Really? My Win 11 install (sparsely used nowadays) is nag city. Set up OneDrive, activate cloud backups, sign into your Microsoft account, oops Xbox Game Bar popped up because I pressed some key combination, reboot (a few times) to finish updates, set up copilot, error installing update, reboot before installing update, etc.
Some other ones to add on from my fresh install: Start menu search will search the Microsoft Store for apps they want you to install, some key combinations will launch copilot and if it's not setup it will take you to a webpage that will help you set it up, every office application has a cheap looking unhideable jeweled title bar button to "Upgrade your plan".
Solutions in order of the problems listed: https://superuser.com/questions/1927207/how-to-remove-the-st..., https://github.com/midrare/hyperenable, and my favorite: downgrade to a previous version of office which is almost certainly unsafe and has active exploits (16.0.19929.20106). But I hate that button THAT much and my wife refuses to move off of Onenote for our family knowledge management. I am close to just using Onenote in a browser (where I can zap the offending element) but the loading pages on demand is annoying.
I have Windows 11 Pro and I've never seen an ad. I don't remember turning anything off but I did upgrade from Windows 10, so maybe that had something to do with it, unless it's just that Pro doesn't contain ads.
I also don't use it with a microsoft account and don't have any "services" from them, so maybe that helps.
A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible. You could easily configure it so that it stayed out of your way, and only the updates were a headache. Windows 8 and those beyond were all downright atrocious. While I had dabbled in Linux for years before then, announcing Win7 EOL finally pushed me 100% into the Linux camp.
Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.
Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.
It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.
7 had the advantage that the drivers didn't muck up the system requiring a re-install. I liked both - I had a saved image to reinstall when it inevitably screwed up.
This is insanely good and mimics my personal experience of Windows these days. I literally say "pop-up! pop-up! pop-up!" out loud during a normal workday where one pop-up or prompt is rapidly replaced by another. Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop unless you configure the hell out of it (and even that is no longer enough).
My favorite "joke" from this site:
> Scan complete: 1 threat found — ChromeSetup.exe
FWIW, I switched to Fedora in January and have no plans to look back. Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
It's soul destroying going from personal computer Linux (been figuring out the distro for me) to Windows for work.
Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.
Things are pretty dire.
Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.
Any big name is going to be Windows or Mac, 95% of the time. There's not many UEM / RMM tools that handle linux well, and if they do, it'll only be for one or two distros like Ubuntu.
Lmfao. Whay are they even doing with Copilot? Paying for premium and then handicapping it because they think that being able to search online sources might exhilarate your shareppint data? That is not at all how that works.
The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.
[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them
IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.
That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.
But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.
I kind of disagree that it is done easily in Windows, network drives are pretty cursed everywhere in my experience.
But yeah, I'm a professional who lives in multiplexed terminals and none of the people who I've helped migrate to Linux were keen on NFS, CIFS, SMB and so on, so it's not like I have a solid grasp on the graphical tooling available for such things.
It has been much rarer for people to come back to me with problems after I've helped them move to Linux compared to the Windows users, though.
Yes, but I don't believe it can do so permanently. And by that I mean, solely through the UI, connect to a network drive and have it persist across reboots. You can do that in the Windows or Mac file explorers.
Works for me, I have my nextcloud webdav saved there since I didn't want to deal with any client bloat. It's not only persisted across reboots, but persisted across platform upgrades (I run fedora KDE)
OK, so I did this recently and it depends a lot on what software you're then running whether it works or not, and whether the keyboard will actually flip some Caps Lock switch somewhere regardless of being remapped.
ctrl2caps tends to break and activate Caps Lock, i.e. capital letters unless Shift is held.
Many others have already replied and it is 6 days later, but I wanted to reply to say I am quite happy with the stock KDE Plasma 6 desktop. I use some themes, e.g. "Breeze AlphaBlack" gives a nice Win10-like pure black taskbar, lovely on OLED. But the rest is stock. It Just Works (tm).
Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop
One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.
Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.
I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.
CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.
Sounds like Proton and SteamOS are very successfully closing the gap with games. Ironically hardware pricing might be the reason SteamOS doesnt progress at the same speed that it has been as Steam machines are pricey.
Specialist software on the otherhand. I get that. Its the same reasonw hy I have a macboom for academic work and Windows for other work. Vendors not building across ecosystems is frustrating, though presumably thats due to tooling lock in.
I only have Windows at work, which means less pop ups. Nevertheless, lately I get forced updates with 5 minutes “grace period” more often than I’d like. Soon will be approaching pop up frequency.
It’s too snappy and responsive, real windows I gotta wait with the spinning blue ring thing for a few seconds after clicking ‘x’ on the notifications. That is when they’re generous enough to give an ‘x’ and not force the user through some onboarding flow with no easy way to opt out
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop last week and asked me to set it up for her, it came with Win11 by default. I was genuinely flabbergasted at how terrible of an experience it was, screen after screen of "We respect your privacy. Let Microsoft collect every single thing you have ever dared to breath onto this computer?" right in the install screen. After that lovely experience you're greeted with a billion random junkware preinstalled like fucking Candy Crush. I wanted to crash out when I clicked around in explorer and saw every UI element buffer for a split second, and after further research it seems they're using React in explorer these days.
Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.
154 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] thread"Windows is taking its time for your convenience"..
I'm sorry but where is the parody?
- A Win11 Home user
I'm glad I didn't have to spam the back button to do it.
Solutions in order of the problems listed: https://superuser.com/questions/1927207/how-to-remove-the-st..., https://github.com/midrare/hyperenable, and my favorite: downgrade to a previous version of office which is almost certainly unsafe and has active exploits (16.0.19929.20106). But I hate that button THAT much and my wife refuses to move off of Onenote for our family knowledge management. I am close to just using Onenote in a browser (where I can zap the offending element) but the loading pages on demand is annoying.
Haters gonns hate I suppose
Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.
Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.
It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.
We've come a long way when web apps feel faster and more native than native apps.
My favorite "joke" from this site:
> Scan complete: 1 threat found — ChromeSetup.exe
FWIW, I switched to Fedora in January and have no plans to look back. Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.
Things are pretty dire.
Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.
Amazon Linux
Debian
Fedora
Linux Mint
Oracle Linux
PopOS
RHEL
Rocky Linux
Ubuntu
(May work on others)
https://jumpcloud.com/support/agent-compatibility-system-req...
[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them
[1] that is, they require the command line
But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.
But yeah, I'm a professional who lives in multiplexed terminals and none of the people who I've helped migrate to Linux were keen on NFS, CIFS, SMB and so on, so it's not like I have a solid grasp on the graphical tooling available for such things.
It has been much rarer for people to come back to me with problems after I've helped them move to Linux compared to the Windows users, though.
Lol! You should try being a comedian.
Really? In my experience you can go for pretty much anything and it will be more coherent and less buggy than the Windows shell.
Try Gnome or XFCE. As a bonus you'll be able to remap Caps Lock with ease.
ctrl2caps tends to break and activate Caps Lock, i.e. capital letters unless Shift is held.
This being Windows 11.
I keep it installed on a secondary drive just-in-case but I haven't booted into it in months.
One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.
Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.
Hey, Johnny Apple! Fix this!
I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.
Specialist software on the otherhand. I get that. Its the same reasonw hy I have a macboom for academic work and Windows for other work. Vendors not building across ecosystems is frustrating, though presumably thats due to tooling lock in.
That wasn't fun. At all.
screams into pillow
What the hell happened?
Thank you for a good laugh