There was a popular discussion thread yesterday on the steps Google took to ruin search (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976) I see a lot of parallels to how Microsoft is ruining Windows. I used to love Windows and it had a profound impact on my life. However, now that it’s in late stage enshitification, I am doing everything possible to avoid using it. It’s astonishing how Microsoft keeps making Windows worse. They just need to leave it alone and keep patching security updates.
This unfortunately overwhelms 90% of users already. Ok, Debian. But what is KDE or Xface? Why do I have to choose? How do I choose? What's the difference? And so on.
Its not fine, and similar statements make situation much worse, since some actually believe it and then get bad disappointment and never look back at the choice
Well, this depends on your point of view. GNU/Linux has been very fine for more than a decade now, but it obviously is not a MS Windows clone. Not because it is less capable -- quite to the contrary -- but because it is less opinionated how things should be.
Now I could go into a rant about tradeoffs and choices and how freedom is hard and so on, but I don't feel like it.
"Linux"? You mean the thousands of different operating systems, each with their own GUI, package manager and often incompatible software? Never running out of the box - because of some weird bug or lack of support for the specific hardware you happen to have? If you run some headless server it's fine but not for desktop computing.
I switched to macOS in 2020. This feels more-and-more like a good choice. I rather pay a (hardware) premium and at least be treated as a customer then as a cash cow.
Apple seems to be doing the best thing too and mostly leaving macOS alone and letting it just be quietly competent. It’s an… OS, with a nice UI, that… works!
Linux can do the same thing. The Linux desktop can beat Windows just by sitting still while MS destroys its product.
Advertising an Apple-owned app within another Apple-owned app is not the same as Microsoft putting 3rd party ads in the primary interface for launching applications in the OS.
It’s an Ad. They’re not physically, emotionally, a psychologically damaging you.
You literally agree to all of this when accepting the windows license. Use osx or Linux if you don’t like it. Don’t just shout “RAPE” on the internet because a company is showing you ads.
> They’re not physically, emotionally, a psychologically damaging you.
I contest this claim. Ads create envy, which create overconsumption, which leads to environmental degradation. Furthermore ads which try not to look like ads tend to take advantage of people who are not smart. Also, things that are given away for free, but ad-supported, have been shown to create market distortions where "you are the product", and also facilitate loss of privacy through ad-driven surveillance and shady data-broker deals.
Windows 11 is only marginally worse than the baseline terrible set by 10. They screwed up the UI again and continued gradually ratcheting up Microsoft account requirements and new ads. If 11 hadn't have been released the later items would have just come to Windows 10 in the form of a feature update.
10 was full of spyware from the outset but for some reason people argue that it is better than 11 in this regard in a weird bit of revisionist history. The biggest problem with Windows 11 is it dumps hardware support for anything remotely old.
Personally, I think Windows 10 is the exception to this pattern. I don't think that it counts as a "good" release -- it just got rid of a couple of the more horrific aspects of 8. That said, I haven't been forced to use it yet, but it does look like Win 11 will be even worse than 10.
Agreed. Back when windows 10 was out, 8.1 was considered a good release and 10 was considered a bad release. Now 10 has suddenly become good somehow, and 8.1has been lumped in with 8.
I don't personally know anyone who considered 8.1 to be a good release. It was welcome because it did blunt a couple of the more egregious sharp edges of 8, but that doesn't mean it was anywhere near good.
Agreed. But people hated 10 more than 8.1, so they labeled 10 as a bad release and 8.1 as a good release so that the pattern could fit. Now that people hate 11 more than 10, people say that 10 was good so that the pattern can fit.
I don't see why everyone expects Win12 to be a good version.
Why would they go back on all the new user hostile changes? It's not like you're paying for the OS - they'll want to extract value from you somehow.
Right now it looks like Win12 will just be Win11, but with more integrated "AI"-stuff.
There’s a history of alternating between bad and good versions as they push bad ideas then back off and polish up the important stuff. Of course, there’s no guarantees that the pattern will continue
I've heard good things about the Chris Titus Tech winutil. I've also used O&O shutup 10 and it lets you disable a lot: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Tiny10 and Tiny11 were debloated stand-alone ISO's by a developer who chose some of the most despised default features & apps, and removed them in advance from the install media. Based on media from recent years these are still available, but appear to have been surpassed by the more versatile "Builder" approach where you can do more of a personal selection of extraneous features to retain or eliminate.
So now it's "Tiny11 Builder" which is like a template script you select your features from, and you have to supply your own Windows ISO which you download from Microsoft:
After the process is complete you end up with your own custom Tiny11 ISO, debloated according to the Powershell builder script.
Using your Tiny11 ISO no differently than the original ISO from Microsoft, you can then clean-install that same debloated version on target PC's instead.
Once installed, it does have a smaller resource footprint, but this is Windows 11 so it's never going to be exactly "tiny".
Alternatively, Ameliorated seems to have taken a similar path to Tiny11, also for Windows 10 as well:
The more desirable upgrade from Win10 is Linux 6.8. With proton and the game emulation ecosystem built by Valve there’s really no reason left to run Windows.
The tyranny of the default. As others have said: consent. When they bought their computer, it looked like normal windows and now it's CRAZY WINDOWS being pushed on non technical users. Dump it.
Due to these changed I've reverted to Windows 10. W10 feels like an "adult" OS in comparison, free of frills and distractions. W11 is an experimental sandbox.
I hope my question is not too trite, I am asking here in case others benefit: I have been running Linux exclusively for over 10 years now, and I need to set up a Win10/11 environment for my sister. To that end, I installed Win10 offline in a VM with virt-manager, but I do not have an activation key. Or rather, I have several coming from old computers of mine, but I am not sure if they are valid; I don't use those computers any more.
So, here I am, with a Win10 VM at my fingertips. Do you have any advice or suggestions on how to tweak or configure the machine or the installation, preferably in such a way that gives me control over what the OS does? One interesting example is, can I configure the network to discard stuff sent to Microsoft servers with minimal disruption?
I'm not sure what your question is exactly. If you want to bypass the activation, google Windows MAS. But Microsoft also offers a VM version for evaluation purposes[1]
Beyond that, there are also custom versions of Windows that come preconfigured with the bloat and spyware removed. I've been using ReviOS[2] on a mini gaming PC for the past year and have had no issues so far.
Upcomming, windows 12 will end up being a down-payment with “seasons” subscription to keep using the software fully. And micro transactions like “the ability to open documents in notepad the next two hours”,
But on the plus side they’ll have daily reward loot boxes that give you a new PowerPoint or word document or similar valuable offerings.
It’s not enough for HN readers to move to Linux. We need to influence the casual computer users we know to also try it, or at least have them move to Apple to hit Microsoft’s bottom line and force them to change course.
I no longer give advice or encouragement for people to use or not use any particular OS. What I started doing years ago was to tell friends and family that I don't use Windows (true, at home. Not true, at work) and can't provide any real tech support to them. If they use Linux or BSD, I'll happily help them with difficulties.
It should be obvious by now that it has been years, if ever, that Satya Nadella has opened the box on a brand-new Windows machine and used it for any length of time.
Back in Detroit's "Malaise Era", all of the executives received company cars that had first gone through the workshop to correct defects. The executives had no way to personally experience the problems that regular customers saw and felt; even worse was that they only experienced a product that had been worked over and prepped - leading them to think that their product was better than it really was.
MS (and probably even Apple) is heading for disaster, and their cloud revenue is probably going to mask it until it is too late.
Just installed arch on my desktop last night. Going to daily drive and see if I can escape the windows madness. Only part I'm really worried about is all my music production stuff, going to have to try out all these new VST wrappers
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadI like that. I am going to use this moving forward.
It had stagnated at 1.5%-ish for a good decade.
But as of four years ago, it started to go up, higher than ever before, reaching 2% in 2021 and 4% this year.
Is the YoLD finally nigh?
It's not the early 2000s; and you still can't just walk into a store and test-drive and buy a laptop with linux on it.
Now I could go into a rant about tradeoffs and choices and how freedom is hard and so on, but I don't feel like it.
Linux can do the same thing. The Linux desktop can beat Windows just by sitting still while MS destroys its product.
It’s an Ad. They’re not physically, emotionally, a psychologically damaging you.
You literally agree to all of this when accepting the windows license. Use osx or Linux if you don’t like it. Don’t just shout “RAPE” on the internet because a company is showing you ads.
Go touch some grass.
I contest this claim. Ads create envy, which create overconsumption, which leads to environmental degradation. Furthermore ads which try not to look like ads tend to take advantage of people who are not smart. Also, things that are given away for free, but ad-supported, have been shown to create market distortions where "you are the product", and also facilitate loss of privacy through ad-driven surveillance and shady data-broker deals.
But it’s not.
My low-end Xiaomi backup phone is a good example. It’s so dirt cheap I’m quite sure most of my money goes into the hardware itself.
I could debloat it, but eh, it’s just a cheap backup phone so I can tolerate the ads and bloats.
Win11 is clearly the new Win8. Still hoping it can be skipped entirely and that a more desirable Win12 will eventually be announced.
10 was full of spyware from the outset but for some reason people argue that it is better than 11 in this regard in a weird bit of revisionist history. The biggest problem with Windows 11 is it dumps hardware support for anything remotely old.
If you use an alternate shell then you get an error msg as it expects explorer/start menu.
A lot of the unwanted parts of Win8 lived on, but they could mostly be ignored, they weren't aggressively shoved into your face
Right now it looks like Win12 will just be Win11, but with more integrated "AI"-stuff.
-- EDIT --
After all, Windows is just a set of executables and registry entries. The former or the latter can be removed or replaced somehow.
So now it's "Tiny11 Builder" which is like a template script you select your features from, and you have to supply your own Windows ISO which you download from Microsoft:
https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder
After the process is complete you end up with your own custom Tiny11 ISO, debloated according to the Powershell builder script.
Using your Tiny11 ISO no differently than the original ISO from Microsoft, you can then clean-install that same debloated version on target PC's instead.
Once installed, it does have a smaller resource footprint, but this is Windows 11 so it's never going to be exactly "tiny".
Alternatively, Ameliorated seems to have taken a similar path to Tiny11, also for Windows 10 as well:
https://ameliorated.io/
I would love to read/listen the internal conversations at Microsoft about this thing.
So, here I am, with a Win10 VM at my fingertips. Do you have any advice or suggestions on how to tweak or configure the machine or the installation, preferably in such a way that gives me control over what the OS does? One interesting example is, can I configure the network to discard stuff sent to Microsoft servers with minimal disruption?
Beyond that, there are also custom versions of Windows that come preconfigured with the bloat and spyware removed. I've been using ReviOS[2] on a mini gaming PC for the past year and have had no issues so far.
[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...
[2] https://github.com/meetrevision/playbook
EDIT: Ah, I'm seeing the sarcasm now. I guess I didn't read it closely enough.
Back in Detroit's "Malaise Era", all of the executives received company cars that had first gone through the workshop to correct defects. The executives had no way to personally experience the problems that regular customers saw and felt; even worse was that they only experienced a product that had been worked over and prepped - leading them to think that their product was better than it really was.
MS (and probably even Apple) is heading for disaster, and their cloud revenue is probably going to mask it until it is too late.
Pipewire being decent at JACK helps, so does using Arch's `linux-rt` kernel package.