops every few months and got myself a new MacBook every few years instead.
>Win11: ... "I already knew from Win10 that some diagnostics settings could no longer be switched off permanently."
Technically no, however it was in a drawer under their desk, they only used it to debug software written long ago and they state they have not used windows since version 8.
If you were going to download an os to install that you wanted your kid to be able to tinker with and reinstall and you had not used windows in 8 to 10 years why would you download windows 11 rather than ubuntu or Mint?
Based on their old Windows skills and experience (and having no Linux experience?), they thought they knew what they were going to get with a newer Windows install. The article is all about how shocked they were when they didn't get what they were expecting. I suspect they'll be trying out a Linux distro now though...
Windows 11 will run on a Dell laptop from 2015. That is an 8 year old laptop.
That OS is used by millions of people. It is loaded with obnoxious advertising and news. Nothing false in this article. There have been countless complaints about this crap forced into Windows 11.
I think their argument is that most laptops from the W8 days don't support W11 mainly because of the processor requirements and check. Although the author could've burned the image to a USB disk with Rufus which has defaults that remove the W11 pre-checks during flash.
Windows 11 is horrendous but so is this article. I've installed Windows 11 on probably 10 machines and I've never seen 'TikTok' preinstalled but assuming that it can be in certain regions it really isn't that difficult to remove the default bloatware apps. As for the rest of the problems this guy mentions, has he ever heard of Group Policy? Even if you're on a version that doesn't have access to GPEdit, what about the Registry?
Windows 11 has a fuckload of problems and is objectively a step or 12 backwards in terms of configurability, but this article doesn't really sell the problems very well IMO.
Doesn't Group Policy only work in Pro, which costs $100 to upgrade to? Even if you're rich enough to afford that without thinking twice, do you really want to reward Microsoft with more money for their bad behavior?
It's a bit worse. While Group policy requires at least the pro version of windows , many of group policy settings for disabling this junk only work in enterprise and educational versions of windows.
I built a new desktop last week.
One of the first things I did once windows was installed was go through the start menu uninstalling things. Including tiktok.
Just bought an asus machine for work and Ive had the same experience as the author.
Gpedit isn’t available on the home edition and you’re plagued with notifications, tabloids, apps that should be mobile apps and I would argue, ironically, have no place in a home.
I cant be bothered to upgrade to pro or linux as the machine is just a host for vmware horizons but lets see when the first major update happens.
I’m not a big fan of these features and i turn them off right away. MS is going to where the consumers are. anyone under 30 will expect this content . imagine a 20 year old using windows 2k and the only real apps are notepad and ms paint .
We give companies too much blame for providing consumers what they want.
MS could do a better job with transparency and control of these features. But i don’t believe the blame is being put in the right place .
Haven't we already handed over phones for this? And, if you really want a phone, well, there are phones for this… (No need to put an end to computers. Why would you even transition to a computer to watch TikTok?)
Having never lived in a Windows world I had no idea what life was like on the other side.
So many times on HN I read about how MacOS is bad for the user, locked down, rubbish etc etc.
But if this article is true then Windows 11 is absolutely insane. That is what anti consumer looks like. Not SIP. Not poor documentation. Not first party apps.
While those of us who use Apple’s OS fear for the worst, those in Windows appear to be receiving it.
(But I definitely agree that news apps have no place on a desktop and I have had very bad news headlines pop up on my kids screens. Please Apple, turn this stupid default off, or give us an option at install time).
I started with Red Hat 5 bought in a box in 1998 from Microcenter, compiled my own kernel with the original Gentoo, ran XMonad under Arch, and need both hands to count the number of distros I've used as daily drivers.
I have settled on Linux Mint. It just works, and looks good.
Haha, good to know that my laziness is not looked down :P
I used Ubuntu for a while, but fell in love with Mint. I really like how the interface looks, and how things are organized very intuitively. It feels so unfair to use it for free thay I donated 20 bucks, just to show appreciation.
I've used some form of *NIX since 1999, almost exclusively.
Began with Red Hat 5. Moved on to Slackware for my server at the time, and Debian for workstations (I also had various MacOS machines as well). Dabbled with Arch for a few years and Manjaro. Recently, I sold all of my Apple equipment and standardized on...Linux Mint.
Mint + Cinnamon DE is simply amazing and even with lower specs on the current laptop I'm running (Thinkpad T460S vs. Apple MBP 2019 i9), the difference is stark. Not to mention rock-solid stable.
Sure, but Steam doesn't run natively, and is very heavy on battery and GPU. So it isn't good for playing on a laptop when mobile; signficantly worse to native game binary running on a tablet or laptop.
> Sure, but Steam doesn't run natively, and is very heavy on battery and GPU. So it isn't good for playing on a laptop when mobile
I'm assuming this statement is referring to the large amount of software that is Windows only on Steam and runs in a compatibility layer on Linux, rather than Steam itself.
This really isn't that big a deal vs "native" for Steam on Linux and it's getting even less so with time - the Steam Deck mobile console and other x86 handhelds use the exact same Proton tech to run Windows games under Linux on a pretty small ~40Wh battery.
Power consumption of the Proton compatibility layer isn't really any better or worse than running native in my experience - its a wash.
Steam runs natively. It is a linux application (to my knowledge, and it wraps "a webview", so there might be some nuance here. But native enough for this distinction).
Steam uses a compatibility layer called Proton to run Windows games under Linux. Running the games that way is not significantly worse. It can get the same or even better performance (but sure, sometimes worse) and will affect battery life pretty much exactly as if running the game via Windows on the Laptop.
Proton is based on Wine, and Wine is not an emulator. Translating the calls does not make them heavier.
Functionality for older windows games is a little bit more absurd. I have a few games I kinda gave up on because they stopped working on windows 10, until I chucked them into proton or wine and suddenly those games were working. That was a confusing evening for a moment.
b) Not all Steam games that are on Proton run efficiently without tweaks e.g. one that I found unplayable due to overheats (on MacOS) was Sid Meier’s Civilization VI [https://www.protondb.com/app/289070]
c) Not all Steam games where you had the pre-Proton version installed, download the right version update. See Steam's forums, people saying disable Steamplay; and have to do that globally, not per-game.
d) In addition, I found the Steam updater daemon (interacting with MacOS Mojave Quarantine) also burned power like no tomorrow.
Just not if gaming is the goal. Steam would be only available as a Flatpak, says https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Steam. And the Flatpak version is problematic.
Void would be a better choice if liking simplicity. Or to keep it simple, maybe Pop!_OS. Or Debian. Or Arch. Pretty much everything not Alpine ;)
I certainly would never use Alpine for gaming, any more than I’d use OpenBSD. I don’t use it for multimedia, either.
My normal setup is i3 on Alpine. I like to think I have a good understanding of how an Alpine system is built up via its install scripts and maintained by its packaging system.
There’s not a lot of cruft lying around that I don’t need and didn’t request.
That’s what I intended by using the word “simplicity”.
Why would you think that Debian and Void are simpler systems than Alpine? They are much larger.
They are much easier to use for gaming, as you can install Steam without any hurdles. Note how the grandparent comment of your response mentions that being able to game easily now was what made the switch to Linux possible.
I ran Linux Mint on a Lenovo Legion gaming laptop for 2 months.
Almost everything related to gaming worked but I did have problems.
Under X11 + Gnome, fractional scaling was pretty badly broken for some things, especially the Steam app. X11 + KDE fixed that issue.
Under X11 + KDE with hybrid graphics mode (automatically use APU for light tasks, dedicated GPU for games), the laptop's brightness controls were totally inoperable. I tried to research this but could not find a working solution. If brightness was problematic enough, I could pick one of the fixed graphic modes and log out and back in - mostly I left it near or at 100% and didn't touch it.
One game (Anno 1800) would not connect to multiplayer, but works completely under Windows.
Hogwart's Legacy ran horribly and was unstable in Linux Mint. It ran with much higher quality/performance and 100% stability under Windows.
Other games like ARK, Conan, Valheim, StarCraft 2 (using non-Steam Proton), Deep Rock Galactic all ran identically (from what I can tell) to Windows.
Also about 50% of the time, booting would hang for Linux Mint and I'd have to hard-reboot, probably pick an older kernel to boot into, and then I could reboot and go back to the latest kernel (a minor release under Linux 5.15). Fortunately rebooting is mostly infrequent.
Overall it wasn't quite in a state I was comfortable with, so I'm back to Windows 10, which is much better than Windows 11 (or much less bad?).
It's very rare for me to even buy a new game (unless it's a $20 early access game) but my spouse was very excited for it and I wanted to play alongside. (It's not multiplayer but we can still talk about the parts we've played.)
The issue with Linux for me is how crude and unpolished the desktop environment is compared to windows and Mac. For the average user the desktop is everything and Linux lag way behind on that. Why are there basically only 2 choices on Linux and both have the same boring font?
I assume when you say two choices you mean Gnome and KDE?
But there are other options like Xfce, and there are quite a few variants, like Cinnamon, MATE, i3, etc. [0]
I still think Windows 10 looks and feels relatively polished (if you don't dig too deep and see just how many iterations they've gone through and still haven't gone back to fix.) I think Windows 11 feels a bit goofy - like they are trying for polish now, but it's in that modern overly spaced out and flat look that I can't seem to appreciate.
I found Linux Mint Cinnamon to be quite nice, and KDE is really nice in my opinion. More consistent than Windows in some ways.
I much prefer the desktop environment of Mint + Cinnamon over Windows or Mac.
Ditto, I am not an average user, but Windows was only really good on Windows 7, and I never really liked Mac OS (use it at work as a MCB is the laptop they issued for me)
Windows 11 and Windows 10 with the last updates as well are just awful in terms of UI; the UX works more or less alright, but many of the default applications, and specially the settings, control panel, etc. are just an inconsistent mess, awful flat UI without any kind of colors, etc.
Mac is much nicer, nicer fonts, colors, overall look although personally I can't stand the UX too much (specially in terms of window management) apps are usually great tho.
I'd very much rather use something like Kubuntu or Pop_OS, Cinnamon works fine as well, honestly nowadays they just work and are usually better off than Windows by default.
> the UX works more or less alright, but many of the default applications, and specially the settings, control panel, etc. are just an inconsistent mess, awful flat UI without any kind of colors, etc.
The whole GTK2/3, now 4? and KDE, Plasma, Kirigami, what have you nowadays, isn't an inconsistent mess? I was using Linux (fedora 37) recently and it was not a consistent experience, either.
If anything, W11 is more consistent across all applications even if the settings/control panel have a weird Jekyll/Hyde personality to it at times.
My desktop experience on Linux is so clean. Everything is a "windows" key press away. I hit they then enter the first characters of the program name. It's all composited and GPU accelerated too, and interaction is instantaneous.
Almost anything that needs additional polish is on the web and looks the same on every computer...
For me, what seems janky is stuff with the systems on MacOS (planned hardware obsolescence = jank, batteries that die after a predetermined number of years, expanding until they break the motherboard = jank) or the user treatment and configuration of Windows (the article in question gives a lovely example of windows jank). In short, being treated like a consumer = jank. I can't understand how anyone puts up with it, much less says "polished" when referring to it. But I'll admit I'm weird!
It's a bit of an exaggeration, but I've written the whole Linux application in the same time that I needed to get my build environment working on Windows. I still don't know how people can like developing on Windows, especially if it involves anything regarding C/C++ libs. (Not using a paid version of Visual Studio, fwiw).
The fact that you lack the experience with proper Windows development tooling kind of shows, it isn't an exageration, otherwise you would realize how stone age is anything Gtk+ related, specially after Glade was killed.
I dunno, I've used Qt. You can argue that it's not "proper windows development tooling" and I can argue that 90% of apps I've written in my life have benefitted from being cross-platform. Happy to be corrected here, but I've seen most hobbyists not use Visual Studio because historically you had to pay for it in the first place, and it's only common between Windows-only devs, to no surprise.
If you use the Visual Studio build system the way it's designed to be used and use vcpkg to manage your third party libraries, then C++ on Windows is pretty great, even when using the free version of Visual Studio.
Trying to force a UNIX shaped build environment and development setup into a Windows shaped hole on the other hand can be a pain.
To me a desktop is mostly determined by what can be done with a file browser and the file browsers that come with a Linux distribution (dolphins, thunder, etc) are much better than finder or explorer.
This seems like where RMS would chime in. Because what we're actually missing on Android are the GNU tools - we have the kernel, but not the userland tools that define the experience.
I have one and the hardware is so slow and the software ecosystem is still so incomplete... I understand still holding out for a 'good' Linux phone despite those things.
I hear you, and that's why I bought a Librem 5 as well. Since it finally arrived like five (plus?) years later, I haven't yet spent enough time to settle in with it. But I hate my Android phone, and would like to eventually.
Still, I wish we could get better hardware and the software support definitely still has growing to do. And I understand those who feel like it's not a viable option for them yet, but do want to switch in the future— because that's kinda where I'm still at myself, even though I have one of those devices.
I've run semi-proprietary Linux distros that are (in practice) parasitic on Android but include a GNU userland as well, like Sailfish.
They are a lot better in some ways, but I think much of the issue is present in the kernel alone, where dependency on binary blobs and proprietary drivers means kernels are frozen in place forever.
The issue is software freedom in general, beyond just the missing parts of the desktop Linux software stack that we know and love, like our package managers, GNU utilities, Wayland, systemd, etc.
That's also a pathological failure case with MacBook (depending on the trim level of MacBook, you'll run into situations like only 1 monitor working. Or both monitors work, but randomly trade position when the computer wakes from sleep)
Does that mean that paying for an OS means your time has negative value?
Surely the time spent installing, configuring, and messing around with your personal desktop or laptop after already having paid for a complete OS is tantamount to buying a prebuilt PC, taking it apart, and putting it back together with a few missing screws.
The argument is that you will lose relatively less money from the time wasted. So instead of wasting $1000 worth of time, you only are wasting $200 of time.
An operating system that lets you waste less money, means that you will save money. Saving money is what can make purchasing something worth it.
As alluro2 pointed out in another comment on this little chain, you also get to pay less money for the guarantee of control over that configuration.
Phrased another way, you're paying more for a limited set of tools, it's not that you must spend $1000 worth of man hours to configure the minutiae of a Linux system, it's that exploring 100% of the configuration options on Mac (or even windows to a lesser extent) is so limited you only have $200 man hours of total possible configuration space.
Confusing analogy aside, you just have less possible room to move and thus people spend less time moving. That doesn't mean you must move on Linux, just that you have the freedom to do so.
I would happily submit ALL the time required to set up my perfectly-tailored Linux environment once and have it stay that way, just to not have Windows Update (or a random blue screen or 100% disk utilization etc) make my machine unavailable for 40 min just before a hugely important client demo one more time.
Various Linux distros still have ways to go in terms of polish and stability - but, anecdotally, the only times my Arch + KDE failed were when I did stupid things and went too far with tinkering without thinking.
You can do this with Pro and a group policy setting. Yeah it's not optimal, but most of us that use Windows professionally (IT/Dev at least) already have this set up.
Over the last 10 years or so, I'd try out Linux for a week, get frustrated for one reason or another, and then switch back to Windows.
Back in February I decided to try Linux Mint again, and this time it worked, and I haven't switched back to Windows yet. I think Linux is starting to get good, even for someone like me, who doesn't want to become a part-time Linux admin.
One of the most beautiful things about the open source / Linux world is that you rarely have to learn a new way of doing things, unless you want to. Prefer Gnome 2? Fork it. Not flippant advice -- enough people preferred it that a new community project started. So you can still run the desktop environment you did 15 years ago. That's simply not an option - no matter how many users might want it - with Windows should Microsoft make a decision about the direction of Windows. You will spend time and effort relearning after forced changes.
that sounds like you either never tried Linux… or maybe sometimes 25 years ago. The reality is (and has been for quite a long time) that Linux actually takes far LESS time than Windows. Heck, when I see the type of shitty problems I hear from Windows users, I wonder why they put up with it.
In fairness, SIP can be disabled. Having said that, Linux is way more appropriate than MacOS for the preschool to highschool crowd. It's bursting with educational resources, and it's relatively easy to set up a locked-down non-administrator account that's appropriate for kiddos (e.g., lots of programming environments and educational games from the 90s; no internet access. If you need cloud backup, you can use cron + rsync).
If they wanted to remove that option, they would have done it as part of the Apple Silicon transition. Apple might have its issues (App Store, Right to Repair, etc), but they seem quite set on not locking down the Mac.
I dunno. Seems like a boiling frog scenario. They keep adding hoops and one day they'll lock it away. There's no reason they had to wait for the start of the AS transition to do it either. Over the Intel era we saw them lock things down with the introduction of the T1 and T2 chips. AS was another small leap. Maybe M4 will introduce something else like software fuses to prevent rollback or something.
T1 was just for Touch ID. T2 did change a lot, but SIP is still as easy to disable as it was before T2. When Apple Silicon came out with a completely different boot process, they still allowed disabling SIP (and added the ability to do it per OS instead of at a global level), and despite the secure boot, they give you the option to turn that off and boot whatever you want (see Asahi Linux). I doubt they would have put the engineering effort into that if their plan was to lock the Mac down.
That’s like saying air bags are anti-consumer. Two differences between air bags and SIP: Consumers don’t know SIP exists, and anyone savvy enough to understand the esoteric reasons for needing to disable SIP can do that.
how is SIP "super anti-consumer"? You can easily turn it off if you want to. AFAIK there are no repercussions if you do even other then your computer being more susceptible to malware.
B. This is actually platform consistency for iOS developers. If you are building an iOS app, you should be fairly comfortable knowing it will be running on a locked-down device, particularly if it’s a social media app with anti-robot technologies. You shouldn’t need to engineer around macOS blowing a hole in that security. If you could run iOS apps on macOS without SIP, what is iOS security good for again?
Are mainstream Linux distros as user-friendly to a 10-year-old as the other two operating systems, even if the latter are more anti-consumer? As the article states the author was trying to set up a first-time computer for his son. Which flavor of Linux to install is clearly an important factor for such an audience, as it makes distros like Arch out of the question.
I built a gaming PC recently, so also new to Windows (normally Linux main). I was very surprised to see advertising in the operating system, for an operating system that people pay at least $190 CAD for.
This issue is made worse by every hardware vendor needing to install their own bulky applications with their own popups. It's extremely noisy.
My main take is that Microsoft has lost all pride in Windows and they're uninterested in actually competing.
For _some_ games and hardware combinations it's great. Some games are still windows only, and for some games the performance on Linux is abysmal, even with Proton.
This is irrelevant for multiplayer gaming, where the anti-cheat software only runs on Windows because it needs to establish a security baseline for all players.
Most of these games don't do a great job at preventing cheaters; for years all Riot did to deter cheaters in League was threaten legal action against the cheat creators (In particular Joduska.me which was a scripting framework that enabled automated performing actions perfectly), Blizzard dealt with cheats by threatening legal action against WOW botters, CS:GO has Overwatch because Valve only mass-bans cheaters once every few years (and only when that cheat developer has amassed tens of thousands of customers and has open signups), and personal anecdotes from friends suggest that Apex cheating is somewhat still a problem. For VRChat, what would cheating even be for? Epilepsy / bypassing model age rating?
I don't really get why you keep playing the contrarian in this thread. Linux works for me for all the games I play. I get incredible performance. And the anti cheat stuff I don't really care about. I used to play CS 1.6 and there were cheaters sure but it didn't really change my ability to be a PC games enjoyer.
I'm not gonna read your comment and be like "omg he's right. my linux install sucks. back to winblows". I used to constantly wrestle with my Windows install and now I wrestle with my Linux install less.
I'm not playing the contrarian just to do so, I'm noting that there is a potential correlation between "allows linux users (AKA relaxed requirements / a lower baseline for cheating assurance)" and a higher percentage of cheaters in their game. At the start of both Valorant and Overwatch's lifetimes, it was effectively impossible to find a cheater in a PC match, and even now there isn't much evidence for there being widespread cheats available for <$100/month for these games.
You haven't actually offered any evidence of this being the case. It's just as easy to make cheats for games on Windows as it is on Linux. In fact most cheats are made for Windows precisely because most of the people buying these cheats are using Windows.
That's not what I said - my point is that companies with a relaxed security baseline (ie. not having a dedicated team of people tasked with investigating cheats and improving their anti-cheat system) tend to invite an increased number of cheaters into their games, and I back this up with real events.
- These companies will send cease-and-desist letters to cheat makers instead of working to detect their cheats (Joduska.me ceased operations due to a Riot C&D, and Bossland GmbH was actually sued and lost). If these cheats were instead detected and users banned on a continuous basis, no lawsuits would be needed.
- CS:GO implemented (as in, almost a decade ago) an "Overwatch" review system to allow players to review potential cheaters and have a consensus on whether or not cheating is likely. Valve is knows to be very relaxed on VAC - and knowing the company culture @ Valve being what it is, these ban waves probably only happen when one of the seniors @ Valve gets killed by a cheater in-game themselves and tasks someone with implementing some detection mechanism into VAC. Only recently (~4 years ago) has valve supposedly started to incorporate more advanced automatic detection and punishment systems[0], but at the time it wasn't doing anything about wallhacks and at auto-headshot cheats tend to be pretty good at adding enough noise to make it look very close to what professionals can do and thus these cases still end up in the overwatch queue (and note that this system probably hasn't been iterated on much; Valve doesn't do dedicated teams that own specific products).
Of course, there is no hard evidence for the actual number of cheaters in all of these games. But my point isn't that Linux is the vehicle or platform cheats are used on, just that a video game without a rigorous cheat detection system is more likely to open up their attack surface to other platforms. Valorant still has firepower behind it, so while there are cheats, Riot is invested in keeping it Windows-only to ensure they don't incidentally have to split their resources between detecting cheats and hardening their executables on Linux and Windows at the same time.
>There were a few kernel patches necessary only a year ago to make certain EAC games work.
You are thinking of getting the Windows version of EAC working. EAC has had a wine version for a long time. EAC will detect if you are using wine and try and download the wine version.
Don't some big publishers of 'important' trendy multiplayer games with strong network effects still basically refuse to enable EAC's Linux support, though?
Do you know any recent articles or blog posts summarizing the state of affairs with competitive multiplayer games rn?
GloriousEggroll is a Red Hat employee who works on the proton compatibility layer full time. He typically posts his progress on Twitter and will have world first screenshots of certain games working. His Twitter is a good resource.
Epic hasn't even enabled it for Fortnite, and UE5 definitely should enable fairly seamless Vulkan usage on other platforms (although the reasoning could be because the market is so small and Fortnite's QA team is already stretched incredibly thin)
Destiny 2? Bungie has been unpleasant about this, as I’m sure plenty of other devs still do-which, unlike the past where they could claim no market share, makes less sense now that Steam Deck is a thing and doing great.
Bungie is specifically and on-purpose making the game broken on Linux for no apparant reason. Other BattleEye titles work just fine. There's no technical reason why it doesn't work. All the technical work was done all the way in 2021.
This is one of those cases where you need to vote with your money and stop supporting studios that are hostile to Linux. I actively avoid all Bungie titles for this reason.
As someone who has been on both sides, developing cheats and working in anticheat, AC on linux will always be significantly gimped compared to windows because of GPL related issues, anyone saying otherwise is doing it entirely for marketing reasons.
On windows a closed-source driver that can utilize and scan for anomalies in reverse engineered undocumented internal kernel structures is feasible. If you want to do something similar on linux you need to find a reverse engineer that has never laid eyes on linux kernel sources(good luck with that), have them reverse engineer and take very detailed notes on relevant kernel structures and functions, and then find a software developer that has also never laid eyes on kernel sources to write a driver according to those notes. Needless to say, this takes a fair amount of time and therefore money.
The alternatives are to implement your detections in usermode, where they can easily be fed false information from the kernel, or to publish the source code for your detections making them almost worthless.
Cheat developers have it much easier, they do not give a fuck about licensing and will just read kernel sources and ship a closed source driver, or ship a hypervisor that tampers with kernel data structures that they are able to just copy and paste out of the sources.
Yeah they do. It started with Windows 10. It’s one of the reasons I moved over to Linux for gaming last year (I have been using Linux for work for years)
Why do you share what an AI may have hallucinated?
The rising prevalence of comments like this is concerning, and I’m worried this indicates the existence of a large number people using AI this way that don’t warn us.
Windows isn't free, though upgrades have been for a while after major releases since 10. You pay for it with a new PC or you have to buy it for custom built PCs.
ChatGPT was trained on data from 2021 and earlier, and tends to hallucinate. It's not a reliable or original source.
I recently deleted my Windows partition, but I recall how after an update it blocked me from login in until it could tell me I really should try out Office 365, informed me Edge is better for me than whatever browser I was using (Firefox) and asked me for a Microsoft account.
> I was very surprised to see advertising in the operating system, for an operating system that people pay at least $190 CAD for.
Most people don't pay this - and I don't mean buying keys from lower-buying-power countries, I mean that anyone with a gaming laptop (which is a 2x bigger market than desktop[0]) is really only paying maybe $50 for Windows since Dell/Alienware, Acer, etc get very large volume licensing discounts.
0: "In 2021, gaming notebooks are forecast to account for nearly 43 percent of shipments in the global gaming PC market, with gaming desktops making up 27 percent of shipments. In 2025, the shipment share of gaming notebooks is expected to grow to 46 percent globally." https://www.statista.com/statistics/1119850/gaming-pc-market...
This is true. However, I have to say I still dislike the (kind of) double charging of selling the OS as a product and using it for advertising. The position Microsoft has allows them to both sell the cow and have the milk but that doesn't make it seem like a fair deal.
Discounts for Windows licenses to OEMs have been a thing for decades (maybe always?), yet Windows was still seen as one of Microsoft's crown jewels and an important business, and Microsoft didn't exactly go bankrupt.
Filling a paid product with advertising and monetized data collection just seems like a cheap move, even if the product is sold at significantly less than the list price in most cases.
I use both Linux and Windows. Windows Pro 11 on desktop and Linux on desktop and servers. I removed ads from "Search" using settings and see no other ads. Am I special or it is related to Pro vs Home?
Everybody on here like to think they are amazing power users but can't disable a single setting, that I'm pretty sure is part of the standard setup process, to get rid of ads. I've used a number of Windows 10/11 pc's and never seen any of the issues hn complains about regularly.
There was a time when Microsoft themselves realized the crapware experience sucked.
Back in the Windows 8 days, Microsoft had a few physical mall shops trying to capture some of the Apple Store magic. One of their selling points was "Signature PCs"-- guaranteed to have nothing on there but Windows and drivers, no vendor bloat.
Strange they don't recognize the spam when it's coming from inside the ~~house~~ multinational.
For better and worse everything productive is becoming OS agnostic. In 15 years I don't think many first-class applications will be truly native. They will be UI via HTML (webapps, electron, etc), CLIs based on POSIX, or company maintained UI frameworks which break OS styling conventions (JetBrains, etc).
OS agnosticism isn't just webapps taking over. Docker is making development from the ground up be OS agnostic.
I see this in my personal life as well. Every day I use MacOS, Linux, and Windows -- OS doesn't really matter much anymore to me.
The weird revelation to me was that the goal of what a decent OS is keeps moving, even as what we want to do doesn't change much in nature.
20 years ago I was on FreeBSD and it was fine. But as laptops became mainstream, and even the main linux distros were completely impractical.
Now we have really good linux laptops, but tablet form computers are maturing and we're starting to see very good ones, and linux support is still generations behind (heck, windows support is still meh)
I'd expect linux to be viable there in 4 or 5 years, when the dust settles, but then will the compatibility extend to the machines on the better form factors of that time ?
Basically "the year of linux on the desktop" meme has stopped being about sheer viability and more about what you're willing to give up to keep using linux. As long as it doesn't become the primary target of the more innovative hardware makers out there, I wouldn't expect to solve this situation anytime soon.
Windows is weird, from a Linux or MacOS point of view. It is always broken, but also poorly written, so the user can just make a workflow happen by accumulating kludges.
I think Microsoft might have hired too many people who were familiar with other operating systems, resulting in a Windows 11 that actually manages to implement their vision.
It's not poorly written or broken, at least it wasn't for most of it's history. Windows does an awful lot of stuff very well, something MacOS and Linux are not even close to, e.g. backwards compatibility. You can still run a Windows 95 app on 11 and it will run pretty much perfectly. There were some very smart people working for MS who helped design the NT architecture.
It's just the last few versions have really gone to shit. I saw a link to some comment on HN where someone on the Windows team was posting about how all the Apple users got hired and kept trying to make 11 like MacOS, and the seasoned Windows people were losing fights and just quitting. That explains a lot.
as a general windows fan, I also hate windows 11. I upgraded my 11 to windows 10, and if windows 12 doesn't resolve this horrible apple/android copy cat nonsense, I will regrettably move to Linux full time. I run kde on hardware for my work computer as the only os on the device for over 2 years now. I still use windows 10 at home for personal computing. kde based Debian is good, better than osx and windows 11 for sure, but I just can't swallow it as my only os for entertainment, it just isn't there yet.
The thing is, those claims about MacOS have been true for some time, while Windows becoming this bad is a relatively recent thing. 10 was the start, and 11 was a huge escalation.
I ran windows 1.0 back in the day through 11 (arm) in a VM now. I ran OS/2 at a prior employer years back so I could do builds for Windows 16 as well as do other work. Windows is a tool. I have run laptops using Windows to FreeBSD. I run MacOS as a choice because Linux sucks for dealing with multiple environments and printers and the things that make a "desktop OS" useful.
Windows 10 / 11 let marketing be stupid and added things like Candy Crush, etc. I'm not a fan and wish they had done different. There are things to "like" about windows - backward compatibility being one that has been pretty amazing.
Rediscovered Windows on a new Surface recently (so the pure Microsoft experience...), and yes it's pretty bad out of the box. Not just the ads, but the presets and aren't great either, so you're expected to take a bunch of time to make it sane first.
The general advice I got was to start with a debloating program [0], especially for people new to the platform.
My take is, Windows 11's lows are really low. Having to debloat is one thing, the overall mild bugginess is another (everything kinda only works 99% of the time, that 1% of FU doesn't seem to disappear). Then the arcane science of digging through old layers to resurect past UIs that are still more powerful than the newer ones.
On the other side the highs are way way higher. People stick with all the crap because that's the only path to where they want to go.
It's not because they were lying, but Windows was changed delibaretly in the wrong direction, and MacOS got much more usable because of open source contributions.
I miss the consistency that I had with Windows 7 (renaming a file anywhere with the F2 key), but those days are over.
With Mac I still don't know what the Mac / option / control / fn / shift keys mean and can't remember keyboard shortcuts, so I'm much more dependent on the touchpad, but at least the touchpad is awesome.
> Some people recommended tools to me which can be used to switch most of those things off. But honestly: How do you trust a system (or its manufacturer) if you can't even know if those settings, which you deliberately chose, persist?
No doubt you've all noticed how your carefully crafted config gets trashed by routine window's updates %#%$$#%#! If you use windows, you're pushing against a company that 1) you've given complete control of your computer, and 2) has very different intentions and priorities to you.
What configs are you talking about? Because most things in the official UIs are carefully crafted to be permanent user preferences that windows updates don't touch.
If this is a good-faith question, then I assume you don't use Windows as your primary OS. After most major Windows updates, you'll see new crapware in the Start menu and get nagged to set up a Microsoft account and have your default programs switched back to the Microsoft ones, no matter how many times you said "no, and never ask again" before.
Can’t say I’ve had this experience. I run one computer on insider builds and another on stock, neither seem to cause lost settings reset defaults, etc. New progs I guess rarely/infrequently.
You'll find apps and things that wiggle their way back onto the start menu, at least that's what happened minutes prior to me downloading a Fedora ISO last year.
Whatever arcane configuration is required to disable dynamic contrast seems to get regularly reset with Windows updates (although this may be a graphics card driver vendor issue -- nevertheless). No, Windows, I don't want you to turn the backlight down when I'm looking at a dark image.
The most reliable way to get things to stick is by using Group Policies. Because if there's one group Microsoft is afraid of messing with, it's their Enterprise customers.
Of course that requires getting Windows Pro or better, but that's becoming a must anyways, Windows Home just keeps getting worse with every update. Luckily the upgrade is only about $20 (using the unofficial key reseller of your choice).
Then you'll get to enjoy all sorts of other fights with your OS.
(I, will, of course, be put in my place by everyone who is ready to chime in that if I just change <some immutable aspect of my expectations>, then <their OS of choice is going to be a perfect fit for me>.
I'm not that special, either. But I also don't give two figs that the Start menu includes a link to TikTok, or that the pre-loaded Solitaire is a mobile game straight out of the fifth circle of hell.
I don't click on shit in the start menu, I don't play Solitaire, and I have way more important things to get upset over.
Good for you… or not I guess if you have bigger issues than what OS to use. I really can’t tell.
Anyway, my biggest issue with Windows that pushed me away was the feeling of loosing control, caused by settings constantly being undone. So I solved it by dumping Windows.
By the sounds of it, you are still happy with it, so cool.
Microsoft has a habit of flipping settings back to stock, but so far as I know, this has never happened for group policy. I've been using GPOs to reliably flip things off in Windows 10
Can't speak to 11 but I imagine it's the same; GPOs are one of the few things Microsoft wants to make sure never break with an update given the market that uses them.
Did you know you can't set your login wallpaper without an enterprise or education license via GPO? It won't tell you that's the problem when it doesn't work but it is at least documented in the GPO itself - so you need to notice that a pretty basic feature is POSH license only. I'm one of those rare people who actually read messages and docs and hence I eventually spotted it when roughly 20 people diagnosing a snag had not. I'm also the PHB (actually I have very little hair) so, in your face: Dilbert.
Features that are offered but silently fail is wankery of the first order to add to your flipping back of settings - hello again Edge you fucking numpty!
Yeah, I really feel for people here. I've been maintaining GPOs since Windows 2003 in our small business, and I never run into any of the issues most of these posts are dealing with. I download the policy files, flip the settings around so they work for our employees, and forget what most users have to deal with... If there's not someone in the loop, dealing with the problems.
I've heard that TPMs are mandatory for Windows 11 - if so, those can typically be disabled in the BIOS and this can be used to prevent unattended upgrades.
Windows 11 start menu search is slowest shit i've ever seen
I can't stand when I type app name (e.g paint or vs) and it appears but click needs like 5-10 sec to be registered
what the hell
It worked perfectly fine on Win10 on the same hardware (my OS has been updated recently either automatically or by company).
I'd call Windows 11 pretty OK once you tweak one or two things in register settings, maybe the lack of right click menu on task bar sucks (e.g show desktop), but search being slow is ridiculous, it should be blazingly fast
Yup, even on a slow machine with a mechanical drive you could blind type the first 3 letters of a program name and slam the enter key. The search filtering was so quick it would have completed the operation in time for your enter key-press to be registered.
Try the same thing on 10 or 11 and you're probably going to end up with a new edge window running a Bing search.
Heck, it's bad even on reasonably fast machines like my surface pro. I've recently found that if I "blind type" a search query at my normal (very fast) input speed, it actually enters the keypresses _before_ loading fully, blinks the correct app up for about 1 frame, then resets the input field to nothing!
Former MSFT employee here. Not every keystroke, but a surprising amount, yes. A startling amount. (Disclaimer: I was on Azure platform, so I can't speak directly to Windows.)
You can disable it (there are lots of articles all over) but the sheer scale of the problem makes these mitigations rather unreliable.
On the other side of the one-way mirror, there's this thing called Kusto which lets you sort of surf through someone's sessions, at least for the web apps. Someone brilliant in my unit hooked it up with emojis, which you could read in columns; it was very nearly like those columns of green figures in _the Matrix_, but, you know, with emojis. Just scan down from top to bottom; dude opens file... dude renames file... dude copies file... dude wanders away for 15 min... etc
Because EU regs, we can't see PII, but frankly if you named your folder 'Bob Bobberson's Bobfiles' whoever is on DRI is seeing your name. "Don't name your folder your name," we always said, to our customers. They always did anyway.
This was always uncomfortable but since the political breakdown has progressed, I've started to worry that these reams of data will either (a) be seen by some True Believer for one side or another or (b) quietly collected by the usual (legal) means, by a federal agency that is itself compromised.
This is in the context where there are literally states with bounty programmes for e.g. people seeking (or helping) women get abortions. How long is it until $10K sounds good enough to a disgruntled layoff-rattled rank-and-file? What happens if those programmes are expanded to include other things? What if you had a folder named, say, "Getting my wife TF out of TX?" What if you did five years ago? Think it through.
The worst part is I'm sure it's no different anywhere else, in 2023, at least so far as commercial apps go. Even some FOSS stuff like Audacity.
That's why I run OpenBSD and NixOS, and have even managed to wean myself off VSC.
I definitely did not enjoy seeing the sausage be made.
As a life-long Windows user, the most frustrating part is how broken search is, and always has been, but… in new and unique ways in every version I’ve ever used!
It’s astonishing: they’re clearly working on it, making material changes, but only ever sideways. I’ve never observed an improvement.
To those people that say “version x has worked”: I doubt it. Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu. Maybe you just got used to what search terms work, and forgot about it. But I assure you that it has never “just worked”.
I still have a habit of searching for “management” in the start menu because if I type “SQL”, it won’t ever find “SQL Management Studio”.
>Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu
Yet another beef of mine. The Search Indexer runs frequently, chews up a lot of CPU, and always engages my fans into turbo mode. I know that 99% of my files at any given moment are identical to the last month. Windows, you have all the hooks to know the last time a file was modified. Stop re-scanning everything forever.
Don't worry, I expect Microsoft will replace their search with gpt in the future. "Hey Windows, find me that work presentation I worked on a while back".
It's been baffling to me how such a high % of the world is using this OS for work but the search function is fundamentally not functioning.
I have the same set of files on two machines and its actually faster for me to turn to the mac, search on there to find where the file will be on my windows machine than to watch the windows search churn away for minutes only to not find it.
Not to mention if it does find it there is this obtuse dance you have to do to get it to actually open the containing folder in a way thats navigable because the search results are all fake shortcut links or something that burn the path hierarchy. Rolls my eyes every time I bump into that.
And 3rd-party apps like Everything are lightning fast, so it's certainly possible to have fast Windows search. I'm genuinely buffaloed as to why MSFT hasn't fixed this obvious flaw in the last 20 years.
VoidTools Everything FTW. Naming things using /common words is a wee pet peeve, but the software is pretty great. Just a few random things are either mouse-only, or a sequence of focus-shifting keystrokes.
Is there any rock solid program that effortlessly lets me shut off contentious “features”? Ie. no unreliable registry mucking or other stuff. I just want to open an application and begin unchecking checkboxes.
I use 10, but only as essentially a glorified console. Time for work? Time to boot into the Linux partition.
I look vaguely fondly back on XP, 98, and 95… but at least, XP was pretty bad with frequent crashes. And of course the idea of security was added on afterwards, which was not really successful and kind of a dumb idea.
Anyway I think the death-date of Windows is essentially a personal thing. It is the first day you look at it with at all a critical eye.
I installed Mint here. RetroArch works like a charm. Steam games are surprisingly smooth thanks to Proton - some games require some minor tinkering to work, but I am amazed at how well it works.
I got even games from other stores that don't officially support Proton (such as GoG) to work with the help of Lutris.
If Windows for you is just a console, might be time to re-evaluate on that.
I don't even hate Windows btw. I was using 10 and it worked mostly fine to my tastes, especially with WSL. But Linux is just so much better in every way.
I did Linux gaming for a bit. The main annoyance was getting all the sound settings to work with… I guess it must have been Skype at the time, or maybe Google Hangouts or something… so I could play multiplayer games with friends.
This would have been more than a decade ago, so I believe you if you say it is pretty good nowadays. Might check back. I know Discord runs OK on Linux.
For a long time I had Linux in Dual boot, cursing at how unfortunate it was that I couldn't really play games there. Even games that had Linux builds often had those as afterthoughts, with bugs not present in the main windows version.
Now I can just play the Windows version through Proton. I hope that if Linux gains traction Proton becomes unnecessary, but I'm happy that Proton came as far as it is. Honestly, to play old Windows games it is probably better than Windows.
A few games required some minor tinkering to work, but have been pretty smooth here. If you enjoy playing the latest AAA (that probably takes a while until it gets supported), I would say that you'd better stay on Windows. Otherwise, Linux is more than a viable alternative right now.
If I'm not mistaken, one of the reasons Proton is necessary is DirectX (Windows native & Proton) still does a better job of handling a lot of things than OpenGL (Linux native), so while you still see the same house (the game), the graphics foundation underneath is completely different. And say what you will about Microsoft (don't even get me staaaaaaarted), but DirectX is polished. It might even be their best product.
Industry has moved to dx12 and vulkan. With vulkan being native to win and Linux(and switch). In bigger engines you suport all of them, even opengl still. Some Indies might still use opengl due to it being simpler or for better support on the web or mobile.
With dx12 and vulkan its mostly up to what platforms do you want to support. As they do things quite similar. While you need vulkan for switch you need dx for Xbox. PS has its own API.
Tldr opengl is mostly irrelevant today for bigger titles and that's not what's blocking titles from supporting Linux.
Same here, but I only boot into Windows for VR. I'm waiting for Valve to stop hyperfocusing on the Steam Deck and get SteamVR to behave well under Linux.
I made the mistake it getting a Rift, it is gathering dust now that Facebook has gotten their creepy hands on it.
I wonder if Linux is a fundamentally much better platform for VR than windows? The problems are mostly latency related, right? And the openness of the platform means that Valve can really tinker to their hearts’ content.
>now that Facebook has gotten their creepy hands on it
No Oculus headsets shipped to consumers until after the acquisition by Facebook. The DK1 from the Kickstarter started shipping a few days after the acquisition.
>I wonder if Linux is a fundamentally much better platform for VR than windows?
The most popular OS for VR is the one running on the Quest headsets and uses Linux. For quickly evolving technology like VR I believe Linux is a better fit, but in the long run I don't think it's a fundamentally better base.
>The problems are mostly latency related, right?
Latency isn't a big issue with VR due to reprojection and latency is important for normal games too. The amount of people on Windows who want lower latency for FPS games far outnumber the people who want low latency for VR. For VR you are likely just talking to the graphics driver and can bypass the operating systems compositer with your own.
> No Oculus headsets shipped to consumers until after the acquisition by Facebook. The DK1 from the Kickstarter started shipping a few days after the acquisition.
Pretty sure your timeline is wrong here. I remember the news of the sellout coming in while waiting for my DK2 shipment.
I knew I was gonna get a device which would instantly get obsolete by a move into an Apple style walled garden.
I'm in the process of setting up a W10 box for the sole reason of running MS Flight Simulator 2020 and flyuk.aero with VATSIM.net. Otherwise, it's an Air/M2 for surfing and social, and GNU+Linux for serious stuff.
It’s not Windows. It’s the broken social contract the entire PC industry has in believing it’s ok flood us with ads and surveillance driven “marketing”. Any retail PC is a sewer of bloat and crap ware.
People want low prices, and care about little else. Possibly because it’s simply one of the easiest to understand metrics. How does a Ryzen 4678v compare to an i12363k? I follow computers and have no idea.
Price matters a lot even if you do know all the ultra-technical things.
How do you make computers cheaper than the next guy? Subsidizing. Who will pay? Ads and internet companies.
People complain Apple stuff is overpriced. It’s not subsidized by Intel or AMD or Candy Crush or TMZ.
Yeah they like their profit margins (especially upgrades). But they only shill for themselves (which IS getting annoying). They’re not angels. Still sounds better than that experience to me.
Without a privacy law to make data collection illegal or something to make junk legally easy to remove… this is where the race to the bottom goes.
It’s just like what happened to TVs. You can’t buy a consumer model at any price that doesn’t suck. $4500? Still tracks you and wants to push apps.
I always found it interesting how every business that used to sell a product based on demonstratable customer value and quality user experiences wants to instead cling to the ad industry.
Whether or not there's a little more money to be had there now is somewhat irrelevant. The bigger deal is that advertising is a hyper-fickle industry, very much subject to tossing out babies, bathwater, bathtubs, and entire metropolitan water infrastructures in a single fell swoop. There's a clear and identifiable risk factor here.
Somewhere, at the end of the line, there's someone actually writing checks for to ad service providers, who's going to ask "We're spending (collectively) 829 kazillion dollars to feed these adtech gigaunicorns, basically out of FOMO that we had to be more data-driven than our competitiors. Did this actually move $829 kazillion more Pepsi than just running a 30-second TV spot with a hot boy band would have?"
When the bubble bursts, how many otherwise viable products are going to implode because they've become too financially dependent on ad/data sales, or have become so eroded by the compromises for ads that they won't be able to recover their reputation after the adpocalypse?
Every few months/years we see reports of how the numbers coming out of ad-tech are basically lies. People drastically cutting spending with no impact on things because no one but boys are seeing the ads.
It’s got to pop at some point. Maybe as a side effect of privacy legislation?
When it pops it’s going to be a hell of a wild ride.
> People want low prices, and care about little else
Yeah I mean look at the iPhone, this was key to the success of that product.
Oh wait no, its the opposite and testament that enough people don't just want the cheapest no matter what that a whole extra ecosystem from silicon to apps exists just to satisfy the pent up demand of it.
Just look at Android phones. I really believe that if Linux was dominant what would end up being shipped on these computers would be entirely filled with random crap that someone paid to be there.
This is horribly insecure (unless your system is totally air-gapped), now that 7 is EOL. If you're unwilling to put up with Windows 11, then you should switch to Linux.
That's just a bunch of FUD to keep you on their leash. Security is always an excuse. If you don't do things like downloading and running random executables or letting every site you visit run JS by default, you've already reduced your attack surface to the point of being a non-issue unless you're being specifically targeted. In fact W11 probably has more insecure shit you didn't know about yet.
As much as I also use Linux and advocate its benefits, there's a huge amount of software that still doesn't work right there (even with WINE.)
Windows 7 Extended Security Updates were still there until January 2023, and if you know where to look, there's a guy, I believe he's Ukranian(1), who's been providing the ESU updates for mortals (non-corporate users). But yeah, "Download an EXE provided by a mysterious man to keep your OS 'secure'." isn't really a safe policy.
On the topic of setting up a PC for a kid: I set up Debian for my 9 year old. I put Mate desktop, since I remembered mid 2000s gnome to be ok. She has no complaints about it.
Yup! And it's not even hard or complex. I got my mom running Ubuntu 2 years ago and he's doing great. Word processing in Libreoffice, she can even save a PDF and attach it to email using thunderbird. She's absolutely not by any means a computer power-user. But she's scanning, printing, word processing, browsing the web, watching youtube how-tos about lawn equipment, banking, etc.
I can remote in if needed to show her something, but she doesn't need me to.
It's infuriating how much work one has to do to clean up what should already be a bare-bones, stock, factory environment. All of these 8 kb "apps" like LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. that you "uninstall" but then re-appear right in the Add or Remove Programs menu.
I haven't tried, but what do these little TikTok, LinkedIn apps even do? I imagine they don't install a local version of LinkedIn to peruse, right? I don't totally understand how the economic incentive for MSFT and manufacturers can be high enough to make these actively user-hostile actions worth it.
I installed a fresh copy of windows straight from the official ISO a month or two ago and was bombarded with candy crush, tiktok, CNN, instagram, LinkedIn, etc. It took me a few solid hours to get it out of my way as much as possible.
After that, even on my brand new Ryzen 9, it took 15 seconds to open a web browser. I decided to quit my windows-only games and delete windows in favor of Linux (like usual).
It's not just OEM installs, perhaps you got windows a few versions back and updated it avoiding the new bloatware crap.
I don't have a computing-age child yet, but I aim to steer them down the Linux road. I've been given 3-4 Macbooks over the years which are now far too old to run modern macOS at any reasonable level of performance, but I suspect they will run Ubuntu etc just fine and make a decent first machine. Maybe starting out in this environment will also prompt the same curiosity that I developed which led into confidence/skill/a career, just by having access to settings and the like (which seem to be increasingly stowed away or removed altogether).
I also hope that starting out in Linux instills the same "ugh, GTFO my machine" response in them that I get when I encounter the kind of default/forced cruft the OP did.
Tik Tok and Instagram are not actually installed on Windows 11 by default. They just appear in the Start Menu as logos, because so many people install them manually. They only begin installation once you click on the logos.
I have thought about this myself quite a bit: Should I or should I not filter the world for my kids? Back then, as a kid, computers/Internet allowed me to access an unfiltered world. It was great! I didn’t like adults restricting what information I had or didn’t have, nurturing their own agenda in me. I am leaning to not filter what my kids will have access to... but I suppose this fulfills my agenda.
It feels like the purpose of most communication on the internet has changed from sharing an idea to making a buck.
Dont the big money makers hire psychologists to help them figure out how to 'drive user engagement'?
I feel like there is a difference between letting your kid browse through a library that contains the anarchist cookbook and letting your kid loose in a casino which I think maps to old internet/new internet. Old internet had dangerous information but individuals tended to be treated as an end in themselves, new internet tends to treat individuals as a means to an end.
Setup your 10 year old with bleeding edge Arch Linux, add a script to automatically update nightly (or even hourly lol), and give them a secondary device like a tablet loaded up with access to arch wiki, every man page, etc. but nothing else. They will be an absolute Linux wizard in months and maybe a core contributor soon after.
Computers are tools. You're supposed to learn them because they make you better at something else. There is no virtue in being a Linux wizard; if anything it's a stain on Linux that wizards are even a thing.
Every single time I’ve had to poke around my mom’s computer in the last 20 years I’ve come to the conclusion you need to be a Windows Wizard to do even simplish things.
Sounds like hell. They will quickly be turned away from Linux and want something simpler. Yak-shaving in lieu of work sounds cool, but it sucks when you really need to do stuff other than dick around in the terminal.
My first computer was a Raspberry Pi v1 that I got when I was 9 (now 19). Definitely not the case for me. I became proficient in using Linux very quickly.
Were you running bleeding edge Arch updating every day though? Probably not. An RPi is fine for kids. The original comment suggested the sadistic Arch setup, which would obviously just frustrate most kids at worst, and waste their time and creativity at best.
My father first introduced me to Linux (an installation disc he borrowed from his employer). It didn't work. It just didn't click for me, and I didn't know why my Dad would consist that I use it.
Fast forward a few years a couple of friends around my age introduced me to Linux; it was Ubuntu back when it was hipster and trendy and friendly. I started by dual booting (probably WUBI) and then switched completely.
This is just purely anecdotal, but my conclusion is that it just didn't work when a parent forces a child to do anything. Better to influence the social circle of the child so that the child can be convinced to learn use Linux from friends.
> Sounds like hell. They will quickly be turned away from Linux and want something simpler. Yak-shaving in lieu of work sounds cool, but it sucks when you really need to do stuff other than dick around in the terminal.
Kids did fine with Amiga or Atari ST back in the days. Linux isn't a problem at all, they'll get used to it. And Valve/Steam proton platform allows them to run plenty of games.
> A tiny number of very interested kids did fine, most just ignored computers.
This is false. It didn't take a genius to load a program just by putting a floppy disk into a floppy disk reader. It's even easier with linux. There is nothing difficult with Linux for a kid, nothing that is more complicated than windows.
I’ve run arch and gentoo for years, i’ll be setting up my kid with a mac unless he expresses extreme interest in the depths of linux. Learning linux trivia is misrepresented as virtuous and there are more useful things to do with your time.
When you're a kid it's precisely the time to learn about and deal with all the minutia. Tell them it's like Minecraft but you're building an operating system instead of a world.
Yeah obviously, but as long as the kid is interested in bulding an OS from the ground up, if he wants to do webdev, 3d design, music production, writing or whatever, it's just gonnna be an useless hassle.
And this comes from someone who spent a good amount of his teenage years toying with linux, arch, slackware, lfs, whatever. It was good fun but nowadays I think it was mostly useless and I'd rather had finished dev projects or whatever.
Setting it up for him means passing up on an opportunity for him to learn by doing it himself. Automatic upgrades means passing up on another such opportunity.
Setup your 10 year old with a ChatGPT and Midjourney subscription instead so they become a talented prompt engineer instead of a systems engineering neckbeard.
I naively did something like that with my kid, although nowhere near as extreme. All I achieved was to instantly kill any interest she might have had for learning about tech and computers.
"I have never looked back since. I stopped buying new laptops every few months and got myself a new MacBook every few years instead. I stopped counting crashes and dealing with anti-virus"
This is a quote around them using Win 7/8. There's definitely some hyperbole going on here, because I and many others found Windows 7 to be a relatively stable environment and I say this as a prolific user of Photoshop, visual studio, and ableton.
The idea that he's buying new laptops every few months rather discredits this article. I had a dell Inspiron that lasted about two years, and after that I purchased a IBM T530 that lasted nearly 5 years.
Post Windows 10 LTSC, I've abandoned windows completely though.
I have never had a laptop last less than 3 years. and I would definitely consider myself a power user. wtf is he doing to his laptops that they only last a few months?
The idea that he's buying new laptops every few months rather discredits this article.
I agree that statement in the article was completely ridiculous.
The overarching point though of the over-commercialization of Windows stands as completely legitimate. I've used Windows (and modems) a decade longer than the the OP, have been a fairly strong supporter of Windows but I've about had enough myself.
Microsoft isn't alone in this - Google's constant whining about not using Chrome on their web properties is just as pathetic.
Microsoft, you're worth $2.15 trillion. You are violating your fiduciary duty to shareholders by prioritizing extremely short-term revenue gains over long term viability of the platform. You are jeopardizing that long term viability of the platform by annoying and spying on your user base so you can make pennies from them. It is a veritable "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" situation.
If your home improvement store reintroduced lead and asbestos into the products they sell today, and then created a new premium product line without them, would you pony up for the latter, or would you take your business elsewhere?
Windows 7 was the last possible usable version as far as I´m concerned. When Steam sunsets support in 2024 I´ll most likely switch to Ubuntu. Windows 8-11 are just untenable choices and we should all just realize this.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadHow did the author even get a windows 11 install since they claim they have not used windows since version 8.
Will any win8 laptop even support an upgrade to 11? I doubt it.
Why not get linux running on the old laptop. Mint likely installs just fine.
I'm not saying win 11 is great and frankly none of the systems I have will even install it as they do not meet the requirements just that I find the set up to be sus.
I agree with the article too. Windows is dead.
The blog post doesn't say it was old. Did you misread So far, I have only used it a couple of times to debug old software I wrote long ago that needed some fixes ?
I think it perfectly reasonable to conclude the laptop ran windows 8. Otherwise if it ran windows 10 the author would have said the last time they used windows it was version 10.
No, they say Windows 8 was the last version I used daily.
> Win8 was the last version I used daily. It was when I moved from web development to mobile development, which wasn't (and still isn't) possible to do without a Mac when targeting iOS. One day I decided it would be worth making the switch as I had developed an aversion to the new Metro UI of Windows [8] anyway.
> ...never looked back since. I stopped buying new laptops every few months and got myself a new MacBook every few years instead.
>Win11: ... "I already knew from Win10 that some diagnostics settings could no longer be switched off permanently."
From Microsoft? https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11
Based on their old Windows skills and experience (and having no Linux experience?), they thought they knew what they were going to get with a newer Windows install. The article is all about how shocked they were when they didn't get what they were expecting. I suspect they'll be trying out a Linux distro now though...
That OS is used by millions of people. It is loaded with obnoxious advertising and news. Nothing false in this article. There have been countless complaints about this crap forced into Windows 11.
Windows 11 has a fuckload of problems and is objectively a step or 12 backwards in terms of configurability, but this article doesn't really sell the problems very well IMO.
Doesn't Group Policy only work in Pro, which costs $100 to upgrade to? Even if you're rich enough to afford that without thinking twice, do you really want to reward Microsoft with more money for their bad behavior?
I cant be bothered to upgrade to pro or linux as the machine is just a host for vmware horizons but lets see when the first major update happens.
We give companies too much blame for providing consumers what they want.
MS could do a better job with transparency and control of these features. But i don’t believe the blame is being put in the right place .
also the hyperbole is too much
I'm under 30, and I absolutely do not expect my OS to push this crap on me.
So many times on HN I read about how MacOS is bad for the user, locked down, rubbish etc etc.
But if this article is true then Windows 11 is absolutely insane. That is what anti consumer looks like. Not SIP. Not poor documentation. Not first party apps.
While those of us who use Apple’s OS fear for the worst, those in Windows appear to be receiving it.
(But I definitely agree that news apps have no place on a desktop and I have had very bad news headlines pop up on my kids screens. Please Apple, turn this stupid default off, or give us an option at install time).
It's not an either-or. Both of those are super anti-consumer. If you want an OS without anti-consumer "features", then install Linux.
What kept me from it was not being able to reliably play games, but I can confirm that is no longer a problem.
I can't properly describe how happy this makes me.
I just love Mint, but I think any Debian based distro should work just fine for playing.
I have settled on Linux Mint. It just works, and looks good.
From one "filthy casual" to another...
I used Ubuntu for a while, but fell in love with Mint. I really like how the interface looks, and how things are organized very intuitively. It feels so unfair to use it for free thay I donated 20 bucks, just to show appreciation.
Honestly, easily beats Windows or Mac OS for me.
Began with Red Hat 5. Moved on to Slackware for my server at the time, and Debian for workstations (I also had various MacOS machines as well). Dabbled with Arch for a few years and Manjaro. Recently, I sold all of my Apple equipment and standardized on...Linux Mint.
Mint + Cinnamon DE is simply amazing and even with lower specs on the current laptop I'm running (Thinkpad T460S vs. Apple MBP 2019 i9), the difference is stark. Not to mention rock-solid stable.
No going back for me.
Otherwise, Steam doesn't really emulate anything, it just reimplements Windows API calls, so games run roughly as efficiently as they do on Windows.
I'm assuming this statement is referring to the large amount of software that is Windows only on Steam and runs in a compatibility layer on Linux, rather than Steam itself.
This really isn't that big a deal vs "native" for Steam on Linux and it's getting even less so with time - the Steam Deck mobile console and other x86 handhelds use the exact same Proton tech to run Windows games under Linux on a pretty small ~40Wh battery.
Power consumption of the Proton compatibility layer isn't really any better or worse than running native in my experience - its a wash.
Steam uses a compatibility layer called Proton to run Windows games under Linux. Running the games that way is not significantly worse. It can get the same or even better performance (but sure, sometimes worse) and will affect battery life pretty much exactly as if running the game via Windows on the Laptop.
Proton is based on Wine, and Wine is not an emulator. Translating the calls does not make them heavier.
What do you mean by this?
a) Not all Steam games are on Proton [https://www.protondb.com/]
b) Not all Steam games that are on Proton run efficiently without tweaks e.g. one that I found unplayable due to overheats (on MacOS) was Sid Meier’s Civilization VI [https://www.protondb.com/app/289070]
c) Not all Steam games where you had the pre-Proton version installed, download the right version update. See Steam's forums, people saying disable Steamplay; and have to do that globally, not per-game.
d) In addition, I found the Steam updater daemon (interacting with MacOS Mojave Quarantine) also burned power like no tomorrow.
Void would be a better choice if liking simplicity. Or to keep it simple, maybe Pop!_OS. Or Debian. Or Arch. Pretty much everything not Alpine ;)
I certainly would never use Alpine for gaming, any more than I’d use OpenBSD. I don’t use it for multimedia, either.
My normal setup is i3 on Alpine. I like to think I have a good understanding of how an Alpine system is built up via its install scripts and maintained by its packaging system.
There’s not a lot of cruft lying around that I don’t need and didn’t request.
That’s what I intended by using the word “simplicity”.
Why would you think that Debian and Void are simpler systems than Alpine? They are much larger.
Almost everything related to gaming worked but I did have problems.
Under X11 + Gnome, fractional scaling was pretty badly broken for some things, especially the Steam app. X11 + KDE fixed that issue.
Under X11 + KDE with hybrid graphics mode (automatically use APU for light tasks, dedicated GPU for games), the laptop's brightness controls were totally inoperable. I tried to research this but could not find a working solution. If brightness was problematic enough, I could pick one of the fixed graphic modes and log out and back in - mostly I left it near or at 100% and didn't touch it.
One game (Anno 1800) would not connect to multiplayer, but works completely under Windows.
Hogwart's Legacy ran horribly and was unstable in Linux Mint. It ran with much higher quality/performance and 100% stability under Windows.
Other games like ARK, Conan, Valheim, StarCraft 2 (using non-Steam Proton), Deep Rock Galactic all ran identically (from what I can tell) to Windows.
Also about 50% of the time, booting would hang for Linux Mint and I'd have to hard-reboot, probably pick an older kernel to boot into, and then I could reboot and go back to the latest kernel (a minor release under Linux 5.15). Fortunately rebooting is mostly infrequent.
Overall it wasn't quite in a state I was comfortable with, so I'm back to Windows 10, which is much better than Windows 11 (or much less bad?).
Do you think this is because it's new? If I could only play games with a year or two delay that would be fine. Cheaper too.
It's very rare for me to even buy a new game (unless it's a $20 early access game) but my spouse was very excited for it and I wanted to play alongside. (It's not multiplayer but we can still talk about the parts we've played.)
But there are other options like Xfce, and there are quite a few variants, like Cinnamon, MATE, i3, etc. [0]
I still think Windows 10 looks and feels relatively polished (if you don't dig too deep and see just how many iterations they've gone through and still haven't gone back to fix.) I think Windows 11 feels a bit goofy - like they are trying for polish now, but it's in that modern overly spaced out and flat look that I can't seem to appreciate.
I found Linux Mint Cinnamon to be quite nice, and KDE is really nice in my opinion. More consistent than Windows in some ways.
[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/gnome/
Ditto, I am not an average user, but Windows was only really good on Windows 7, and I never really liked Mac OS (use it at work as a MCB is the laptop they issued for me)
Windows 11 and Windows 10 with the last updates as well are just awful in terms of UI; the UX works more or less alright, but many of the default applications, and specially the settings, control panel, etc. are just an inconsistent mess, awful flat UI without any kind of colors, etc.
Mac is much nicer, nicer fonts, colors, overall look although personally I can't stand the UX too much (specially in terms of window management) apps are usually great tho.
I'd very much rather use something like Kubuntu or Pop_OS, Cinnamon works fine as well, honestly nowadays they just work and are usually better off than Windows by default.
The whole GTK2/3, now 4? and KDE, Plasma, Kirigami, what have you nowadays, isn't an inconsistent mess? I was using Linux (fedora 37) recently and it was not a consistent experience, either.
If anything, W11 is more consistent across all applications even if the settings/control panel have a weird Jekyll/Hyde personality to it at times.
Have you used gnome shell in the last five years?
My desktop experience on Linux is so clean. Everything is a "windows" key press away. I hit they then enter the first characters of the program name. It's all composited and GPU accelerated too, and interaction is instantaneous.
Almost anything that needs additional polish is on the web and looks the same on every computer...
For me, what seems janky is stuff with the systems on MacOS (planned hardware obsolescence = jank, batteries that die after a predetermined number of years, expanding until they break the motherboard = jank) or the user treatment and configuration of Windows (the article in question gives a lovely example of windows jank). In short, being treated like a consumer = jank. I can't understand how anyone puts up with it, much less says "polished" when referring to it. But I'll admit I'm weird!
Visual Studio has had free express editions, before community was introduced, since 2010.
Even those express editions were more feature rich than GNOME tooling.
Trying to force a UNIX shaped build environment and development setup into a Windows shaped hole on the other hand can be a pain.
> Isn’t Android Linux?
Yes, but it isn't good, especially not in the ways that desktop Linux is good.
Reminder: this thread is about avoiding anti-consumer behavior from manufacturers. Android is practically useless for that.
Still, I wish we could get better hardware and the software support definitely still has growing to do. And I understand those who feel like it's not a viable option for them yet, but do want to switch in the future— because that's kinda where I'm still at myself, even though I have one of those devices.
They are a lot better in some ways, but I think much of the issue is present in the kernel alone, where dependency on binary blobs and proprietary drivers means kernels are frozen in place forever.
The issue is software freedom in general, beyond just the missing parts of the desktop Linux software stack that we know and love, like our package managers, GNU utilities, Wayland, systemd, etc.
Android is a mess of propietary blobs that runs Linux, but Linux isn't its OS.
There are much more time efficient operating systems than Linux, Windows or macOS.
Here's Lars Brinkhoff studying to become a 10x programmer:
https://twitter.com/larsbrinkhoff/status/1642569175657771009
Surely the time spent installing, configuring, and messing around with your personal desktop or laptop after already having paid for a complete OS is tantamount to buying a prebuilt PC, taking it apart, and putting it back together with a few missing screws.
Zero is still greater than any negative number.
An operating system that lets you waste less money, means that you will save money. Saving money is what can make purchasing something worth it.
Phrased another way, you're paying more for a limited set of tools, it's not that you must spend $1000 worth of man hours to configure the minutiae of a Linux system, it's that exploring 100% of the configuration options on Mac (or even windows to a lesser extent) is so limited you only have $200 man hours of total possible configuration space.
Confusing analogy aside, you just have less possible room to move and thus people spend less time moving. That doesn't mean you must move on Linux, just that you have the freedom to do so.
Various Linux distros still have ways to go in terms of polish and stability - but, anecdotally, the only times my Arch + KDE failed were when I did stupid things and went too far with tinkering without thinking.
Not only you're paying Windows but you have to waste time to disable its antifeatures..
Back in February I decided to try Linux Mint again, and this time it worked, and I haven't switched back to Windows yet. I think Linux is starting to get good, even for someone like me, who doesn't want to become a part-time Linux admin.
(Your joke still made me laugh, for the record)
For now. A year ago, I predicted that this will change within 10 years, and I still stand by what I said then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067592
That’s like saying air bags are anti-consumer. Two differences between air bags and SIP: Consumers don’t know SIP exists, and anyone savvy enough to understand the esoteric reasons for needing to disable SIP can do that.
B. This is actually platform consistency for iOS developers. If you are building an iOS app, you should be fairly comfortable knowing it will be running on a locked-down device, particularly if it’s a social media app with anti-robot technologies. You shouldn’t need to engineer around macOS blowing a hole in that security. If you could run iOS apps on macOS without SIP, what is iOS security good for again?
This issue is made worse by every hardware vendor needing to install their own bulky applications with their own popups. It's extremely noisy.
My main take is that Microsoft has lost all pride in Windows and they're uninterested in actually competing.
Most games now just work
Here are all the games I play regularly with no problem:
- League of Legends
- Counter-Strike Global Offensive
- Apex Legends
- VRChat
- Civilization VI
- Factorio
- RimWorld
- Path of Exile
- Skyrim
- Final Fantasy XIV
And my performance is usually better.
I'm not gonna read your comment and be like "omg he's right. my linux install sucks. back to winblows". I used to constantly wrestle with my Windows install and now I wrestle with my Linux install less.
- These companies will send cease-and-desist letters to cheat makers instead of working to detect their cheats (Joduska.me ceased operations due to a Riot C&D, and Bossland GmbH was actually sued and lost). If these cheats were instead detected and users banned on a continuous basis, no lawsuits would be needed.
- CS:GO implemented (as in, almost a decade ago) an "Overwatch" review system to allow players to review potential cheaters and have a consensus on whether or not cheating is likely. Valve is knows to be very relaxed on VAC - and knowing the company culture @ Valve being what it is, these ban waves probably only happen when one of the seniors @ Valve gets killed by a cheater in-game themselves and tasks someone with implementing some detection mechanism into VAC. Only recently (~4 years ago) has valve supposedly started to incorporate more advanced automatic detection and punishment systems[0], but at the time it wasn't doing anything about wallhacks and at auto-headshot cheats tend to be pretty good at adding enough noise to make it look very close to what professionals can do and thus these cases still end up in the overwatch queue (and note that this system probably hasn't been iterated on much; Valve doesn't do dedicated teams that own specific products).
Of course, there is no hard evidence for the actual number of cheaters in all of these games. But my point isn't that Linux is the vehicle or platform cheats are used on, just that a video game without a rigorous cheat detection system is more likely to open up their attack surface to other platforms. Valorant still has firepower behind it, so while there are cheats, Riot is invested in keeping it Windows-only to ensure they don't incidentally have to split their resources between detecting cheats and hardening their executables on Linux and Windows at the same time.
0: https://youtu.be/SnRgW54EWwA?t=299
You are thinking of getting the Windows version of EAC working. EAC has had a wine version for a long time. EAC will detect if you are using wine and try and download the wine version.
Do you know any recent articles or blog posts summarizing the state of affairs with competitive multiplayer games rn?
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/
GloriousEggroll is a Red Hat employee who works on the proton compatibility layer full time. He typically posts his progress on Twitter and will have world first screenshots of certain games working. His Twitter is a good resource.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/31046...
This is one of those cases where you need to vote with your money and stop supporting studios that are hostile to Linux. I actively avoid all Bungie titles for this reason.
On windows a closed-source driver that can utilize and scan for anomalies in reverse engineered undocumented internal kernel structures is feasible. If you want to do something similar on linux you need to find a reverse engineer that has never laid eyes on linux kernel sources(good luck with that), have them reverse engineer and take very detailed notes on relevant kernel structures and functions, and then find a software developer that has also never laid eyes on kernel sources to write a driver according to those notes. Needless to say, this takes a fair amount of time and therefore money.
The alternatives are to implement your detections in usermode, where they can easily be fed false information from the kernel, or to publish the source code for your detections making them almost worthless.
Cheat developers have it much easier, they do not give a fuck about licensing and will just read kernel sources and ship a closed source driver, or ship a hypervisor that tampers with kernel data structures that they are able to just copy and paste out of the sources.
I've been a Linux user for 20 years so I don't know.
The rising prevalence of comments like this is concerning, and I’m worried this indicates the existence of a large number people using AI this way that don’t warn us.
ChatGPT was trained on data from 2021 and earlier, and tends to hallucinate. It's not a reliable or original source.
Or are Microsoft double dipping?
Most people don't pay this - and I don't mean buying keys from lower-buying-power countries, I mean that anyone with a gaming laptop (which is a 2x bigger market than desktop[0]) is really only paying maybe $50 for Windows since Dell/Alienware, Acer, etc get very large volume licensing discounts.
0: "In 2021, gaming notebooks are forecast to account for nearly 43 percent of shipments in the global gaming PC market, with gaming desktops making up 27 percent of shipments. In 2025, the shipment share of gaming notebooks is expected to grow to 46 percent globally." https://www.statista.com/statistics/1119850/gaming-pc-market...
This is true. However, I have to say I still dislike the (kind of) double charging of selling the OS as a product and using it for advertising. The position Microsoft has allows them to both sell the cow and have the milk but that doesn't make it seem like a fair deal.
Discounts for Windows licenses to OEMs have been a thing for decades (maybe always?), yet Windows was still seen as one of Microsoft's crown jewels and an important business, and Microsoft didn't exactly go bankrupt.
Filling a paid product with advertising and monetized data collection just seems like a cheap move, even if the product is sold at significantly less than the list price in most cases.
Microsoft has not had the need to compete on the merits of their software for very long, and this is really by design.
In the corporate world they sell to people who can't make informed choices and will never be held accountable for the choices they make.
In the home market they mange to get pre-installed on most hardware.
I doubt I'll go to Mac, I'm just not a fan, so looking at different linux options, even though I barely do any coding anymore.
Windows used to have bloatware and shareware, but I never felt it was in your face like it is now.
But it really is the volume of advertising and crap that has gone into Windows 11 which is why I've stayed on 10 and am avoiding upgrading.
It still tries to move you to 11, big You Have Free Upgrade window on startup. I declined maybe 4 times already. It still shows.
Im totally a MacOS fan, i use Linux daily but only for my servers. Windows in on my gaming PC.
Now this comes by default with windows. I think Microsoft too is feeling the blandness of its product without vendor crapware.
Back in the Windows 8 days, Microsoft had a few physical mall shops trying to capture some of the Apple Store magic. One of their selling points was "Signature PCs"-- guaranteed to have nothing on there but Windows and drivers, no vendor bloat.
Strange they don't recognize the spam when it's coming from inside the ~~house~~ multinational.
there is no reason to keep using a walled, closed desktop OS in the 2020s
OS agnosticism isn't just webapps taking over. Docker is making development from the ground up be OS agnostic.
I see this in my personal life as well. Every day I use MacOS, Linux, and Windows -- OS doesn't really matter much anymore to me.
Docker is not really OS agnostic, on macOS or Windows it involves some kind of Linux VM.
20 years ago I was on FreeBSD and it was fine. But as laptops became mainstream, and even the main linux distros were completely impractical.
Now we have really good linux laptops, but tablet form computers are maturing and we're starting to see very good ones, and linux support is still generations behind (heck, windows support is still meh)
I'd expect linux to be viable there in 4 or 5 years, when the dust settles, but then will the compatibility extend to the machines on the better form factors of that time ?
Basically "the year of linux on the desktop" meme has stopped being about sheer viability and more about what you're willing to give up to keep using linux. As long as it doesn't become the primary target of the more innovative hardware makers out there, I wouldn't expect to solve this situation anytime soon.
The frame laptop is a move in that direction.
I think Microsoft might have hired too many people who were familiar with other operating systems, resulting in a Windows 11 that actually manages to implement their vision.
It's just the last few versions have really gone to shit. I saw a link to some comment on HN where someone on the Windows team was posting about how all the Apple users got hired and kept trying to make 11 like MacOS, and the seasoned Windows people were losing fights and just quitting. That explains a lot.
Windows 10 / 11 let marketing be stupid and added things like Candy Crush, etc. I'm not a fan and wish they had done different. There are things to "like" about windows - backward compatibility being one that has been pretty amazing.
The general advice I got was to start with a debloating program [0], especially for people new to the platform.
My take is, Windows 11's lows are really low. Having to debloat is one thing, the overall mild bugginess is another (everything kinda only works 99% of the time, that 1% of FU doesn't seem to disappear). Then the arcane science of digging through old layers to resurect past UIs that are still more powerful than the newer ones.
On the other side the highs are way way higher. People stick with all the crap because that's the only path to where they want to go.
[0] https://github.com/builtbybel/BloatyNosy
I miss the consistency that I had with Windows 7 (renaming a file anywhere with the F2 key), but those days are over.
With Mac I still don't know what the Mac / option / control / fn / shift keys mean and can't remember keyboard shortcuts, so I'm much more dependent on the touchpad, but at least the touchpad is awesome.
No doubt you've all noticed how your carefully crafted config gets trashed by routine window's updates %#%$$#%#! If you use windows, you're pushing against a company that 1) you've given complete control of your computer, and 2) has very different intentions and priorities to you.
Of course that requires getting Windows Pro or better, but that's becoming a must anyways, Windows Home just keeps getting worse with every update. Luckily the upgrade is only about $20 (using the unofficial key reseller of your choice).
No OS brings enough of a difference these days that it’s worth suffering an adversarial relationship with.
(I, will, of course, be put in my place by everyone who is ready to chime in that if I just change <some immutable aspect of my expectations>, then <their OS of choice is going to be a perfect fit for me>.
For me, either Mac or Linux works just fine, no fighting required. I am just not that special.
I don't click on shit in the start menu, I don't play Solitaire, and I have way more important things to get upset over.
Anyway, my biggest issue with Windows that pushed me away was the feeling of loosing control, caused by settings constantly being undone. So I solved it by dumping Windows.
By the sounds of it, you are still happy with it, so cool.
Can't speak to 11 but I imagine it's the same; GPOs are one of the few things Microsoft wants to make sure never break with an update given the market that uses them.
Did you know you can't set your login wallpaper without an enterprise or education license via GPO? It won't tell you that's the problem when it doesn't work but it is at least documented in the GPO itself - so you need to notice that a pretty basic feature is POSH license only. I'm one of those rare people who actually read messages and docs and hence I eventually spotted it when roughly 20 people diagnosing a snag had not. I'm also the PHB (actually I have very little hair) so, in your face: Dilbert.
Features that are offered but silently fail is wankery of the first order to add to your flipping back of settings - hello again Edge you fucking numpty!
I can't stand when I type app name (e.g paint or vs) and it appears but click needs like 5-10 sec to be registered
what the hell
It worked perfectly fine on Win10 on the same hardware (my OS has been updated recently either automatically or by company).
I'd call Windows 11 pretty OK once you tweak one or two things in register settings, maybe the lack of right click menu on task bar sucks (e.g show desktop), but search being slow is ridiculous, it should be blazingly fast
Try the same thing on 10 or 11 and you're probably going to end up with a new edge window running a Bing search.
Argh.
You can disable it (there are lots of articles all over) but the sheer scale of the problem makes these mitigations rather unreliable.
On the other side of the one-way mirror, there's this thing called Kusto which lets you sort of surf through someone's sessions, at least for the web apps. Someone brilliant in my unit hooked it up with emojis, which you could read in columns; it was very nearly like those columns of green figures in _the Matrix_, but, you know, with emojis. Just scan down from top to bottom; dude opens file... dude renames file... dude copies file... dude wanders away for 15 min... etc
Because EU regs, we can't see PII, but frankly if you named your folder 'Bob Bobberson's Bobfiles' whoever is on DRI is seeing your name. "Don't name your folder your name," we always said, to our customers. They always did anyway.
This was always uncomfortable but since the political breakdown has progressed, I've started to worry that these reams of data will either (a) be seen by some True Believer for one side or another or (b) quietly collected by the usual (legal) means, by a federal agency that is itself compromised.
This is in the context where there are literally states with bounty programmes for e.g. people seeking (or helping) women get abortions. How long is it until $10K sounds good enough to a disgruntled layoff-rattled rank-and-file? What happens if those programmes are expanded to include other things? What if you had a folder named, say, "Getting my wife TF out of TX?" What if you did five years ago? Think it through.
The worst part is I'm sure it's no different anywhere else, in 2023, at least so far as commercial apps go. Even some FOSS stuff like Audacity.
That's why I run OpenBSD and NixOS, and have even managed to wean myself off VSC.
I definitely did not enjoy seeing the sausage be made.
It’s astonishing: they’re clearly working on it, making material changes, but only ever sideways. I’ve never observed an improvement.
To those people that say “version x has worked”: I doubt it. Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu. Maybe you just got used to what search terms work, and forgot about it. But I assure you that it has never “just worked”.
I still have a habit of searching for “management” in the start menu because if I type “SQL”, it won’t ever find “SQL Management Studio”.
Yet another beef of mine. The Search Indexer runs frequently, chews up a lot of CPU, and always engages my fans into turbo mode. I know that 99% of my files at any given moment are identical to the last month. Windows, you have all the hooks to know the last time a file was modified. Stop re-scanning everything forever.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/chang...
I have the same set of files on two machines and its actually faster for me to turn to the mac, search on there to find where the file will be on my windows machine than to watch the windows search churn away for minutes only to not find it.
Not to mention if it does find it there is this obtuse dance you have to do to get it to actually open the containing folder in a way thats navigable because the search results are all fake shortcut links or something that burn the path hierarchy. Rolls my eyes every time I bump into that.
0 - https://fluentsearch.net/
Except that Windows updates will turn the stuff back on over time, so I'm not sure about 'effortlessly'.
I look vaguely fondly back on XP, 98, and 95… but at least, XP was pretty bad with frequent crashes. And of course the idea of security was added on afterwards, which was not really successful and kind of a dumb idea.
Anyway I think the death-date of Windows is essentially a personal thing. It is the first day you look at it with at all a critical eye.
I got even games from other stores that don't officially support Proton (such as GoG) to work with the help of Lutris.
If Windows for you is just a console, might be time to re-evaluate on that.
I don't even hate Windows btw. I was using 10 and it worked mostly fine to my tastes, especially with WSL. But Linux is just so much better in every way.
This would have been more than a decade ago, so I believe you if you say it is pretty good nowadays. Might check back. I know Discord runs OK on Linux.
Now I can just play the Windows version through Proton. I hope that if Linux gains traction Proton becomes unnecessary, but I'm happy that Proton came as far as it is. Honestly, to play old Windows games it is probably better than Windows.
A few games required some minor tinkering to work, but have been pretty smooth here. If you enjoy playing the latest AAA (that probably takes a while until it gets supported), I would say that you'd better stay on Windows. Otherwise, Linux is more than a viable alternative right now.
With dx12 and vulkan its mostly up to what platforms do you want to support. As they do things quite similar. While you need vulkan for switch you need dx for Xbox. PS has its own API.
Tldr opengl is mostly irrelevant today for bigger titles and that's not what's blocking titles from supporting Linux.
Once that happens I can bin Windows off for good.
I wonder if Linux is a fundamentally much better platform for VR than windows? The problems are mostly latency related, right? And the openness of the platform means that Valve can really tinker to their hearts’ content.
No Oculus headsets shipped to consumers until after the acquisition by Facebook. The DK1 from the Kickstarter started shipping a few days after the acquisition.
>I wonder if Linux is a fundamentally much better platform for VR than windows?
The most popular OS for VR is the one running on the Quest headsets and uses Linux. For quickly evolving technology like VR I believe Linux is a better fit, but in the long run I don't think it's a fundamentally better base.
>The problems are mostly latency related, right?
Latency isn't a big issue with VR due to reprojection and latency is important for normal games too. The amount of people on Windows who want lower latency for FPS games far outnumber the people who want low latency for VR. For VR you are likely just talking to the graphics driver and can bypass the operating systems compositer with your own.
Pretty sure your timeline is wrong here. I remember the news of the sellout coming in while waiting for my DK2 shipment.
I knew I was gonna get a device which would instantly get obsolete by a move into an Apple style walled garden.
Maybe some car racing, too, later....
Price matters a lot even if you do know all the ultra-technical things.
How do you make computers cheaper than the next guy? Subsidizing. Who will pay? Ads and internet companies.
People complain Apple stuff is overpriced. It’s not subsidized by Intel or AMD or Candy Crush or TMZ.
Yeah they like their profit margins (especially upgrades). But they only shill for themselves (which IS getting annoying). They’re not angels. Still sounds better than that experience to me.
Without a privacy law to make data collection illegal or something to make junk legally easy to remove… this is where the race to the bottom goes.
It’s just like what happened to TVs. You can’t buy a consumer model at any price that doesn’t suck. $4500? Still tracks you and wants to push apps.
Whether or not there's a little more money to be had there now is somewhat irrelevant. The bigger deal is that advertising is a hyper-fickle industry, very much subject to tossing out babies, bathwater, bathtubs, and entire metropolitan water infrastructures in a single fell swoop. There's a clear and identifiable risk factor here.
Somewhere, at the end of the line, there's someone actually writing checks for to ad service providers, who's going to ask "We're spending (collectively) 829 kazillion dollars to feed these adtech gigaunicorns, basically out of FOMO that we had to be more data-driven than our competitiors. Did this actually move $829 kazillion more Pepsi than just running a 30-second TV spot with a hot boy band would have?"
When the bubble bursts, how many otherwise viable products are going to implode because they've become too financially dependent on ad/data sales, or have become so eroded by the compromises for ads that they won't be able to recover their reputation after the adpocalypse?
It’s got to pop at some point. Maybe as a side effect of privacy legislation?
When it pops it’s going to be a hell of a wild ride.
Yeah I mean look at the iPhone, this was key to the success of that product.
Oh wait no, its the opposite and testament that enough people don't just want the cheapest no matter what that a whole extra ecosystem from silicon to apps exists just to satisfy the pent up demand of it.
Wintel computers are a dime a dozen. And with little else to differentiate them price seems to have quickly become the prime factor for many people.
As much as I also use Linux and advocate its benefits, there's a huge amount of software that still doesn't work right there (even with WINE.)
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/u...
(1) The EXEs are signed with a digital signature where the signer's address is Kherson, Ukraine.
I used all Windows versions over all these years, but even my patience is wearing thin.
Search, Bing, search, Bing! In every effing square inch of screen real estate they can get their hands on.
I can remote in if needed to show her something, but she doesn't need me to.
I haven't tried, but what do these little TikTok, LinkedIn apps even do? I imagine they don't install a local version of LinkedIn to peruse, right? I don't totally understand how the economic incentive for MSFT and manufacturers can be high enough to make these actively user-hostile actions worth it.
Maybe I'm cynical or naive
After that, even on my brand new Ryzen 9, it took 15 seconds to open a web browser. I decided to quit my windows-only games and delete windows in favor of Linux (like usual).
It's not just OEM installs, perhaps you got windows a few versions back and updated it avoiding the new bloatware crap.
I also hope that starting out in Linux instills the same "ugh, GTFO my machine" response in them that I get when I encounter the kind of default/forced cruft the OP did.
News on search bar cannot be defended though.
Dont the big money makers hire psychologists to help them figure out how to 'drive user engagement'?
I feel like there is a difference between letting your kid browse through a library that contains the anarchist cookbook and letting your kid loose in a casino which I think maps to old internet/new internet. Old internet had dangerous information but individuals tended to be treated as an end in themselves, new internet tends to treat individuals as a means to an end.
Linux stuff, no problem.
Really depends on what you’re used to, I suppose.
Fast forward a few years a couple of friends around my age introduced me to Linux; it was Ubuntu back when it was hipster and trendy and friendly. I started by dual booting (probably WUBI) and then switched completely.
This is just purely anecdotal, but my conclusion is that it just didn't work when a parent forces a child to do anything. Better to influence the social circle of the child so that the child can be convinced to learn use Linux from friends.
Kids did fine with Amiga or Atari ST back in the days. Linux isn't a problem at all, they'll get used to it. And Valve/Steam proton platform allows them to run plenty of games.
A tiny number of very interested kids did fine, most just ignored computers.
This is false. It didn't take a genius to load a program just by putting a floppy disk into a floppy disk reader. It's even easier with linux. There is nothing difficult with Linux for a kid, nothing that is more complicated than windows.
And this comes from someone who spent a good amount of his teenage years toying with linux, arch, slackware, lfs, whatever. It was good fun but nowadays I think it was mostly useless and I'd rather had finished dev projects or whatever.
Setting it up for him means passing up on an opportunity for him to learn by doing it himself. Automatic upgrades means passing up on another such opportunity.
Not a good way to start.
This is a quote around them using Win 7/8. There's definitely some hyperbole going on here, because I and many others found Windows 7 to be a relatively stable environment and I say this as a prolific user of Photoshop, visual studio, and ableton.
The idea that he's buying new laptops every few months rather discredits this article. I had a dell Inspiron that lasted about two years, and after that I purchased a IBM T530 that lasted nearly 5 years.
Post Windows 10 LTSC, I've abandoned windows completely though.
I agree that statement in the article was completely ridiculous.
The overarching point though of the over-commercialization of Windows stands as completely legitimate. I've used Windows (and modems) a decade longer than the the OP, have been a fairly strong supporter of Windows but I've about had enough myself.
Microsoft isn't alone in this - Google's constant whining about not using Chrome on their web properties is just as pathetic.
Microsoft, you're worth $2.15 trillion. You are violating your fiduciary duty to shareholders by prioritizing extremely short-term revenue gains over long term viability of the platform. You are jeopardizing that long term viability of the platform by annoying and spying on your user base so you can make pennies from them. It is a veritable "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" situation.
I've used xfce as my desktop for the last decade or so, before that it was fluxbox/blackbox, and before that enlightenment.
Looking at other people's screens at FOSDEM there's till plenty of choice in UI